A science writer who doesn’t understand the difference between binary and bimodal

Tom Chivers has dipped a tentative, timid toe into the arguments about trans issues to declare that of course biological sex exists, a statement I find utterly baffling. “Biological” sex? Is there some other kind? I look forward to hearing stories about abiological sex, or artificial sex, or machine sex. It’s very silly — next thing you know, the TERFs are going to start ranting about an equally silly term like “biological woman”, as if the non-biological women are running around made of plastic and aluminum. Uh-oh, I guess they already are. That’s another one I don’t get. Are they just sticking “biological” onto terms that they want to dignify with a sciencey label, contrary to what actual biologists say?

I’m still trying to wrap my head around “biological sex”. Is non-biological sex what you get when you stuff a Hitachi magic wand into a Fleshlight? Biology doesn’t have much to do with that.

Anyway, what triggered Timid Tom was a comment by a British politician, Jo Swinson (sorry, I’m American, I know nothing about politicians in the UK):

Swinson, on Radio 4’s Today programme, was asked by Justin Webb whether she believes that “biological sex exists”. She replied: “Not on a binary, from what I’ve read. I’m not going to pretend that I’m an expert in the subject but I don’t think that things are as binary as are often presented.”

That’s about as coherent and sensible a response as you can make to a silly question. She’s not going to pretend to be an expert, but she translates an absurdity into something as close to reality as she can, and answers that. She is correct. Sex is not binary. It’s a complicated mess of a subject with all kinds of variations.

Tentative Tom disagrees. He waffles about with a comparison to Pluto? Which used to be a planet? But “planet” was redefined so it isn’t anymore? Which he uses to somehow make an argument that objects in space are either planets or not-planets, a true binary, as long as you use the Correct Definition™, and that the fact that some objects are ambiguous does not affect the fact that Jupiter really is a planet.

OK.

I don’t see how arguing that there are artificial definitions that partition a continuum of object sizes supports his claim of unambiguous definitive binary states, but this is apparently Tom being Tom.

Then he launches into a discuss of intersex individuals, conceding that there are human intermediates in sexual differentiation.

With sex, just as with the concepts of “planet” or “species”, there do exist ambiguous cases. The intermediate cases in human sex are usually known as “intersex” people. There are various ways in which one can be intersex: the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA)’s FAQ site mentions genital ambiguity, such as girls with very large clitorises or boys with very small penises, or scrotums that have divided to form labia-like structures; external genitals that appear female, but with male-typical anatomy inside; chromosomal abnormalities, such as mosaicism, when some cells are XX and others XY, or having three sex chromosomes such as XXY; or having standard male XY chromosomes but a body that is insensitive to the androgenic hormones such as testosterone, which tell the embryo to start becoming male.

You’re losing me, Tom. These are all people exhibiting variation in sex-related traits. Are you trying to argue that these do not demonstrate that sex is nonbinary? They seem to me to show a clear range in the phenomena.

But then he says something that makes all clear. He doesn’t understand the difference between bimodal and binary distributions! Something can exhibit a bimodal distribution yet not be binary, so telling me that a phenomenon is bimodal does not imply that it’s binary.

…that doesn’t mean that sex doesn’t exist “on a binary”. If you did a graph, plotting human beings by height, you will see two clear peaks on that graph — average male height and average female height. If you plot weight, it would be even clearer. Foot size, hip-to-waist ratio. There would be significant overlap between men and women, but there would be very clear differences.

That’s a really good example. You’ve probably seen that kind of curves plotted to illustrate the differences in height of the different sexes. The trick is that they usually segregate the data into two categories first, and then plot two curves. Oh, look: two peaks!

Except for one little problem. He says if you “plot human beings by height”, then you will see “two clear peaks.” Let’s try that, without first biasing the interpretation.

Ooops, without the color coding, that looks like a bit of a smear; maybe with the right statistical analysis, you could extract a bimodal distribution out of that, but it would be pretty much impossible to turn that into a binary distribution.

Other small problems with these data is that height varies in history and geographic location. The average height of men 150 years ago was equivalent to the average height of women today; South Asian men tend to be shorter than American women. Were all those workers in the industrial revolution women, as are the majority of people in South Asia? Belgians are significantly taller than the French…are they more manly?

This is not to claim that biological differences are non-existent — individual traits do vary significantly between sexes. Even height! This kind of growth curve is really interesting.

It’s almost as if exposure to differing hormone concentrations at puberty elicits a differing pattern of growth, an observation that isn’t at all surprising to all those biologists who will tell you that there is a spectrum of variation that tends to be biased by sex, but still insist that sex is not binary.

But you still wouldn’t argue that a solution to the terrible transgender bathroom problem is that all you have to do is put a stick across the restroom door 170cm from the floor with a sign that says “You must be shorter than this to enter”. That wouldn’t work at all. My wife would have to use the men’s room, and Tom Cruise would have to use the ladies’. So why is Tom Chivers using this argument?

I think Timorous Tom is well aware that this won’t work, so he unslings a fresh battery of “facts.”

And those are not really sexual characteristics. If you were to plot, say, volume of mammary tissue, or number of ovaries, or number of sperm cells produced, you would see a far, far clearer picture of two enormous spikes with almost no overlap at all. Sex is about as binary as any biological or natural classification gets. It’s certainly a lot more binary than planetary status, and we’re happy to teach kids that Mercury is a planet but Pluto isn’t. There is a twilight, but it’s tiny compared to the size of day and night.

Whoa. I think if you plotted the volume of mammary tissue it most definitely produce a non-binary distribution within women and within men, and there would be overlap. You wouldn’t see two enormous spikes, you’d see two rounded mounds, which would remind me of something, I can’t quite think what. Similarly, if you plotted sperm counts, there’d be a broad distribution, admittedly floored at near zero for many women and some men, so there’d be a strong, tall rod at 0 and a rounded hemisphere subsequently. But again, it’s a poor way to distinguish men and women. I can’t quite see the bathroom police cupping breasts or getting a sperm sample before allowing you to enter.

It also brings up another problem: there are so darned many traits with differential expression. Trembling Tom brings them up one at a time to try to make the case that everything is binary, and he’s failing at even that, but what about the combos? A person is short, has large breasts, a Y chromosome, and a sperm count of 0; man or woman? Another person is tall, is flat-chested, had a hysterectomy, and identifies as a woman; will you tell her no? We don’t just have a graded distribution, we have combinatorial variation.

Oh, and he also trots out that familiar excuse, that it’s a tiny minority. So what? You don’t get to ignore their existence, and they still wreck your imaginary binary distribution.

But wait, one more absurdity from poor Torn Tom.

Male suspects in domestic homicides outnumbered female ones by more than seven to one in England and Wales from 2016 to 2018. Men — male-bodied people — are simply much more violent than women, and it’s silly to pretend otherwise.

No one is pretending otherwise, it’s a disgraceful statistic. But why? That’s a real concern — is it something about masculine nature, or is it something about masculine roles in our society? Also, is it binary? Are all males violent, and all women passive victims? Tom — honest question here, I’m just trying to discern your sex — how often do you beat your wife? If the majority of men are not violent, doesn’t this make violence a poor criterion? We’re only going to allow you to use this public restroom if you present a copy of your arrest record for domestic violence.

It should also go without saying that transgender women are by far the victims of violence. I guess that makes them Biological Women™ by definition, then.

I hope they’ve put their best detective on the case!

Welcome to Trump’s America, where bigots can run over kids on the sidewalk.

The girl was walking to Indian Hills Junior High when a vehicle drove onto the sidewalk, ran over her and left the scene, the release said. Officials say the girl was able to return to school one week after the incident, according to CNN affiliate WOI-TV.

During her interview with detectives, Poole Franklin, a Des Moines resident, said she was the driver and intentionally struck the girl because she “was a Mexican,” police said. Poole Franklin then “made a series of derogatory statements about Latinos,” police said.

I’m glad the girl is physically OK now, but you have to wonder how safe she’s going to feel about using public sidewalks from now on.

There’s still one thorny question to resolve, a difficult problem that will require bringing in a Hercule Poirot to puzzle out.

Authorities are looking at whether Poole Franklin running the girl over was a hate crime, Clive Police Chief Michael G. Venema said during a news conference.

Oooh, that’s a difficult one.

God works in mysterious ways, even in Norway

I rather doubt that this ad would fly in the US, but apparently it’s just funny in Norway.

I have to question the effectiveness, though. When I put something in the mail box, I expect it to be delivered to its destination, and I’m not paying postage to subsidize a swarm of traveling gigolos.

Also, I recall that Norway does have a solid conservative political and religious bent (nowhere near as bad as the US, of course) — they banned Monty Python’s Life of Brian, once upon a time. I’m sure someone somewhere was outraged about the postal service advertising heresy.

How much longer must we put up with this?

No one is in doubt that this man is unfit for office, are they?

There has to be some medical/psychological reason to have him removed from office immediately. He is humiliating the whole country.

At least I got a battery of mindless things done

I’m in a fog today, so I decided to do mindless things for a day. Would you believe I got the syllabi done for Spring term classes all done? I was in the right state of mind to work through a calendar and update my schedule. I even submitted it all to the division secretary! I hope she survives the shock, she usually has to nag me to get it done.

I also got my schedule all mapped out. I’m going to have Fridays free of all classes, and you know what that means: Friday will be SpiderDay!

Monday and Wednesday won’t be bad, either. Although, realistically, a lot of that blank space will get chewed up with committees and other work.

I have things to do!

I do! Lots! Yesterday I was working on a paper, writing up a script for a video, and fussing over spiders, and I still have a couple of term papers to finish grading. I started to fade in the mid-afternoon, though, and was feeling exhausted, because I haven’t been sleeping well, waking up way too early. So last night I programmed our lights to dim at 9:30, went to bed promptly at 10, and went right to sleep. I had also programmed the lights to come up gradually at 6:30, and wake me gently by 7. I was determined to get a good night’s sleep and break this cycle.

Unfortunately, I had not planned on the behavior of the two large mammalian organisms I share the house with, one of whom started eating crackers crunchily in bed and checking their phone at sometime around 5am, and the other started snuggling up to my neck and purring at about the same time. I won’t say which was which, to protect the guilty.

So no, I didn’t get my good night’s sleep.

I’m so tired right now I might just go stretch out on the sofa and spend the day in a lazy haze of stupid television. Or maybe go the other way and take a long walk in the cold, although there’s no place to go on a Sunday (everything is closed) in Morris. Oh, I know! I’ll sit dazed and stupidly incapable of making up my mind all day long!

Chonky

Another day in the lab, waiting for spiders to hatch out. They keep teasing me. While I was looking for egg sacs, though, this guy stood out. That’s a chonky big Steatoda borealis.

Note the light horizontal band across the front of the abdomen, and the hint of a midline stripe, all against a darkly pigmented body. These are true native spiders, found in the northern US in the midwest and east, and also in Canada. Parasteatoda tepidariorum is, apparently, also native to North and South America, but has spread all around the world, unlike these stay-at-homes.

S. borealis is also more stocky than P. tepidariorum. Here’s the latter to remind you what they look like.

Now I’ve got to wonder what has made S. borealis so well-tuned to these places with snowy winters.

Why does God need a hundred thousand dollars?

A little two year old girl died suddenly. Her parents are grief-stricken. But then tragedy takes a strange turn.

The parents are Christian “influencers” (I am hating that word), and they put out a call, asking for a resurrection.

We’re asking for prayer. We believe in a Jesus who died and conclusively defeated every grave, holding the keys to resurrection power. We need it for our little Olive Alayne, who stopped breathing yesterday and has been pronounced dead by doctors. We are asking for bold, unified prayers from the global church to stand with us in belief that He will raise this little girl back to life. Her time here is not done, and it is our time to believe boldly, and with confidence wield what King Jesus paid for. It’s time for her to come to life.

OK, they’re delusional in their loss, and they’re going to be heartbroken again in the end. They have my pity. Except…

A fundraiser set up for the child’s rebirth with a target of $100,000 has raised more than $33,000 in two days. Bethel Church in Redding, California, where Kelley is a singer, is one of the organizers of the fundraiser.

Now I’m confused. Does God charge for resurrections? Would my insurance cover that?

Apparently, she’s a member of a real cult that believes miracles, even raising the dead, are possible. There is a Dead Raising Team that claims to have brought about 15 resurrections already. They even have a dead raising team here in Minnesota, just in case you need their services. Unfortunately, they seem to have failed in this case.

It is all bizarrely interesting and very sad, but doesn’t answer the question. What is God going to do with $100,000?

Just Asking Questions, The Atlantic way

We mere bloggers have seen this before, and are able to see through it fairly easily. It’s the phenomenon of Just Asking Questions, also known as JAQing off, in which an interlocutor dodges any effort to state what they really think by the game of only asking questions, questions that they already know the answer to, simply to troll for attention and stir up opposition. It’s an extremely common tactic, one that takes an act of will to cut short. The only way you can win is to not play the game.

So why aren’t experienced, professional journalists, like the gang at the prestigious publication The Atlantic, able to recognize the problem? Maybe it’s because they like JAQing off themselves, as they do in this dreadful article, What does Tucker Carlson believe?. Is that even an interesting or useful question? We know what Tucker Carlson does, does it matter what he thinks in his heart of hearts? So we get nonsense like this:

The subtext of these conversations is the question of whether Carlson is, as Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently claimed, a “white supremacist sympathizer.” For a time, the question could be written off as unserious, a voguish desire to ascribe racism to anyone who might not support increased immigration. But in recent years, Carlson and some of his guests have lent more and more plausibility to the label. On August 6, for example, days after a white gunman killed 22 people in El Paso, Texas, motivated by a fear of a “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” Carlson took to his program to argue that white supremacy was “not a real problem in America,” but rather a “hoax” drummed up by Democrats.

It is not a question whether he is a “white supremacist sympathizer.” We know that he is. Watch his show, and as shown above, it’s a parade of white nationalist talking points. Right there, the writer has answered the question…so why even pretend it’s an issue that we need to talk about? Because that’s Carlson stock in trade, the racist tirade, followed by the knitted brows and quizzical expression that just makes him look stupid, as if he’s JAQing off right there, “Why are you accusing me of being racist?”

At least The New Republic sees through the facade.

It all comes back to the lie of objectivity in journalism—the idea that reporters and editors are not themselves actual people with beliefs and bias. If an outlet takes a stand and dares to say, for instance, that President Donald Trump is a racist, it runs the risk of appearing “biased”—or worse still, alienating the faction of its wealthy conservative readership with sympathetic views of the administration. Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet exemplified this when he deflected a simple question about whether Trump is racist, responding in that special Timesian speak to say, “I’m not in [Trump’s] head enough to know whether he says [racist comments] because he wants to stoke his base.”

Then, to make a straightforward enough statement—that Tucker Carlson is a racist, say—is to issue a grave moral ruling, rather than to simply describe what is plain to see. And so for the purpose of self-preservation, and grinding against the core tenets of journalism, a facade must be crafted, one that requires a very specific kind of reporter and a very specific environment of praise and accolade in political journalism.

Reporters who carry out this grimy task are actively rewarded by the editors who hold the keys to power at major national publications. Shortly after the Carlson piece dropped, Yoni Appelbaum, a senior editor at The Atlantic, deemed it “fabulous” and doted on Plott [the author of the Atlantic piece] as one of the industry’s “great profile writers.” CNN’s media critic lauded it as “very good.” John Hendrickson, an Atlantic senior editor, wrote that the piece included “the greatest kicker I’ve read all year.” Bill Scher, contributing editor at Politico, called the piece “exceptional.”

Amazing. The metaphor of masturbation works on so many levels when looking at modern American journalism — it’s a circle jerk of JAQing off, where any effort to expose the reality of what’s happening in the media is deflected with a question and a pretense that one is thinking very hard and very deeply about a plain and simple fact.

Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump are racists.

But what does it mean to be a racist? How can we truly know what is in men’s hearts? Sure, they do and say racist things, but have you considered the possibility that it’s merely economic insecurity? Whether they are actually racists is a profound and important question worth writing at length about, but in the end, how can we really be sure? I wonder how many articles I can churn out asking questions?

Oh, shut the fuck up, wankers.