Honestly, I could have ignored this. It’s nothing but familiar anti-trans stupidity, inventing sharp distinctions out of blurry ones, pretending overlaps in morphology don’t exist. There’s just so much of it that I don’t have the will to address it all. But that last bit…I saw red.
Male skeletons literally have more ribs than female skeletons and many other differences. Did you go to an online college?
That is simply not true. Did you go to a bible college?
I’ll admit that I laughed at the stupidity of that last comment. Wasn’t Eve made from Adam’s rib and hence men have less ribs than women. (No cause it’s a stupid fairy tale, both sexes have the same number of ribs.)
Although the exact translation is Eve was made from Adam’s side. I could be wrong on that count.
Probably.
This is a common myth of the fundie xians.
Are they ribbing us?!
If memory serves don’t paleontologists and archaeologists often find it easy to confuse male and female skeletons and haven’t there been quite a few cases of confusion with skeletons once thought to be male been found to actually be female and vice-versa?.
What is true is that a significant number of humans do have extra ribs. It’s 0.5% for cervical ribs and 1% for extra lower ribs.
Extra ribs are more common in females than males though.
The opposite of what the fundie xians claim.
Shouldn’t there be skeletons of fundie males, with an extra rib, because they choked to death eating a rib?
Here you go, fundie, try the ribs, they’re delicious!
“No, no, dumbass, we’re supposed to own the LIBS!!”
gijoel @ #1 — I looked up the verse (Genesis 2:22) in the Interlinear Bible, and the article on Eve in Wikipedia which agrees, that the phrase used is ’aḥat miṣṣal‘otaiv (אַחַת מִצַּלְעֹתָיו) which translates “one of his ribs”. Of course, it’s an allegory, so humans generally have the same number of ribs. Also, it’s the second time Eve is created. In Genesis 1 human males and females are created at the same time and no rib is involved.
I suspect a lot of this stupidity comes from Bible stories for children. I remember reading these simplistic renderings as a child that gloss over things like the multiple creation stories in Genesis. They don’t want to confuse children with the obvious fact that the “inerrant word of god” is a collection of myths that don’t agree with each other.
I think serious theologians™ have concluded that men are missing one left rib, though a few contrarians think it’s a right rib.
“holy shit sans undertale”
College? Nah, they went to Sunday school once and called it an education.
During my A&P class, 40 years ago, I remember male, and female anatomy were fundamentally the same except for reproductive systems. Extra bones happened in some people but that was the exception. Using intentional ignorance to try and prove a fairy tale is true just makes them more stupid.
The best suggestion I’ve heard is that “rib” should be considered as a way of making the story seem a little less rude, and probably should be read with audible quote marks and waggled eyebrows.
What bone do lots of other mammals have that humans don’t? Why, a baculum, of course! And why don’t they have one anymore? Well, clearly god ripped that sucker out and turned it into a person. Only explanation.
Even better that part of the woman being created from Adam’s rib or side is only one of the two creation stories in the bible. (The other one is the one that names Eve I think.) Similarly like Noah either carrying 2 of every animal or carrying 7 pairs of the clean animals and 4 pairs of the unclean.
It’s quite simple really. If you remove a man’s rib, all his male offspring will have a rib less as well. We can change men into invertebrates in just a few generations.
Does gender-affirming surgery also entail rib-removal or rib-implantation? Let’s get it right!
(Rib-removal used to be a thing in the Victorian age, allowing women to wear even-tighter corsets [all the fad!]. My little brain boggles to contemplate the social pressure driving that in an era without antibiotics, or anesthetics…)
Strangely enough, rib removal surgery for cosmetic reasons still happens.
It is rare though.
It’s quite sad that anyone thinks men have one less rib than women. Of course Archeologists would have assigned gender according to grave goods and skeletal remains, assuming that the skeleton is complete. It’s not possible to determine a gender on some remains using only morphological evidence.
Swords and spears were assumed to be male, though DNA analysis has proven that many women were buried with weapons in Anglo-Saxon and Viking cemeteries.
I take x-rays for a living, and have seen A LOT of peoples’ bodies in grey scale (at this point, it’s in the 40-50,000 range, ~80% of which are chest x-rays which enable the viewer to accurately count a person’s ribs). And I do see the odd patient who lacks one (or both) of the lowest ribs (the floating ribs), and rarer still, a patient who has an extra rib (or two – I’ve never seen 26 ribs, but it is apparently possible), protruding from the 7th cervical vertebra (which is caused by a genetic mutation leading to an excess growth of one of the transverse processes of said vertebra). But the vast majority of people (regardless of their assigned sex at birth) have 24 of them.
@Robro Interesting, thanks.
@14
I’m in eastern TN, we’re about 95% there.
It’s incredible that people can believe things so trivially disproved. I’ve heard the rib claim myself, but that was back in elementary school, from another student.
Coincidentally, a comment on today’s SMBC led me to the story of “Julie Doe”, a transgender woman initially identified as a cis woman based on her bones.
I’m in the camp that even if these knobs (who either can’t count and/or can’t do actual research) actually were right about skeletons, my response would be, “Why should I give a crap?”
about the time i was in high school and learning biology in more depth the watching it on the TV, the discrepancy between thee bible stories I was being taught and the science I was being taught kindled my natural curiosity and skepticism to look more closely at both, Hey something here don’t make sense.
It’s not just archeological. Around 1 in 7 women have an ‘android’ pelvis (as in ‘male-like’ not ‘artifical human’) as defined by shape and measurements between bony landmarks. The idea that pelvis shape is definitive evidence of sex is just as wilfully ignorant as the rest of the anti-trans talking points.
[huh. ‘gynecoid pelvis’ is a thing. Callypigious!]
If my gender’s determined by what archaeologists will say 1000 years later, can I at least use my preferred restroom in the meantime?
My ex-wife taught intro biology at Ohio State, and ran into a student who was very insistent about the rib thing. She suggested that the woman find a male family member, count his ribs by touch, and then do the same to herself. To her credit, I believe the student actually did so.
@12: Is that why every single thing these fundie fucks say boils down to — wait for iiiiit — argumentum ad baculum? :)
I used to think that the story of the creation of Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs was a charming myth invented to explain an odd anatomical fact. Never believed it, of course, but I assumed that men had an additional rib and that there was some complicated scientific explanation for it that I didn’t know and probably wouldn’t understand. It was only many years later that, for some reason, I saw a pair of skeletons, male and female, and actually counted the ribs. I learned soon after that not everyone had the same number of ribs and that the variations were random rather than gendered.
“argumentum ad baculum?”
Heh. PZ posted about this, back in the day.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/07/02/the-mfap-hypothesis-for-the-origins-of-homo-sapiens/
(putting the fap into mfap)
[I know… not penis-bone, but rather just a whacking-stick. Oh, wait…]