Biologist PZ Myers Peddles Sex Pseudoscience (Again)
Myers’ attempted critique of Richard Dawkins only revealed the depths of his own scientific ignorance.
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There was a time when biologist PZ Myers was relevant. This period spanned the late 2000s and early 2010s, coinciding with the rise of “New Atheism” (as some called it). In 2006, Myers’ blog Pharyngula was celebrated in Nature as the world’s most popular science blog and was deemed the top atheist blog by Hemant Mehta in 2009. In 2008, Myers was part of a memorable incident where he and Richard Dawkins were planning to attend a screening of Ben Stein’s pro-Intelligent Design propaganda film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Despite Myers being interviewed and featured in the film, he was barred from entering by a security guard on orders from the producer, Mark Mathis—but Dawkins was allowed in!
In 2010, I invited Myers to give a talk about Intelligent Design at Sierra Community College in Rocklin, CA, where I was studying before transferring to UC Davis for my bachelor’s degree. I picked up Myers from the Sacramento train station, and we enjoyed a stimulating conversation about evolution en route. Before his talk, I gave him a tour of the school’s esteemed natural history museum. After his talk, we all went out with Myers for food and drinks and had a great time. I share this to show that my starting attitude toward Myers was nothing short of admiration.
However, as gender ideology gained a foothold within the atheist movement, the brains of many prominent and once-rational figures began to melt. Philosopher Peter Boghossian has poignantly characterized this shift among Left-wing intellectuals from being quick to point out the limits of their knowledge to a tendency to pretend to not know what is undeniably known.
This trend is exemplified by Myers, as I will illustrate.
Recently, Richard Dawkins shared on 𝕏 the lecture I delivered at the Genspect conference in Denver, CO, last year, titled “The Sex Binary: What It Is and Why It Matters.” Dawkins praised my talk as “superbly clear & totally correct,” and reaffirmed the reality of the binary nature of sex. Following this, gender activists bombarded Dawkins with absurd articles challenging the binary concept of sex, including a particularly misleading piece in Scientific American titled “Stop Using Phony Science to Justify Transphobia,” which asserts that “Actual research shows that sex is anything but binary.”
In response to this onslaught of dubious science, Dawkins countered the article directly: “This ridiculous article…ignorantly misunderstands the nature of the sex binary.” He went on to underscore the important distinction between how sex is “determined” versus how it’s “defined” in biology that I outlined in my talk.
In turn, Myers, seemingly desperate to regain some of his previous prominence, criticized Dawkins in a blog post. Myers’ misunderstanding of the biology of sex, especially given his background in developmental biology, is on embarrassing display in his post.
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