Dig into the racist circle jerk

Take a browse through Nancy McClernan’s blog, especially for the past few weeks. She’s tying all the threads together: evolutionary psychology, human biodiversity, Steve Sailer, Steven Pinker, Jerry Coyne, Phillipe Rushton, the Pioneer Fund, Arthur Jensen, The Bell Curve, all the usual suspects. It’s the ugliest bit of knitting I’ve ever seen.

One of the many interesting examples is this story about how racists tried to use sports statistics to prove the inferiority of black people — they just can’t handle the intellectual demands of playing quarterback, goes the claim. Who is the source for the statistics behind this argument? Steve Sailer.

In one of my essays, I wrote that the position a quarterback is taken in the college draft is not a reliable indicator of his performance as a professional. That was based on the work of the academic economists David Berri and Rob Simmons, who, in a paper published in The Journal of Productivity Analysis, analyze 40 years of National Football League data. Their conclusion was that the relation between aggregate quarterback performance and draft position was weak. Further, when they looked at per-play performance — in other words, when they adjusted for the fact that highly drafted quarterbacks are more likely to play more downs — they found that quarterbacks taken in positions 11 through 90 in the draft actually slightly outplay those more highly paid and lauded players taken in the draft’s top 10 positions. I found this analysis fascinating. Pinker did not. This quarterback argument, he wrote, “is simply not true.”

I wondered about the basis of Pinker’s conclusion, so I e-mailed him, asking if he could tell me where to find the scientific data that would set me straight. He very graciously wrote me back. He had three sources, he said. The first was Steve Sailer. Sailer, for the uninitiated, is a California blogger with a market research background who is perhaps best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people. Sailer’s “proof” of the connection between draft position and performance is, I’m sure Pinker would agree, crude: his key variable is how many times a player has been named to the Pro Bowl.

If you’re citing Steve Sailer, you’re really dredging the cesspool. Do go read the rest — scroll down to the bottom of the page, there’s a list of links to this month’s posts, and they’re all good.

Where’s my magical truth detector? I’m sure it’s somewhere in my lab.

Last week, Mary Beard was getting sneered at because she agreed that the Roman Empire was ethnically diverse, and that — gasp, shock horror — there were brown people living in ancient Britain. She’s still getting sneered at, of course, because one thing racists really hate is being told their prejudices aren’t empirical facts. But at least the silly contretemps stirred up some excellent responses.

Jennifer Raff summarizes the complexities of ancient DNA analysis, and also makes an important point: it takes a village. There isn’t one unambiguous perfect path to the Truth™.

Framing this issue as a debate between hard science and fuzzy humanities is simply nonsense. Reconstructing the past is a multidisciplinary effort, and I can’t think of a single geneticist who wouldn’t candidly admit to many limitations in our approaches. To get around these limitations, and to improve the collection and interpretation of our data, we work closely with collaborators in other disciplines: archaeologists, linguists, osteologists, specialists in stable isotope analysis, and yes, even historians. Perhaps instead of fussing about whether cartoon characters conform to our beliefs about how the ancient world should have been, our energies would be better spent in learning more about how it actually was.

Yes. One of the hallmarks of the current round of Nazi pseudoscience is their claim of far more certainty than we actually have, and insistence that genetics and molecular biology, which they don’t understand, offer perfect clarity on race. The only perfect clarity we have is that it’s a complicated muddle.

Massimo Pigliucci goes after the philosophy behind these biases, and offers a good explanation of scientism.

It’s a good thing Mr. Taleb was being polite, I hate to imagine what he’s like when he’s not. Of course, so far as I know, he is no rocket scientist either, and he also operates under a “structural bias.” We all do, there is plenty of empirical evidence (not to mention good philosophy of science, but of course that’s just part of the humanities, which lack intellectual rigor anyway) that everyone is affected by personal cognitive biases. Moreover, any organized enterprise — not just the academic study of history, but also the practice of statistics, or population genetics, or whatever — is affected by structural constraints and biases. That’s just another way of saying that no human being, or organized group of human beings, has access to a god’s eye view of the world. All we have is a number of perspectives to compare. Which is a major reason, as articulated by philosopher Helen Longino, to work toward increasing diversity in the sciences: many individually biased points of view enter into dialogue with each other, yielding a less (but still) biased outcome.

The mistake of scientism is to elevate scientific knowledge and data crunching to a level of certainty and competence they most definitely do not have, while at the same time dismissing every other approach as obsolete nonsense. But human knowledge and understanding are not zero sum games. On the contrary, they work best when we expand, rather than artificially or ideologically limit, our methods and sources of evidence. The scientistic game is foolish not just because it is incoherent (what statistical, empirical evidence do we have that scientism works? What does that even mean??), but because it is dangerously self-serving. It makes a promise on behalf of science that science cannot possibly maintain. And this in the midst of an already strongly anti-intellectual climate where half of the American public, for instance, rejects the very notion of global warming and does not believe in the theory of evolution.

It really bugs me to see prominent people spreading a cartoon version of what science is — whether it’s Pinker to now, Taleb — and continued progress in science demands that we explore multiple perspectives on the evidence, and try our best to shake ourselves out of our comfortable biases.

Now that David Brooks has endorsed it, can we declare evolutionary psychology brain-dead and pull the plug?

This is a doozy of a canard that just won’t die. It’s how idiots who don’t understand evolution, but know that the theory is highly esteemed by scientists, attempt to coopt Darwin to be the figurehead for racism and sexism.

The Cultural Marxist War against Darwinism

Creationists: evolution is a social construct, not biologically real.

Liberal Creationists: race is a social construct, not biologically real.

Charles Darwin: I’m not a creationist: I’ll use the word ‘race’ in title of my Origin of Species

It’s the dumbass dichotomy: you will either believe in their crude, ill-informed, cartoon version of biology that says that black people are different and inferior, or you’re a creationist. It’s false. The argument is rotten all the way through. Not only do I reject the premise as ill-informed and wrong, but I also reject it because it’s a blatant attempt to commandeer science to be their banner.

It’s bad enough that racists play this game, but guess who else does it? Evolutionary psychologists. Evolutionary psychologists are just the worst.

So I got called out by Lilian Carvalho, a professor of marketing at a business school who studies consumer behavior and — what else? — evolutionary psychology. I have to revise my previous statement: evolutionary psychologists who think their crude misunderstandings of how evolution works gives them a handle on consumer behavior and marketing are the worst of the worst.

Anyway, Carvalho twitted this:

Another false dichotomy, common to evolutionary psychologists! You see, if you don’t accept their adaptationist model of how the human brain evolved, with every quirk and kink selected to be optimal for life on the savannah 10-100 thousand years ago, then you think biology only works from the neck down. They like to set themselves up as the sole arbiter of how brains evolved, when they always seem to have such a poor grasp of evolution in general, and usually are just coming at it in defense of the biases of the status quo.

I took a look at her twitter history before blocking her, and oh, yeah — it’s full of familiar names, “scientific” racists and anti-feminists and marketing professors, basically a collection of third rate ignoramuses puffing themselves up by waving Darwin around as their virtue signal. Ugh. I don’t need that crap in my life.

But then I read…David Brooks. Fuck me sideways, but we’ve found the worst of the worst of the worst.

Like all the EP wackaloons, he’s irate over the James Damore affair — he argues that Damore shouldn’t have been fired, because he was correct about the biology (which raises the question…how would a conservative pundit with no qualifications for anything know?), but that the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, ought to be fired for joining the mob. Of course, he cites evolutionary psychologists as saying Damore’s manifesto was scientifically accurate when the truth is that an evolutionary psychologist wouldn’t recognize scientific accuracy if it bit him in his bright pink berries.

I hit this paragraph and was stunned at the magnitude of the dishonesty and inanity.

Damore was tapping into the long and contentious debate about genes and behavior. On one side are those who believe that humans come out as blank slates and are formed by social structures. On the other are the evolutionary psychologists who argue that genes interact with environment and play a large role in shaping who we are. In general the evolutionary psychologists have been winning this debate.

Whoa. Brooks sets up two strawmen, labels them incorrectly, stages a battle in his head, and declares the victor.

Look, guy, the nature/nurture debate is dead. Any time I see someone setting up an argument with this hoary ancient dichotomy, I know I’m dealing with an uninformed nitwit. But to characterize it as Brooks has done is carrying idiocy to an absurd degree.

And then…the blank slate. Good god, I blame Pinker for reviving this bullshit and using it to slander his scientific opponents. No one believes the human mind is a blank slate. No one. I’m probably as liberal as most scientists come, you can call me a SJW and I don’t blink an eye, and you won’t find me claiming that. I believe we carry all kinds of predispositions (like a tendency towards tribalism…) that are consequences of our biological nature. I know there are biological differences between men and women, but I also know that people like to falsely rationalize behavioral differences as somehow innate and genetic. That first straw man is basically a nonexistent cartoon.

His second straw man made my jaw drop. evolutionary psychologists … argue that genes interact with environment…unbelievable. The standard understanding among all knowledgeable biologists is that organisms are products of genes and environment interacting; you can’t tease the two apart. That’s why the nature/nurture debate is archaic nonsense. What Brooks has written there is not the key property of evolutionary psychology. It’s what actual evolutionary biologists think.

Evolutionary psychologists believe that the human brain evolved in a specific environment over 10,000 years ago, and that all of the features of how our minds work can be described as adaptations to that environment. It is profoundly dishonest to appropriate the mainstream understanding of the role of genes and environment and credit it to a pseudoscience, while leaving out the actual premises of that pseudoscience. Evolutionary psychologists emphasize the primacy of genetic explanations; they argue that human behavioral traits — how well we do at math, who is most suitable for working in computer science — are affected by a legacy of genes we inherited from our paleozoic ancestors, and that they have the tools to determine exactly which traits are adaptive products of our past. They don’t. They’re masters of the panadaptationist just-so story, nothing more.

And then Brooks declares that the evolutionary psychologists are winning. But he’s just used a bogus definition of evolutionary psychology, one that is more appropriate to real biologists, and pretended that their opponent is a caricature, the blank slater.

Man, those two straw puppets just whaled the hell out of each other.

Yet people are citing David Brooks as the voice of reason all over the place — even Steven Pinker retweeted it. Wait. Of course Pinker would retweet that pile of crap.

James Damore was speaking bullshit calmly, so I can sort of understand David Brooks approving of it, as a kind of professional courtesy among bullshitters. But if you know anything about the science, you shouldn’t accept these lies.

Science doesn’t say that biology holds women back in the workplace. What Damore and Brooks have written is the same old exhaustingly familiar apologetics for discrimination. It’s not science, it’s prejudice pretending to be science.

And right now, evolutionary psychology is the field of choice for bigots who want to pretend to be scientists.

Which do I dislike more, Encyclopedia Dramatica or Johnny Monsarrat?

Hey, y’all remember the Secular Policy Institute? The dodgy atheist organization that was formed when Edwina Rogers got fired from the Secular Coalition of America, and immediately signed up some big names like Dawkins & Harris & Shermer & Pinker & Boghossian &tc, who shortly afterwards all fled the organization? No? Maybe this photo will trigger your memory, or your gag reflex:

Yikes, but that was one atheist shit-show I wish I could forget. In addition to the desperate reaching to grab the Usual Suspects, there was another individual I’d never heard of, who was busily working hard to alienate other organizations, and also didn’t like me (but I’m so loveable!). This individual had a prominent role in the SPI, and was also working for the Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.

That person was Johnny Monsarrat.

I know. Who? Never heard of him. But apparently he was going to be a new mover and shaker in the world of atheism He wasn’t. This was several years ago, and he’s more or less vanished from the scene, in part because of odd crackpot crapola in his history, like this:

Reader Jason sent over a blog post that sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole, following the story through a variety of twists and turns. The key player in the story is Jonathan Monsarrat, who among other things founded the video game company Turbine (Asheron’s Call, Lord of the Rings Online, Dungeons & Dragons Online, etc.). In early 2010, Monsarrat was arrested concerning events at a party in Massachusetts. The charges against him were later dismissed. However, there were various blog discussions among local bloggers and commenters. Not long ago, approximately three years after all of this happened, Monsarrat sued two named defendants and 100 “John Does” in a Massachusetts (not federal) court on a variety of charges, centering around defamation, but also including copyright infringement, commercial disparagement, deceptive trade practices and conspiracy. He’s asking for an astounding $5.5 million.

He’s one of those obnoxious people who flings around lawsuits when people say mean things about him, which, unfortunately, seems to be a common affliction within the atheist community. In this case, he tried to sue people who wrote about his rather tacky behavior and arrest record.

Upon arriving at the scene, police found broken beer bottles near the door of the first floor of the apartment and 25-30 teenagers inside. Many were attempting to conceal bottles of beer and other alcoholic beverages, the police report states. Open bottles of alcohol were found in the kitchen area as well as a small amount of marijuana.

Monsarrat identified himself as the host of the party, but denied that any alcohol was being served, the report states. When asked by an officer to inform his guests that the party was ending, Monsarrat became “argumentative” and refused to follow instructions, police said. Officers asked for identification from several partygoers who responded, “We’re in high school, we don’t have ID.”

So what we have is a fellow who is very full of himself and likes to file frivolous lawsuits who managed to get himself associated with some major players in atheism. He has a reputation as a copyright troll who brings on lawsuits with extravagant demands — basically, he’s a legal extortionist. And now he’s up to his old tricks again.

He’s suing Encyclopedia Dramatica for $750,000.

I detest and despise Encyclopedia Dramatica. It’s a kind ugly amalgam of 4chan Lite, fake news, and generic hate, a wiki for 12 year olds who want an outlet for puerile slurs. They even have a page about me with fake quotes and dishonest characterizations, so I owe them no fondness.

But here’s the thing: I don’t care. There are lots of sites filled with what they consider amusing lies, and no one in their right mind is going to cite Encyclopedia Dramatica as a source for anything — any claim made there is immediately tainted by juvenalia and their disregard for the truth. But I also have no patience for wankers who file SLAPP suits, having been a target for this shit myself.

I can’t quite bring myself to donate to their legal fund — it’s one of those sites that would improve the internet with its disappearance — but I also can’t condone this attempt to extort it out of existence, as a general principle. So I’ll just mention here that yes, you could hold your nose and donate to their legal defense fund, if for no other reason than that Monsarrat is a walking talking chancre.

Ugh. Feel so unclean now.

I have heard these words too many times before #marginsci

Here we go again. The Science March is facing conflicts for familiar reasons: reasons that I’ve heard applied against science communication (“shut up, Myers, my way is the only way to explain science”) and against a better atheism (“shut up, Myers, atheism only means there is no god and including values is mission creep”). I always seem to end up on the side that is repeatedly told to shut up.

There are two paragraphs, one after the other, that very nicely encompass the problem with the march in just a few key words. Here’s the side that resents the inclusion of diversity as one of the goals:

At the heart of the disagreements are conflicting philosophies over the march’s purpose. In one corner are those who assert that the event should solely promote science itself: funding, evidence-based policies, and international partnerships.

Notice the word I emphasized. This is what’s familiar. There’s always a side that wants to limit what’s allowed and control what topics are appropriate, usually because they’re uncomfortable with new ideas and new approaches. This is the regressive side.

Now look at the characterization of the other side:

In another are those who argue that the march should also bring attention to broader challenges scientists face, including issues of racial diversity in science, women’s equality, and immigration policy.

Again, I emphasized an important word. This group agrees that “funding, evidence-based policies, and international partnerships” are appropriate and should be included, but also considers other topics are essential. They are happy to do the heavy lifting of representing their interests, and are not demanding that everyone explicitly follow their lead. One side is dictating what others are allowed to stand up for; the other side wants to stand up for their place in science, and are being told, in essence, to shut up.

Regressive authoritarians ruin everything.

I can sympathize with this comment from Stephani Page (who is now on the steering committee for the march).

“I wasn’t about to join something just to be a face or a Band-Aid,” Page said. She joined the committee in large part because she wanted to change the culture of science — “I was not going to carry the banner of an institution [of science] that continues to treat me as if I don’t belong there.”

Exactly. She is not telling others what should be excluded from the march, she is making an effort to include what is important to her. I agree. That’s a point of view that must be represented, and it does not detract from the message that we need more funding and more evidence-based decision-making, it strengthens it, because it brings the breadth of the culture of science forward, and increases the reach of science by representing more Americans.

Why would anyone oppose that?

For the answer to that question, let’s turn to that bastion of regressive orthodoxy, Reddit. They’re a reliable source, right? Especially when they’re condemning Social Justice Warriors.

In early February, an unofficial poll posted by one Reddit user in the site’s March on Science forum found that a majority of respondents said they wouldn’t participate in the march if organizers emphasized social justice issues. Several threads on the march’s Reddit community explicitly criticize the march for what they call “scope creep.”

Yes. We should trust the opinion of the users of a site where the most popular subreddit right now is r/theDonald. Has anyone polled Breitbart or /pol/ on this issue?

As for “scope creep”, I’ve always wondered who gets to define the scope. It always seems to be some loud, prominent, hostile jerk who demands that people don’t bring up subjects they don’t like. Speaking of which…

Others in the scientific community have expressed concerns about the march’s message becoming watered down. When, for instance, the diversity page was briefly removed from the march’s website in January, prominent Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker tweeted that he was “glad to see that the March for Science Web site has removed the distractions.” Pinker had previously described the march as “anti-science” for its left-wing political tone.

And yet no one ever tells Steven Pinker to shut the fuck up, even as he arrogantly decides what is a distraction and what is not.

Here’s the bottom line: some people feel that they get to silence others in the name of keeping the “mission” pure and undiluted by subjects they don’t like. Typically, these are people who are already privileged and benefit from the status quo, and are trying to exclude people to whom these subjects are vital to their involvement in science. We have people who are arguing that diversity and inclusiveness are “distractions”, and they get far too much respect and attention. They get to claim that justice and equality and diversity are “anti-science”, and damn few people point out that that is a repulsive attitude.

No one has tried to kick Pinker out of any march — he’s free to join in with a great big sign that says nothing but “$” if he’d like. But who is giving him, and the mob of alt-righties on Reddit, the right to insist that a woman or a black man or a transgender person who wants to promote their contributions to science is diluting his sign, and must stay out of his parade?

And if they’re made uncomfortable by diversity or new perspectives, they’ve lost sight of the science. Science always pushes cultural boundaries with new ideas. If you don’t have the courage to face this novel idea that non-white, non-male people have a stake in science, then you don’t have the courage to challenge the public with ideas like climate change, or evolution, or vaccination, or any of the thousand other difficult concepts science has the duty to bring to the table.

Gender essentialism is not scientific

A reader let me know that I was mentioned on the March for Science Seattle page.

An excellent example of the perils of ideology trumping science.... from the left. Yes, we love talking about how the Right is so anti-science and ideologically based and praise the Left for being so much better. But they aren't. They just have different ideologies and therefore reject different science. We laugh at those dumb Republicans for denying climate science while our own "tribe" screams about the (false) perils of nuclear power, the (false) dangers of GMOs, and now, with the Regressive Left (of which PZ Myers is as deeply dogmatic as the worst Evangelical) the idea that there are no biological differences between men and women, that there are no evolutionary differences in male and female psychology, and that everyone is a clean slate (tabula rasa hypothesis - false) with gender being 100% socially determined without biological basis.Men and women ARE different. We have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to be different. Yes there is a lot of variation and there is more in group heterogeneity than between group heterogeneity (meaning that there will be a lot of overlap where on just about any characteristic there will be men that are less "manly" than some women and so on), but that doesn't mean that there aren't legitimate differences based purely in our biology and contingent evolutionary history.But as Steven Pinker points out, it is ALWAYS a mistake to tie your *ethics* to your *science*. Different =/= better or worse. It CAN be, but usually isn't. Acknowledging that men and women are biologically different is not the same as as saying one is "better" than the other. But in a bizarre and ironic twist the Left (particularly the regressives) have fetishized science to the point where they can't make an argument that they see as valid without referencing science, and so they twist and deny scientific facts to fit into their ideology, bastardizing it just as much as their counterparts on the right.

An excellent example of the perils of ideology trumping science…. from the left. Yes, we love talking about how the Right is so anti-science and ideologically based and praise the Left for being so much better. But they aren’t. They just have different ideologies and therefore reject different science. We laugh at those dumb Republicans for denying climate science while our own “tribe” screams about the (false) perils of nuclear power, the (false) dangers of GMOs, and now, with the Regressive Left (of which PZ Myers is as deeply dogmatic as the worst Evangelical) the idea that there are no biological differences between men and women, that there are no evolutionary differences in male and female psychology, and that everyone is a clean slate (tabula rasa hypothesis – false) with gender being 100% socially determined without biological basis.

Men and women ARE different. We have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to be different. Yes there is a lot of variation and there is more in group heterogeneity than between group heterogeneity (meaning that there will be a lot of overlap where on just about any characteristic there will be men that are less “manly” than some women and so on), but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t legitimate differences based purely in our biology and contingent evolutionary history.

But as Steven Pinker points out, it is ALWAYS a mistake to tie your *ethics* to your *science*. Different =/= better or worse. It CAN be, but usually isn’t. Acknowledging that men and women are biologically different is not the same as as saying one is “better” than the other. But in a bizarre and ironic twist the Left (particularly the regressives) have fetishized science to the point where they can’t make an argument that they see as valid without referencing science, and so they twist and deny scientific facts to fit into their ideology, bastardizing it just as much as their counterparts on the right.

Wow. Let me repeat that amazing accusation.

…the idea that there are no biological differences between men and women, that there are no evolutionary differences in male and female psychology, and that everyone is a clean slate (tabula rasa hypothesis – false) with gender being 100% socially determined without biological basis.

I am a fairly conventional cis-het man, steeped in Western culture, married to a conventional cis-het woman. I have seen porn. I have had heterosexual intercourse. I’m entirely conscious of the biological differences between men and women.

I’m also a biologist. I know the difference between a testis and an ovary, between a Mullerian duct and a Wolffian duct, between testosterone and estrogen (which, in the latter case, isn’t much). I’m also fairly well acquainted with the literature in evolutionary biology, and even know a bit about neuroscience.

To say that I claim there are no biological differences between men and women is so patently absurd and totally divorced from reality that Mr Pavlov ought to be embarrassed about saying something so stupid while accusing me of saying something so stupid. He won’t be.

What he’s doing is a common rhetorical trick. It’s obvious that most men have a penis and most women have a vagina, therefore, with a bit of clumsy sleight of hand, he wants to claim that every bit of cultural bias about the relative abilities of men and women is equally valid. He wants to pretend that because ovaries exist, all his notions about femininity must be equally rooted in biological reality.

Similarly, he reveals his hand with that odious Pinkerism about blank slates — that’s exactly the same game! Argue that some element of human psychology is not fixed by genetics and that it arises in a social context, and you are castigated by Pinker fans who like to bring the discourse to a dead stop with the ludicrous accusation that you must believe everything is 100% socially determined without biological basis. It’s idiotic and dishonest, but right now it’s Pinker’s main claim to fame.

Some things are complex and culturally determined. Biological sex is strongly canalized to produce a bimodal distribution of physical properties, but intersexes do exist. The brain is a plastic organ that responds to its environment in sophisticated ways, and carries both predispositions and the potential to develop in new ways, and gender is less strongly specified by genes than is the reproductive tract. If anyone is anti-science, it’s these people who want to argue for a less responsive, less adaptive, less diverse pattern of possible behaviors from the human brain.

You don’t get to claim that you have a solid biological footing in arguing that women are more nurturing, are less capable of doing math, and prefer the color pink because estrogen unless you’ve done actual work to demonstrate that those differences are real. Breasts aren’t your shortcut for imposing a mass of narrow Victorian cultural prejudices on how people should be, and you don’t get to hide behind science on this one.

Also…hiding behind trivially exposed lies isn’t science, even if some of your scientific heroes who try to defend a regressive conventionality think so.

Yet another TERFy oversimplification of reality

One does have to wonder if gender feminists and transgender activists are undermining science. One does, I guess, if one is going to properly apply critical thinking to these question. Unfortunately, that article by Debra Soh doesn’t seem to be interested in doing that, but instead on throwing around mischaracterizations of her critics. She fully embraces a tactic that Steven Pinker used in his book, The Blank Slate: let’s accuse those damnable “blank slaters” of believing that genes and biology play absolutely no role in brain and behavior, so that every bit of evidence that brains are made of meat refutes the cartoon extremists he is babbling about. He could have gone further, you know, and argued that the “blank slaters” believe that the skull contains nothing but cotton candy and whipped cream and meringue, so that any photograph of a brain in a bucket is a thorough disproof.

Debra Soh does the same thing. Let the strawmanning begin!

Gender feminists — who are distinct from traditional equity feminists — refuse to acknowledge the role of evolution in shaping the human brain, and instead promote the idea that sex differences are caused by a socialization process that begins at birth. Gender, according to them, is a construct; we are born as blank slates and it is parents and society at large that produce the differences we see between women and men in adulthood.

No. See, this is the difficult thing about dealing with these people: they immediately make a stark dichotomy, trying to pretend that one side, theirs, recognizes the importance of biology to the human mind, while the other side simply denies any role at all by biology and genetics. It’s annoying. I just have to say that the nature:nurture debate is fucking dead, that all influences are significant and inseparable in generating the complexity of the organism, and that these people with an inflamed notion of the black and white nature of the contributions to development belong back in the 19th century.

Gender is a construct built around probabilities in the disposition of traits associated with sex; most of the stereotypes are nothing but cultural impositions. There is no biological basis for girls wearing dresses and having long hair; boys don’t have a genetic predisposition to wearing pants and having their hair cut shorter. But there certainly are biases in brain development generated by hormones, for instance, biases that can also be overwhelmed by cultural influences. Could girls have a lesser potential for doing higher mathematics, on average? Maybe. But the evidence isn’t available, because social constraints have discouraged women from pursuing math for generations. Women could be better, on average, than men at math, but we wouldn’t know it because of all the baggage they’ve been forced to carry.

By the way, she does include a link to her claim that gender feminists refuse to acknowledge the role of evolution in shaping the human brain — again, I don’t know anyone who would make such an absurd claim, but it’s a staple of the kind of false characterization constantly perpetrated by the biological determinists (see? I can use misleading labels as well as they can). You might imagine it would be a link to some feminist claiming that brains are made of cotton candy and whipped cream and meringue, but no — it is to an evolutionary psychology journal article that also claims that feminists fails to consider evolutionary accounts of psychological sex differences. No evidence given.

I will tender the hypothesis, however, that gender feminists have evolved to avoid circle jerks.

Let us continue to see the caricatures drawn…

The idea that our brains are identical sounds lovely…

What? Why? I like the fact that people are different. And also, I don’t know anyone who argues that all brains are identical.

but the scientific evidence suggests otherwise. Many studies, for instance, have documented the masculinizing effects of prenatal testosterone on the developing brain. And a recent study in the journal Nature’s Scientific Reports showed that testosterone exposure alters the programming of neural stem cells responsible for brain growth and sex differences.

Yes, yes, we all know this. These facts are only relevant if you’re arguing with your cartoon feminist who thinks brains are not influenced by genes or hormones.

Gender feminists often point to a single study, published in 2015, which claimed it isn’t possible to tell apart male and female brains. But when a group of researchers reanalyzed the underlying data, they found that brains could be correctly identified as female or male with 69% to 77% accuracy. In another study, published in 2016, researchers used a larger sample in conjunction with higher-resolution neuroimaging and were able to successfully classify a brain by its sex 93% of the time.

Warning sign again: she doesn’t link to that single study which we often point to. I don’t think I’ve ever pointed to such a study. I participated in a histological study of mouse brains way back when I was a student, and we found a measurable, statistical difference in the size of cells in a certain area of the brain between males and females. The curious thing is that I spent month staring into a microscope measuring sections — I was the data collection grunt — and at no point could I have sexed a mouse brain from looking at it. I did trust that the statistics were valid, though.

So I’m a bit doubtful about their claims of accuracy. I believe there are statistically detectable differences, but that they’re not as absolute as claimed.

But even if as accurate as claimed, there’s a problem. Even if you can classify a brain successfully 93% of the time, what about the other 7%? Those ambiguous brains? What do they mean? When the estimates of the size of the transgender population range from 0.3% to almost 0.8%, saying that your magic MRI machine has a wobble of 7% leaves a lot of leeway.

Further, I would not claim that the 0.8% is embedded somewhere in that unclassifiable 7%; I suspect a lot of transgender individuals, when scored by the anatomical metric of their brain, just as if we scored them by their genitals, would be ranked as solidly male or female…on that one metric, which says nothing about how their brains function. What are you going to do, deny that someone’s sexual orientation is valid because their nucleus magnocellularis lit up on one MRI reading?

That’s the whole problem with this approach: deny the whole because of your interpretation of a part. You have a Y chromosome, therefore you are male. You have a vagina, therefore you are female. You like football, therefore you are male. Your brain has this particular shape, therefore you are female. It’s ridiculous. Just the fact that there are a thousand easily measured parameters for gender, and they are only loosely correlated with one another, ought to tell you that trying to find the one, single, infallible metric is a fool’s errand.

Soh has more shoehorning to do, though.

In my experience, proponents touting the “blank slate” view are willing to agree, in private conversations, that neurological sex differences do exist, but they fear that acknowledging as much publicly will justify female oppression. This is backward. As it stands, female-typical traits are seen as inferior and less worthy of respect. This is the real issue the movement fails to address: Nobody wants to be female-typical, not even women.

Wrong again. There are no “blank slaters”. There are people who will publicly assert that there are both cultural and biological elements to sex and gender — they’re not going to whisper that as a dirty secret to you in private. And the claim that we see female-typical behaviors as inferior is false. What is objectionable is the belief, so blithely taken for granted by people like Soh, that you can tell someone what is typical. No one wants to be female-typical, as defined by the determinists, because they stuff that definition with a lot of crap, so that they can have it both ways: If you’re typical, you’re weak, passive, a good help-meet to your spouse; but if you’re strong, assertive, and independent, you’re not typical, that is you are bad at being a woman. You cannot win.

Unlike gender feminists, transgender activists firmly believe that gender is a biological, rather than social, reality — but of course they don’t believe that it’s necessarily tied to sex at birth. They also believe that gender identity is quite stable early on, warranting a transition not only for transgender adults, but also young children who say they were born in the wrong body.

I give up. Has this person actually talked with any transgender activistås? Because they’ll have a range of perspectives, and will almost always recognize that these issues are complex — there is absolutely no one-size-fits-all formula for how people manage their gender identity. Yet here is Soh, acting as if they’re a uniform ideological bloc. It’s dishonest and demeaning.

But then, this kind of dishonesty is exactly like what comes out of right-wing think tanks: cast doubt on the complexity of the real science, while insisting that their bogus, overly-simplified version of reality is the True Science. We also get that from creationists, claiming the scientific high ground while puking up total bullshit. That’s what makes these kinds of claims galling:

Distortion of science hinders progress. When gender feminists start refuting basic biology, people stop listening, and the larger point about equality is lost.

Yes, Ms Soh, distortion of science hinders progress. So stop doing it, OK?

You also punch yourself in the face when you try to imply that gender is merely basic biology. It’s not. It’s advanced and complex neurobiology, psychology, and sociology, and it’s your reductive attitude that it’s simply biology that is the grandest distortion of science.

All science is always political

I have been out of the loop for a few weeks — man, my workload spiked recently — but now that I’m catching up, I feel nothing but dismay at the ridiculous complaints from scientists about the March for Science. I could hardly believe that some oppose the idea of scientists expressing vigorous dissent.

Al Gore, bless his heart (as we say in the South), was well intentioned when he made “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006. But he did us no favors. So many of the conservative Southerners whom I speak to about climate change see it as a partisan issue largely because of that high-profile salvo fired by the former vice president.

Scientists marching in opposition to a newly elected Republican president will only cement the divide. The solution here is not mass spectacle, but an increased effort to communicate directly with those who do not understand the degree to which the changing climate is already affecting their lives. We need storytellers, not marchers.

I’ve heard that so often: don’t rock the boat. We’ve got ours, if you make waves you’re imperiling the precious position we are clinging to by our fingernails. It’s absurd, selfish, and futile. The situation for science has become increasingly dire, and instead of shaking up the situation, putting your position at risk, you want to make sure that scientists are more harmless/helpless, more innocuous, more inoff-fucking-ensive because conservatives who despise science already might use the support of a political movement they hate as more ammo against us?

We have a common word for that. It’s called cowardice.

Then he dares to lecture us on what would be effective science communication? I’ve been through that for years, too. There’s always someone who will lecture at others who are doing the work that they’re doing it wrong. And that someone doing the hectoring is usually terribly ineffective at communicating science, so they are reduced to pontificating about the proper way to do it to the science communicators.

When they tell people “we need storytellers” without recognizing that we already know that, and are doing it, it’s remarkably clueless. We just see the need for something more, that when we reach yet another period of peak crisis, it’s time to add another approach to the toolkit.

And hey, you want to tell stories? Go ahead. No one is stopping you. The only ones trying to suppress diverse methods of outreach to diverse communities are the ones saying there can be only one acceptable way of explaining science.

By the way, I know people who found “An Inconvenient Truth” useful and powerful. That it antagonized the assholes who have been subverting science for decades is a point in its favor.

I thought that op-ed was bad, but here’s a dude complaining that the March is too political…or worse, that it’s the wrong politics. Those damn SJWs! Ruining everything!

What does make me worry is the increasing politicization of the March, which is fast changing from a pro-science march to a pro-social justice march. Now there’s nothing wrong with marching in favor of minority rights and against oppression, but if you mix that stuff up with science, as the March organization seems to be doing, well, that is a recipe for ineffectiveness. What would be the point of a march if it’s about every social injustice, particularly when, as the organizers did, they indict science itself for its racism and support of discrimination? The statement of aims below from the March’s organizers has now disappeared, but the tweet below that is still there. (You can find the full statement archived here.)

We’ve seen this same crap recently from Steven Pinker. The March for Science declares that they are “committed to centralizing, highlighting, standing in solidarity with, and acting as accomplices with black, Latinx, API, indigenous, Muslim, Jewish, women, people with disabilities, poor, gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, trans, non-binary, agender, and intersex scientists and science advocates,” and boom, the conservative science wing reacts in horror. I don’t get it. Encouraging diversity and new ideas and approaches is exactly what scientists should support — but I guess if you’re part of the establishment now, you’d rather not see the implicit policies that helped you get where you are change. It’s almost as if they’re willing to help others climb the ladder of scientific achievement, but only if they look like the people that are already there. Can’t clutter up the old boys’ club with disabled lesbians and transgender brown people and all that, because they wouldn’t be as committed to doing good science as…privileged white people?

But that would be racist/sexist.

There’s another distractor there, too: fighting oppression is a “recipe for ineffectiveness”. We must focus laser-like on ONE THING, even if we are a massive organization of hundreds of thousands or even millions of members — everyone must be in lockstep on the ONE THING or we won’t get the ONE THING, even if the one thing is so abstract and huge that it’s effectively indefensible. So Movement Atheism must focus on the ONE THING of ATHEISM, which is fiercely defended as the sole principle that there is no god, never mind all the complex cultural baggage associated with that. Scientists must focus on the ONE THING of SCIENCE, a concept so complex that we have a name for the problem of trying to define its boundaries, the demarcation problem.

I have no idea how (or why) this dude plans to narrow the focus of the March. Is the March for Science to consist only of white men looking distracted as they concentrate on the scientific method? Wait — that would look just like a bunch of philosophers, and we can’t have that. A bunch of white men fiddling with telescopes and dissecting cats and punching numbers into their handheld computers as they march? That sounds like a recipe for effectiveness.

There’s another complaint. The organizers for the March for Science have criticized science. How dare they! Clearly, they don’t understand the True Purpose of Science, which is Good and Above Criticism. All Hail Science!

If a March has any chance of being effective, it can’t consist of a bunch of penitentes who flagellate themselves loudly and publicly for bad behavior. After all, stuff like “immigration policy”, “native rights”, and many other issues of social justice are not, as the organizers maintain, “scientific issues.” They are moral issues, which means they reflect worldviews and preferences that are not objective. Of course once you set your goals on immigration, pipeline locations and who should not be near them, and so on, then science can inform your actions. But to claim that all issues of social justice are “scientific issues” is palpably wrong.

This is just weird to the point of incomprehensibility to me. Science must have an objective purpose? But most of it doesn’t! Science is about curiosity and wonder and exploration. What objective purpose was Thomas Hunt Morgan pursuing when he was searching for sports in his fly colony? What was the objective purpose of Santiago Ramón y Cajal spending long nights drawing the beautiful filigree of Golgi-stained neurons, or writing lovely prose about the growth cone?

Please, do tell me how to define this criterion of “objectivity”. It seems to me that this arbitrary distinction would make postage stamp collecting, which has discrete, specific, measurable criteria, more scientific than launching a space probe to Pluto, where we had little idea what we’d find.

It is clearly not so much that some issues lack objectivity — once you recognize that native Americans are human beings, “native rights” becomes a rather clearly defined concern with measurable goals — but, as defined, that adding a moral component taints a subject, polluting the purity of Science, making it non-objective.

I’ve got news for him: everything has a moral component. Everything has a political component. If it’s a human activity, it is contaminated with moral and political ramifications, because that’s what humans do. Deciding that we have the economic surplus and the privilege of leisure to be able to support people who study fruit flies full time is a moral, social, and political act, for instance.

It becomes even more profoundly moral, social, and political when we make arbitrary decisions about which people will be permitted to have the privilege of spending their days studying fruit flies, or even which people will be granted the education that will allow them to appreciate the study of fruit flies. Until the day comes that AIs are doing all the science, discussing the science only among the other AIs, and doing all the work to benefit or harm only AIs, you cannot divorce the moral from the scientific. And even then I hope the AIs are smart enough to consider the impact of their pursuits on AI morality, because we feeble apes sure don’t seem to be able to comprehend that concept.

Just the idea that science ought not to criticize itself in public gives me the heebie-jeebies. Damn. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study? I guess that was scientifically objective, let’s not criticize it. Eugenics? All sciencey and shit. Bioethics is not a field that actually exists, or if it does, it’s not objective and Truly Scientific because it recognizes the impact of science on society.

It’s easy to find fun and exciting examples. How about this: An Adorable Swedish Tradition Has Its Roots in Human Experimentation. They fed institutionalized, mentally-ill people with massive doses of candy until their teeth rotted, to determine if sugar actually caused tooth decay. It was objectively done, of course. All Praise Science!

Or how about the whole issue of evolutionary psychology, which mainly seems to exist to rationalize traditional Western values as objective and scientific, perpetuating a whole vast collection of oppressive ideas.

Victorian social attitudes and science were closely intertwined. The common belief was that males and females were radically different. Moreover, attitudes about Victorian women influenced beliefs about nonhuman females. Males were considered to be active, combative, more variable, and more evolved and complex. Females were deemed to be passive, nurturing; less variable, with arrested development equivalent to that of a child. “True women” were expected to be pure, submissive to men, sexually restrained and uninterested in sex – and this representation was also seamlessly applied to female animals.

That sure sounds like Science with a capital “S” to me! Let’s get some grant money to prove the status quo and get it published in Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, Cosmpolitan, and The Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management! A three-fer, win-win, here comes tenure…and none of that has involved those damned “moral issues”, as long as you realize that white, conservative, capitalist, male biases are the gold standard of Truth, and it’s only those deviants who question the status quo who are bringing in that dirty word, “morality”, and making everything messily unscientific.

Oh, god, this thing gets even worse.

If we are to march, we should march in unity for truth, and against those who reject empirical truth. What unites all science—and makes it unique—is that it is a universal toolkit, used in the same way by members of all groups, regardless of gender, ethnicity, or religion. That is what holds us together. If we start dragging in issues of social justice—and I’m not of course saying they should be ignored in other venues—then we divide not only ourselves, but separate ourselves from much of the electorate, who, as we’ve seen above, generally trust us.

Declaring that you’ll only be marching under the banner of TRUTH sounds awfully religious to me. Declaring that science always works the same way in everyone’s hands sounds awfully ahistorical to me. Declaring that what holds us together is a disregard of gender, ethnicity, or religion sounds awfully privileged to me — I have the luxury of being unaffected by my sex and race, but damn, if you listen with half an ear to everyone who isn’t a white man you can’t help but notice that that isn’t true for everyone.

Social justice isn’t something that we “drag in” when social injustice is the muck that hinders the participation of more than half the citizenry in science, when toxic nonsense about sex and race poison the whole discourse about science in our culture.

This whole argument that social justice must be actively excluded from the March for Science reminds me of another march: the suffrage parade of 1913, in which black women were asked to segregate themselves from the white women and march at the back of the parade, because the white ladies did not want their goals marred by that other issue of equality. If you’re worried that your cause might be tainted, that’s the example you should examine, because it was Ida Wells who emerges the hero and white feminists who damage their own reputation (and who still, all too often, kick their own butts when they ignore intersectionality).

And sweet jesus, the hypocrisy. Science is all about Truth and Objectivity, which is why we should bow to the biases of the electorate, who will be divided from us if we start dragging in issues of social justice, since they, after all, are assumed to not like it (and oh, the implicit bias in which part of the electorate we must listen to…I cringe). So much for the objectivity of science — it should say what the people desire, or it might erode their trust in us.

I presume Dr Coyne will now respect the wishes of all those faith-heads who want him to shut up about atheism. Might separate ourselves from much of the electorate, don’t you know.

“Identity politics” is racist code

Accusing someone of “identity politics” is the new, genteel way of calling them a “nigger lover”. I still remember being shocked into silence when I was about 15 years old, and my fervently Christian, home-schooling, John Bircher relation called me that, with a patronizing smile, after I tried to explain that no, black people are not more closely related evolutionarily to gorillas than are white people. He had pretensions to intellectualism, so I’m sure he would have loved the phrase “identity politics”. It’s excellent double-speak. Take a term that refers to a tendency to splinter into groups that favor narrower causes built around race, religion, or class, and apply it exclusively to any person who promotes a more inclusive, broader politics, one that crosses racial and sexual boundaries, the exact opposite of what the term implies. At the same time, avoid labeling what the white supremacists, the KKK, the alt-right, and the neo-Nazis do as identity politics, even though that would be far more accurate.

I was stunned and unable to respond when I was 15, but I’ve had 45 years now to think about it (l’esprit de l’escalier with a vengeance!). It’s been decades of being called a faggot, a Jew, a race traitor, and all sorts of variants of the identity politics insult, and I can confidently say now that it’s true: I am an old white heterosexual man, and I reject the politics of white heterosexual male supremacy, which is what you’re really trying to say. I don’t think my gender or race automatically make me a better human being. You think yours does, and that makes you a worse human being. It’s hard work to lift ourselves above our prejudices, and anyone who uses the phrase “identity politics” to disparage those who are trying is displaying their own lazily held biases. It’s virtue signaling to your fellow bigots.

I say this in response to a post by a well-regarded Atheist Hero, Sam Harris, A Few Thoughts on the “Muslim Ban”. The fact that he puts it in quotes is foreshadowing.

He makes it crystal clear that he detests Donald Trump — calling him “a malignant Chauncey Gardiner” is a good phrase — and that he thinks the implementation of the ban is terrible policy and inconsistent in its targets. But this is Sam at his oiliest: he is able to condemn Trump without reservation, but the ban…well, its real problem is that it doesn’t go far enough, and it’s undermined by those damned liberal leftists who are unable to see the true, depraved evil of Islam, the standard Sam Harris rant. You see, the real cause of all of our problems is not the right wing and demagogues like Trump, it’s the Left and their identity politics.

However, most of what is being said in opposition to Trump’s order is thoroughly contaminated by identity politics and liberal delusion. The Left seems determined to empower the Right by continuing to lie about the problem of Islamism. As David Frum recently wrote, “When liberals insist that only fascists will defend borders, then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals won’t do.” I have been saying as much for more than a decade—and am vilified by my fellow liberals whenever I do.

Yes, Sam, you are, because we can see right through you to your conservative heart and decidedly illiberal views. That one paragraph is a perfect example.

“Identity politics” is a far right dog whistle. The only identity politics being practiced is a refusal to accept the privileges of being a white man — the only division being fomented here is between a larger vision of a united humanity and the bigotry of the status quo. It is also classic Harris to place the blame for Trump not on the people who voted for him, or the cowardly, amoral power brokers of the Republican party, or the corporatist drift of an out-of-touch Democratic party, but on the progressive, liberal people who rejected Trump and are now leading the angry opposition. It’s madness. It’s like blaming centuries of authoritarian religious oppression by the Catholic Church on those horrible atheists and pagans.

The only lying here is by Harris. He quotes David Frum — David Frum! — making the common argument that liberals can’t be true patriots, claiming that we are insufficiently zealous in being isolationist and xenophobic. There’s more to being an American than being a bigoted nativist (although, to be honest, that has historically been a significant part of being American). Liberals do not argue for the necessity of fascism to defend ourselves. It turns out that we actually think the diverse people who inhabit this country are ourselves, and what we oppose is the fascist politics of racism. The assumptions of Harris and Frum are fundamentally wrong. That we can embrace immigrants who have chosen to live in our country, whether they are Mexican or Muslim, is our patriotism, our values, our appreciation of an American identity. The America of Harris and Frum is a meaner, insular, provincial place, and that we reject their vision does not imply that we want a police state by default.

I really can’t get over the fact that he quotes David Frum to characterize liberals. Frum was a speech-writer to George W. Bush (he’s proud to have coined the Manichaean phrase “axis of evil”, which is perfectly Harrisean). He worked for the Reagan and Giuliani campaigns. He’s a neocon who supported the Iraq war. And he is the authority my “fellow liberal” Sam Harris turns to to explain liberalism? I am so unsurprised. They are very sympatico.

Then Harris says something I agree with.

It is perfectly possible—and increasingly necessary—to speak about the ideological roots of Islamism and jihadism, and even about the unique need for reform within mainstream Islam itself, without lapsing into bigotry or disregarding the suffering of refugees. Indeed, when one understands the problem for what it is, one realizes that secular Muslims, liberal Muslims, and former Muslims are among the most desirable allies to have in the West—and, indeed, such people are the primary victims of Islamist intolerance and jihadist terror in Muslim-majority countries.

Yes. I can despise Islam while at the same time recognizing that I have a moral duty to defend Muslims from oppression, violence, and discrimination. I am also able to recognize that someone identifying as Muslim has not confessed to being an Islamist on jihad. So why isn’t Liberal Sam condemning in plain English any kind of “Muslim Ban”? I can’t think of many better ways to alienate secular and liberal Muslims than making blanket prohibitions of entire nations of people from setting foot in America.

Well, I can think of one better way: we could bomb them and kill their civilians. We do that, too.

Harris, however, cannot categorically reject the Trump policy, because he favors something similar — maybe implemented with more finesse, with more carefully placed weasel words, but exactly the same in effect. So he writes a “few words” on the Muslim ban that consist of denouncements of the liberals who are out on the streets and in the airports right now protesting against this uncivil oppression. It’s telling.

Harris is not alone, however. Have you seen the latest from Steven Pinker?


Scientists’ March on Washington plan compromises its goals with anti-science PC/identity politics/hard-left rhetoric https://goo.gl/AVB7mR

Whoa. The March for Science is anti-science? Where does that come from?

It apparently comes from “identity politics”, which in this case, means the March for Science openly invites diversity. Here’s the horrible hard-left compromising rhetoric of that web page:

In the past days, scientists have voiced concern over many issues – gag orders for government science agencies, funding freezes, and reversing science based policies. We recognize that these changes will differently and disproportionately affect minority scientists, science advocates, and the global communities impacted by these changes in American policies. Addressing these issues is imperative in understanding how recent developments will affect all people – not simply the most privileged among us. We take seriously your concerns that for this march to be meaningful, we must centralize diversity of the march’s organizers at all levels of planning. Diversity must also be reflected in the march itself —both through the mission statement and those who participate.

We hear you, and thank you for your criticism. At the March for Science, we are committed to centralizing, highlighting, standing in solidarity with, and acting as accomplices with black, Latinx, Asian and Pacific Islander, indigenous, non-Christian, women, people with disabilities, poor, gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, trans, non-binary, agender, and intersex scientists and science advocates. We must work to make science available to everyone and encouraging individuals of all backgrounds to pursue science careers, especially in advanced degrees and positions. A diverse group of scientists produces increasingly diverse research, which broadens, strengthens, and enriches scientific inquiry, and therefore, our understanding of the world.

That’s what Pinker considers anti-science: a statement that clearly declares their intent not to discriminate. He might want to check out the NIH policies on inclusion — it’s even more thorough. I guess the NIH is anti-science.

Or perhaps he should wag an angry finger at those damned SJWs at the NSF and NASA. Totally PC. Must be anti-science. Thinking that people with disabilities, or uteruses, or too much melanin in their skin, should actually be respected for their skills is such a deplorable hard left position to take.

The March for Science also includes a blatant example of identity politics.

Who can participate:

Anyone who values science. That’s the only requirement.

Yep. Maybe that’s what annoyed Pinker. A refusal to discriminate on the basis of racial or other identity is “identity politics” to bigots.

Dogma comes in many flavors

Ask an atheist, and they will tell you that religion poisons everything. There is an understanding that human nature is not fixed, but is susceptible to all kinds of influences — people make decisions based not simply on what they are, but on how they were brought up and shaped by their environment. They are likely to note that an American is most probably a Christian, not because they thought it through and worked out the logic and evidence, but simply because they were brought up in a predominantly Christian culture; if they’d been born in India they’d most likely be Hindu, in Italy Catholic, in Iran Muslim, in Sweden Lutheran, etc.

Where this awareness fizzles out, though, is in domains where we’ve absorbed and accepted the dominant worldview — suddenly, the conventions become not a plastic response to history and contingency and idiosyncratic circumstance, but “human nature” and the arguments become all about the necessity of maintaining the status quo: “that’s the way it is”, “are you some kind of freak?”, “we wouldn’t be this way if it weren’t adaptive.” There is a pressure to conform, because everyone is expected to behave the way everyone else is.

We wouldn’t hesitate to be iconoclastic if the issue is one of faith. Break it down, we’d say, shatter those chains and think for yourself. Other topics, though, are suddenly taboo. Try to go to most atheist meetings and question, for instance, conventional notions of masculinity. A significant number of those radical superstition-breakers will be appalled and start whispering about you, and divisions will form and some will cast you out. There will be references to such distinguished defenders of the fixity of gender norms as Steven Pinker and Christina Hoff Sommers when they want to appear highbrow, and mutterings about cucks and SJWs when they don’t care. They are willing to be infidels only on narrow matters of religion, but on anything else, they are as hidebound and inflexible as the most dogmatic Catholic.

But they are wrong. Masculinity is not one simple thing. There is no rulebook that says “You must have short hair; you must enjoy football; you must sneer at queers; you must eat steak and work out on weekends.” Having a penis does not imply that there is a suite of behaviors you must accept, while not having one means you cannot engage in them. There is a link between biology and behavior, but it’s weaker than you think and requires constant reinforcement from culture in order to sustain itself. We know this is true because different cultures have different notions of masculinity. There is no one true male nature.

Cartomancer has a long and thorough post on the nature of masculinity in ancient Greek culture. It’s amazing. Right there at the root of contemporary Western culture, they can’t even get this fundamental biological essentialism right — different cities had different perspectives on what it means to be a man, almost as if the Y chromosome does not dictate every aspect of your identity.

I have spent some time outlining the Homeric models of manly behaviour, because they show us threads that continued to be important in the culture of the Classical city-states of the 5th and 4th centuries BC, widely regarded as the high water mark of Greek culture. But to talk of one Greek culture is clearly a mistake. The different city states each took their shared Homeric inheritance and distorted it in different directions, placing emphasis on different aspects of their shared culture and in so doing creating different and competing conceptions of masculinity.

Spartan culture, for instance, was radically authoritarian, militaristic, anti-intellectual and anti-capitalist. Full Spartiate citizens were expected to be full-time warriors, living in communal barracks with their fellow men and spurning the trappings of wealth, comfort and sophistication. To them courage was everything, the model of Achilles their ultimate goal. The Spartan approach to courage comes across well in the saying, recorded by Plutarch, that Spartan mothers expect their sons to come back carrying their shields or on dead on top of them (that is, having won the battle or having died trying – throwing away your heavy metal hoplon shield to better escape a pursuing enemy was an unforgivable crime in Sparta). The Greek word we usually translate as “courage” is andreia – literally “manliness”, and the two were pretty much synonymous in Sparta (compare the Latin virtus, from vir, man, which is the root of our “virtue”).

They don’t say much about femininity — there’s another lengthy essay that needs to be written — but it’s too often implicit that the feminine is the mirror image of the masculine. If courage and virtue are manly traits, then women must be timid and weak, or they are violating norms. If men of other cities are less diligent in pursuing glorious death in battle, they must be “pussies”, or that universal put-down, “women”. If a woman expresses courage like a man, she must be “butch”, a “dyke”, and must therefore be ugly and less desirable as a woman.

We are soaking in these attitudes. Fire up an online video game and do poorly, and watch the reaction: you must be a “pussy” or a “fag”. It’s gotten so bad that if you merely defend the equality of women, you are a damnable SJW who is betraying men.

But we can fix that! We tried to bring up our kids to be tolerant and open and willing to explore their identities beyond blindly accepting gender-defined paths, and I think they turned out pretty good. There are sub-communities within atheism that are conscious of other ways of thinking than the default patriarchal set, just as there are better ways of thinking about the universe than the indoctrinated godly explanations. We can learn to be better and recognize the artificiality of so many conventions in our society, so we can break them. This ought to be understood as the default position of atheist organizations everywhere. No gods, no masters, no dogmas about human nature.

There’s a flip side to human plasticity, though. If we’re flexible enough that we can be made better, then we must also recognize the possibility that culture can make us worse. If atheism is liberating, it’s also true that Catholicism is persuasive, and we could be living in a society that constantly tells us we need to be more Christian (hey, we do!). If the truth is that gender roles are more complicated and less rigidly dictated by biology than many people believe, there can also be a culture that promotes the lie that there is only one true way to be a man, and we have that, too, and it harms people as badly as the most demented religion out there. It’s called the alt-right, or the manosphere, or machismo, or any of a thousand names that some will automatically accept as virtuous (it’s built into the language that man equals virtue, after all.) Abi Wilkinson reports on her experiences with toxic masculinity.

In modern parlance, this is part of the phenomenon known as the “alt-right”. More sympathetic commentators portray it as “a backlash to PC culture” and critics call it out as neofascism. Over the past year, it has been strange to see the disturbing internet subculture I’ve followed for so long enter the mainstream. The executive chairman of one of its most popular media outlets, Breitbart, has just been appointed Donald Trump’s chief of strategy, and their UK bureau chief was among the first Brits to have a meeting with the president-elect. Their figurehead – Milo Yiannopoulos – toured the country stumping for him during the campaign on his “Dangerous Faggot” tour. These people are now part of the political landscape.

On their forums I’ve read long, furious manifestos claiming that women are all sluts who “ride the cock carousel” and sleep with a series of “alpha males” until they reach the end of their sexual prime, at which point they seek out a “beta cuck” to settle down with for financial security. I’ve lurked silently on blogs dedicated to “pick-up artistry” as men argue that uppity, opinionated, feminist women – women like myself – need to be put in their place through “corrective rape”.

I know about the “men going their own way” movement, which is based around the idea that men should avoid any sort of romantic or sexual relationship with women. I’m aware of “traditional marriage” advocates, who often argue that you should aim to marry a very young woman as she’s likely to be easier to control. I also learned the difference between an “incel” who is involuntarily celibate, and a “volcel” who makes a deliberate choice to avoid sexual activity, and sometimes also masturbation, often in the belief that ejaculation depletes their testosterone and saps them of masculine power.

I’ve read their diatribes, too, and what I find dismaying is how often they cite science as somehow backing up their views, but to their minds, “science” means rationalizing their rigid and deterministic gender essentialism. Good science says no such thing. Neither does history or philosophy or sociology or anthropology or psychology. We have a responsibility to stop these lies. They are as damaging to human psychological development as dogmatic Christianity or Islam, and if you are concerned about removing obstacles to our species’ potential, as most atheists will say they are, then you have an obligation to combat the propaganda of these pseudo-scientific Y chromosome worshippers as you do the propaganda of religion.