Peter Boghossian has a schtick: he presents some simple, logical rules that are great for smacking down irrational claims and getting people to engage in critical thinking, and he shows how they can be applied effectively to ideas he doesn’t like. But then he pulls a switcheroo, and starts promoting his own biases, and never applies his own tools to them. It’s weird, annoying, and inconsistent, and it means I can never take him seriously. In his case, it’s obvious who shaves the barber — it’s no one, and he runs around absurdly unkempt and shaggy.
Siobhan does a marvelous and entertaining job of tearing Boghossian down. Go read that. I could just stop here, case closed, Siobhan has hammered all the high points, but I can’t help myself: Boghossian punched a few of my buttons, so I have to be all superfluous and redundant.
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There’s the “It’s all the Left’s fault!” mantra, which we’ve heard from the Sam Harris wing before.
It’s fascinating. I would be lying to you if I told that I wasn’t genuinely concerned about Trump’s presidency. I think the Left bears considerable responsibility in him being elected.
I think Boghossian would have no problem dealing with an accusation that “it’s atheists like you who make people turn to Jesus!”, but somehow he can’t recognize the inconsistency here. People who voted for Trump got him elected, not the people who didn’t vote for Trump. You could legitimately argue that poor decision-making and over-confidence by the Left contributed to Clinton’s loss, but let’s not let the people who pulled the lever for the horrible plutocrat off the hook. Do you deny them agency?
But here’s another thing that bugs me: what side are you on? If you yourself are a left-leaning, social justice, anti-racism and misogyny type (as they all say they are), why are the complaints always phrased as “they lost the election” rather than “we lost the election”? These guys always refer to the losers in the second or third person, distancing themselves from the outcome. If you’re aligning yourself with the right wing, be confident and say so. Again, apply your reasoning to yourself. Are you willing to bear some of the responsibility for this election? What will you do in the future? Besides blaming everyone else.
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Then there’s his small-minded version of post-modernism.
Disciplines such as gender studies don’t have a dialectic. They’re not truth seeking enterprises. They think they’ve already found they truth and exist to indoctrinate students. There is no dialectic at the core of those disciplines like there is in philosophy. And there are profoundly negative consequences for peoples’ views of reality — it untethers them from what’s real.
This is so completely, utterly the reverse of the truth. Post-modernism does have a very severe dialectic, and in fact is all about dialectics, which I’ll remind Boghossian is the discipline of investigating or discussing the truth of opinions. It is actually the very heart of skepticism, although most people who call themselves skeptics are more interested in bigoted dismissal than, you know, investigating it. I’ve written about postmodernism before, so I’ll just quote Michael Bérubé here:
Sokal’s admirers have projected almost anything they desire–and they have desired many things. In early 1997, Sokal came to the University of Illinois, and quite graciously offered to share the stage with me so that we could have a debate about the relation of postmodern philosophy to politics. It was there that I first unveiled my counterargument, namely, that the world really is divvied up into “brute fact” and “social fact,” just as philosopher John Searle says it is, but the distinction between brute fact and social fact is itself a social fact, not a brute fact, which is why the history of science is so interesting. Moreover, there are many things–like Down syndrome, as my second son has taught me–that reside squarely at the intersection between brute fact and social fact, such that new social facts (like policies of inclusion and early intervention) can help determine the brute facts of people’s lives (like their health and well-being).
I love that counterargument. People like Boghossian like to thunder about how they know precisely what a fact is, yet never seem to recognize how strongly shaped their version of “fact” is conditioned by their social world, and never consider the possibility that social facts can represent a significant truth. Consider race, for instance. Race is scientific nonsense; people’s perception of “race” does not coincide with the patterns of descent they purport, and ought not to be used to justify the discrimination and prejudices they endorse. But at the same time, race is a social fact, and ignoring those perceptions has “profoundly negative consequences for peoples’ views of reality”. Declaring that all humans came from Africa is true, but doesn’t do a thing to negate the harsh realities of how society’s have judged humans on the basis of their skin color.
Denying social facts, as Boghossian does, is harmful.
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Boghossian’s specific rant in this case is about gender, and again, he scores an own goal by failing to perceive his own social facts. In response to a quote from a transgender studies professor who rightly points out that biological sex is a complex, messy topic that doesn’t divide neatly into the boy-girl binary, he makes this ranting non-argument.
That is the most asinine, ridiculous, preposterous piece of ideological tripe. The only way someone could possibly believe that is they’ve been sufficiently indoctrinated by radical Leftists. I was once covering a lecture for a colleague and this topic came up. I said: “If sex were really a cultural construction, why don’t men menstruate? Why don’t men have babies? Why are there no women on professional football teams?” And an individual from the back of the class got up and started yelling, “Fuck you,” gave me the middle finger, shouted at me and stormed out of class.
That student did the right thing, and I give them credit for speaking out. Professors are supposed to be informed on a subject, and Boghossian just outed himself as an ignoramus.
He’s a philosopher, for dog’s sake, and he just proudly created an ontological framework and declared it to be an absolute. Women are people who menstruate, have babies, and don’t play football; men are people who don’t menstruate, don’t have babies, and play football.
Is he even aware of how intensely socially constructed his list is? Does he consider all the exceptions? He’s blitheringly oblivious. If I declared that, for example, women have long hair and men have short hair (which is not as absurd as it sounds — Americans of my parent’s generation took that as a fact), then I have just made Rachel Maddow a man and Fabio a woman. If you bounce back and rightly explain that there are multiple factors, not just one criterion, then you have admitted that the gender binary is already false. Thanks for doing my job for me.
And if you try to play the “biological reality!” card, I’ll just point out all the exceptions to your claims that women menstruate (not all do), women have babies (childless women aren’t men), XX chromosomes (not always), and anatomy.
Boghossian is not a biologist, yet he’s always claiming biological authority for his narrow-minded views. He’s a lot like creationists that way.
Boghossian ends by citing his supporting sources, which is a good idea, but in his case, undermines everything he says. Who supports him? Dave Rubin, a right-wing pundit on youtube. Christina Hoff Sommers, anti-feminist hack and lackey of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. Joe Rogan, misogynistic and unfunny comedian. And a Twitter account I’d never heard of before, @RealPeerReview, which is nothing but a person loudly laughing at gender studies articles they don’t understand. Some of those papers are terrible, I agree, but I seem to have frequently found papers in biology that are terrible (it’s actually not hard to do at all), and yet I don’t think all of biology is wrong, because I understand the theory and the evidence behind what I criticize. I can’t say that for Boghossian’s sources.
Goddamn, but organized atheism has enabled a lot of cocky asswits who like to hide behind “objective reality”.
Reading along at a good clip, I saw “cocky asswits” and read it as “cockwits”.
Not actually a bad neologism (even though it does smack a bit of gender reductionism).
He’s even wrong about the football part:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_American_football
Said no one who has actually taken a Gender Studies class.
Ah, but you’re thinking about actual Gender Studies classes – they’re thinking about the ones they’re imagining in their heads…
Also, flagging up typo in the title.
Or was that intentional – a biologist’s foot-in-mouth joke?
“Creationists don’t harass evolutionary biologists.”
I just. I can’t even.
I don’t get it, some men do menstruate and have babies. Oh he means biological males? And by “have babies” he means “get pregnant”? The fact that these terms can be dissected to this detail just goes to show how much of a socially constructed framework of value and identity we’ve attached to those few facts of biology (also both denoting a broad range of different physiologies and experiences with menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth).
=8)-DX
You certainly run into advocates, especially in the corporate workshop sphere, who present certain ideas about gender as indisputable concepts that only a misogynist would challenge (and whose own absolute truth changes annually), but it’s inane to ascribe that to all of Gender Studies. It’s like using Dawkins as a stand-in for all of atheist philosophy.
These guys are so tedious. Some german “skeptics” once tried to make me “prove” that Gender Studies did something they would be able to accept as “real science” after I pointed out that they had (approvingly) linked to a completely unhinged conspiracy rant from a men’s rightser that went something like “gender studies steal money from real science and are clandestinely taking over universities arglbargl.”
Boghossian:
Some men do, jackass.
Next time, Boghossian, try doing a quick Google search before proclaiming to be an expert about things you don’t understand.
However, even if no socially recognized male defined by some biological criterion ever menstruated, it would still be a socially established fact to define “woman” as someone who menstruated. You can’t get around the problem that your criteria are a social construct, and what you prioritize is a product of culture.
Yep, something like that. No classes ever me me think as hard , challenge so many things and question my culturally constructed assumptions.
Something similar about “postmodernism”: Most people who rant about it seem to have given up after they ran into the first obstacles and then decided it’s bollocks based on their own failure to grasp the concepts.
So I’m curious PZ if you don’t accept biological sex as a ‘thing’ (to paraphrase the gender studies professor) how do you possibly manage to set up fly crosses?
PZM @11:
Agreed, solving that is on par with trying to go North of the North Pole or experiencing sensation without qualia. He’s making a fairly basic misunderstanding.
It’s depressing to see a philosopher who doesn’t know much philosophy become a strong voice within the atheo-skeptic community.
What’s the point of making distinctions between “brute” facts and “social” facts? If one group of people murder another because they are motivated by the false belief that their victims are an “inferior race,” what’s the point of saying that the nonexistence of biological race is a “brute” fact but the murders are a “social” fact? It’s all just facts.
@chris61
PZ doesn’t accept that sex is a discrete binary, not that it doesn’t exist or that no predictions could be made as to reproduction. Neither Dr. Matte nor PZ has made any such claim.
@Siobhan
Dr. Matte claimed in a video that it was not correct that biological sex was a thing. That may not be what he believes but it’s certainly what he said and that quote was the one that Boghossian was apparently describing as asinine, ridiculous etc.
Hmm. Did you know that sex determination in flies is cell autonomous? You can have male and female cells all mixed up in the same animal, and they express their genetic fate independently. Look up gynandromorphs sometime.
I love it when people who don’t know anything about biology try to hit me with a biology gotcha.
Way to dodge the question PZ. I highly doubt that you use gynandromorphs to set up your crosses.
You do? Way back in the dawn of time, when I worked in a fly lab for realz, we did use gynandromorphs in some crosses: they can have perfectly functional ovaries or testes.
Generally, we use the more numerous fertile males and fertile females. But we don’t deny the existence of interesting intermediates and other states. You seem to be missing the whole point: the fact that sex isn’t black and white, doesn’t mean we deny black or white, or even try to claim numerical parity between black, white, and all the other colors of the rainbow.
Generally you use ‘the more numerous fertile males and fertile females’ which you identify by virtue of their sex specific characteristics which you can do because you recognize that biological sex is a thing (as the gender studies professor so eloquently put it).
@chris61
Quoth the professor in question:
The implicit omission being “and nothing else.”
You’ll note the image in question of Dr. Matte’s quote displayed on Boghossian’s Areo Magazine post is selectively edited.
Can postmodernism be applied to evolutionary biology?
Differential reproductive success in a population which is based on traits that confer a survival advantage in a sub population of that species. Over eons, this results in phenotypic changes that can lead to speciation. All this was formulated by a man who was the product of a white western Anglo-patriarchal Enlightenment that established a scientific hegemony that drowned out the knowledge of marginalized voices. “Reproductive success”, “phenotype”, “speciation” are cultural constructs that mandate critical analysis and subjecting these terms to interrogation based on the oppressive social context……
You can see where this is going. Pomo discrediting evolutionary biology. Unlike some here, I don’t have a soft spot for pomo for this and similar reasons.
It’s infuriating to see people who profess to know things about science and logic making such blatantly stupid arguments as Boghossian does. Saying “why don’t men menstruate,” etc., isn’t even sneaky about assuming the thing it’s trying to prove. If someone asked him “if God isn’t real, then who created the universe?” I think he’d have no problem pointing out the same flaw.
The thing Boghossian (and chris61) fail to understand is that, while many of the things we’re discussing are real and exhibit real differences, the terminology we use and categories we define aren’t. Lines are always drawn somewhat arbitrarily based on people making decisions, and words are imperfect models of the things they’re meant to describe. Boghossian clearly has in his mind a definition of “male” and “female” loaded with all sorts of unspecified assumptions, which he’s uncritically accepted without giving a thought as to whether or not his definition is reasonable or those assumptions have any grounding in any but the most general, cursory observation of facts.
One could just as easily argue his point about the term planet. “What do you mean Pluto isn’t a planet? Doesn’t it have a moon? Doesn’t it orbit a star? Isn’t it made of rock and ice?” The notion that words and their definitions are human constructs that can and must sometimes change if they are meant to represent reality with any degree of precision seems to have eluded him, despite the fact that he almost certainly lived through 2006 and the IAU’s illustration of that very point.
Yet some people still vehemently cling to an outmoded, imprecise definition of “planet” (and consequently the additional categories it implies) out of tradition, so the comparison is even more clear.
Much the same can be said about chris61’s insistence on “biological sex,” implying that an organism has only one, that biology provides some clear answer there. Except that chromosomes and gonads and genes and secondary sex characteristics and hormone levels and brain structures are all “biological,” all linked to what we think of as “sex” (many in fairly definitive ways), and all may differ within a single organism before we even get to talking about chimerism or mosaicism or gender. “Biological sex” is only slightly more meaningful than “Biblical kind,” in that regard.
@ragdish:
I honestly don’t know what postmodernism does or what it’s for, so I’m just going to take your PoMo-style critique at face value and try to counter it, because I don’t understand how it’s supposed to work:
The terms “reproductive success”, “phenotype”, “speciation” are cultural constructs: they’re terms we attach to observable natural phenomena. I guess we can subject those terms to interrogation (and we do, scientific technical vocabulary changes all the time), and if any marginalised voices have something to contribute to the theory they should absolutely be heard…but the phemomena the terms describe aren’t “constructs”.
Cultures can define things into existence, creating cultural facts, but not out of existence — gravity doesn’t care if we understand it, and people have different skin colours and genitalia and chromosomes whether we use those as markers to categorise them into “races” and “genders” or not. That Darwin was the product of a white western Anglo-patriarchal Enlightenment etc. etc. doesn’t affect the truth value of his claims.
So I don’t see how you can discredit evolutionary biology that way unless you deny the existence of empirical facts, in which case you’ve discarded all of science anyway and are really making a much more fundamental criticism of knowledge.
Just to use one example, try talking to evolutionary biologists about the magic word “species” sometime. It’s hard. There are whole books written on the species concept with multiple definitions. Here’s the blurb for WIlkins’ book:
All those words ragdish thinks have simple concrete meanings, so he has no patience for working through all this po-mo discussion of their meanings? That’s what the serious scientists in this field do.
Zeppelin 26
“you’ve discarded all of science anyway and are really making a much more fundamental criticism of knowledge”
That is exactly what I was trying to mock with my pomo analysis of evolutionary biology. What you described is my critique of pomo.
Our understanding of ourselves including notions of sex, gender, race, etc. will only emerge from further advancements in biology. Pomo only sets things backwards in a way worse than supernatural woo promoters. I feel totally comfortable calling all of us a mixture of sexes and genders. We all inherit our mitochondria from our “mothers”. We are all of a spectrum of phenotype with a bimodal distribution. How we describe ourselves may change organically over time. I’m perfectly happy acknowledging that we are brains housed and nourished by a bipedal carbon based machine. Thus, it’s the truths we get from science that (should) shape our cultural constructs and not the other way round.
chris61@21
Oooooo, the old “if it’s not real, why did you need to invoke it?” card, so beloved by presuppositionalists. Reminds me of a conversation I had with a biologist friend of mine, which went something like…
So congrats! You got a biologist to say a magic word, one that you think has a sharp and precise definition but they think is fuzzy and ill-defined. All you’ve proven is that the word’s definition can vary from person to person, precisely what you’d expect from a social construct.
PZ, all our vocabulary can be deconstructed as such but I don’t see the point of the exercise in science. How does exploring the sociocultural foundations of “force” in physics add new knowledge. Supposing the word “force” originated in a sexist context. Today no human except the likes of Pumpkinhead is going to attribute sexism to that word. We continue using the word “force” until modern physics evolves to replace it with a term that better reflects the fundamental nature of reality. I have no qualms in folks deconstructing words like “force”, “charge” or “gravity” but IMO, none of that adds new knowledge to science.
I’ll give you a more practical real life example. In the ER I often see patients who have a left hemisphere stroke with a Broca’s aphasia. Paul Broca was a racist asshole who thought dark skinned folks like me were inferior. By all means, please deconstruct the racist Broca and the word “aphasia” to your hearts content. But none of that changes the scientific reductionist fact that this poor patient indeed has a Broca’s aphasia.
Ragdish, are you talking about anything that any actual person has ever argued? Because “examine the definition of ‘force’ as used in physics through a lens of sexism” feels like a strawman. PZ gave a concrete example of why we need to deconstruct vocabulary in science, I gave another. I’d argue that deconstructing vocabulary is more important in scientific fields than some others, because science relies so heavily on precise terminology. Especially where we use words that have been adapted or borrowed from other sources (as opposed to scientific neologisms), we need to define terms carefully and occasionally redefine them.
Words are models that we use to conceptualize and communicate ideas, just as surely as a diagram of an atom or a picture of a cell. Relying on outdated or unclear terms is like relying on a Thomson plum-pudding atom or a 9th grader’s pencil drawing of an onion cell through a microscope. Chances are, what you understand won’t quite match up to reality, and what you’re trying to explain won’t be clear.
As for Broca, maybe his racism didn’t affect the legacy of his work, but cultural biases do shape the assumptions we make and the tests we perform. From skin color affecting medical treatment to the problem of generalizing research done on small homogenous groups, we have tons of historical and ongoing instances of bias affecting research. That’s not getting into any kind of meta-effects of how questions are asked or what research tends to receive funding or get published, the file-drawer effects and replication crises that should affect our confidence in cutting-edge research but often don’t.
After being introduced to Boghossian (he is a distressingly popular figure here in the Portland, OR “freethinker” community) I was surprised at how unsophisticated and uncharitable his work is. Subsequently, I found out that his PhD is in Education and that he had been kicked out of the doctoral program at the University of New Mexico.
poor Chris. always thinks his strawmen are the awesomest strawmen ever… and yet, they get torn down here so fast.
will Chris ever learn?
fuck no.
Well, some of the more radical post-modernists did question the existence of any empirical facts for a while, but as far as I know, it didn’t really stick, so holding that against the entire field seems rather like laughing at physicists because some of their predecessors believed in phlogiston.
*sigh*
Chromosomes are things
Genitals are things
Many other biological factors are things
Us grouping those factors and labelling some of them “male” and some of them “female” and then filling the terms with a whole lot of assumptions is a very cultural construct that is often at clash with those things I called “things” above.
It’s a world in which all children know that Asian elephants live in groups led by the strongest bull because that’s what they saw in the Jungle Book and because that’s what is in accordance with a whole lot of other stuff they “know” about organisms labelled “male” and “female”.
That’S what gets you to such ridiculous statements as “women menstruate” when most women on planet earth are not able to menstruate.
+++
Also, congratulations to ragdish for demonstrating what I said above in comment #12
Biological sex, males, and females are all things. And it really is a binary (just not a “discrete” binary).
Large immobile gamete vs. small usually motile gamete, like Hornbeck’s friend said. That’s a definition that applies across eukaryotic biology. For present purposes we can consider animals and then mammals. Most animals and to my knowledge all mammals have separate binary sexes by that definition. That’s a functional definition of male and female / biological sex.
It certainly does not apply to all species of animals–there are strictly asexual species/lineages (made up, necessarily, of biological females but lacking males) and hermaphroditic species/lineages in which individuals function as both sexes. It does apply to all species of mammals, but of course not to all individual mammals. There are juveniles, for example, and perhaps senescents, and developmental anomalies (though mammals, unlike flies and birds, cannot be gynandromorphic or chimeric with respect to sex) that cannot produce gametes.
The closest anatomical correlate to gamete production is gonad structure. In mammals ovaries and testes are distinguishable phenotypically in juveniles and senescents, so nearly all individuals can be classified as biologically male or female. Exceptions are few and are attributable to rare developmental anomalies. It’s a not-quite-discrete binary, a massively bimodal distribution with rare exceptions: individuals with no gonads at all, hermaphrodites with both types of gonadal tissue (never both funcitonal, as far as I know, in mammals), and intersex individuals with undifferentiated and/or unidentifiable gonads. The existence of such anomalies does not obviate the otherwise huge, obvious, and clear binary pattern. All that is straight biology and there is no reason it doesn’t apply to humans as well as any other mammal.
Any other definition of biological sex will rely on other phenotypic correlates of gamete/gonad structure, and all of these are species- or lineage-specific products of sex determination and development. They include details of sex determination (sex chromosomes or incubation temperatures, developmental switches, hormones), primary sex characteristics (genitalia, reproductive plumbing) and secondary sex characteristics (body size, coloration, antlers, hair-growth patterns, etc.). On top of these, at least for humans, are cultural characteristics–not genetically or developmentally determioned–that could vary intraspecifically. None of these correlates by itself is a complete definition of sex (which is the argument many are making above). Some of them are very strong correlates indeed (reproductive plumbing) others very weak (PZ’s haircuts), but there are anomalous exceptions to even the strongest of them.
Nevertheless, exceptions to a strong pattern do not obviate the pattern (often they “prove the rule” in the original sense of testing it). They do not change a binary into a ‘spectrum’.
[That is my shot at a purely biological discussion. Note that I do not refer to ‘gender’, which for all I know may well be a purely cultural concept and/or a spectrum. I also avoided any mention of behavior as a phenotype, since there’s a can of worms right there.]
oh, here’s that can o worms right here:
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2016/12/14/the-ideological-opposition-to-biological-truth/
First comment there:
Well, there’s an idiot outing himself.
Coyne himself:
I agree that testosterone can induce greater aggression…but I would suggest that if you look at the world around you, you’ll find that it’s not as simple as men have more testosterone, therefore more aggressive, and women have less, so less aggressive. If we assume for the sake of argument that all women have lower testosterone than all men, how do you account for the fact that there is a wide range of aggressive behaviors within a sex, and that some women are more aggressive than some men? Are we going to suggest that those women have man-like testosterone levels, therefore making the testosterone distinction difficult as a basis for spotting sex?
Maybe it’s because learned behaviors can override some of the effects of hormones. That’s the simplest explanation.
Not to sound too cliched, but why, PZ, don’t you and Coyne just compromise and say “it’s a combination of nature and nurture”?
A number of my patients who suffer neurologic illness are transgender. All of them feel that they were born that way. They explain an innate gender identity that was discordant with their sexual anatomy. And they fully acknowledge that gender roles and expectations (eg. pink versus blue) are cultural constructs. I’ve seen no better examples of nature and nurture interacting. Genes, hormones, environment all acting in harmony. If you, Coyne, Dawkins, Pinker, Kandel, Churchland, Fine, etc., are all in agreement with this then we’ve achieved Kumbaya by the campfire, yes?
Ragdish: Where exactly do you think gender and nurture entered this conversation?
Also, feel free to define “sexual anatomy.”
Rereading, I think I misread Ragdish’s last comment as applying more generally to the thread and not only specifically to PZ’s most recent point, so I retract the first bit. I’d still be interested in what’s meant by “sexual anatomy” in this context.
#41 Tom Foss
To clarify, I meant anatomy (both micro and macro) that is not in accordance with one’s gender identity. That would include genitalia, chromosomes, etc. Calling it “sexual” a little too archaic.
@ragdish
Genitalia I can see but how many people know or care about their chromosomes?
PZM @38:
I don’t.
Translated to effect sizes, you’re looking at a Cohen’s d that ranges from 0.16 to 0.28, which is pretty small. It’s well within the range of what publication bias can generate (ego depletion, for instance, had an effect size of roughly 0.6 according to a 2010 meta-analysis). That the two meta-analyses I quote above can disagree over most of their significant findings is not a good sign, either, as it suggests a large degree of noise in the data.
Based on the studies I’ve read, either testosterone does not have an effect on aggression in humans, or it has an effect so small as to be negligible.
Wait wait wait, I just clicked through to the link to Coyne’s article.
Yeah fair enough, though I’m thinking more along the lines of “WiFi is a human health hazard.”
Actually Myers uses reason and stuff, not ideology, but Coyne’s half-right that there’s no data there.
OK, there’s your claim. Where’s your evidence?
… yeeesss, sure, but what does that have to do with human behaviour and testosterone?
OI, COYNE!! You’re still prattling on about physical differences in size! Where’s your data about testosterone and human behavior? As I cited above, these studies have been done, and you can easily search for more of them on Google Scholar.
WHAT DATA?! You didn’t provide any! Google Scholar vomits up about 48,000+ references and just on the first page I can spot a half-dozen studies you could have cited. Instead, you just did a bait and switch on your readers. When did you get so lazy, dude?
Well, by pure physiology, a male has a bat and a pair of balls (or more bats, in some cases), a female has internal organs and a void, which may or not be shared by alimentary organs.
Alas, animals are a *lot* more complicated than mere plumbing.
That said, that an entire political viewpoint is predicated upon a defective analysis of reality, I entirely fail to see what idiot is going on about, save that the idiot is rejecting reality in favor of phantasms.
Well, there is one plus side to this nonsense, it isn’t Orwellian for a change.
No, there’s a second plus, no moron milk to pass onto the idiot’s stupid flakes for breakfast.
I love the “size” argument, because it actually says quite something else: humans are remarkably similar. What’s the average difference between people labelled male and female? Some 10 %?
Doggammit, Giliell. I’ve got a heavy workload at the moment, but your question got me curious so I did a literature search. I learned:
1. That’s about right, the body mass difference is about 11.5-12.1% according to Grabowski, Mark, et al. “Body mass estimates of hominin fossils and the evolution of human body size.” Journal of human evolution 85 (2015): 75-93.
2. But also according to the above, human beings have less dimorphism than any of our ancestors! This is important because many researchers think there’s a tie between behaviour and dimorphism.
3. Most researchers may be wrong, or at least overplaying that card. Emphasis mine:
4. I should write a blog post on this.
@HJ Hornbeck, if you do, let us all know. I, for one, would love to read more about the subject!
wzrd1 @49:
As teased, here’s that blog post. Unfortunately, Coyne just fired off a follow-up post with dozens of new assertions and half a dozen citations. This should be a multi-parter.