Richard Dawkins has attempted to answer the question “what is a woman” by inventing a definition, while simultaneously decrying attempts to answer such a question with a definition. It’s a sad state when he is reduced to such blatant sophistry.
It’s a long, far too long, article, not at all crisp and succinct, which is what you can expect when a man is floundering to impose untenable nonsense as objective biological fact. I’ll give you the one key paragraph.
How can I be so sure that there are only two sexes. Isn’t it just a matter of opinion? Sir Ed Davey, leader of the British Liberal Democrat party, said that women “quite clearly” can have a penis. Words are our servants not our masters. One might say, “I define a woman as anybody who self-identifies as a woman, therefore a woman can have a penis.” That is logically unassailable in the same way as, “I define “flat” to mean what you call “round”, therefore the world is flat.” I think it’s clear that if we all descended to that level of sophistry, rational discourse would soon dig itself into the desert sand. I shall make the case that redefinition of woman as capable of having a penis, if not downright perverse, is close to that extreme.
I have to first mention that he’s wrong, that Davey is not imposing a definition in his argument; he’s making a reductio, that you can defeat a claim that a woman can’t have a penis by…finding a woman who has a penis. He has left open the criteria for womanhood, implying that it is a complex multidimensional problem that can’t be resolved with a single criterion.
To which Dawkins responds by inventing a single criterion that he calls the Universal Biological Definition
! If you’re going to complain incorrectly that someone has fallaciously tried to resolve a problem by simply defining the problem away, don’t then indulge in your own attempt to resolve it with a definition! But here we go, Dawkins’ Universal Biological Definition
:
I shall advocate instead what I shall call the Universal Biological Definition (UBD), based on gamete size. Biologists use the UBD as the only definition that applies all the way across the animal and plant kingdoms, and all the way through evolutionary history.
Problem: it is not a universal
definition, and Richard Dawkins does not have the authority to tell all biologists what is true. If you ask the American Society for Reproductive Medicine or the NIH (at least, recently — they may not say this anymore as the Trump administration takes a wrecking ball to our research institutions) what the universal
definition is, they’ll tell you:
The National Institutes of Health defines biological sex (“assigned sex”) as “a multidimensional biological construct based on anatomy, physiology, genetics, and hormones,” also referred to by some as “sex traits.” All animals, including humans, have a sex.
Ideologically driven policymakers have introduced or enacted legislation and policies defining legal sex based on biological characteristics at birth, such as genitalia, chromosomes, or reproductive anatomy.
For example, a 2023 Kansas law defines males and females based on reproductive anatomy at birth, stating that females are individuals whose reproductive systems are developed to produce ovaries, and males are those whose systems are developed to “fertilize the ova” of a female. A 2023 Tennessee statute defines sex as a person’s immutable biological sex as determined by anatomy and genetics at birth.
All the scientific societies I have been associated with say something similar. It is rather arrogant of Dawkins, who is not a reproductive biologist, a developmental biologist, an endocrinologist, or has any other relevant credentials to think that he can ignore a consensus and simply decree that his simplistic definition is absolutely and completely universal and true.
Dawkins’ expertise is as an ethologist, someone who studies animal behavior. I don’t understand how an ethologist can come to the conclusion that there is only one simple parameter that determines everything, but I guess that’s the power of motivated reasoning.
He tries to justify it ethologically, but this whole section falls flat.
If you define females as macrogamete producers and males as microgamete producers, you can immediately account for the following facts (see any recent textbook of Ethology, Sociobiology, Behavioural Ecology or Evolutionary Psychology):
- In mammals it’s the females that gestate the young and secrete milk.
- In those bird species where only one sex incubates the eggs, or only one sex feeds the young, it is nearly always the females.
- In those fish that bear live young, it is nearly always the females that bear them.
- In those animals where one sex advertises to the other with bright colours, it is nearly always the males.
- In those bird species where one sex sings elaborate or beautiful songs it is always the male who does so.
- In those animals where one sex fights over possession of the other, it is nearly always the males who fight.
- In those animals where one sex has more promiscuous tendencies than the other, it is nearly always the males.
- In those animals where one sex is fussier about avoiding miscegenation, it is usually the females.
- In those animals where one sex tries to force the other into copulation, it is nearly always the males who do the forcing.
- When one sex guards the other against copulation with others, it is nearly always the males that guard females.
- In those animals where one sex is gathered into a harem, it is nearly always the females.
- Polygyny is far more common than polyandry.
- When one sex tends to die younger than the other, it is usually the males.
- Where one sex is larger than the other it is usually the males.
Notice all the qualifiers? In this particular clade it works this way, “usually,” “nearly always,” “more common,” etc., etc., etc. Not so universal, then, is it, when even your best examples have to be padded with exceptions. Do polyandrous or monogamous species not exhibit anisogamy? If a female exhibits bright colours, is she no longer a true female (conversely, are drag queens the most female of us all)? If males of a species incubate eggs, are they all faggoty cucks, not deserving to be called male? It seems to me that anisogamy does not and cannot explain all of the complexity of sex. As his own examples show, sex is a diverse phenomenon that you can’t just sweep into one catch-all bin.
I would also note a fallacious sleight of hand: he starts by complaining about a definition of “woman” that allows for women having a penis, and then hinges his entire argument on gametes. Men and women are more than a pile of gametes! There’s a vast body of cultural baggage associated with the human categories of man and woman, and you don’t get to jettison them all as inconvenient to your claim…and similarly, you can’t pretend that all those ethological variations in the sexes of non-human species are unimportant. I know that Richard is exercising his well known penchant for extreme reductionism, but sometimes that just breaks and produces nonsensical visions that do not reflect biological reality at all.
An evolutionary biologist ought to embrace variation and diversity rather than discarding it. That only harms the individuals who are part of the normal range of variation, but don’t belong to the typical median — and this is particularly problematic when you’re dealing with a species that has exploded the range of cultural, phenotypic variation, as humans have done. We’re not penguins or hyenas or ticks, you know. Why ignore all the diversity within a species notorious for its behavioral flexibility?
Not only is he ignoring all the people whom we easily sort into the male and female categories (and who are happy there) who have never and will never produce any gametes (and may not even notice), but have you noticed the language? Males force, but when there is strong female choice, they are “fussier” like toddlers who skipped their nap.
Was there an older, perhaps mid-1900s definition, that he’s using? In ‘The Machinery of Nature’ (1986) Paul Ehrlich wrote on page 107, at https://archive.org/details/machineryofnatur0000ehrl/page/106/mode/2up?q=%22male+and+female+are+defined%22 .
“You might wonder if females always produce larger gametes. I can reply “yes” with an assurance rare for a response to a biological question, because that is how male and female are defined — by the relative sizes of their gametes”
He then describes E. O. Wilson’s views on the topic, which might help characterize who shares this viewpoint.
All of this is so stupid.
All you have to do to prove such definitions wrong is this:
“So, you universally test for gamete size before using gendered pronouns for someone?”
If the answer is no, then whatever the definition of “woman” for the purpose of interpersonal interaction, it’s not that.
“Does the law universally test for gamete size before allowing sex discrimination lawsuits to proceed?”
If no, then whatever the definition of “woman” is for the purposes of the law, it’s not that.
Etc. for whatever particular purpose is relevant at the time. Dawkins is in flat reality denial about his own definition of the word “woman”. He is the flat earther here b/c he refuses to acknowledge the criteria he himself uses to group humans into gender. Whatever those criteria are, and they could be vastly different from PZ criteria or my criteria or Arnold Schwarzenegger’s criteria, they certainly don’t involve sampling others’ gametes or we all would have heard about some very creepy lawsuits by now.
If he told me that he defines women as those adult human beings whose wrists are visibly narrower than his own, while men are everyone whose wrists are not immediately determined to be smaller by brief visual inspection, I would think his definition was weird, but it’s at least plausible that he could, in fact, be using that definition in every day life without me having previously know it. in other words, I wouldn’t instantly know he’s lying.
However, when he says that the definition he uses is one of gamete size, I know for a fact that he’s lying – possibly even to himself.
He’s a mendacious twit, and better off dismissed.
No. See above. He’s clearly not using that definition for “woman”.
To be clear: no one has EVER used that definition for “woman” in any but the most ad hoc, operational way in a specific scientific context where the gametes of each individual human subject were examined as part of some experimental procedure.
Rem acu tetigisti (as Bertie Wooster would say)
It’s rather like saying that all music is either in a major or a minor key, which defines absolutely the fundamental nature of said music and explains everything about its social and psychological impact on the world. So all we have to do to understand music properly is to measure the intervals between notes.
Songs in as major key are nearly always happy songs. Songs in a minor key are nearly always sad songs. Etc etc.
Oh, and we should bully and threaten and try to eradicate any music that doesn’t fit this schema, because it’s clearly wrong on a fundamental level.
It’s even more stupid than that, because part of the definition of “woman” includes “adult” we have to acknowledge that the definition of “adult” has biological components, but it also socially and legally determined.
An “adult” in the biological sense is a being that is “Fully grown or developed”. But since that wildly changes all over the place, we decided that an adult is someone who is 13. Or 16. Or 18. Or 21. Or 25. Or after they can maintain their own job. Or after they are reproductively capable. Or, wait, actually, the idea of who is an “adult” changes a lot, depending on the context.
Don’t understand why gender should be any different.
Why is he listing a bunch of common behavioral patterns that clearly don’t apply to humans? Our males don’t all have bright colors or sing special songs or fight to the death over females and build harems, so that’s hardly an endorsement of the gamete size definition for us.
And you can’t really talk about what fish do and then forget to mention sequential hermaphroditism.
It’s also…telling that he used the word “miscegenation” instead of “hybridization.” Shows where his mind is at these days.
My response to all of Dawkins’ postulating is: so what? None of this tells us anything useful about how society should be organized or how we should treat each other.
I’m reminded of the observation that “there’s no such thing as a fish;” i.e., the assertion that there is no taxonomic grouping that includes all animals commonly understood to be “fish” and excludes all animals commonly understood to not be “fish.” And yet, a vague and intuitive definition of “fish” is all we really need in daily life.
has he answered the fundamental question of “why does it matter to him?”
A long time ago, he wrote an essay that I really admired called “The Tyranny of the Discontinuous Mind”. In it, he argues that biology does not work in categories as much as continuities (although interestingly he argues that sex is one case, but without any evidence). https://richarddawkins.com/articles/article/the-tyranny-of-the-discontinuous-mind
Richard Dawkins has attempted to answer the question “what is a woman” by inventing a definition, while simultaneously decrying attempts to answer such a question with a definition. It’s a sad state when he is reduced to such blatant sophistry.
Here’s a definition I heard from somewhere: A woman is a person who exhibits the traits and characteristics that society defines as those of a woman. Which sounds a bit circular at first, but it really isn’t; it’s exactly how we’ve always determined the genders of everyone we see or encounter, ever since grade-school age. And we almost NEVER — as in only maybe 0.1% of the time — have to use any other metric due to uncertainty.
(Also, notice how these transphobes ever seem to grapple with the question “what is a man?”)
It’s a long, far too long, article, not at all crisp and succinct, which is what you can expect when a man is floundering to impose untenable nonsense as objective biological fact.
Not to mention a man who’s suffering significant cognitive decline, and who’s desperately trying to keep on reiterating an opinion that he can’t bear to admit isn’t as solid and demonstrably true as he may have thought it was.
How can I be so sure that there are only two sexes…
Funny thing, that’s not the notion Dawkins is actually trying to defend later in that same paragraph. This is the same motte-and-bailey BS we heard from Holms and other transphobes: first, claim that “sex is a strict binary” and ridicule anyone who tries to “muddy the waters” or “deny a scientific truth;” and then, when that claim gets debunked, retreat to another claim, “there are only two sexes,” and then pretend that we cannot accept the latter claim without, ipso facto, accepting the former claim as well.
And (AFAIK at least) most of us aren’t really claiming there’s a “third sex” — we’re saying that the two sexes we recognize, male and female, are two ends of a SPECTRUM, with a huge range of mixing of characteristics in between those two ends. Anyone who keeps on repeating “there are only two sexes” is misrepresenting the arguments against transphobia and simplistic binary thinking.
Biologists use the UBD as the only definition that applies all the way across the animal and plant kingdoms…
Yes, but it’s not biologists applying that definition to individuals; it’s doctors, social workers and mental-health practitioners who determine — in cooperation with individual patients — how to address issues of healthcare, gender identity, etc. Dawkins can bang on all he wants about official universal scientific definitions, but it’s all mostly irrelevant at the individual-health-and-well-being level.
He tries to justify it ethologically, but this whole section falls flat…
I gotta say that’s an impressive list of non-sequiturs. I almost feel mean dismissing it all with a mere two words, “So what?”
I’ve heard of an argument being called a “definition fallacy” recently. I can’t find anything about that specific fallacy, so perhaps it’s known by some other term. However, this would appear to qualify.
robro: I’ve used the phrase “argument by labelling.” That might be similar to what you’re referring to.
@robro:
I have heard people use that term — one of recent coinage — to describe the problems that occur when people act as if definitions are prescriptive (“definitions dictate word usage and even the reality words describe”) or descriptive (“definitions describe word usage, and do not constrain those usages to ones that conform to any particular reality”).
If words’ definitions are descriptive, then a hot dog is a sandwich when someone uses “sandwich” to include a hot dog, and a hot dog is not a sandwich when someone uses “sandwich” in a way that excludes hot dogs. There is no objective definition that corresponds with objective, platonic sandwichness such that one can objectively determine whether a hot dog is or is not a sandwich. So beginning a debate with the assumption that there is such a definition is sometimes described as employing a “definition fallacy”.
Of course, since there’s no objective definition of definition fallacy, you might have come across it being used in a way I haven’t seen, but this is what I understand from what I’ve read and heard.
Gamete size has got to be the worst of all possible criteria for someone’s sex. First of all, gametes are not produced by a large portion of the population. People who are young, people who are old, and people who have disabilities may not produce gametes. Furthermore, one’s gametes are quite private; when you meet someone, it is rather unlikely you could be sure of their gamete type.
So his definition is basically women are people who are useful to men for producing children? This all seems like slight of hand for justifying patriarchy
I note these people never try to define man in this. They want to say that I, a trans woman, am a man, but I bet if I turned up to their men’s only clubs I would get harassed out, or worse. The gender binary they’re advocating for actually has a 3rd category of non-people at the bottom, and they don’t like that we’re demanding to be counted as people.
Thanks, Crip Dyke @ #16. That’s exactly how I’ve heard it used, in particular by Dan McClellan. He sometimes cites the argument you outline when someone tries to use a definition to support dogmatism.
And thanks, Raging Bee @ #15 for your POV. As a professional labeler…really…I can find a certain humor in the phrase as there’s often argument about labeling.
Notice all the qualifiers?
A good sign, those: Dawkins thereby signals he has not gone full Republican(/Tory), but maintains a degree of intellectual honesty &/or acknowledgement that those who disagree have at least some evidence supporting their position.
He has not fallen so far as hardcore Bannonism (yet).
If a trans man gets bottom surgery, wouldn’t that mean that, according to Dawkin’s logic, a woman would have a penis? Or would he argue that his penis isn’t real since he wasn’t born with it?
It seems to me that Dawkins has now completed the full arc of patriarchal egocentric life. He is demonstrating that he is a misogynistic, difference-intolerant clown satisfied with having discourse with other misogynistic, difference-intolerant clowns. No one else can find any interest or merit in his inane pontifications.
Walter: a trans-man’s penis is not a real penis because it isn’t imbued with Platonic/Thomist penis essence. /s
@Raging Bee
So a man is someone who has the platonic penis essence imbued into them? :P
Ready for the twist at the end of the tale?
According to Dawkins’ “universal definition” a woman can have a penis.
Now look who’s being “downright perverse”. X-D
Another dumb thing about his “universal definition” is that it would define intersex women with CAIS (who have dysfunctional internal testes) as men – despite them having been regarded as women in every society throughout history and many having lived and died completely unaware that they weren’t just ordinary women (apart from the quirk of never getting their period).
His definition is detached from reality. As Crip Dyke says, no one has ever used it in reference to human beings.
Julia Serano has a great writeup on why there’s been such a focus on gametes from transphobes lately:
https://juliaserano.substack.com/p/why-are-gender-critical-activists
Colin Wright had something to say on the matter. From J. Coyne’s blog:
He begins with how the sex binary helps us understand reverse sexual dimorphism (rare cases in which males help gestate young or in which the females rather than the usual males are the ornate and decorated species):
“. . . . how do we know that male seahorses are the ones that gestate young and give birth? Or that in northern jacanas (J. spinosa), it is the females who are larger, more ornate, territorial, and exhibit less parental care than males? This knowledge stems from understanding that male and female are categories that exist independent of mere morphology and behavior.
Myers makes an uninformed argument:
Somehow, an awful lot of biologists study sexual behavior — like lekking, or sexual displays, or fidelity, and on and on — that don’t necessarily involve sperm collection or measuring ovulation or that kind of thing. It is absurd to insist that only gametes define sex. I recognize spider sexes by the morphology of their palps, and by their differences in behavior, not gametes. I see the birds flying outside my window, and I discriminate sexes by color, primarily.
Myers could not be any more confused here. How does he recognize that it is typically males who form leks, or that males often display more elaborate mating behaviors and exhibit less sexual fidelity? This knowledge comes from studying these species and correlating these behaviors with the type of gametes an individual produces. Once we discover that males of the Vogelkop superb bird-of-paradise (Lophorina niedda) possess highly decorative plumage and engage in elaborate sexual displays, we no longer need to continuously verify this. We know it’s the males because we learned that only those with decorative plumage and elaborate sexual displays in this species produce sperm.
However, Myers insists that defining an individual’s sex based solely on gametes represents an “extreme reductionist” approach, and suggests we should consider “all the other valid signals they openly display.”
Dawkins is just being an extreme reductionist to the point he’s making himself and his position look silly. Go ahead, all you reactionary biologists, rant about how there can be only two true sexes because people have some cells that are almost never seen in public, in defiance of all the other valid signals they openly display. Better biologists will go on recognizing all the factors that define sex without your self-imposed, narrow-minded blinders.
And then, very concisely, Wright summarizes the problems with Myers’s criticisms:
The core and critical flaw in Myers’ argument for using other traits to determine the sex of an individual is that these traits are only reliable indicators of sex in species where we already know which individuals are males and females, based on their gametes. In humans, we associate breasts with females and facial hair with males because adult human females typically develop breasts and adult human males tend to grow facial hair. But how would Myers propose to identify males and females in a newly discovered species without any prior knowledge of their secondary sexual characteristics?
Consider a hypothetical new mammal species with some individuals small and blue and others large and brown. Since we know mammals are anisogamous (i.e., reproduce via fusion of a sperm and an egg), we can be as certain as possible that this species also exhibits males and females. But how do we determine which is which? Should we assume the blue ones are males and the brown ones females, as is the case with blue groper fish? But in blue gropers the males are large and the females are small. Should we therefore consider the blue individuals of our new mammal species female because they are small? But in spiders the males are smaller than the females, suggesting perhaps the small individuals should be considered males?
Do you see the absurdity of the approach? We know human males tend to be hairier, male blue gropers are blue, and male spiders are usually smaller, because being male is a trait independent of hair, color, or size. What unites these males is the type of gamete they have the function to produce. That is what makes them male.
Thus, the only way we can know which individuals of our new species are the males and which are the females is to find out which individuals produce sperm and which produce eggs. The. End.
Myers has to understand this, but he is too afraid to tell the truth.”
Oops, I left out the link @ 25
https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/teenager-raised-as-a-boy-announces-pregnancy-after-discovery-of-female-reproductive-organs/news-story/eeceee6be4ed519a6b2ed8d77eaa61ba
@ 29 samp
Dude! Learn to quote. It’s unclear who’s speaking in your comment – you, Coyne, Wright – some bits look like it’s supposed to be PZ.
But anyway, your undifferentiated wall of text is a strawman. PZ has never said you can’t classify members of species as male or female most of the time on the basis of reproductive abilities. He does it himself all the time. This blog is full of posts about his female spiders’ egg sacs, and his male spiders’ behavior toward the females.
The argument is:
– Biology is complicated not simple and you can’t rely on simplistic reductionist criteria. You can’t reduce everything to gametes because some individuals have no gametes, but are not unsexed. They still have sexually differentiated traits.
– All this is irrelevant to human social organization anyway. “Woman” is not a term of art from a scientists laboratory, it’s a common word in everyday use, and nobody goes around checking chromosomes and gametes before deciding someone is a woman. We call transgender women women and not transgender kumquats for a reason. We call intersex women women and not intersex petunias for a reason. Because they aren’t anything like kumquats or petunias but do exist in society in the social category for which we are accustomed to using the word “women”.
@29. samp :
FYI greater than and lesser than symbols aka angled backets – > & < but other way round with an i inside (without spaces) create italics and with a b inside get you bold
With the word Blockquote – capital b inside gets you
Also FYI Coyne’s blog and Coyne himself are not held in high regard here for good reasons see PZ’s posts about him here :
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/?s=Coyne
@ 29. samp :
Emphasis added – note a tendancy is not an inevitability. Co-relation ain’t causation and so on. Women tend to have longer hair than men but having short hair does not define or make one male & having longer hair does not make one female. Or non-binary, intersex, cis or trans in either case.
Also spiders aren’t people and nor are fish and fish can change sex and that’s about as relevant as what you wrote maybe more.
Nope. Bzzt. wrong. For starters plenty of men don’t prouce spermand plentyof woemnn don’t profuce eggs. Ever heradof menopause or intersex people?
Also do you know just fromlookinga t someone whether theyar eproducing sperm or eggs? No. No you don’t.
Myers is telling the truth and isn’t afriad to do so. You are the one rejecting scientific biological reality here which is a lot more complex and less simplistic than you seem to believe.
[StevoR, ‘Myers has to [blah] and ”Myers is [blah] is presumably intended as a parallel phrasing (I do that sort of thing), but it tacitly concedes the nominative disrespect as proper. Me, I would have written ‘PZ’ instead]
By the way, Colin Wright, whom samp invokes @ 29, is a notorious clown and I recommend this amusing recent video of Wright getting utterly shredded by trans woman Katy Montgomerie. X-D
(31 minutes)
@32
“Also FYI Coyne’s blog and Coyne himself are not held in high regard here for good reasons”
Yeah? By whom? Unlike Myers, Coyne writes for the major news orgs. Myers is largely considered a “social justice” dishonest whackjob, whom no one would touch with a 10-foot pole. Who invites Myers to share his opinions about anything these days?
@32
You should read Dawkins’ article “Why biological sex matters” where he does an excellent job explaining why sex is binary and that “gender” is a term really co opted from lingistics, and is really nothing but a synonym for “sex”. There are only two sexes, therefore only two “genders”.
For a biology professor to insist otherwise is a disgrace (even though it is tremendously entertaining) and the fact that Myers still has his teaching job is an idicator of just how much political correctness and the current “gender mania” have degraded education in the country.
Reckoning is coming, though
By the people here, of course.
(To what did you imagine”here’ referred?)
Oh, also… X-D
(Sorry for comment hogging, I don’t usually post so many comments in a single thread, I’ve just kept thinking of more things so say)
Montgomerie, who is also an atheist and skeptic, has also done a video on Dawkins’ lack of skepticism as regards anti-trans prejudice. This one’s ~40 minutes:
@samp
So if all this is just about general cases at the species level and individual variation can lead to edge cases it would be reasonable to say that while generally women don’t have penises, a woman can have a penis in an outlier case? And that she is broadly within the female space based on things like breasts, fat distribution, body hair, in the same way we would for a woman who doesn’t produce gametes for some reason?
‘You should read Dawkins’ article “Why biological sex matters” where he does an excellent job’
Mmmhmm.
Surly (heh, oops) Surely Coyne’s authority on these matters exceeds that of those to whom PZ refers.
Here, from the OP:
“If you ask the American Society for Reproductive Medicine or the NIH [etc]”
(Coyne is a sour cherry, a loaded coyn, even. A weak authority, compared to entire national institutions, no?)
I guess they shouldn’t give out FRS to anyone who is stupid enough to engage in a land war in Asia.
Funally, why stop with calling a castrated, hormone soacked “man” a woman, if that “man” just FEELS like e woman.
What if a person says he or she FEELS like a poodle (or anything else for that matter)?
Would it make someone who refuses to considers that person anything other than psychotic, “dog-phobic”?
@20–
That is a very generous interpretation. If Dawkins had any integrity left, his cascade of qualifying statements would lead him to conclude that sex definition based on gamete size is not just irrelevant to human gender identity, it is untenable in nature. Whenever a critic points out an error in one of his definitional arguments or provides a devastating counter-example, the response should be “Oh, I see. That does make the definition unusable”. But we know full well that the actual response from the gender essentialists will be “But Dawkins already acknowledged that” so that they can continue without addressing the flaw. It’s lampshading, not honest grappling with the arguments.
I’d add that when he lists his reasons for gamete size being deterministic of sexual behavour, he has avoided the most telling counter-examples. For instance, there are species of plant that make both large gametes and small gametes at the same time and can thus self-fertilise. This is not rare. Around 15% of flowering plants self-fertilise. In the case of the orchid H. amesianum, the anther twists downwards to insert its own pollen directly into its own stigma cavity. So are these orchids male or female? Any meaningful definition would have to conclude that they are both, and that rigid dichotomous sex determination by gamete size fails even in common, unambiguously anisogametic organisms.
Dawkins has also selectively chosen his example groups. For instance, among insects where there is body size dimorphism, females are almost always larger than males.
“Sexual selection is often considered as a critical evolutionary force promoting sexual size dimorphism (SSD) in animals. However, empirical evidence for a positive relationship between sexual selection on males and male-biased SSD received mixed support depending on the studied taxonomic group and on the method used to quantify sexual selection.”
As for bird monogamy, we now know this is largely an illusion created by researchers noticing that the same pairs tended to share a nest every year’s mating season. When scientists look more closely, by direct observational of behaviour or DNA testing of offspring, these so-called monogamous birds are having frequent non-monogamous matings. And if males are having “illicit” encounters with females, it follows that females must be having “illicit” encounters at the same average frequency. So Dawkins’ comment is clearly wrong.
His comments on polygyny vs. polyandry are also contradicted by the evidence. “The historical notion of monogamous females, pair-bonded with the same male for life, has been steadily eroded away over the past 40 years since the first review of sperm competition in insects. Since then, ever-increasing numbers of studies have reported multiple paternity in natural litters, clutches, and broods, leading to the currently popular notion that females mating with multiple males, or polyandry, is a common and ubiquitous phenomenon in nature.”
Dawkins’ insistence that polyandry is rare is derived entirely from his own social expectations, not evidence. And in fact, any evolutionary argument that supports polygynous sexual behavior in males must also apply to polyandrous behaviour in females. The size of one’s gametes has no bearing whatsoever on the reproductive value of multiple mate choices.
The killing point, to me, is that Dawkins is a professional biologist who has, in the past, been well read. When he argued with Gould in the 70s, at least he had read Gould. But his failure to address these issues now is a huge red flag. Clearly he has not been keeping up with the literature for decades and can’t even rouse himself to check a few recent reviews before pontificating on any subject. Clearly he has not internalised the criticisms of his attempts to define sex by gamete size because he does not respond to the actual arguments and observations. He has diminished himself to objecting by reflex, drawing on “facts” he learned as an undergrad and refusing to update his knowledge.
Here, from the OP:
“If you ask the American Society for Reproductive Medicine or the NIH [etc]”
They’ve lost any credibility on that matter.
Should I point out that this is one of those “only in America” things. And in a handful of other western countries, where they’ve recently began to walkback all this nonsense.
Where else in the world do biologists argue that there are more than 2 sexes?
And once again we have a great example of how this “there’s only two sexes” stuff is just a wedge for blatant transphobia
No. Not one bit. That’s just your bluff.
Anyone worldwide or nation-state wide body that does not agree with your specific authorities obviously has no authority on the matter, according to that claim. Which, you know, is kinda aspirational.
(Care to try to show me wrong?)
But sure, better to pretend to really believe the American Society for Reproductive Medicine and the NIH lack credibility.
As, of course, does the WHO.
(https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=world+health+organization+sex+and+gender)
(You keep munching on those sour cherries, which is why you have that expression)
Yeah? By whom?
By people who have actually read what Coyne has written, and know it’s all bigoted bullshit.
And as for PZ allegedly being “dishonest,” go ahead and show some examples of PZ being dishonest. We’re waiting…
@46
@49
Sure. And when people start declaring they FEEL like cats, dogs or whatever, you would be dog-phobic or cat-phobic for disagreeing with them that they are indeed those animals.
Or would you accept their delusions?
So spare me the “transphobia” stuff. It’s a meaningless term.
If a person calling himself or herself “they/them” is not a sympton of a severe multiple personality disorder, I dont know what is
So, in some hypothetical future when people do what never actually happens or has happened, you think some collective ‘you’ would be “dog-phobic or cat-phobic”.
(cynophobic, ailurophobic… but that means other than a tiny weeny lexicon)
[Can’t be fun having a wizened lexicon]
Well, duh.
First of all, nothing wrong with ‘themself’, it can only be parsed one way, but is still gender neutral.
No need for the clumsy circumlocution to which you resort.
Next, why you have an issue with whoever calling themself whatever is left to others to fathom, but it clearly indicates intolerance. Whyever do you care what they call themselves? [plural
form]
Next, what is the difference, in your estimable judgement, between mere regulation “multiple personality disorder” (I leave aside the ignorance this evinces) and the “severe” kind?
(Ah, never mind. I’m not allowed to have fun with you)
—
But hey, let me not be all negative!
“I dont [sic] know what is”.
Indeed.
You actually got that 100% correct.
(Well done!)
Well at least that is true.
CD: :)
We’ve been through this before, but I wonder is Dawkins intentionally lying or is he just that ignorant. I haven’t read all the comments, but I am not the first here to point out that not everyone produces gametes. There have always been XY women, i.e. phenotypically women and considered to be uncontroversially female through most of history when people did not even know about chromosomes or gametes. As ChatGPT summarizes (correctly, to the best of my knowledge):
Needless to say, I expect Trump and his religious goons to be unaware of all of this, but Dawkins cannot possibly be, so why would he trot out a “definition” that clearly fails?
@51
“So, in some hypothetical future when people do what never actually happens or has happened, you think some collective ‘you’ would be “dog-phobic or cat-phobic”.”
Im sure it happens in lunatic asylums.
In the past people also didnt just declare themselves being the opposite gender, or being “gender neutral”.
The tiny number of people who did, were rightly seen as psychiatric patients
@49
There are so many examples of Myers being dishonest(among oyher things) that someone coyld write a book about.
Here is an excerp once again from Coyne’s blog:
“This is one of the bits that discredits itself, but it shows how intellectually dishonest Myers has become. A quote from his first piece:
“The list of members consists mainly of people who are demonstrable assholes. They include:
Sam Harris
Eric Weinstein
Christina Hoff Sommers
Dave Rubin
Jordan Peterson
Heather Heying
Ben Shapiro
Douglas Murray
Joe Rogan
Maajid Nawaz
Bret Weinstein
Michael Shermer
Camille Paglia
Steven Pinker
James Damore
Etc., etc., etc. You know, if you really wanted to compile a list of the worst people in America, the shallow populists who poison the discourse with conservative toxins and Libertarian lies, that wouldn’t be a bad start. These are not particularly smart or interesting people — they are good at inflaming other assholes and acquiring a following, but that’s about it.”
[Note that, as Speaker to Animals says in the comments, “Nawaz and Murray are Brits.”]
I mean, yes, these people are of variable intellectual quality and accomplishment, but calling people like Steve Pinker, Heather Heying, Maajid Nawaz, Bret Weinstein, Sam Harris, Christina Hoff Sommers, etc. “assholes” and “the worst people in America”? Seriously? I can think of many worse people, starting with our Chief Executive. And let us remember the what Myers means by “poisoning the discourse” is “saying things I don’t agree with.”
Okay.
Wait, what? “This never happened, and when it happened…”
Are you, in fact, English-literate?
Go on.
So your example of dishonesty is that you and PZ have differing opinions on who counts as an asshole?
You realize that by “asshole” he doesn’t mean a literal anus, right? That this is a metaphorical use intended as an insult and therefore not easily subject to evaluation for truth, right? You realize that opinions are not lies, right?
I’m seriously questioning that English literacy again.
“Im sure it happens in lunatic asylums.”
Really? Your mind is sure a fertile field of fantasy, then.
Are you quite sure of that?
(In the past, to be an atheist was to be burned at the stake. Just saying)
Look, ignoring your ignorant and redundant and confusing comma, you are just making shit up.
(There’s no ‘there’ there, mate!)
—
Oh, right.
Care to confirm you are a penis possessor?
(You sure vibe that way, cutey)
@53
“Next, why you have an issue with whoever calling themself whatever is left to others to fathom, but it clearly indicates intolerance. ”
I dont have an issue with people calling themselves whatever they want. There are people calling themselves Napoleon. (They are usually under appropriate supervision).
What many of us, including Dawkins, totally object to, is that thevrest of us should accept as a fact that just calling yourself a man, a woman, non binary, a dog, a sheep, or indeed, Napoleon, actually makes you so.
You want to spread the idea that a mental disorder, that has recently become fashionable(!), should be somehow considered normal.
And of course, you would never win that fight. Your position is so extreeme, that democrats, having even mildly endorsed this crazyness, lost against the crazy clown Donald Trump.
“Are you quite sure of that?”
Apart crazy people, that is.
That’s the point
simp, #57
For a start “opposite gender” is inaccurate. Given that there are many more than two genders, and they do not exist in opposition to each other, we use “a different gender”. You total bellend.
Secondly, stupid frightened and incurious people like you have often made facile attempts to categorise things they don’t like as mental illnesses. Ever heard of drapetomania – the “mental illness” that slaves who didn’t want to be enslaved showed? It is rather telling how badly your attempt at an argument is going that you should fall back on this kind of nonsense.
Thirdly, trans, nonbinary, intersex and gender-nonconforming people are attested in societies going back as far as ancient Mesopotamia. Go read Kit Heyam’s “Before we were Trans”, or one of the many other good books on the subject. You many need the large print version, or maybe get a grown-up to help you with the big words.
Finally, would you kindly fuck off back to Coyne, Trump, Rowling and all your drooling idiot friends.The adults are trying to have a discussion.
“I dont have an issue with people calling themselves whatever they want.”
Ahem. You think those that do are “rightly seen as psychiatric patients”.
You sure that truly does not mean mean you have an issue?
(I mean, you say you don’t, yet here you are, as if you did indeed)
You are so sweet.
Dawkins and you are worlds apart, other than in your shared transphobia.
MMmmmm. I get this a lot.
Anyway. Your supposed inference about my motivation is flawed inasmuch as it is a false claim.
What I’m doing is pointing out the feebleness and lack of rigour of your sheepishly-bleated regurgitated claims.
Well, some don’t think I am a ‘regular’. Whatever that means.
But I’m pretty sure I have not actually stated any position.
I’ve disputed your claims, sure. Because they are shitty and mockable.
(But I’ve not stated a position, never mind one that is extreeeeeeeeeeeme)
Hey, samp, whaddayathink about gay marriage?
(Same sex! Homosexual! Unnatural!!!)
That’s my guess. Am I wrong?
—
Do explain your stance, since it will most certainly inform people.
(If you make a good, cogent stance for your essay, you will get extra credit)
[OK, I can see this might be hard. So, hint is: What Would Dawkins Think.
Dum dum duuuuum!]
@64
“Thirdly, trans, nonbinary, intersex and gender-nonconforming people are attested in societies going back as far as ancient Mesopotamia. ”
Im sure they are. But they were considered nothing but freaks that no normal person would go near.
“Finally, would you kindly fuck off back to Coyne, Trump, Rowling and all your drooling
friends.The adults are trying to have a discussion.”
Dont make me laugh.
Um, no. They were special, but not exceptional in those societies.
Like, just another group of people. Their existence was normative.
(You’re just fabricating claims at this point. Be aware cartomancer is an actual scholar)
A more evasive and guarded response I can hardly fathom.
(No denial, though. Mmmm)
—
Hey, just checking… is your keyboard key for the apostrophe (‘) broken?
@65
“Ahem. You think those that do are “rightly seen as psychiatric patients”.
You sure that truly does not mean mean you have an issue?”
I dont have issues with psychiatric patients. As long as they are recognized as such and treated appropriately. Not normalized.
“Hey, samp, whaddayathink about gay marriage?
(Same sex! Homosexual! Unnatural!!!)
That’s my guess. Am I wrong?”
Homosexuality IS unnatural for the obvious reason: in the context of a sexually diamorphic species, same sex attraction makes no sense except as some sort of diviation.
As far as same sex marriage, I was originally for legalizing it. Now, I’m not so sure. But certainly, allowing for same sex couples to adopt children is beyond the pale. That’s an entirely different thing, and should’ve never been alloewed.
Wait, Sam Harris isn’t an arsehole? Did he renounce his support of torture?
samp, this for sure is gonna hurt you more than it hurts me.
But, for $REASON$, I shall not try to have fun with you.
(Incidental fun, well… that’s not my doing)
—
So.
“I dont have issues with psychiatric patients.”
Evasive.
Um, we are talking historically.
Here. Consider this.
The original claim: “In the past people also didnt just declare themselves being the opposite gender, or being “gender neutral”.”
Your revised claim: “I dont have issues with psychiatric patients. As long as they are recognized as such and treated appropriately. Not normalized.”
Can you do the inferences implicit in your own assertions, or should I do them for you?
(Hint, you indeed have issues)
“Um, no. They were special, but not exceptional in those societies.”
They were abnormal, thats what counts.
Until recently, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine would have said the same thing. Just like virtually every organisation for Reproductive Medicine around the globe
Absolutely untrue.
What many of us, including myself, totally object to, is that the rest of us should accept as a fact that just asserting something as historically true makes it so.
Should we be forced by society to accept your delusions?
@dangerousbeans:
Nope, he did not. Still an arsehole.
simp, #68
Your utter ignorance of cultural history is on full display. In many societies the trans, intersex, non-binary and otherwise nonconforming people (as we would consider them – they had other terms of art) were regarded as holding special places of honour, or being an entirely ordinary variation on human existence. The eunuch priests of the Magna Mater in Rome, for instance, who tended the shrine of one of the most important goddesses, lived right by the back door of the Imperial Palace, or the pharaoh Hatshepsut, who was buried with hundreds of wooden phalloi to better achieve her traditionally masculine role in fertilising the divine river in the afterlife. Or two-spirit people in many cultures of the pre-colonial New World. Or we could even talk of Queen Elizabeth I, who is extremely famous for saying she had the body of a weak and feeble woman, but the heart and stomach of a king. Or Queen Christina of Sweden. Or we could talk about the legal records from Mediaeval England which reveal the many gender-fluid sex workers in London who identified sometimes as male, sometimes as female, and were accepted in society as either. We could talk about the hijra women of India. We could talk about the castrati and their highly prized vocal talents in Western musical culture. There are many more examples.
And, yes, there was plenty of vile, bigoted transphobia like yours too. Just as slavery and racism were extremely common in the past. Just as misogyny and homophobia were near-universal until 40 years ago. You’re wrong about the universality of a bigoted dislike of the gender-unorthodox, but even if you weren’t “a load of arseholes in the past thought this” isn’t really a great argument for why we should do so too.
First, I dont need your hints.
Second, my original claim above concerns the fact that is want accepted as normal to declare oneself of a different sex/gender, and people righlty saw the few who did, as crazy. Which is what the are.
And third, dont project any issues you might have on me. If you are a homosexual or something, fine. I have had a coworker and a fellow student who were gay. The rest of us teased them a bit ocasionally, but nothing more. Being abnormal(gay) doesnt mean you are mentally deficient, or unreliable, or whatever. Sure, not suitable to raise children, but thats about it.
@76
“And, yes, there was plenty of vile, bigoted transphobia like yours too”
Spare me. You’ve aleady lost the privilidge to be taken seriously
Oh boy, actual unreconstructed homophobia too – you do bring in some of the most rare and sought-after chew toys, PZ!
So you (simp, our bigoted friend), say that homosexuality is “unnatural”. And yet, strangely, it occurs at great frequency throughout nature. Look up Aldo Polani’s “Animal Homosexuality: a Biosocial Perspective”, or one of the yet more good books on the subject. These ones even have lots of pictures to make all that difficult text more fun! Indeed, some animals, like hyenas, engage in homosexual activity more frequently than heterosexual activity.
How exactly is an utterly ubiquitous phenomenon in nature, “unnatural”? Personally I don’t find the term “unnatural” (like its parallel “supernatural”) at all meaningful. But you clearly do. How exactly are we to classify phenomena occurring in nature into the “natural” and “unnatural” boxes then?
Also, the many, many happy, supported, loved and thriving children adopted by gay couples throughout the world stand testament to how wrong your statement about gay people adopting is. Indeed, by most measures lesbians tend to make better parents than heterosexual couples.
So you don’t deny you’re a vile, bigoted transphobe, you would just like it known that you’re a vile, bigoted transphobe who doesn’t take the corrections of others seriously.
An INCORRIGIBLE, vile, bigoted transphobe. Got it. I’ll amend your bio accordingly.
LOL
Oh, you had a gay coworker once? Wow. I’m impressed that you lived through the experience barely more hateful and prejudiced than necessary to deny kids the chance to live in a family rather than a foster home. Those must have been trying times for you, eh? Working next to someone who was somehow not entirely like you in the sex that they enjoy and the people they find attractive? I hope your community provided you with all the support you deserved.
@Crip Dyke
Thanks, i was wondering if i had missed something in the last 20 years of ignoring him
@ 68. samp : “Im sure they are. But they were considered nothing but freaks that no normal person would go near.”
Wromg yet again troll. FYI
Source : https://www.britannica.com/list/6-cultures-that-recognize-more-than-two-genders
Plus :
Source : https://www.theindigenousfoundation.org/articles/the-history-of-two-spirit-folks
In addition to :
Source : https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/08/21/transgender-and-intersex-people-in-the-ancient-world/#more-5576
Amoing plenty of other sources if you’d actually bother to pay attention to reality here insteda of your own transphobic bigotry and willful ignorance.
After thinking about it a bit, I’m pretty sure that “Samp” is a sock puppet for a previously banned troll.
samp has been banned. He went on his rampage of spewing bigoted opinions after I’d gone to bed — he’s one of the common coterie of cowards who wait until I’m not paying attention to flood the zone with nonsense and slurs — but I don’t tolerate people who call trans people “freaks” and “insane” or think gays are “unnatural”. I’m also going to be biased against anyone who just copy-pastes the opinions of Colin Wright, who is a writer for Quillette and has appeared on PragerU videos, two seriously disqualifying qualifications. Coyne has similar credentials at this point (he hasn’t been featured on PragerU as far as I know, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what he’ll be doing next.)
I will address one of Colin Wright’s points, because it shows how stupid he is.
That’s the point. You know nothing about macrogametes & microgametes, but you can still categorize a range of variation in a species, and breasts & beards are a perfect example. They are imperfect markers for sex, but members of the species can still use them to identify mating partners. The distinctions are not absolute. It is possible to recognize that the species exhibits variability without ostracizing or selecting against differences.
But sure, you can imagine some kind of species with intense selection against women with small breasts and men who shave. Do you want to live in such a society?
Yeah, his MO is familiar. Leave an innocuous at some point to get past the approval process (samp did that back in November), and then lurk until the opportunity is right — specifically, that the moderator, me, steps away from monitoring the comments — and then go on a bigoted comment spree.
@70. samp : Care to give us your definitions of what is äbnormal” and “normal” and “crazyness” – all vague and relative terms that different people veiw different ways.
Note that “abnormal” means people like Einstein as well as Michael Phelps, Shakespeare, Jesus and Vera Rubin were “äbnormal” in that they had exceptional skills and abilities and, yes insome cases bodies as well as brains.
Is it good to just be “normal”‘ – whatever that is? Does “normal” have a certain skin colour to you even? (Hint : The global average statistically speaking is neither white nor male.)
So you didn’t go out and physically or verbally (?) assault your gay workmate. Oh what paragon you are – not. Clearing the lowest bar outside of limbo dancing is not the ideal you seem to think it is dude.
Driving a car is unnatural. using the internet or aphone is unnatural. A ceratin fallacy you spout and fall for there Simp the troll.
Always make sense, nature does not. Your ideas of “sense”, mistaken may be.
Wow. Now your balatant homophobia freak flag sure is flying. Yuk. Fuck you are ugly judged only by your own words.
Now you’re “not so sure” eh?? After equal marriage has been legalised in many nations for decades and, y’know, the world very clearly has NOT ended and all the ridiculuous predictions made by the bigots been proven wrong. Including when it comes to sae sex couples rasing kids. Fuck you – and no, not literally.
See : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage
Source : https://www.businessinsider.in/The-scientific-truth-about-kids-who-grow-up-with-same-sex-parents/articleshow/47558855.cms
Oh and Samp the homophobe, transphobe and troll, note that typically you are the oppsoute of correct when you spewed :
Transphobia very much has a meaning and you exemplify it with your bigoted ravings. See wiki definition :
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transphobia
Oh and this from your #37 is extra nice ain’t it?:
By which you mean what? The persecution and discrimination against people because fo how they were born? The genocide or erasure of trans people and what, all gays back in the closet outta sight at threat of physical harm even death? What sorta “reckoning” do you want to see or think is fair here exactly, oh do tell us piece of shit..
… & now I see PZ’s #85 and sigh, we’ll never know just what Samp’s likley iiosyncratic personal definitions were nor what “reckoning” he thinks is due – at least until the next tedious ugly stinking sock puppet by some banned bigot shows up again.. So hopefully a while.
@79 cartomancer : “Oh boy, actual unreconstructed homophobia too – you do bring in some of the most rare and sought-after chew toys, PZ!””
I gotta disagree. That chewtoy tasted pretty foul. Wasn’t that rare either albeit been a while since one has attacked equal marriage & queer couples raising kids.
I fear given how far backwards the USoA is regressing we’ll see more like them there and here – both in blogverse and Oz & other places too – and the empowered bigotry of the Christian Supremacist Theocrats will soon be coming for that bit of basic Civil Rights progress too. Sigh.
Don’t worry. This guy has a history, and you know he’ll be back again…under a different pseudonym, but of course he’ll be entirely recognizable by his rhetoric.
Speaking of Coyne, the guy is just stupid. This is from his blog:
A1. More than two because nature does not care about simplistic human definitions. Animals show complicated and varied behaviors that do not cluster nicely into two separate and disjoint groups.
A2. Coyne is a dumbass.
A3. See A2.
If a person calling himself or herself “they/them” is not a sympton of a severe multiple personality disorder, I dont know what is.
It clearly isn’t, sampie, and you clearly don’t.
@92 Raging Bee, of course a person almost always calls themself myself. Moreover they/them with a singular antecedent has been part of the English language since before Shakespeare.
I find it strangely reassuring that vile transphobic and homophobic bigots such as samp so often turn out to be not only invincibly ignorant, but semi-literate and clearly rather stupid.
StevoR,
You’re right, of course. I can express disdain by pretending that morons like our unpleasant interloper are fun to chew up and spit out, but the truth is each one of them is a standout failure of human compassion, empathy and rational thought.
I have to say, anything anti-trans has started to make my blood boil far more than it used to. Ten years ago the anti-trans crowd could be dismissed as cranks and weirdos, but now they’re everywhere and their bigoted nonsense is much more harmful on a practical level. They’ve gone from farce to tragedy.
I’m not trans, so this is only my fight in the sense that I try to be a decent human being and oppose oppression and injustice where I can. Though it is somewhat personal. I grew up in the 80s and 90s, when all this crap was being thrown at gay people instead. We were a danger to children, because we were basically paedophiles. We were “unnatural”. We were mentally ill. We didn’t deserve healthcare (for AIDS primarily). We should be criminalised (age of consent laws, etc.). We were a threatening presence in toilets and changing rooms. Today’s transphobia is beat for beat a remix of all that bollocks.
I almost feel guilty, sometimes, that I avoided all that crap when I was younger by being very closeted and not getting involved. Which was something I could do as a gay teenager – not so much for a trans person of any age who wants to be their authentic self. I am keenly aware that generations of gay people (and allies) before me fought the fight while I was sitting it out, although I was a casualty to some degree, because it gave me considerable anxiety and I ended up rather socially maladjusted having to hide myself and stamp down my feelings during such a key developmental stage. But, even though I bear the mental scars, I still feel I should have taken my place in the battle line when it was my people’s acceptance we were fighting for. I feel I was cowardly, and bear some measure of shame for that, however useless a gawky 14 year old with severe social anxiety would have been in the fight.
But now… now the fight must be fought again, albeit for someone else’s benefit, and I’m not standing on the sidelines this time.
CD@75 StevoR@83
Yes, and not only were XY women not considered “freaks” but they may not have been considered special at all except being sterile, which admittedly could have harmed their social status, but hardly caused people to run away in fright. I read a study of a Swyer woman who was unaware of her condition well into adulthood until discovering after marriage that she should couldn’t get pregnant. Like others with this condition, she had a functioning uterus, and was able to get pregnant and bare a healthy child with an egg donor.
Dawkins could fall back on “usually” but this completely undermines the idea that there is a “definition.” Populations have clusters, not categories. That’s the reason evolution works. Nobody has set down a Platonic “type” or punishes variations from them, merely because they are variations. Natural selection is based on fitness not comparison to a standard. With sex, there are two large clusters, male and female, that we give names to. There is everyone else. To say their condition is less “real” or “normal” is a huge case of mistaking the map for the territory.
This does not address transgender individuals, which is really a matter of civil rights. But it disgusts me to see bigotry against transgender people cast as science when it runs contrary not only to biology but to history and medical practice. It also disgusts me to see discredited Platonism and essentialism accepted as “common sense.”
And now Trump has an asinine rule about trans athletes being banned from women’s sports. OK, how about a phenotypically female women with an XY chromosome? Are they going to karyotype athletes now?
With all due respect to, and appreciation of, PZ for pointing out aholes as aholes, I’m dismayed by all the fetishistic rhetoric regarding how important sex and gender are. There are so many factual scientifically valid articles that convinced me years ago that there are more than two sexes/genders. If someone provides information that is factually correct and not hateful and furthers my knowledge on any subject, I don’t care what sex/gender that person is. The same goes for race and ethnicity. I have more important things to do than give any credibility to rtwingnut xtian terrorists trying to tell the sex/gender of people. In my strong opinion, those rtwingnut xtian terrorists are as laughable as they are dangerous. To use my newly created acronym: COAD (crawl off and die)
I see what you did there with that phalarope. :D
chrislawson @ # 44 – You’re absolutely right, and thanks for the illuminating zoological/botanical examples. (Mycology provides even more fun/confusion…)
I just wanted to draw attention to the way Dawkins himself implicitly admits the holes in his claims, and the contrast with the present Trumpian (sampian) trend of never conceding an atom’s width of fallibility. Apparently scientific training does confer a modicum of sociability.
Lotharoo @91:
I grow increasingly convinced that people like this truly believe that human-invented words are more real than the real things they serve to describe or label.
If a woman can have facial hair, wear pants, drive trucks, enjoy sports, not menstruate, pee standing or whatever it is women can do, then I don’t see why the fuck it suddenly is a problem if a woman has a penis. Actually, I happen to know a man with a vagina (not that I have seen it — I don’t have that weird obsession with genitalia that trans haters seem to have) so Dawkins and his ilk can just go fuck off and die.
@Recursive Rabbit, 100:
What is perhaps amazing is that I learned this point from reading Richard Dawkins himself. He has argued that concepts like “species” are completely man-made and our definition of species is also absolutely wrong. This is me paraphrasing but the point is that because between any two animals, e.g., a scorpion and a falcon, there have lived a chain of other animals that start from the first animal and ends in the second animals and every pair of adjacent animals look absolutely similar to be the same species. Nature does not care about how we categorize things. Our human brains like to simplify but the simplification is not the reality.
lotharloo @102: Species are much like languages, I guess. We categorize ‘standard’ languages. So, Dutch and German are distinct languages, but there is (was?) a continuum between the two. ‘standard’ is decided largely by politics.
And those criteria can result in weird, uninformed nonsense. I remember a Spaniard insisting that Catalan was merely a debased form of Spanish, rather than a language with its own rich history. And I’ve heard similar comments about Swiss German, and various dialects of English.
Recursive Rabbit@100
This isn’t even a stretch. I was thinking the same thing, and not for the first time. “In the beginning was the word.” John 1:1*. They are Platonists, though this may be putting it too kindly since I doubt they have given it that much thought. They treat reality as an imperfect shadow of the words they were taught in school, church, from parents, and of course the Bible (in the original KJV haha). If you press a creationist on this they’ll eventually resort to “coz ‘The Fall'”. This makes it extremely hard to learn to do science, though they can learn engineering and applied science.
*See ID weirdo Bill Dembski https://billdembski.com/bible-memory-course/the-word-of-god-advanced/
Pierce R. Butler–
Yeah, I’m with you. But the point I’m trying to make is that Dawkins is not conceding an atom’s width of fallability. What he is doing is lampshading the flaws in his argument instead of (1) abandoning the flawed arguments, (2) reworking the arguments to remove the flaws, or (3) changing his mind. [In this particular case, option (2) is not available to him because many of his listed arguments are flat out wrong and can only be reworked to remove a flaw by introducing a new flaw.]
The big reveal is the fact that he calls this a “Universal Biological Definition” when by definition it cannot apply to isogametic or non-gametic organisms (which are plentiful in nature, btw, and not weird exceptions). Even within anisogametic organisms, this “universal definition” fails spectacularly to account for flowering plants, reef fish, pulmonate land snails, earthworms, C. elegans, whiptail lizards, and many other well-known natural examples. If Dawkins was truly interested in conceding the possibility of error, he would already have conceded error. Instead he doubles down on his definition by calling it universal while at the same time adding all sorts of qualifiers to his own examples. Memo to Prof Dawkins: If a universal principle has case examples that only apply mostly and usually, then those cases are actually, inescapably counter-examples. (This, btw, was one of PZ’s original points.)
I hope this doesn’t come across as criticising you personally. I too would like to believe that Dawkins has a shred of intellectual integrity left, probably because I used to admire his work and could overlook the flaws. But this latest foray has convinced me otherwise.
#13 They never ask “what is a man?” because the answer is universally the meme from Castlevania:
‘A miserable pile of secrets, but enough of this! Have at you!’
Actually, I doubt if that’s the case. Given the nature of developmental processes, and in particular the role of homeobox genes, there would probably be some points at which successive generations look quite different.
voidhawk @106:
Que Diogenes coming in with a plucked chicken. “Behold, a man!”
The desire for norms is strong.
The desire to use category boxes for norms is strong.
Even if you use flag poles, over here with all these traits is “man” and over here is “woman”, the desire to put a box around them and say those flags must be used for all purposes is a human madness.
voidhawk@106
I thought that was the universally accepted answer.
Since when are there women “all the way across the animal and plant kingdoms”?
Jim Balter@111 Aren’t many (most?) flowers hermaphrodite anyway?
That’s what I was taught, IIRC: plants generally have “male” parts and “female” parts. But I heard that in grade-school, long ago, so I have no idea how close that is to what botanists actually know.
Plants also take cuttings.
(They’re not people)
“rightly seen as psychiatry patients” – oh, you mean the way the Soviet Union forcefully committed political dissidents, rightfully like that? Or the way the Rosenhan experiment worked out?
Are you a mental ward candidate if you want to be a musician but no one thinks you’re any good at it? Should you be allowed to compete in sports if you can’t run very fast? What if you want to learn a foreign language, but you have a terrible lisp? Do they all make you mental ward candidates?
Why are some people so sure they know what’s best for other people?