[Previous: Why I lost faith in New Atheism]
I haven’t thought about Richard Dawkins in a while, but he’s still around. At the age of 83, he’s going on a lecture tour that’s being advertised as his farewell bow. Ross Andersen, writing for the Atlantic, attended one of these talks.
It really is a tragedy what Dawkins has become. Those of us who once looked up to him, including me, admired him for his earnest desire to bring the spirit of scientific wonder to the masses. It was his first passion in life, and that was always obvious when he was speaking about it. I had the impression that his atheist advocacy wasn’t separate from that, but came from the same wellspring of wanting everyone to know the true nature of reality. Next to the power of real understanding, the tall tales of religion are shoddy counterfeits.
The attendees at the talk (though lacking a certain diversity) still reflect some of that spirit:
The packed theater looked like a subreddit come to life. Bald white heads poked above the seat backs, as did a few ponytails and fedoras. This being an assembly of freethinkers, there was no standard uniform, but I did spot lots of goatees and black T-shirts. The faded silk-screen graphics on the tees varied. One was covered in equations. Another featured a taxonomy of jellyfish extending onto its sleeves. These people had not come here merely to see a performer; Dawkins had changed many of their lives. A man in the row behind me said that he had attended Dawkins’s show in Newark, New Jersey, the previous night. As a Christian teen, he had sought out videos of Dawkins, hoping that they would prepare him to rebut arguments for evolution. He ultimately found himself defeated by the zoologist’s logic, and gave up his faith.
However, the evening immediately took an ugly turn. The introduction, from a member of Atheists for Liberty – a hard-right organization – gave a hint of what was to unfold:
Jake Klein, the director of the Virginia Chapter of Atheists for Liberty, told a similar conversion story onstage, before introducing Dawkins. Klein said The God Delusion had radicalized him against the Orthodox Judaism of his youth. Millions of other creationists had similar experiences, Klein said. He credited Dawkins with catalyzing an important triumph of reason over blind superstition. Klein’s opening remarks, to that point, could have described Dawkins of 20-odd years ago, when he was first going on the attack against religion’s “profligate wastefulness, its extravagant display of baroque uselessness.” But then things took a turn. Klein told the crowd that they couldn’t afford to be complacent. Human ignorance was not yet wholly vanquished. “Wokeness and conspiratorial thinking” had arisen to take the place of religious faith. Klein began ranting about cultural Marxists. He said that Western civilization needed to defend itself against “people who divide the world between the oppressors and the oppressed.” He sounded a lot like J. D. Vance.
Regrettably, this wasn’t a case of an overstepping host seizing the pulpit to preach his own weird ideas. Dawkins himself has embraced this worldview, to his detriment:
For nearly an hour, Dawkins stuck largely to science, and it served him well. The latter half of the evening was heavier on culture-war material. To whoops and hollers, Dawkins expressed astonishment that anyone could believe that sex is a continuum, instead of a straightforward binary. He described safety-craving college students as “pathetic wimps.” It all seemed small, compared with the majesty of the ideas he’d been discussing just minutes before.
But… sex is a continuum. That’s not political correctness or woke culture gone mad. That’s science!
Sexual reproduction evolved from precursor species that were asexual, and nature doesn’t do binary, saltationary jumps from one state to another. Evolution works through gradual transitions and slow accumulations of complexity.
If you think sex is a straightforward binary, then how do you explain the many species that are hermaphroditic, producing both male and female gametes? What about the species that change sex in response to life cycles or environmental cues?
Even if you confine the discussion to human beings, there are people whose bodies defy simplistic notions of a gender binary. There are people with chimeric sex chromosomes, ambiguous genitalia, and bodies that don’t match what a genetic scan “should” lead one to expect. Dawkins, who’s a biologist, has no excuse for not knowing any of this.
Richard Dawkins, of all people, has done the same thing creationists are so often guilty of. He started with an ideological premise – in his case, that transgender and non-binary people shouldn’t exist – and allowed that belief to dictate his factual conclusions. Certainly, you can make philosophical arguments about what makes a person male or female, or debate how we should allocate rights based on sex or gender. But there should be no room for denying the facts of nature to support a political preference.
The saddest part of this is that, even while echoing the language and the preoccupations of right-wing culture warriors, Dawkins doesn’t seem to understand why they cheer him:
The day before, on a video call, Dawkins told me that he was puzzled—and disquieted—by the support he has received from the political right. He tends to support the Labour Party. He loathes Donald Trump. The New Atheist movement arose partly in response to the ascent of George W. Bush and other evangelicals in Republican politics.
This is the only thing Andersen has to say about this video call – no further detail, no direct quotes – and his article suffered from the omission. I wish we could’ve heard more details from that call. Why does Dawkins think he’s getting support from right-wingers?
Does he have any idea? Even a wild guess? Or is he just writing it off as a mystery he has no desire to speculate about?
When it comes to culture-war issues like this, Dawkins isn’t just on the same side as the right; he’s on the same side as the religious right. You’d think that he, of all people, would have noticed the stark incongruity of this.
Obviously, I don’t choose my opinions based on the company it puts me in. But if I found that my allies on one issue were people I vehemently disagreed with about almost everything else… at the very least, I’d want to do some serious reflection to figure out why that was. Dawkins seems remarkably incurious about it.
Andersen suggests that Dawkins built his reputation on defending evolution against creationist attacks. Now that that’s no longer a burning culture-war issue, he doesn’t know what to do with himself and he’s casting about for another target worthy of his attention:
Dawkins seems to have lost his sense of proportion. Now that mainstream culture has moved on from big debates about evolution and theism, he no longer has a prominent foe that so perfectly suits his singular talent for explaining the creative power of biology. And so he’s playing whack-a-mole, swinging full strength, and without much discernment, at anything that strikes him as even vaguely irrational.
I think this misses the mark. At best, it’s only a partial explanation.
Rather, Dawkins possesses an all-too-human flaw: he can dish it out but can’t take it. He delights in skewering other people’s sacred cows, but when it’s his own cherished assumptions under attack, he lashes out with the same knee-jerk defensiveness he so often encounters from religious believers. (Remember when I wrote an article in the Guardian offering some criticisms of Dawkins, and he flew into a rage and accused me of wanting to stamp out all dissent with my verbal jackboots?)
Like I said, Dawkins built his persona on scientific skepticism, on willingness to question what everyone “knows” to be true. In The God Delusion, he wrote: “I am hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise. It teaches us not to change our minds, and not to want to know exciting things that are available to be known.”
Now he’s abandoned that principle entirely. It’s almost a cliche: the scientist who made great achievements in his youth, but ossified into stubborn crankery in his old age, resisting any new ideas he wasn’t personally responsible for.
When confronted with sex and gender issues or social-justice controversies that he had no personal experience with, his own principles should have led him to be gracious, considerate and open-minded. Instead, he entrenched himself, exactly like the fundamentalists he deplores. He concluded that he was right and everyone else was wrong and that he had nothing left to learn. It’s small-minded, mean behavior, unworthy of a true scientist. It’s a grand shame that, at the twilight of his career, he’s made this his last act and the way he wants to be remembered.
Unlike other people, I was never a fan. Not that I didn’t appreciate some of the things he said, nor entirely disagreed with him, but… Dawkins has always seemed smug and overly confident to me, approaching things in a way that alienates many and paints people with too broad of a brush. I’d say that Hitchens and Harris had/have the same flaws. Perhaps then it doesn’t surprise me as much what he’s become-the seeds were already there, with takes that aligned to the right on Muslims even then for instance.
Jake Klein complains about “conspiratorial thinking,” then promptly starts babbling about cultural Marxism. I guess like a lot of people he thinks X is a bad thing only when others supposedly do it, not his side.
I had vaguely heard of Hitchens but didn’t think much of him based on the little I heard… someone accused me of being a Sam Harris follower once, I had no idea who that was and mostly still don’t… while I’d heard the book “The God Delusion” mentioned a few times, I haven’t read it, and didn’t remember the name of the author. And it wasn’t until something like 2017 or 2018 or something that I really learned about Dawkins, and that was in the context of Elevatorgate and Dear Muslima, both of which apparently happened years earlier, in 2011 and 2014 respectively. So I never had a chance to see any of the so-called “New Atheists” in a good light.
I never idolized any of the “Atheist Thinky Leaders™.” At best, they were people who used their prominence to help destigmatize atheism. At worst, they were active saboteurs; actively abetting the Christian Right while inciting waves of harassment against women and minorities in the atheist community. And from 2011 through 2016 and beyond, I saw a LOT more of the latter than of the former.
That said, I *did* read Dawkins’ books, and I initially had a better opinion of him than Harris or Hitchens as an advocate. His science background was solid, he didn’t cheerlead Bush’s religious war, and he engaged in SOME legitimate advocacy and stigma-busting work like the Out Campaign.
But that was in 2008. I can’t think of anything he’s done since then other than undermine and embarrass himself.
One episode that still sticks in my mind was the moment when Dawkins came out guns blazing against safe spaces…at the exact same time his foundation was TRYING to establish safe spaces for atheists! Yet it’s only the tip of the iceberg for that man.
Cultural Marxism doesn’t even exist.
It is just two words used to scare people. They are as real and scary in real life as Halloween ghosts.
Whenever you see anyone use that term, you know you are dealing with a complete and total idiot.
As many have noted, Dawkins made his fame by picking the low hanging fruit.
Which is atheism.
Once you think about it and examine the evidence, stating that the gods almost certainly don’t exist is obvious and easy to defend.
The gods never seem to mind because they are imaginary.
The xians claim that their god is everywhere and can do anything. What we see is a god that is nowhere and does nothing.
We no longer need the gods to explain the universe around us, a task that they weren’t any good at anyway.
When it came to anything harder than saying god is a delusion, Dawkins couldn’t get past what he was and is.
A privileged old, upper class, well off, white British male at Oxford
I was taught that sex is not a binary but a continuum at university between 1995 and 2000. I was taught both about the multiple karyotypes vis-a-vis sex chromosome configurations, as well as about the various non-binary phenotypes that occur naturally in humans. And I was merely studying to become a high-school biology teacher.
Recently I had an opportunity to talk with one of my former schoolmates and she insisted, despite having the exact same education as I do, that sex is binary. She, just like Dawkins, is living proof that some people are quite willing to actively ignore scientific facts they learned if said facts get in the way of their prejudice and bigotry (in her case, prejudice against trans and non-binary people). I was disappointed to learn that, I liked her. I was disappointed in Dawkins to, but I had over a decade to heal from that disappointment and I ignore him nowadays completely.
“Obviously”? I think it’s not a bad heuristic, given that life’s too short and complicated to be an expert in everything.
In 2016, on the eve of the Brexit vote here in the UK, I posted this to Facebook:
(*Remember, this was 2016, when Rowling was still well regarded in progressive circles. Her turn away from that status started in March 2018.)
I also said something along the lines of “Which theory do you think has the best chance of reconciling quantum mechanics with general relativity – loop quantum gravity, or string theory? If you consider yourself comedically unequipped to even fully understand the full meaning of the question, much less formulate a meaningful answer, know that you are precisely much of an expert on European politics and economics and precisely as well equipped to meaningfully answer the question on the Brexit referendum, and if you pretend otherwise it makes you look dumber.”
@raven, 4:
It’s a label applied to a set of ideas, and that set of ideas and the behaviours it leads to definitely exists. It doesn’t call itself that, because it’s a deliberate formulation intended to mark some behaviours out as self-evidently reprehensible. But claiming it doesn’t exist is just daft – it’s like claiming “Trumpistas/MAGAts don’t even exist”. There’s no political party called that, but you know what you’re talking about when you call someone that.
When I’ve seen it used it’s usually a dog-whistle means “Jews or Jew-adjacent types”.
raven @ # 4: Cultural Marxism doesn’t even exist.
Pls read (or read about) Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, et alia, and/or the legend of Che Guevara, and reconsider.
FWIW this writer claims that ‘The Atlantic’ is the worst magazine in America:
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-worst-magazine-in-america?
Dawkins was losing me years before when he asked me what “epigenetics” was — he’s a biologist who learned the discipline in the 1960s, and he really doesn’t understand the essential topics that invalidate his gene-centric perspective. That’s how a famous biologist can continue to believe that genetics can produce black-and-white outcomes for complex phenomena like sex. He’s a man who has stepped out of a time machine and is extremely uncomfortable with the modern world. Same for Coyne.
My “favorite” argument is when supposed atheists use creationism to argue for binary sex.
“Oh, sure, intersex people exist, but their bodies are DESIGNED to be either male or female. Likewise, you can change almost every part of your body through medicine, but you can’t change what gametes your body is DESIGNED to produce. Therefore sex is binary! BTW I’m against religion.”
Dawks should have said farewell long ago. I basically said goodbye to him when he started spouting obvious rubbish about sex, gender and transpeople.
The sad thing is that they make “sex is a binary” their hill to die on in their fight against trans folks and non-binary folks, and they don’t even understand that this is pretty irrelevant to the question of trans and non-binary people (not that I think there is a question. People are who they are and they generally know that information better than me.) It’s like forced birthers who go on and on about fetal personhood when that isn’t relevant to abortion rights either.
I think there are exactly two sexes, and your examples do nothing to rebut this position. Hermaphroditic species – by which I take you to mean simultaneous or ‘true’ hermaphroditism – embody anatomy of two sexes simultaneously. Sequential hermaphroditism also involves only two sexes. Even keeping it to the only relevant species here* i.e. humans… chimerism involves two sexes exhibited patchwork-style in a body. Ambiguous genitals are not a new sex, they are the result of improper gene expression and/or cell division. Intersex conditions generally can be described similarly.
In each case, there remain only two sexes, and in fact two sexes are definitional. The problem seems to be that you – and a depressing number of others who should know better – are letting the vagaries of biology and the numerous ways a body can develop improperly block your view of the pattern.
Note that at no point did I use the term ‘binary’, let alone something as silly as ‘straightforward binary’. This phrasing is used purely to set up a semantic argument, which can be dispensed with by use of better phrasing: there are two sexes. If you think this number is wrong, please tell me the correct number of sexes.
* That is, relevant to the broader context in which this tangent is brought up: sex in humans as it relates to the topic of trans people.
Those are loaded words, don’t you think? Who decides what constitutes a “new” sex, versus what’s merely “improper”? You?
Nature does what it does, and it doesn’t care about our oughts. When sexual reproduction first emerged, it was – it had to be – the result of “improper” gene expression in a previously asexual species. If any of those asexual organisms had had the intelligence to notice or to care, they, too, might have dismissed it as just a genetic mistake that didn’t constitute anything qualitatively new.
I don’t need to give you the “correct number” of sexes because I don’t believe there is such a thing. That’s the same fallacy that Dawkins commits, treating a human conceptual framework as if it had to map one-to-one onto an objective reality.
Here’s an analogy you might find less fraught: there’s no “correct number” of species, because species is a human construction. When do two separate populations stop being subspecies of the same species and start being two distinct species? There’s no objective answer, and that’s okay. We construct categories for our intellectual convenience, but nature is under no imperative to conform to them. That’s only a problem when people, like Dawkins, start mistaking the map for the territory.
A better way to put it is this: there are two types of gametes. That, I would agree with. But which type of gamete your body produces doesn’t dictate anything else about you. It doesn’t necessarily govern what reproductive organs you have, or what secondary sex characteristics your body displays – let alone how you should dress, what jobs you should have, or what your social role should be.
Holms @15, I think that you need to read the medical research literature, or at least popular science articles that summarize those findings (there was one published recently in Nature.)
It was those researchers, because of their scientific findings, who pointed out that two sexes did not explain their data accurately, and their findings demonstrated that sex is a continuum. I think that you’d better educate yourself on the scientific facts before drawing a conclusion. Without learning all the data, it is impossible to come to a correct conclusion.
And, I must say, the “definition” of sex has almost nothing to do with trans people. Trans and NB people actually don’t deny the existence of sex, however it is defined. They say that people have genders, and their gender is not congruent with their sex.
No trans person says they are “changing” their sex by transtioning (I think). It was TERFs who made up that “there are only two sexes and so trans people cannot exist” as a strawman argument, so that they could ignore trans peoples’ actual statements, which are about gender, not sex.
Oh yeah, the medical researchers are finding that there are more and more “normal” people who don’t have “improper gene expression” (it’s demeaning of you to call them that), who have characteristics that differ from strict male-female sexes.
Most of these people live and die completely unaware that they are not pure XX or XY, and that organs and their internal bodies don’t have the perfect “male” or “female” features. Medical researchers are finding that this is the case in more and more “normal” people. That’s why “two sexes” does not explain their results. I really recommend learning how common this is, and why scientific data confirms a continuum of sex.
“sex is a continuum. That’s not political correctness or woke culture gone mad. That’s science!”
“I was taught that sex is not a binary but a continuum at university between 1995 and 2000”
“their findings demonstrated that sex is a continuum”
“scientific data confirms a continuum of sex.”
Sex is a continuum. OK. I have no problem with this – how could I? People far better qualified than I say so, with references, and I respect their expertise. I am left with a couple of questions though. Sex is a continuum…
In how many dimensions? (Please give a fair bit of explanatory detail if your answer is more than one.)
With how many extreme points? (Please be very clear what they are if your answer is more than two.)
Because simply saying “sex is a continuum” rebuts only the most crude and reductive and objectively wrong arguments, and you wouldn’t want to be accused of setting up that straw man, would you?
Gilliel @14, sorry, I see that you also pointed out that TERFs made up the story that sex is really important in the trans rights movement.
Should also have said, trans/NB peoples’ genders aren’t congruent with sex-assigned-at-birth, wherever on the contiuum that may be.
@15
Right on cue, Holms uses creationism to argue against the existence of intersex people. Holms wants to say human bodies develop “improperly,” which only makes sense in the creationist framework where human bodies are designed to fulfill a specific purpose. In reality, human bodies have no purpose. Nothing in nature is “improper” or “organized around” anything.
sonofrojblake
If you seriously want answers to your questions you need to do the relevant course, assuming you have an adequate grounding in biology. A lot of this won’t make sense without a reasonable chunk of degree level human or at least mammalian physiology etc. – I’ve got that albeit some forty years old, and I struggle to understand some of the things we now know about how bodies work. I certainly couldn’t summarise what I have since learnt in a comment with out a lot of work.
Jazzlet: aha, not straw man but courtier’s reply. Points for the unexpected, if nothing else.
How about you start with just giving the numbers? That’s very obviously not a lot of work, and you fairly clearly imply that you do know the answer.
“The continuum of sex has A dimensions, and B extreme points.”
Simply fill in A and B in that sentence, for starters, please.
I accept that understanding WHY the answer is what it is could take work, but I find it interesting that you’ve made absolutely no attempt to even address the simple part of the question, and have leapt straight to the “it’s complicated, you wouldn’t understand” gambit. You must, surely, recognise that that makes your position look shifty?
Don’t, please, tell me that the word “continuum” has a special meaning unique to biology that means you can’t just give those two numbers, because ALL the uses of it that I quoted use it as though it’s meaning is the dictionary one and that a reasonable person should understand it in that context.
>Jazzlet: aha, not straw man but courtier’s reply.
The “courtier’s reply” is actually relevant when you think you know more than scientists about a complex field of science. It’s only a fallacious argument when used to dismiss criticisms of something that isn’t actually very complicated, like the Bible’s stance on slavery.
@raven #5
There are two things that “Cultural Marxism” can refer to:
One is a very real, if obscure, school of art criticism from the 1950s.
The other is literally a Nazi conspiracy theory from the 1920s, Kulturbolschewismus, (lit “Cultural Bolshevism).
All well and good, except I explicitly stated that I don’t “think [I] know more than scientists about a complex field of science”.
I think I know what the word “continuum” means.
What do YOU think it means?
sonofroblake, why do you insist that science must already have determined the exact mathmatical dimensions of the continuum?
In science, knowledge comes slowly, and one piece at a time. Just because it’s been determined that sex is better defined as a continuum doesn’t mean that they already need to have the data on the mathematics of it yet.
You seem to have a strawman there. And, instead of asking people commenting on a blog (thanks Jazzlet), *you* need to read the research and find out what science has actually as yet determined.
We are not your research tools. If you’re ignorant of some matters, educate yourself and find out what science has as yet established and what is still unknown. It’s not anyone else’s job to do it for you.
What a long-winded way of saying “i don’t know”. Fair enough, if it’s undefined. Life’s too short to do ALL the research. I had hoped for a meaningful summary from a reliable source. “it’s complicated” is the summary I’m taking away here. /shrug/
The problem seems to be that you – and a depressing number of others who should know better – are letting the vagaries of biology and the numerous ways a body can develop improperly block your view of the pattern.
We’re letting the obvious complexity of the pattern block our view of the pattern?
I think there are exactly two sexes, and your examples do nothing to rebut this position. Hermaphroditic species – by which I take you to mean simultaneous or ‘true’ hermaphroditism – embody anatomy of two sexes simultaneously.
I think there are exactly two colors, black and white, and your examples of all those shades of grey do nothing to rebut this position. Shades of grey are merely improper mixes of those two colors, not an actual third color. If you think there’s more than two colors here, then please tell us exactly how many colors there are.
Note that at no point did I use the term ‘binary’, let alone something as silly as ‘straightforward binary’.
I also note that you didn’t really offer better or more appropriate terms in place of the ones you admit are silly. In place of “binary” I’ll offer the term “bimodal”: as in, there’s two ends of a spectrum, male and female, but most of us (yes, even straight cis men and women who never had occasion to question their birth-assigned gender identity) are pretty close to one end or the other, but very very few of us are actually unequivocally 100% at either end.
Dawkins is a frustrating case. Harris and Hitchens , I already had some doubts when I initially came across them but Dawkins commanded respect – and was saying the right things for the right reasons. But we were so so wrong – now if you go back and see some things that were said you can recognize that these flaws were always present (what poor judges of character we are!)
@Holms @15
Giliell (that this precise definition of sex is mostly irrelevant to the discussion) and Raging Bee( (How many colors are there? As a software person i have to say 3!) already covered most of what i wanted to say
But you act as if the human species only came up with sex once we discovered Chromosomes and Gametes – its almost as if you went looking for a scientific justification for your pre-existing bias, no ? And its not like as if people when asked if they are male or female say – oh let me get my blood test done first.
Raging Bee@30: I wouldn’t even use a line, with endpoints, so much as a multidimensional space with two clusters and a probability distribution function that puts the majority of human beings in one or the other cluster, but by no means all of them. Notably, this allows points that are on the far side of “average male” from women (uncommonly hypermasculine, e.g. Ahnold) or likewise ultrafeminine, as well as points “off sideways”; and for those who are in-between in different ways (say, butch vs. flat-chested women, or men with less body hair vs. ones with smallish nads, for those who are on the fringe of one cluster at the side facing the other; and no doubt there are a panoply of different ways one can be outright intersex, i.e. well off from both clusters but maybe close to the plane bisecting the line segment joining their centers).
One could even add psychological traits to this, in which case being bi or ace are both (very different from each other!) ways of being “psychologically intersex”, and being gay puts you near one cluster along the “who you find attractive axis” while likely being near the other cluster on anatomy and on other psychological axes.
In the end, “masculine” and “feminine” then boil down to a single axis in a large dimensioned space (the one you’d get from singular value decomposition and picking a basis whose first coordinate is the one that predicts the largest amount of the variability in the sample, then projecting down onto that axis) and the “male vs. female binary” is then just the two points where the probability density function has a local maximum. The first loses a lot of information, and the second loses all but a single bit of the rest. They are simplifying assumptions, or simplified models, which must not be confused with reality (“all models are wrong; some are useful”).
In the end, arguments that presume a strict sex binary (let alone a strict gender binary) may as well have started with “assume a frictionless, perfectly spherical cow in a vacuum…” Designing any system based on such assumptions is about as useful as designing a vending machine’s coin-slot machinery under the assumption that every coin a customer will ever drop into that slot will be either a mint-condition current-year quarter or a mint-condition current-year dollar; one may easily picture what happens when a scuffed quarter of some vintage and with a commemorative Olympic-torch design instead of the default moose head gets dropped in, let alone a twonie (if it will even fit in the slot), a nickel, a dime, or a penny. (Which, despite its discontinuation, remains in circulation by the million. One supposes when they get deposited they get melted down, with every fifth replaced by a newly-minted nickel, or something, but it will be a looong time before they’ve all been deposited, if ever.)
And if you think that’s complicated, there’s a bird out there with four sexes. Two different pairs of chromosomes that behave like our X and Y, two orthogonal axes of mating behavior and anatomy. One axis governs gonads, gametes, etc: the male vs. female physical reproductive role, who inseminates and who lays the eggs. The other axis governs behavior: whether one is an introvert/vetoer or an extravert/proposer. (Stable long term partnerships are easiest to get if one partner is each — to see what happens if two of the latter type pair up, look no farther than the male and female leads in the original Twister. Humans have this largely correlate with reproductive role: women tend to be vetoers, and men proposers, independently of introversion; but there are exceptions, another sort of psychological intersex. 2x vetoer will rarely even pair up to begin with, each one waiting for the other to make the first move.) In the birds, both axes affect visible aspects of phenotype, so the birds can quickly place one another in one of the four categories, male vetoer, male proposer, female vetoer, female proposer. Unless of course a bird is intersex … along either axis. Usually they pair as opposites, one male and one female, and one proposer and one vetoer, though not without exceptions. The pairing of a vetoer with a proposer is probably the most conducive to staying in a stable pair bond long enough to conceive, lay eggs, incubate them, hatch them, and raise the offspring to weaning. I expect a vetoer/proposer divide to exist, with one or another underlying mechanism to make a bimodal distribution for that trait, in any species where the dads often stick around to help with the childrearing, and where it is advantageous for the children if he does, a set that includes many bird species and, of course, humans. Most such species probably tie it to the usual sex “binary”, as seems to be the case with humans, or have one be the default and the other triggered during a critical developmental window (much like how sex itself is determined in reptiles), rather than having a whole second, independent pair of sex-like chromosomes to govern it though!
sonofrojblake
Bekenstein Bound has touched upon the problem of giving simple numbers, I could give you numbers for different hormone levels, for possession of gamete type, for possession of each of the external sexual organs, estimates for the possession of each of the internal sexual organs, and so very many more things. The reason I won’t do it is the whole point of the model of sex as a continuum is just it’s another way of trying to explain that there are multiple ways of measuring sex (and gender), so there are no accurate numbers with out a lot of qualifications, which are difficult to understand with out the background. And we still can’t explain it all, because there still seem to be factors we haven’t discovered that affect the possible outcome. It’s almost as if biology was like maths, pre-school you learn small numbers, in infant school you learn about more numbers along with basic addition and subtraction, in primary you add multiplication and long-division, and so on right up to the people doing the cutting edge maths. Like I said I don’t understand more than the basics a biology degree gave me along with some of what I’ve learned in the years since in no systematic way, I do not grasp this stuff well enough to explain it beyond saying that asking for numbers is like using the blocks we had in infants that represented one or five or ten to do something like group theory, you can’t because the concepts just aren’t there.
Reading the post and the comments would be hilarious if it wasn’t depressing (speak of captatio benevolentiae :P).
Nobody seems to understand (or engage in good faith with) sonofrojblake (except Bekenstein Bound to which I’ll come in a moment). He is showing to you that the notion of a “continuum” of sex doesn’t make any sense, because in order to claim that you should first be able to say what that axis is/measures/quantifies. To put it simply, if the picture you have in mind is a bimodal distribution with the Y axis representing frequencies, you should be able to say what the X axis measures. You can’t, because sex is not a spectrum.
Sex-depending (or sex-influenced) CHARACTERISTICS may be depicted in this way (each one of them, singularly).
All the arguments boil down to a (deliberate?) confusion between the DEFINITION of what sex is, what biologically DETERMINES which sex an individual is, and the characteristics one has (also if I’m not mistaken nobody has pointed out that the claims “there are two sexes” and “every individual of a certain species belongs to one of the two sexes” are very different).
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(BTW this is why the black/white metaphor is misleading; and as another aside, how humans perceive colour, or how color is implemented in TV/monitors, is not just an inherent property of the light reflected by the object but it’s influenced by how the eye works. If one meant an inherent property of the object as “color”, I’d say that there is a unique definition and that color really is a spectrum, and it’s measured by the wavelenght of the light reflected, not by the amount of RGB pixels).
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@Bekenstein Bound I totally subscribe to your way of modelling how INDIVIDUALS would be represented on the MANY-DIMENSIONAL SPACE of all the SEX-RELATED CHARACTERISTICS. What I find surprising is that, to me, that’s a very useful way of showing that sex is, indeed, “binary” not only from the gametes point of view (definition) but also as a practical, “agnostic”, deduction from observation. In fact, from that model it comes out there is indeed a (multi-dimensional) plane that clearly separates the two “clouds” of points. In other words, in this space you clearly can attribute which point “belongs” to which “cloud”, aka for every individual you can say if they are male or female (if we are speaking of humans).
(I don’t understand what you would propose to define as “masculinity/femininity”, even if you use the line between the center-points of the two clouds as an axis. What would this describe?! This would be a mixing of very different things, since the dimensions on your space are in principle any sex-related characteristic: hormone levels, genes, heights, weights, … and you suggest this should represent something physical? What’s more, you would then treat ANY point in the n-1 dimensional, ortogonal plane, as “of equivalent masculinity/femininity”?)
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Humans are a bipedal species, if one is born without legs, this doesn’t refute neither the fact they are humans, nor that the human species is bipedal.
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It seems to me you all claim “nature is complicated” and believe you are the enlightened one who can see so, but actually are unable to deal with the existence of exceptions, as if the only way to do so would be to utterly reject the rule. If this was the case, not just sex dimorphism, but ANY rule would not hold, and language would have no meaning, because every word we use, indeed every concept we have, has “fuzzy boundaries”. But the existence of fuzzy boundaries does not mean the concept is invalid or not useful. You don’t need to have a set of necessary and sufficient characteristics to define a family resemblance cathegory.
Is there something more binary than true or false? Physical implementations, though, show smoothness (i.e. reading 0 or 1 from a memory as they were implemented in old times, what is a “high” vs “low” current?). Arguing for “bimodality” of sex is the same as arguing for a bimodality of truth in information technology.
Where species engage in sexual reproduction, and there is anisogamy, then there are two and only two sexes, and they are defined in relation to one another (“big” vs “small” gametes). A different question is if every individual of the species can be attributed to one and only one of the sexes (i.e. no simultaneous ermaphroditism) or if the sex is stable during the life of the individual (i.e. no sex change). It is the case that in the human species every individual has just one type of gonads and they don’t change from one to the other. So the whole discourse about sex characteristics is actually irrelevant and the type of gonad is enough to determine which sex an individual is and will always be. Yes, there are very rare exceptions (i.e. streak gonads) but as I already said, when a rule applies to 99,98% of the population, it is a pretty good rule, as good as you’re gonna get. Not many natural phenomena are so clear.
Yes, you can argue some males as a matter of ethics should be treated as women (i.e. a person with CAIS) but this is a completely different question. And I don’t start speaking of gender, because I’ve already written too much. I just point out that you should be able to clearly define what you mean with that term, and it seems to me not very many here are familiar with 2nd wave feminism.
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(oh and the birds in question still have only two sexes, they simply exhibits behaviours that are correlated in particular ways with it).
This is actually a good comparison, because it shows both the applicability and the limitations of the conventional view of sex, as well as how it can cause harm.
Of course, it’s true that most humans have two legs. In the same way, I’d agree that most humans fit the generalizations commonly referred to by the terms “man” (penis and testicles, produces sperm, larger muscles, more facial and body hair, nonfunctional nipples) and “woman” (uterus and vagina, produces eggs, more body fat, larger breasts that produce milk).
But in both cases, there are exceptions. We shouldn’t let the generalization blind us to those exceptions – or try to turn it into a normative rule to crush those who don’t conform to it.
It would be like saying, “All humans have two legs” – obviously incorrect – or worse, going on to argue that because humans have two legs, we shouldn’t make things like wheelchair ramps or prosthetic limbs, because anyone without two legs shouldn’t be considered a human but a gross freak who shouldn’t be seen in public.
This is analogous to what Dawkins is doing. He’s not just arguing that the large majority of people fall within the bounds of a bimodal distribution of sex characteristics (true, but trivial; no one denies that). He’s arguing that there are no exceptions, and going on to make the (cruel, ignorant, factually false) claim that people who don’t fit his view of these categories are weirdos and freaks who should be dismissed out of hand.
In both cases, you can recognize that a description applies to most people while still acknowledging that there are important exceptions, and being sensitive to those who fall outside its bounds.
Biologists and clinicians identify patterns, they are described, and mechanistic explanations are gradually discovered. Many variations in bodies have been dubbed improper or atypical or malformed or (etc.) on the basis of that mechanistic understanding and impact on quality of life. Some illustrations:
– the placement of the human heart is under the left edge of the sternum; people exist with their hearts in other positions – called dextrocardia by the way – but this does not refute the fact that there is a correct presentation of the heart.
– the human hand is described as having 5 digits. Obviously people exist with a different number, perhaps due to being born with a different number or perhaps due to injury, but the existence of people with supernumerary fingers does not refute the hand having 5 digits.
– true flies are called dipterans, and that name derives from ptera (Greek for wing), and di- (prefix referencing the number 2). They are so named because they characteristically have two wings, but there exists mutations in the wild that have four wings. Their existence does not undermine the classification of flies as two winged.
And so on ad infinitum. There are patterns, classifications based on those patterns, and aversions of those patters that seem to defy the classification system yet are not fatal to its utility. Same goes for sex.
Your belief not needed when talking about matters of fact, and it seems your entire understanding of what sex is is mistaken. My suspicion is you have lost sight of the context of sex. When discussing this aspect of our bodies, never lose sight of the fact that the pattern arises from our method of reproduction.
Did you know sexual reproduction has quite a simple definition? Any species that experiences a cycle of halving then doubling of genetic material as a necessary part of reproducing is reproducing sexually. Notice already the number two is built in: the adult splits its genome into two (2) equal halves, and the new generation is formed by joining two (2) such halves together. If they are distinguishable from each other, that makes two (2) distinct gametes, and as each gamete is produced by a distinct set of anatomy, if those sets of anatomy are in separate bodies, we have two (2) distinct body types and hence two (2) sexes. As with any other science, biology is interested in finding theoretical explanations for patterns. This particular pattern is well known; if someone asks how many sexes exist, two (2) is the correct answer.
Also, there’s no value in using species as an analogy for sex as they are separate classification systems each addressing a different pattern in biology. You may as well claim bacteria should not be classified as gram negative or positive because that’s not how we classify blood types. Two systems describing two different things do not undermine the validity of the other.
[Oops, that post was in reply to Adam’s #16]
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#17 garnetstar
I did study biology, and at a university with good credentials in both medicine and biology. By contrast, most of the people commenting on this subject are going by things they read off the internet. And at no point did I claim to have all data on the subject, please don’t imply otherwise.
And yet it is often brought up in those discussions.
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#21 183231bcb
An impressively wrong statement. At no point did I argue against the existence of intersex people, nor did I employ creationism anywhere.
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#29 Raging
In your analogy: one. Greyscale is monochrome and mono means one ffs. Why on Earth did you not go with a rainbow??
Anyway, even if we amend your analogy to a more-than-two colour system, it does not make the case you think it does. Sex is not simply a label given to each permutation of traits – a depressingly common misconception. An intersex condition is not a distinct sex, it is the term for when an individual from a species that is normally gonochoric (i.e. not hermaphroditic) exhibits some degree of blending of traits from the two sexes.
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#31 Deepak
Where on Earth did I state, imply, or assume any such thing?? I will state her unequivocally: we have known about the two sexes for millennia. Obviously we didn’t know much detail way back when, but I assure you I am aware we knew of them going way back.
No.
Of course not – we looked at anatomy.
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Beckenstein
Your #32 is answered more or less by my #37, and your #33 shows the dangers of using pop science articles as a substitute for a biology education. No, the white-throated swallow does not have four sexes. It has two, male and female, and the rest of that pop science mess is not sex.
We have also known about the two-spirit people for millennia.
Did you have a point to make?
And it’s the white-throated sparrow, not swallow, and since the second axis also impacts behavioral roles in mating pairs it absolutely is an aspect of sex (unless you take the ultra-reductive position of “if it doesn’t directly involve gamete dimorphism it isn’t sex”, aka the Bill Clinton Denial Maneuver(TM).
Biologists and clinicians identify patterns, they are described, and mechanistic explanations are gradually discovered. Many variations in bodies have been dubbed improper or atypical or malformed or (etc.) on the basis of that mechanistic understanding and impact on quality of life.
Who, exactly, does the “dubbing,” and what are the consequences of said dubbing? Generally speaking, it’s the individual with the variation, in consultation with their doctor. And if there’s no direct negative impact on quality of life, the variation is called “atypical,” but NOT “malformed.” The latter is a value judgment, strongly implying that corrective action needs to be taken to make it “better” or more in line with the standard.
And not all variations call for corrective action; and in the case of sexual characteristics at least, it’s not always obvious WHICH is the most appropriate “corrective” action for any given variation. That, too, is the province of each individual and their doctor, NOT biologists or clinicians, and sure as hell not simpleminded bigots who can’t stop obsessing over what’s in other people’s undies or chromosomes.
– the placement of the human heart is under the left edge of the sternum; people exist with their hearts in other positions – called dextrocardia by the way – but this does not refute the fact that there is a correct presentation of the heart.
First, AFAIK, no one is calling for any sort of discriminatory treatment toward persons with this condition. And second, if the heart still works and its placement has no impact on health or quality of life, then it’s both irrelevant and silly to call said placement “incorrect” if everything is working correctly. “Atypical,” yes, but not “incorrect.”
Did you know sexual reproduction has quite a simple definition?
So does cancer. Your point…?
And finally, Holms, we’re not getting our information from “pop science;” we’re getting it from lay people, scientists and physicians who have actual first-hand experience with gender-related issues and their consequences. That’s not “pop science,” it’s facts on the ground that PhD biologists may not directly confront; and academic education and credentials do not trump facts and experience. And yes, there are actual PhD biologists who agree with me on this, and utterly disagree with the likes of Dawkins.
#36 Adam
You are walking into the trap of taking species-level descriptions of traits as a mandate for which there are no exceptions. I explained with with examples: people with dextrocardia exist but do not invalidate the description of heart placement, people with missing or supernumary fingers exist but do not invalidate the description of the human hand as having five digits, true flies with four wings exist but do not invalidate the classification of flies as dipterans (two, wing). Want more? We are diploid, but that does not preclude the existence of people with aneuploidies; spiders are eight legged but that does not preclude the existence of spiders with non-eight legs, creatures have a single head but even that does not preclude the existence of conjoined animals.
And so on until damn near infinity. When we describe a species or other clade as having a particular trait, this does not preclude and is not invalidated by the existence of exceptions.
No he isn’t. He is stating there are two sexes. Nowhere in that statement is there a denial of the existence of intersex conditions, nor that people with such should are “weirdos and freaks who should be dismissed out of hand. He has agreed in discussions that such people exist and are still people, your summary of his position simply isn’t true.
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#39 Beckenstein
You have abandoned your original claim from #33: “…there’s a bird out there with four sexes.” And given that sex arises from our mating strategy, yes it absolutely is true that that bird only has two. Aggressive males are male and passive males are male; aggressive females are female and passive females are female.
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#40 Raging
…Biologists and clinicians? And the consequence is that the thing is distinguished from the proper function of the mechanism? Sheesh, you even quoted that stuff.
Read up on the euphemism cycle. Those terms that sound so judgy now – malformed, deformed, crippled, lame, handicapped etc. started out as neutral descriptors.
Way to miss the point. That was an illustration of the fact that we describe things as having a typical presentation, yet this description does not preclude exceptions, it is also not invalidated by them. Gah damn I just did a whole thing on that point!
If they oppose ‘there are two sexes’ then they are wrong.
No, I’m not; it’s precisely my point that species-level descriptions have exceptions. Most humans have two legs, but “all humans have two legs” is a false statement.
In the same way, most humans fall into the standard binary construction of sex and gender, but not all humans do. There is a spectrum of intermediate traits. Dawkins is the one claiming that a species-level description is a mandate with no exceptions, as quoted in the article I’m responding to:
As I’ve said, this is factually false. More to the point, most people who argue along these lines are engaging in a motte-and-bailey fallacy.
The position they’re really trying to defend is that the sex assigned to you at birth should determine everything else about your life: how you should dress, what emotions you’re supposed to display, which bathrooms you should use, what level of education you should receive (or not receive), what jobs you’re encouraged to pursue (or whether you’re encouraged to work outside the home at all), what your role should be in the family, what position you should occupy in societal hierarchies of authority and power.
But because this antiquated sexism can’t be defended rationally, when these people are challenged, they fall back to: “Well, there must be two sexes because there are only two kinds of gametes, no one can deny that!”
I happen to believe that that the type of gametes your body produces, or the chromosomes you happen to have, are irrelevant. They shouldn’t determine anything else about your life. Based on his record of public comments, I don’t believe Dawkins agrees with this.
Once upon a time, a rational debate would involve trying to understand what the other was saying, engaging in good faith, being charitable in interprations, and trying to avoid fallacies (like strawmanning).
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One could say that what people are really trying to defend is that sex is a continuum, but when challenged they retort to a motte and bailey practice and start claiming that they agree that
actually they even find it
but very pedantically “clarify” that this holds for “most” but not “all” people. Do exceptions transform a binary (“man” and “woman”) into a continuum? into a spectrum? (and by the way I note that you used “man” as a stand-in for “male” and “woman” for “female”).
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One could also ask for explicit quotes from Dawkins saying that sex should determine “how you should dress” or “what position you should occupy in societal hierarchies”, but I suspect it would be difficult to find one. (By the way, quoting a journalist’s opinion proves nothing more than the bias of said journalist, since he wasn’t quoting -maybe he wasn’t because he couldn’t and wanted to avoid crossing the threshold for libel).
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Strangely, no comment was made on the fact that every concept has exceptions and fuzzy boundaries, or why for sex one should use the word “bimodality” when for values of truth one does indeed speak of a “binary” (when physical implementations in information technology are actually way more “smooth”).
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There is a difference between the obvious liberal principle that an individual should not be discriminated against on the basis of a characteristic, and the political demands of a certain group. Using language to obfuscate this is a very dishonest and disingenuous thing to do. The slogan “trans women are women” is used precisely to avoid having to discuss the various specific contexts: if they are women, they are meant to be treated as women in every situation. Except when they have to become a surrogate mother or they have to do a prostate exam, I suppose. Should they have access to women’s prison? To “pink” quotas in elections? Might it be necessary to distinguish between a “real trans woman” and a malevolent impostor, and if so how? You can think the answers to these questions are obvious (it is often implied that even discussing this is transphobic), but they most certainly have nothing to do with people having differences of sexual development or whether sex is actually binary (which it is indeed).