Offensive Science
As a society, at times it seems we really can’t handle the truth.
If science as an undertaking is meant to achieve anything, it is meant to perform deep analysis as a means of finding truth. And truth, of course, is presumed to have its own value, such as improving our lives or setting us free.
But does truth really set us free if it burdens us with worry, or with thoughts and ideas we don’t like? Does displeasure with the truth and its implications, if broad enough, mean we have to deny it?
Two evolutionary biologists, Jerry A. Coyne and Luana S. Maroja, have presented a lengthy argument that a present-day political narrative threatens to promote convenient lies rather than essential truths in their own field—and they see the same forces at work in other natural science disciplines. In the case of biology, what begins with a conflation of biological sex and (human) gender ends with denial of fundamental scientific findings and their derived conclusions.
Your biological sex is determined simply by whether your body is designed to make large, immobile gametes (eggs, characterizing females) or very small and mobile gametes (sperm, characterizing males). Even in plants we see the same dichotomy, with pollen producing the tiny sperm and ovules carrying the large eggs. The size difference can be huge: a human egg, for instance, has ten million times the volume of a single sperm. And each gamete is associated with a complex reproductive apparatus that produces it. It is the bearers of these two reproductive systems that biologists recognize as “the sexes.”
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But despite the facts, the dichotomy of sex—especially in humans—has recently come under ideologically based attacks. Even in apparently objective discussions of sex and gender, individuals are often said to have been assigned their sex at birth (e.g., “AFAB”: assigned female at birth), as if this were an arbitrary decision by doctors—a “social construct”—rather than an observation of biological reality.
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Why do so many people resist the sex binary? Because it’s in their ideological interest to conflate biological sex with gender—one’s social identity or sex role.
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And why do people distort the truth? We suspect that some of those whose gender doesn’t correspond to one of the two biological sexes, and their allies, want to redefine sex so that, like gender, it forms more of a continuum. While jettisoning the sex binary is meant well, it also severely distorts scientific fact—and all the evolutionary consequences that flow from that fact.
Which is what the authors go on to discuss in detail.
Sometimes scientific truth may offend us. But suppressing that truth requires promoting something we know not to be true. Strictly speaking, spreading information that you know to be false is the definition of lying. When lies and their popularizers are found out, their credibility is ruined, as is faith in anything else they may have claimed.
It isn’t good for society if those we rely on to share their expertise and specialized knowledge—a group of people we could say are part of the elites—are found out to have been telling lies, whether to avoid offending people or just for naked careerism. The suspicion will always be that the latter is the true motivation.
(Thanks to Razib Khan’s newsletter for the recommendation.)
YAY - I can log in again!
I’m posting this a little late, but maybe someone will see it, and find it interesting. My next podcast recommendation is, once again, from Jordan Harbinger. It’s about how we use sanctions. I usually like his stuff, and this is definitely worthwhile. You wonder what’s going on with Russia and sanctions? This will help you find out!
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-jordan-harbinger-show/id1344999619?i=1000621483101
Show Notes: Treasury's War author Juan Zarate joins us to discuss how the US wields its financial power against terrorism, rogue states, and global crime syndicates.
What We Discuss with Juan Zarate:
• Why the Treasury Department became part of the intelligence apparatus of the United States post-9/11 — after resisting such integration for years.
• Sanctions: what are they good for and how do they work?
• How and why criminals (whether they're of the independent, organized, or state-sponsored variety) need banks and financial institutions for any major crime to succeed.
• What the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications) system is and how it's used to disrupt terrorist financing around the world.
• For better or worse, what role does cryptocurrency play in all of this?
• And much more…