Years ago I went to a park and stumbled across a group of "Creation Scientists" who were gathering fossils from a river. They said they were looking for evidence of God's existence. Whatever they found, they were going to retroactively fit to the conclusion that God exists, because concluding otherwise was not on the agenda.
"[the paper] will help biologists 'push back against misunderstandings of the biology of sexual phenotypes that enact harm on marginalized communities.'"
This is really the crux of the problem. Science can't both uncover the truth and be directed toward proving certain predetermined ends at the same time. That includes bolstering activism as much as it includes providing evidence for a God.
Well said ! Denying biology to “ protect marginalized communities” is no better than looking for fossils to prove the existence. of God. The only problem is that the creationists have not been able to take over such a large section of our society as the enablers of the trans cult.
As usual, this is a very thoughtful, and detailed analysis of this preprint. And, of course (as a fellow biologist), I agree with you. I wonder, though, how much these types of papers make a difference in the whole scheme of things. Academics are always trying to flex their intellectual muscles by coming up with odd and sometimes ridiculous theses which they defend ad nauseum. Does it really make a difference (or should it make a difference) in the real world?
I'm also not clear why the characteristics of non-mammalian animal sexuality have anything to do with human primates. We're not clown fish or earthworms, after all. At some point, the discussion should move on to how we treat each other. That really has nothing to do with how jelly fish or parthenogenic lizards have sex (or don't).
In any event, thanks again for a wonderful article. Sincerely, Frederick
I can imagine it making a difference. For example, activists who approach lawmakers cite papers like these to bolster arguments for youth transition or other desired policy outcomes. The more papers they can cite the more credible it looks to the lawmakers, who aren't equipped or inclined to read them skeptically.
What frightens me even more is the stunning success of the trans ideologues in persuading the relevant professional societies to adopt "Standards of Care" or other statements supporting the aggressive diagnosis and treatment of what are deemed disorders in children. In the pending lawsuits against the health care professionals and hospitals, these documents will certainly be cited to prove that the measures the defendants took conformed to "generally accepted medical practice". I'd be surprised if any court would look behind the statements themselves to see the intellectual bullying and threats by which they were adopted, much less the uncertainty of the evidence supposedly underlying them.
If the general media were to report on this paper, the idea that scientists (at Berkeley!) were disputing the sexual binary would become conventional wisdom among many in the general population, let alone the humanities departments. It should be squashed at the earliest possible stage.
I think papers like the one reviewed and rebutted here do make a difference if they are allowed to be published, particularly in the real world outside of a narrow scientific environment. It is because they can be given undue prominence by various media outlets and by those ignorant of biological realities that Colin explains so well; which these days seems to include an increasing number of university academics and administrators and politicians. Medical journals too. They are cited as ‘scientific’ evidence by activists and used to provide a rationale for hounding academics out of their jobs, like Kathleen Stock a British professor of philosophy. Or on a more amusing note to support the likes of Mrs Biden giving a bloke in a dress a women’s award on International Women’s day.
It is making more and more of a (terrifying) difference in the real world. Well, assuming the NIH and other such federal health policy and research funding mechanisms are the real world. My girlfriend sits on an NIH committee that advise on some subpopulation heath policy and one of the other rsearchers on the committee advocated for not using the terms "male" and "female" in any medical or health research or policy because that "perpetuates the harmful binary."
Wow. I wish I had been on that review panel. I sat on many different panels. I no longer am asked to participate, probably because I complained too much about grants from foreign entities (Australia, Canada, UK) trying to get grants from the US NIH. I certainly would have spoken up, in a pretty savagely sarcastic manner. This kind of "harmful binary" shit cannot be allowed to stand.
Yeah, probably why I am no longer on panels. I spoke up on one panel after another, and quoted the rules about non-USA participation. I felt a great coldness in the room, because people call my views "xenophobic". The actual term is "correctly using the rules".
Glad we aren’t clownfish, but it seems that some “scientists “ are bending over backwards to be “inclusive” and thus falling on their noses like clowns.
"why the characteristics of non-mammalian animal sexuality have anything to do with human primates ..."
Kinda think it's a question of comparing apples and apples. I expect what we learn about lower-order or more primitive species -- particularly with respect to sexual dimorphism -- has a great deal of value in understanding the same phenomena in humans. Not to mention medical applications.
You may wish to read a very good paper in the Journal of Molecular Reproduction -- even if I haven't read it all myself -- that underlines that point:
"The ancestral divergence and maintenance of gamete sizes subsequently led to many other differences we now observe between the two sexes, sowing the seeds for what we have become."
"Gamete competition, gamete limitation, and the evolution of the two sexes"
Look, I'm not a smart man. I'm actually a duck who rides a bike, so take my everything I say in that context. But this is just another, glaring example of how we as a society are slouching toward the great Closing of The Mind, the next dark ages.
There is a war on truth, reality, objectivity. We must behave accordingly.
Styling head his biologists also going along with Lysenko. The trans ideology is similar in that it demands complete adherence to its false assumptions. My late husband also said that we are heading towards the DarkAges.
This a great article and I have so many things to say about it! The picture of the spergs and speggs is awesome.
"the 'sex binary' does not refer to, and was never meant to be applied to, every measurable genetic, hormonal, morphological, or behavioral difference between males and females."
Yes. And while the paper's authors' implication is that _biologists_ can't determine sex because of all these "hormonal, morphological, or behavioral differences," it is _activists_, not biologists, who are assigning sex based on these factors. For example, claiming that a male person who is "behaviorally" female is somehow actually female.
And there’s the rub. Changing language to uphold an ideology is simply authoritarianism. The utter absurdity of a woman being a man is somehow now considered to be a “ social justice” thing.
Though I think the top half at least came from a post almost 3 years ago by Matt Osborne who had a $1 million prize for proof of a third gamete. Which he has now increased to $10 million:
But kinda think that both Matt and Colin are barking up the wrong tree to some extent: there's no intrinsic meaning to the words "male" and "female". However, there's some value in DEFINING them -- as reputable journals like Molecular Human Reproduction do -- such that functional gonads are the "necessary and sufficient conditions" for membership in the sex categories which are thereby monothetic categories:
Definitions which are profoundly different from, and antithetical to those of Colin, Heather Heying, and Emma Hilton which basically boil down into polythetic categories, into spectra of 3 sufficient conditions, only one of which is necessary:
Joan Roughgarden is a male who ideates himself as a female persona. Surely he knows he hasn't changed his chromosomes by whatever surgeries and pills or injections he's involved himself in. Because he has this conflict of interest, his writing on any matters of the sex binary should not be considered independent or without ulterior motive. When the Harry Benjamin Institute morphed into the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), it lost the independent doctors and researchers who were previously involved. Thus, the "professional" organization for the psychiatric illness of cross-sex ideation became an advocacy group. The doctor heading WPATH is another such man, now calling himself Dr. Marci Bowers. When he and I were students at UW-Madison in the late 1970s, his name was Mark. Bowers has financial interests in the field, meaning for-profit clinics like the one in Trinidad, Colorado, which pretty much functions as the economic engine of the town. The serious conflicts of interest among proponents of these dangerous operations are rarely brought to light.
The financial issues in the transgender story need more transparency. I participate in an online group, where one participant noted costs for "gender-affirming care": "Note also the extraordinary cost of puberty-blocking medication: a list price of $12,725 for a three-month injection of Lupron, $19,164 for a single injection of Triptodur, and $47,583 for one Supprelin implant."
These financial incentives are incredible. If they are covered by insurance, the cost of insurance will be going up.
We'll all pay the expenses in raised taxes and insurance premiums. Remember that the cost includes potential liability pay-outs. As detransitioners commence malpractice lawsuits, the costs will rise to cover the settlements. In the UK, there was the Kiera Bell case and now Ritchie Herron is suing the NHS. In the US, you can find the cases not reported on by googling Dr. Stephen B. Levine Expert Testimony. There was a case in West Virginia and currently there is a case ongoing against a school district in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Camille Kieffer and Chloe Cole are suing the providers who steered them to double mastectomies. Michelle Alleva in Canada is suing the practitioners she went to for the same reason. Perhaps between the uproar about men in women's sports and these malpractice cases will bring truly, reality's last stand.
I am trying to figure out how to get to the insurance companies to treat "gender-affirming care" as cosmetic, not medical. That would remove insurance coverage. That would end the entire debacle immediately, since the costs are so high.
When my ex, "Neddy" went to Stanford University Medical school for the surgeries in 1996, I'm relatively certain that he paid for it with loans from his parents, who spent many phone sessions with the diagnosing "sexologist." The will to spend the money is part of the "proof" of "true trans." And then these guys have to redo the breast implants every 10 years. I've recommended to parents of rapid onset teens to make sure their child understands they will not take money from their own pension savings to pay for hormones and surgeries. It is a terrible way to "rebel" against tradition, when the doctors are lining their pockets and purchasing yachts.
It is entirely a money grab. The thing that separates this from other money grabs is that the State is the backstop for these doctors and clinics. The State will pay for whatever the insurance doesn't cover.
PZ Myers and other ideological activists have caused much confusion in this arena of argumentation. Thank you for the clarity and clear thinking on display here.
This lends further credence to my suspicion that we are in fact living in a simulated universe, except the designers of our universe installed a weird quirk of causality such that everything we're seeing now is somehow determined by an episode of South Park from 10-15 years prior...
Even if sex were to be determined by, say, height, biologists would still be left with the question as to why Homo sapiens maximus has so many members incapable of bearing young compared with H. sapiens minimus (and why there was so much interaction between the two). Add in more characteristics, and eventually each individual would become a member of their own unique sex.
This policy-based science is paving the way for the discovery of "trans animals" based on circular reasoning so that ideologues can point and say, "See, we told you its natural and innate!"
This is such a tour de force of clear thinking and exposition and importantly, a TOTALLY FAIR review of this paper untainted by animus or ad hominem. Someone on Twitter this week asked of Colin Wright "This is what you're doing with the biology PhD?" meaning to suggest that he's wasting his accumulated years of biological training and study. Nothing could be farther from the truth. No one without his background could have provided the service he's just rendered. We owe him a great deal for heeding his conscience and following the surely frightening-at-times road less traveled to occupy the space he now finds himself in. What he's done here is SO important and he's done it so well.
Now, after the thorough demolition of every argument in this preprint and its exposure as ideologically motivated nonsense, will a journal with a reputation dare to print it? We are watching!
An excellent rebutal. I agree that "in saner times such a paper would perhaps elicit a small chuckle from a journal editor before issuing a swift rejection". If this paper is published in a scientific journal worthy of the name, I would be willing to sponsor a rebuttal. Feel free to contact me Dr Colin.
I remember, a few years ago, being confronted by the idea that clownfish somehow prove that there's no distinction between male and female. At the time I remember thinking, "But clownfish aren't humans." I said nothing, though, because I was a bit intimidated by the whole thing. What you have written here gives me a better handle on how to respond to these kinds of claims.
I'm a lay person but even I can understand your review. My, how science has fallen. THANK YOU for standing up for the truth. Perhaps you could send your review in advance to publications that might fall for it and publish?
Thanks for a very clear and measured review. I share your pessimism regarding the likely outcome of the peer review process. As regards impact, I expect to see figures from this being pasted into twitter responses without thought or comment in due course.
I used to hold out hope that the rot and corruption of what I was seeing in universities would stay at the universities. But then, slowly at first and then suddenly, it was everywhere. I then held out hope that The Sciences would not fall to this madness. Clearly, Covid showed us that they had fallen. The ultimate backstop for the science community was the peer reviewed medical journals. They, too, have fallen.
It is all fallen, all of it. The only thing left is for society to fall into chaos and anarchy, and then maybe the lasts few sane among us will rebuild some sort of normality.
But I doubt it will happen in my lifetime.
Maybe what I call the Third Dark Ages will last a thousand years. Maybe 100, maybe ten. But, make no mistake, we will fall into a new Dark Ages.
As a complete layman on this subject I greatly appreciate this article. It cleared up some confusion in my own mind. For instance, I thought the fundamental sexual difference between males and females lay in the chromosomes; if I'm understanding this correctly, the chromosomes determine sex but the fundamental difference is the gametes.
Unfortunately, my discussions on the subject are with other non-scientifically trained persons. I can only imagine me saying to some of them, "Men produce sperm and women produce eggs," and having them come back with something like, "What about people born without ovaries or testes? Or who've had an injury to those parts?"* It's not so much that they would be arguing (at this point in the discussion) for a third sex, only challenging the idea that this is how we tell males from females. Yes, this kind of discussion is very simplistic, but it's the kind I find myself in nowadays, and as a layman I don't always know the best comeback.
*Heck, I can imagine someone saying, "If producing eggs is fundamental to being a woman, are you saying that a woman stops being one when she passes menopause?" !!!
Thanks again for at least helping ME better understand this subject!
From this article, I learned that chromosomes *determine* sex, while gametes *define* sex. Although, as a layperson myself, I'm still not clear on the difference between determining vs. defining sex. Like you, I thought it was all about the chromosomes (which is what I remember being taught in both high school and college biology class).
Years ago I went to a park and stumbled across a group of "Creation Scientists" who were gathering fossils from a river. They said they were looking for evidence of God's existence. Whatever they found, they were going to retroactively fit to the conclusion that God exists, because concluding otherwise was not on the agenda.
"[the paper] will help biologists 'push back against misunderstandings of the biology of sexual phenotypes that enact harm on marginalized communities.'"
This is really the crux of the problem. Science can't both uncover the truth and be directed toward proving certain predetermined ends at the same time. That includes bolstering activism as much as it includes providing evidence for a God.
Well said ! Denying biology to “ protect marginalized communities” is no better than looking for fossils to prove the existence. of God. The only problem is that the creationists have not been able to take over such a large section of our society as the enablers of the trans cult.
If denying biology to protect marginalized communities is not racist, then I don't know what is.
Agree.
As usual, this is a very thoughtful, and detailed analysis of this preprint. And, of course (as a fellow biologist), I agree with you. I wonder, though, how much these types of papers make a difference in the whole scheme of things. Academics are always trying to flex their intellectual muscles by coming up with odd and sometimes ridiculous theses which they defend ad nauseum. Does it really make a difference (or should it make a difference) in the real world?
I'm also not clear why the characteristics of non-mammalian animal sexuality have anything to do with human primates. We're not clown fish or earthworms, after all. At some point, the discussion should move on to how we treat each other. That really has nothing to do with how jelly fish or parthenogenic lizards have sex (or don't).
In any event, thanks again for a wonderful article. Sincerely, Frederick
I can imagine it making a difference. For example, activists who approach lawmakers cite papers like these to bolster arguments for youth transition or other desired policy outcomes. The more papers they can cite the more credible it looks to the lawmakers, who aren't equipped or inclined to read them skeptically.
What frightens me even more is the stunning success of the trans ideologues in persuading the relevant professional societies to adopt "Standards of Care" or other statements supporting the aggressive diagnosis and treatment of what are deemed disorders in children. In the pending lawsuits against the health care professionals and hospitals, these documents will certainly be cited to prove that the measures the defendants took conformed to "generally accepted medical practice". I'd be surprised if any court would look behind the statements themselves to see the intellectual bullying and threats by which they were adopted, much less the uncertainty of the evidence supposedly underlying them.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/idea-laundering-in-academia-11574634492?st=m2hunh67pfke74l&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
Explains how ludicrous and damaging ideas make it into legitimate (maybe) journals
Great point!
Yes, that's a good point… And I agree with you.
If the general media were to report on this paper, the idea that scientists (at Berkeley!) were disputing the sexual binary would become conventional wisdom among many in the general population, let alone the humanities departments. It should be squashed at the earliest possible stage.
I think papers like the one reviewed and rebutted here do make a difference if they are allowed to be published, particularly in the real world outside of a narrow scientific environment. It is because they can be given undue prominence by various media outlets and by those ignorant of biological realities that Colin explains so well; which these days seems to include an increasing number of university academics and administrators and politicians. Medical journals too. They are cited as ‘scientific’ evidence by activists and used to provide a rationale for hounding academics out of their jobs, like Kathleen Stock a British professor of philosophy. Or on a more amusing note to support the likes of Mrs Biden giving a bloke in a dress a women’s award on International Women’s day.
If a ludicrous argument is not refuted, it retains a status.
It is making more and more of a (terrifying) difference in the real world. Well, assuming the NIH and other such federal health policy and research funding mechanisms are the real world. My girlfriend sits on an NIH committee that advise on some subpopulation heath policy and one of the other rsearchers on the committee advocated for not using the terms "male" and "female" in any medical or health research or policy because that "perpetuates the harmful binary."
Wow. I wish I had been on that review panel. I sat on many different panels. I no longer am asked to participate, probably because I complained too much about grants from foreign entities (Australia, Canada, UK) trying to get grants from the US NIH. I certainly would have spoken up, in a pretty savagely sarcastic manner. This kind of "harmful binary" shit cannot be allowed to stand.
Oh yeah, if you speak up now, even without sarcasm, you're deemed as committing "literal violence" and removed.
Yeah, probably why I am no longer on panels. I spoke up on one panel after another, and quoted the rules about non-USA participation. I felt a great coldness in the room, because people call my views "xenophobic". The actual term is "correctly using the rules".
Glad we aren’t clownfish, but it seems that some “scientists “ are bending over backwards to be “inclusive” and thus falling on their noses like clowns.
"why the characteristics of non-mammalian animal sexuality have anything to do with human primates ..."
Kinda think it's a question of comparing apples and apples. I expect what we learn about lower-order or more primitive species -- particularly with respect to sexual dimorphism -- has a great deal of value in understanding the same phenomena in humans. Not to mention medical applications.
You may wish to read a very good paper in the Journal of Molecular Reproduction -- even if I haven't read it all myself -- that underlines that point:
"The ancestral divergence and maintenance of gamete sizes subsequently led to many other differences we now observe between the two sexes, sowing the seeds for what we have become."
"Gamete competition, gamete limitation, and the evolution of the two sexes"
https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/20/12/1161/1062990
“We assign meaning to certain things…because of dominant gender ideologies.”
So we assign gender, because... gender?
This is why postmodernism is circular babble.
Look, I'm not a smart man. I'm actually a duck who rides a bike, so take my everything I say in that context. But this is just another, glaring example of how we as a society are slouching toward the great Closing of The Mind, the next dark ages.
There is a war on truth, reality, objectivity. We must behave accordingly.
Styling head his biologists also going along with Lysenko. The trans ideology is similar in that it demands complete adherence to its false assumptions. My late husband also said that we are heading towards the DarkAges.
Oops ! I meantStalin had his biologists conforming to the Communist ideology.
Friendly Substack tip - If you click on those 3 dots under your original comment, you will see an option to Edit it.
OK, that makes more sense!
Also, remember Hitler never got The Bomb because he called it "jew science." Thank God.
Also, sorry for your loss. Your late husband was clearly a well read man.
This a great article and I have so many things to say about it! The picture of the spergs and speggs is awesome.
"the 'sex binary' does not refer to, and was never meant to be applied to, every measurable genetic, hormonal, morphological, or behavioral difference between males and females."
Yes. And while the paper's authors' implication is that _biologists_ can't determine sex because of all these "hormonal, morphological, or behavioral differences," it is _activists_, not biologists, who are assigning sex based on these factors. For example, claiming that a male person who is "behaviorally" female is somehow actually female.
And there’s the rub. Changing language to uphold an ideology is simply authoritarianism. The utter absurdity of a woman being a man is somehow now considered to be a “ social justice” thing.
It is indeed a great picture of spergs & speggs.
Though I think the top half at least came from a post almost 3 years ago by Matt Osborne who had a $1 million prize for proof of a third gamete. Which he has now increased to $10 million:
https://www.thedistancemag.com/p/10000000-prize-offer-prove-sex-is
Not that I'm objecting since it is front and center on my own post on the topic 🙂:
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/binarists-vs-spectrumists
But kinda think that both Matt and Colin are barking up the wrong tree to some extent: there's no intrinsic meaning to the words "male" and "female". However, there's some value in DEFINING them -- as reputable journals like Molecular Human Reproduction do -- such that functional gonads are the "necessary and sufficient conditions" for membership in the sex categories which are thereby monothetic categories:
https://academic.oup.com/molehr/article/20/12/1161/1062990
Definitions which are profoundly different from, and antithetical to those of Colin, Heather Heying, and Emma Hilton which basically boil down into polythetic categories, into spectra of 3 sufficient conditions, only one of which is necessary:
https://twitter.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1207663359589527554
Entirely different kettles of fish.
Joan Roughgarden is a male who ideates himself as a female persona. Surely he knows he hasn't changed his chromosomes by whatever surgeries and pills or injections he's involved himself in. Because he has this conflict of interest, his writing on any matters of the sex binary should not be considered independent or without ulterior motive. When the Harry Benjamin Institute morphed into the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), it lost the independent doctors and researchers who were previously involved. Thus, the "professional" organization for the psychiatric illness of cross-sex ideation became an advocacy group. The doctor heading WPATH is another such man, now calling himself Dr. Marci Bowers. When he and I were students at UW-Madison in the late 1970s, his name was Mark. Bowers has financial interests in the field, meaning for-profit clinics like the one in Trinidad, Colorado, which pretty much functions as the economic engine of the town. The serious conflicts of interest among proponents of these dangerous operations are rarely brought to light.
The financial issues in the transgender story need more transparency. I participate in an online group, where one participant noted costs for "gender-affirming care": "Note also the extraordinary cost of puberty-blocking medication: a list price of $12,725 for a three-month injection of Lupron, $19,164 for a single injection of Triptodur, and $47,583 for one Supprelin implant."
These financial incentives are incredible. If they are covered by insurance, the cost of insurance will be going up.
We'll all pay the expenses in raised taxes and insurance premiums. Remember that the cost includes potential liability pay-outs. As detransitioners commence malpractice lawsuits, the costs will rise to cover the settlements. In the UK, there was the Kiera Bell case and now Ritchie Herron is suing the NHS. In the US, you can find the cases not reported on by googling Dr. Stephen B. Levine Expert Testimony. There was a case in West Virginia and currently there is a case ongoing against a school district in Waukesha, Wisconsin. Camille Kieffer and Chloe Cole are suing the providers who steered them to double mastectomies. Michelle Alleva in Canada is suing the practitioners she went to for the same reason. Perhaps between the uproar about men in women's sports and these malpractice cases will bring truly, reality's last stand.
Yes, these are important.
I am trying to figure out how to get to the insurance companies to treat "gender-affirming care" as cosmetic, not medical. That would remove insurance coverage. That would end the entire debacle immediately, since the costs are so high.
When my ex, "Neddy" went to Stanford University Medical school for the surgeries in 1996, I'm relatively certain that he paid for it with loans from his parents, who spent many phone sessions with the diagnosing "sexologist." The will to spend the money is part of the "proof" of "true trans." And then these guys have to redo the breast implants every 10 years. I've recommended to parents of rapid onset teens to make sure their child understands they will not take money from their own pension savings to pay for hormones and surgeries. It is a terrible way to "rebel" against tradition, when the doctors are lining their pockets and purchasing yachts.
It is entirely a money grab. The thing that separates this from other money grabs is that the State is the backstop for these doctors and clinics. The State will pay for whatever the insurance doesn't cover.
Dangerous ,yes! Because we are asked to go along with obvious falsehoods! Most people know these are lies., but it hasn’t sunk in as to how dangerous.
And, as well, the inauthenticity of our "affirmations" should be obvious. Be kind = be truthful.
PZ Myers and other ideological activists have caused much confusion in this arena of argumentation. Thank you for the clarity and clear thinking on display here.
This lends further credence to my suspicion that we are in fact living in a simulated universe, except the designers of our universe installed a weird quirk of causality such that everything we're seeing now is somehow determined by an episode of South Park from 10-15 years prior...
Even if sex were to be determined by, say, height, biologists would still be left with the question as to why Homo sapiens maximus has so many members incapable of bearing young compared with H. sapiens minimus (and why there was so much interaction between the two). Add in more characteristics, and eventually each individual would become a member of their own unique sex.
This policy-based science is paving the way for the discovery of "trans animals" based on circular reasoning so that ideologues can point and say, "See, we told you its natural and innate!"
This is such a tour de force of clear thinking and exposition and importantly, a TOTALLY FAIR review of this paper untainted by animus or ad hominem. Someone on Twitter this week asked of Colin Wright "This is what you're doing with the biology PhD?" meaning to suggest that he's wasting his accumulated years of biological training and study. Nothing could be farther from the truth. No one without his background could have provided the service he's just rendered. We owe him a great deal for heeding his conscience and following the surely frightening-at-times road less traveled to occupy the space he now finds himself in. What he's done here is SO important and he's done it so well.
Now, after the thorough demolition of every argument in this preprint and its exposure as ideologically motivated nonsense, will a journal with a reputation dare to print it? We are watching!
An excellent rebutal. I agree that "in saner times such a paper would perhaps elicit a small chuckle from a journal editor before issuing a swift rejection". If this paper is published in a scientific journal worthy of the name, I would be willing to sponsor a rebuttal. Feel free to contact me Dr Colin.
Oh Colin, you must get so tired of fighting this nonsense. Thank you for your stamina.
Ooh, thank you! A long read, but well worth it.
I remember, a few years ago, being confronted by the idea that clownfish somehow prove that there's no distinction between male and female. At the time I remember thinking, "But clownfish aren't humans." I said nothing, though, because I was a bit intimidated by the whole thing. What you have written here gives me a better handle on how to respond to these kinds of claims.
I'm a lay person but even I can understand your review. My, how science has fallen. THANK YOU for standing up for the truth. Perhaps you could send your review in advance to publications that might fall for it and publish?
If it's possible to do, that's an excellent idea!
Thanks for a very clear and measured review. I share your pessimism regarding the likely outcome of the peer review process. As regards impact, I expect to see figures from this being pasted into twitter responses without thought or comment in due course.
I used to hold out hope that the rot and corruption of what I was seeing in universities would stay at the universities. But then, slowly at first and then suddenly, it was everywhere. I then held out hope that The Sciences would not fall to this madness. Clearly, Covid showed us that they had fallen. The ultimate backstop for the science community was the peer reviewed medical journals. They, too, have fallen.
It is all fallen, all of it. The only thing left is for society to fall into chaos and anarchy, and then maybe the lasts few sane among us will rebuild some sort of normality.
But I doubt it will happen in my lifetime.
Maybe what I call the Third Dark Ages will last a thousand years. Maybe 100, maybe ten. But, make no mistake, we will fall into a new Dark Ages.
As a complete layman on this subject I greatly appreciate this article. It cleared up some confusion in my own mind. For instance, I thought the fundamental sexual difference between males and females lay in the chromosomes; if I'm understanding this correctly, the chromosomes determine sex but the fundamental difference is the gametes.
Unfortunately, my discussions on the subject are with other non-scientifically trained persons. I can only imagine me saying to some of them, "Men produce sperm and women produce eggs," and having them come back with something like, "What about people born without ovaries or testes? Or who've had an injury to those parts?"* It's not so much that they would be arguing (at this point in the discussion) for a third sex, only challenging the idea that this is how we tell males from females. Yes, this kind of discussion is very simplistic, but it's the kind I find myself in nowadays, and as a layman I don't always know the best comeback.
*Heck, I can imagine someone saying, "If producing eggs is fundamental to being a woman, are you saying that a woman stops being one when she passes menopause?" !!!
Thanks again for at least helping ME better understand this subject!
From this article, I learned that chromosomes *determine* sex, while gametes *define* sex. Although, as a layperson myself, I'm still not clear on the difference between determining vs. defining sex. Like you, I thought it was all about the chromosomes (which is what I remember being taught in both high school and college biology class).