It’s like reading the letters section of my local newspaper!

Small town newspapers occasionally get letter-feuds going — it fuels subscriptions, since you really want to know how angry Sally Jo is going to get with Fred over his dog tearing up her petunias, and the back and forth can go on for months. Sometimes science gets that way, too.

The backstory: Augustin Fuentes wrote an editorial for Science in which he pointed out that Charles Darwin was a flawed, prejudiced Victorian man, as part of a celebration of the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Descent of Man. While he may have been somewhat more progressive than many of his contemporaries, he still had awful racist views.

Darwin portrayed Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia as less than Europeans in capacity and behavior. Peoples of the African continent were consistently referred to as cognitively depauperate, less capable, and of a lower rank than other races. These assertions are confounding because in “Descent” Darwin offered refutation of natural selection as the process differentiating races, noting that traits used to characterize them appeared nonfunctional relative to capacity for success. As a scientist this should have given him pause, yet he still, baselessly, asserted evolutionary differences between races. He went beyond simple racial rankings, offering justification of empire and colonialism, and genocide, through “survival of the fittest.” This too is confounding given Darwin’s robust stance against slavery.

Not to mention his ideas about women.

In “Descent,” Darwin identified women as less capable than (White) men, often akin to the “lower races.” He described man as more courageous, energetic, inventive, and intelligent, invoking natural and sexual selection as justification, despite the lack of concrete data and biological assessment. His adamant assertions about the centrality of male agency and the passivity of the female in evolutionary processes, for humans and across the animal world, resonate with both Victorian and contemporary misogyny.

“GASP!” went some scientists. How dare he be so rude? Think of the harm it will do to science education if we reveal the flaws in our heroes! So they fired off a letter to the editor.

We fear that Fuentes’ vituperative exposition will encourage a spectrum of anti-evolution voices and damage prospects for an expanded, more gender and ethnically diverse new generation of evolutionary scientists.

Oh, dear. So rather than be interested in the truth, we should conceal those past embarrassments, lest a creationist discover them. This is a terrible idea, because eventually someone will discover them (they’re in books in the public domain, you know), and then it’ll be the cover-up that is the scandal. Have they learned nothing from political history?

In The Descent he demolished the slavery-justifying view of different races as separate species, so inspiring the anti-racist perspectives of later anthropologists like Boaz. On sexism, Darwin suggested that education of “reason and imagination” would erase mental sex differences. His theory of sexual selection gave female animals a central role in mate choice and evolution.

On races, sure, he was better than many, and he also criticizes the race “science” of his day, noting that none of the proponents of that dangerous nonsense could even agree on the number and boundaries of the various races. He was an abolitionist, but as we Americans should know from our history, you can oppose slavery while still having demeaning views of black people. While it is correct that he demolished the idea of different races as different species, he still thought the races had different characters, which is a belief that still feeds racist views. Like this, from the Descent of Man.

There is, however, no doubt that the various races, when carefully compared and measured, differ much from each other,—as in the texture of the hair, the relative proportions of all parts of the body, the capacity of the lungs, the form and capacity of the skull, and even in the convolutions of the brain. But it would be an endless task to specify the numerous points of structural difference. The races differ also in constitution, in acclimatisation, and in liability to certain diseases. Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct; chiefly as it would appear in their emotional, but partly in their intellectual, faculties. Every one who has had the opportunity of comparison, must have been struck with the contrast between the taciturn, even morose, aborigines of S. America and the light-hearted, talkative negroes.

Oh, those light-hearted negroes, chattering away happily out on the plantation, with their distinct mental characteristics! How dare you accuse Darwin of still clinging to the stereotypes of his day, and being less enlightened than he should have been?

What about his views on women? Did Darwin really think the differences in intellect between men and women would be erased by education?

Here my comparison to conflicts in the letters section of my local newspaper falls down, because Science hasn’t published what should be the next reply in the chain. Holly Dunsworth called the Darwin apologists on their claims by actually reading their citation that purportedly shows how egalitarian Darwin was. Ooops. Here’s Dunsworth’s letter in full:

Whiten et al. described Fuentes’ editorial as a “distorting treatment” of Darwin’s writing in Descent of Man.

As counterpoint to Fuentes’ points about Darwin’s racism and sexism, Whiten et al. wrote that,

On sexism, Darwin suggested that education of “reason and imagination” would erase mental sex differences (1, p. 329).

From that sentence, a reader might reason that Darwin wrote about how educating women could make them equal to men in mental powers. And, a reader might imagine that Darwin advocated for such a thing.

Darwin did neither in the cited passage which says,

In order that woman should reach the same standard as man, she ought, when nearly adult, to be trained to energy and perseverance, and to have her reason and imagination exercised to the highest point; and then she would probably transmit these qualities chiefly to her adult daughters. The whole body of women, however, could not be thus raised, unless during many generations the women who excelled in the above robust virtues were married, and produced offspring in larger numbers than other women. As before remarked with respect to bodily strength, although men do not now fight for the sake of obtaining wives, and this form of selection has passed away, yet they generally have to undergo, during manhood, a severe struggle in order to maintain themselves and their families; and this will tend to keep up or even increase their mental powers, and, as a consequence, the present inequality between the sexes. (1, p. 329)

There is no hope for women and, by the end, Darwin is back on about how men are superior and suggests that they may evolve to be even more so.

It took extraordinary imagination to read that passage from Descent of Man and present it casually in Darwin’s defense as Whiten et al. did.

Now that’s a distorting treatment.

Wow. That passage could be happily quoted by MRAs, anti-feminists, and the general mob of misogynists as perfectly compatible with their views. Do not get into a sparring match with Dr Dunsworth, she’ll cut you.

One other curious thing about that passage…Darwin at the time he wrote Descent of Man was, unfortunately, lacking in a good theory of inheritance and had stumbled into pangenesis — he was basically a Lamarckian. That’s what that bit about how an adult woman had to be trained to “energy and perseverance” so that she would similarly train her daughters, who over many generations might rise to be as smart as a man, if such clever daughters might succeed in producing as many children as those other silly, flighty women. It’s not only profoundly sexist, it’s bad evolutionary logic! He’s not touting the equality of women at all — he’s simply promoting his wrong ideas about the inheritance of acquired characters.

(I’ve written about this before, so this is old ground. Darwin had some even more blatantly sexist passages in the Descent of Man. What’s really going to “encourage a spectrum of anti-evolution voices” is this embarrassing idolatry.)

Schreier does mean noisy troublemaker in German — shoulda been a clue

There was a bit of a shock recently when Science-Based Medicine published a positive review of Abigail Schreier’s godawful conservative anti-trans book, Irreversible Damage, by Harriet Hall. It was surprising that such poor science could get a good review on a usually reliable science site, especially when the typical review pans it as “full of misinformation”.

Good news, though: Hall’s terrible article has been yanked from the site (don’t worry, Freezepeachers: it’s still available on Michael Shermer’s wacky libertarian skeptic site), and now Novella and Gorski have written a strong rebuttal. Here’s just their conclusion, and they also promise some further details in follow-up articles.

Abigail Shrier’s narrative and, unfortunately, Dr. Hall’s review grossly misrepresent the science and the standard of care, muddying the waters for any meaningful discussion of a science-based approach to transgender care. They mainly rely on anecdotes, outliers, political discussions, and cherry-picked science to make their case, but it is not valid.

Most significantly, they warn about medical interventions for children, citing mainly the notion that children are not able to make such choices at such a young age and will likely change their minds, regretting their decision because their gender identity is still developing. However, the age group for which they cite (fatally flawed) statistics do not receive medical interventions, and the age group that is eligible are not likely to change their gender identity. This is a statistical bait-and-switch.

The standard of care waits until children are at an age where their gender identity is generally fixed, and then phases in interventions from most reversible to least, combined with robust psychological assessments. Further, regretting these interventions remains extremely rare, and does not support the social contagion hypothesis.

At this point there is copious evidence supporting the conclusion that the benefits of gender affirming interventions outweigh the risks; more extensive, high-quality research admittedly is needed. For now, a risk-benefit analysis should be done on an individual basis, as there are many factors to consider. There is enough evidence currently to make a reasonable assessment, and the evidence is also clear that denying gender-affirming care is likely the riskiest option.

I suspect that, like Freethoughtblogs, SBM gives their writers considerable autonomy, since they can generally trust everyone in their group. Every once in a while, though, something yucky will slip through, and then you have to do some retroactive peer review. I’ve been there. We’ve had a few dramatic incidents here, too. In this case, they announce that “Dr. Hall still remains an editor of SBM in good standing”. Here’s where we differ — if someone on FtB published something like that, there’d be a week or two of shrill in-house and public battles before the offending writer got the boot.

I don’t want to see your genitals, and I really, really don’t want to see what fluids your genitals produce

Last night, I was listening to Katy Montgomerie’s latest TERF Wars video while I was supposedly puttering away at a lecture — it’s a nice entertaining mix of laughter and righteous anger — when she mentioned a name I hadn’t heard in a while, Andy Lewis. I banned him for his obnoxious TERFy bullshit way, way back in 2018, and I got a lot of cluck-clucking and tut-tutting from the British sceptic community for it. He’s such a rational fellow, don’t you know. Such an important figure in UK scepticism. He is still ranting away about Adult Human Females now in 2021, I guess, so I took a peek at his blog. He wrote about me just last year! Not just me, though, the main target of his ire was Rebecca Watson, who is still punching all the right buttons.

He was mad because she was using slurs and pointing out that the XX/XY dichotomy is “middle school science” and largely irrelevant in any discussion about human rights. He wants to discuss the True Science, which reveals that there are only males and females, and chortles dismissively at the idea that he and his fellow TERFs would use the XX/XY distinction.

The claim is that this is ‘middle school science’ and that if ‘the fervent believers’ are challenged they ‘will throw their hands in the air, claim it’s too complicated or the data is lying or whatever other excuse they can think of, and continue believing what they believe. And in a statement that we shall come back to, “They came to their belief first, for other reasons, and then attempted to build up science and reason in a way that makes it look like it supports their belief.”

This is a straw man argument because biologists do not define your sex by the chromosomes XX and XY. These chromosome combinations are part of a *sex determining mechanism* in organisms like humans. This mechanism is not universal in life. Birds, for example, have a different chromosomal sex determining mechanism – ZZ/ZW. Birds still have quite distinct males and females though.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9354761

In the XX/XY system found in humans, the actual determination mechanism is the SRY gene that is usually, but not always found on the Y chromosome. This gene switches between one of two evolved developmental pathways.

Almost, but not quite. He’s trying to reduce it even further, from a whole chromosome to just a single region on that one chromosome. If only he thought a little deeper about that phrase, “developmental pathways”, because that’s what really matters from a biological perspective — there’s a whole long chain of events that are usually, but not always, in concordance, and there’s a fair bit of wobble in the outcome. It’s not binary at all — as soon as you start dealing with multigenic processes, you open the door to a whole lot of variation.

(By the way, birds aren’t quite so binary, either. Gynandromorphs, anyone? Avian homosexuality? Birds don’t play by your rules, man.)

If not chromosomes, then what is the binary defining character? He plops down in favor of gametes.

Sex is not defined by these chromosomes. Sex arises from the fact that we are evolved sexually reproducing organisms. Sex evolved deep in life’s history and has remained remarkably conserved – although there are many *sex determination mechanisms* in organisms. [Yes? He keeps almost getting it — sex determination in different species is fluid!]

Sex is near universal in eukaryotes and is the ‘the mixing of genomes via meiosis and fusion of gametes’. In multicellular organisms it is almost always done through the joining of unequal size gametes (anisogamy).

It is this fundamental and ancient asymmetry in gametes and the joining together of one of each type that gives rise to the sexes. The small, mobile gamete we class as male and the larger, and immobile one we class as female.

In multicellular organisms like us where anisogamy rules, the *sex determining mechanism* (the SRY gene) is used to switch between two sets of genes that develop different phenotypes to support each gamete type – males and females.

To suggest that there are more than two sexes, or even more extreme, that somehow sex forms a continuum, a distribution or a spectrum is completely incompatible with this view of life and sexual reproduction. (The idea that ‘sex is a spectrum’ is a core part of the credo of gender ideology.)

As usual, he misses the point. He is correct that there are two functional classes of gametes in humans. Generally speaking, an individual can only form one or the other, or none at all. But so what? Am I going to have to provide a semen sample before I’m allowed to use a public restroom? From a policy and social interaction perspective, this is a non-starter.

But most importantly, people are not gametes. Every person is the product of a fusion of two haploid gametes, one large immobile one and one small mobile one, so we start as a mixture of both. We then go through a complex developmental process with many steps that produce the messy diverse multicellular organism that may try to practice mating behavior of one sort or another, or contribute to the upbringing of more messy diploid multicellular organisms, or tries to shape the culture that we use to propagate ourselves. I, for one, do not consider myself a lumbering sperm delivery system, nor do I consider my wife an ambulatory incubator/ovum generator. I am also rather offended that a dilettante with only a superficial knowledge of evolution would think that evolutionary biology can be used to justify such an absurdly reductionist view of humanity.

Yes, I have gonads that produce sperm. It is categorically wrong to think that somehow tells you anything more about my nature, my sexual preferences, or whether I should be allowed to wear a skirt or not.

We see defenders of evolution such as @pzmyers reacting like the worst frothing mouth evangelical preacher when asked to defend the idea that women can have penises.

https://thoughtfreeblogs.com/pharyngula/2018/10/13/why-i-banned-andy-lewis-maria-maclachlan-and-alan-henness/ …

One would have thought that Myers would have taken the opportunity to use this as a quirky way to explain how evolution works and ends up with counterintuitive results. But no. Shouting and screaming instead.

I can only assume that Mr Lewis trusts that none of his readers will ever follow a link he gives, because there is no frothing mouth evangelical preacher or Shouting and screaming at that link. Go ahead, check.

There does seem to be a lot of shouting from TERFs over pragmatically useless distinctions between human individuals. I just don’t need to know about chromosomes or reproductive apparatuses in the people I interact with. As I said back then,

The presence or absence of a penis is possibly the worst gender signal ever, because we keep those hidden in almost all of our social interactions. I’d have to be really close, very intimate friends with a woman before she’d show me her penis.

I’d have to be even more intimate with her before I’d ask her to ejaculate for me.

Lewis also snipes at David Gorski.

And @oracknows screaming ‘TERF’ because I suggested the biggest sceptical issue that should be covered right now is the denial of the material reality of sex among gender ideologists. (now appears to be deleted.)

Tell me, has it ever been accurate to say David Gorski was screaming? It’d be fair to say I sometimes get worked up and rage loudly at the universe, but David is always careful and objective. I also can’t quite imagine him (or me, for that matter), denying the material reality of sex. Sex is most definitely real. It’s just not the simple phenomenon that Lewis thinks it is.

Some cis people really hate the word “cis”

I have never understood the aversion. Is it because I learned the term as part of Science Latin (all scientists get to learn a crude pidgin version of Latin that lacks all grammar rules and has a limited vocabulary, you know) where “cis” just means “on the same side”? It’s common parlance in structures in organic chemistry and regulatory logic in molecular biology. There’s nothing pejorative about it. When I learned it’s also used to describe someone whose gender identity is the same as the sex they were assigned at birth, yeah, sure, it made perfect sense. I’m a cis person. You can call me that and I won’t be offended at all. Some people are trans, they don’t identify as the sex on their birth certificate, and that’s fine, perfectly normal, “trans” is a nice short word to describe that.

Hmmm. Maybe that’s why some cis people are outraged at being accurately described, because the word also implies the normal categorical existence of trans people.

Anyway, how determined are these people to dodge the awfulness of being called “cis”? They’re trying to appropriate other words for their condition, to hilariously offensive results.

You’d think they’d figure out that abandoning the neutral, innocuous term “cis” to use a different word with an immense amount of baggage is a bad idea, but if they were smart they wouldn’t be TERFs.

Why did YouTube allow Steven Crowder back on?

Steven Crowder, the right-wing “comedian”, was previously banned from YouTube for hate speech. They’ve lifted his ban, though, and he’s back in action. He’s been mocking pride week in his inimitably repulsive way.

Now, if we just look at it — look, with kids, you’re going to say, “OK, you’re born gay. You’re born straight.” Fine, let’s just go with that. But you overwhelmingly celebrate gay. If it’s just something that’s a part of you, it either shouldn’t be celebrated or certainly you wouldn’t celebrate the one of the two versions that results in HIV, more likely; AIDS, more likely; promiscuity, more likely; mental health issues, more likely, but lower domestic abuse with gay people, higher with lesbians.

My point is if you’re just going to celebrate, hey, the preference of friction, why wouldn’t you celebrate the one that makes for the most productive environment for children and has worked for perpetuating the human species since ever. That’s all I’m saying. I just don’t think you need — you’re like — you’re just like telling kids, “Hey, hey, isn’t it great? They’re gay.” What does that mean? It means they have sex in a way that doesn’t work.

…

Honestly, let’s look at all major historical gay figures. You look at Milk.

…

You look at Harvey Milk. You look at people, you look at [UNINTELLIGIBLE] — these are people with AIDS.

How dare those gay people, who all have AIDS and don’t make babies when they have sex and are unproductive, celebrate their survival in a culture full of asses like Steven Crowder?

Also, though, I have to ask…how is that funny? Why are they wearing stupid costumes? Does Crowder need a sycophantic claque to laugh at his jokes, because no one with half a brain will?

Wise up, YouTube. Make this guy gone. He’s not a comedian at all, he’s just a mouthpiece for hate.

“A happy ending is ultimately had by all in this delightful if politically incorrect concoction”

Way back when I was a kid, the local television station would occasional broadcast a matinee showing of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. I never watched it. I probably caught a few minutes of it here and there, but it was a musical singing about getting girlfriends at a time when one of the other four channels was probably showing a Gamera movie or something.

But other people paid attention, like Devorah Blachor at McSweeney’s. You mean to say the seven brothers were going to kidnap the seven women and rape them? The movie is based on the rape of the Sabine Women? You mean people in the 1950s just overlooked that it was all about mass rape and even nominated it for a Best Picture Oscar award?

I mean, this was pretty blatant.

I am forced to conclude that the America I grew up in was even more fucked up than I thought, and all that saved me from this kind of indoctrination was a fondness for cheesy sci-fi/horror movies. Did you know that the first Godzilla movie came out in the same year as this dreck, but did it get a best picture nomination? Noooo.

I’d join the misanthropy club, but I would probably detest the members

Early on, one of the things that led me to atheism was that so many Christians insisted on things that were patently wrong. Why did I leave the church at a young age? This would horrify Ken Ham, but they lost me precisely because of the anti-science and specifically anti-evolution slant.

Then the racists lost me because they insisted that black people were a parallel (and inferior!) evolutionary line that looked more like gorillas than white people do. I knew a fair bit about other primates, and no, that’s definitely false. It’s absurdly false. So nope, the racists will not persuade me, especially since now I have even deeper knowledge of the subject than I did as a child.

And then there are the anti-feminists.

It is incomprehensible to me how anyone committed to an evidence-based perspective can be opposed to feminism. You hang out with a few anti-feminists and they’re just oozing with bullshit, which was one of the features leading me to part ways with the atheist movement. This stuff is damaging to any social organization, and if you let it thrive, I want no part of you.

Like this:

At that link, there’s a whole series of dumbass assertions by ignorant idiots about biology. Ick. They’re all from those hives of villainy, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. And I realized that my problem isn’t just with Christianity, or atheism, or racism, or misogyny — it’s with all of humanity. Or, at least, that part of humanity that gravitates towards social media. And with that, my heart shrank two sizes that day.

The bigots who want to know what’s in children’s pants are on the wrong side of history

“What about the children?” they cry. We all know they don’t give a good god damn about the children. It’s all about controlling the children and forcing them to think one way and one way only.

Cody is rather more eloquent than I am on this issue.

These assholes have managed to poison the language — I see someone touting “family!” or “save the children!” I pretty much know they’re actually against those things and are screaming coded versions of “patriarchy!” and “abuse the children!”

Fundraising, stories, and a new video

It’s true, we’re still digging out from under our legal debt and begging for donations. Check out our Fundraising page! There’s new stuff there!

Also, very importantly, Kris Wager is matching donations, up to a thousand dollars total. This is the perfect time to kick in a little bit to our our paypal account.

My contribution this time is a video about a science paper — a case study of an XY woman who gave birth to a child.

You can read the original paper right here, or a transcript of my remarks below the fold.

[Read more…]

It’s all old neckless white guys with buzzcuts harassing kids, in my mind

Ken the Hen is exactly right: LEAVE THEM ALONE.

I remember genital inspections — only we called that junior high PE class. I hated it. Being an insecure and introverted adolescent and being told to strip and take a public shower was bad enough, but it was made worse by the swaggering asshole, Mr Earl, who ‘taught’ PE and would stroll through the locker room making comments about everyone’s bodies. He was definitely in the category of “really mean people”, and was probably also a white supremacist — he certainly raved on and on about the Vietnam War — and I’m sure he’d be a TERF, since, although there were very few openly trans folk in my community then, he was dazzlingly homophobic.

OK, maybe that’s my conspiracy theory. The worst people in the world are brutal PE coaches from the 1970s, and now they’re all running the country and sitting in the Missouri legislature passing hate crimes as laws.