Phlogiston etc
Cage fight.
There’s an ambiguity in there, which Dawkins corrects with the first two words of his second sentence. “Science” refers to the human discipline and also to the realities it uncovers. Gorski assumes Dawkins is talking about the first, but that requires him to ignore the “Science’s truths” bit. Perhaps because…
So is transgender science the socially constructed kind or the “scientific facts” kind?
Dawkins did clear it up, while (characteristically) claiming it was OBVIOUS what he meant (it wasn’t – see above about the ambiguity).
The struggle continues.
I heard that Gorski is a fan of “transgender science” — which could be one reason he seemed so eager to interpret Dawkins’ statement in the most negative light. Dawkins, on the other hand, appears to believe there are only two human sexes.
Though I haven’t been following either as closely as I used to.
Yep, I saw that about Gorski not long ago too. Saw it and was surprised, since he was very hostile to the women who had reservations about the way the skeptic movement treated women, way back then. It’s a bit depressing: real women, meh, but pretend women who are actually men, oh pull out all the stops for them.
Fellow Science-Based-Medicine blogger Skepdoc Harriet Hall, however, is gender critical.
Ah that’s good to know. I met her once at a CFI conference, when the fuss around TAM had died down a good deal. We were at the same table for the dinner, and she was very cordial.
Oh, I am so glad you finally met her. My health took a nosedive or damn I would have been at that table.
I am too, although I felt pretty sheepish about having been quite…combative toward her.
The Selfish Gene (and subsequent new editions) made it abundantly clear that Dawkins only believes in two sexes and is pretty clear as to why that is.
Really the more evolutionary biology I read up on the more clear it is that transgenderism is absolute tosh.
One of the things that puzzles me is that it doesn’t seem to occur to the science-minded advocates of a brain-based “gender identity” to wonder why it would have evolved in the first place. Presumably they don’t think it evolved with early sexual reproduction, so at what point in the evolution of primates did the brain acquire something that gave an ape an inner sense that it was male or female? Here’s a recent description I came across:
What advantage would “gender in the brain” convey if it’s not (and apparently it’s not) about sexual attraction and mating? What would an evolutionary biologist make of this?
Chromosomal XX have female phenotype
Chromosomal XY have male phenotype except in rare cases of testicular feminization
Chromosomal XO patients have female phenotype
Chromosomal XXY (Klinefelter syn) have male phenotype
Chromosomal XYY have male phenotype
Chromosomal OY is lethal
So obviously biology can tell us nothing about sex.
That’s funny. Most of the trans people I know never knew as toddlers; they found out as teens, or in at least one case, in their late 20s. Usually after looking up the symptoms of their depression on the internet. And finding every symptom they plugged in pointed them to trans. Of course, if they’d tried a different list of symptoms, or characteristics that are not symptoms, they would probably find the same thing, because trans has claimed every characteristic of human beings as making someone trans.
Which, in my opinion, makes trans meaningless, because we could all just change the labels and pronouns we call ourselves, and still be in the same dimorphic states we were before…but we’d all be trans.
Compartmentalization? I regard it like scientists who go to mass on Sunday, accept the Body and Blood, and go back to the lab on Monday morning. Or, they might not think very much about it at all , accepting it as part of the “progressive package” of beliefs that all Good and Right people believe.
Do they manage to use a definition of gender that doesn’t rely on, or resort to, tired, sexist stereotypes?
Speaking of meaningless labels and definitions, I just encountered the following in the wild:
“With the understanding that I am using the terms male and female because you did, and that I am using them to mean man/woman as I’ve described above: the difference is discernible to the mind itself. A male mind knows it’s a man/boy, and a female mind knows it’s a woman/girl. And non-binary minds are somewhere in between, or neither, or both.”
Surely, science IS a social construct, which does not mean that it is ‘subjective’ or arbitrary, but that it is something that has been devised by human beings as a way of arriving at truths about the world. I fail to see the contradiction that Dawkins supposes exists between being a social construct and the discovery of truths about the world. I do not think that ‘science’ is some kind of a-historical Platonic entity, consisting of perfect knowledge & existing above and beyond the confusion of the world and human deeds, to which only scientists have some sort of magical access.
I don’t think the claim is that there’s a contradiction, but that they name different things. The discovery of truths about the world is a human enterprise; the truths themselves are independent of humans.
Googling around once, I discovered a claim about the most children ever given birth to by one woman:
Mrs Feodor Vassilyev the first, even if she had ‘only’ given birth to 27 non-multiple children, would surely still qualify for some record or award.
Presumably, in ancestral times before birth control, large numbers of children per female were commoner than is the case today, and natural selection both constant in its severity and with many varied genotypes to work with. In my own case, my maternal grandmother was the only survivor out of 11 children born in NZ to an Irish refugee from the Great Famine. The unlucky other 10 died, probably of the TB that was raging at the time.
Dawkins was IMHO quite right when he said in a TV debate with Cardinal Pell of Melbourne that evolution proceeds by random genetic combination and mutation coupled with non-random selection. Two sexes have only ever been necessary; and have been sufficient.
The trans types are also covered by that scenario.
https://www.kltv.com/story/3278442/unusual-mother-trivia/#:~:text=The%20highest%20officially%20recorded%20number,67%20of%20them%20survived%20infancy.
Well, Dawkins in the first tweet said very bluntly that ‘Science is not a social construct’, and it seems to me that this assertion depends on a confusion in his mind (or supposed to be in other minds, not his) between science as a social activity and science as a body of tested knowledge – a confusion that I suspect derives from the untested assumption that if we admit that science is a social construct then the truths it discovers are somehow compromised, and therefore we should not admit it. Tweets & twitterings aren’t a very good medium for conducting serious arguments, but Dawkins never seems to learn this.
YNNB #11:
They all seem to hotly deny there are any sexist stereotypes involved, but then it gets … vague. “Gender identity” is of course the “internal sense that one is a man or woman,” but near as I can are out “gender” seems to be male or female as a simple characteristic, with no other attributes or description possible, and not involved with gender presentation or, of course, anything biological but the part of the brain that takes care of that. . I was scolded quite severely for trying to “insert” sexist content into that, but I was only hoping to elicit any content at all.
They never seem to say “No, that’s not the definition. Here’s the definition —.”
Omar, I was told decades ago that she was the origin of the English nursery rhyme “There was an old woman who lived in a shoe*”; given that ‘a shoe’ would be a reasonable ‘translation’ of Shuya by people who had never been to the latter, and likely knew nobody who had, I was inclined to believe it.
*There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.
She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do.
She gave them some broth without any bread;
And whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.
The more I think of it, the more I think that Dawkins is just airing prejudices as loudly and angrily as possible.
‘Science’s truths were true before there were societies; will still be true after all philosophers are dead; were true before any philosophers were born; were true before there were any minds, even trilobite or dinosaur minds, to notice them.’
Science’s truths were not true before before this, that and the other, since there was no science and so no organised attempt to investigate and distinguish intellectually and in accordance with generally agreed conventions between what is true about nature and what is not. (I don’t know what all the references to philosophers are about, but I suspect they are not meant to be complimentary.) Nature was as it was (and is) before science was ‘constructed’ by human beings, and will be what it is after humankind and its theories have disappeared. Truth is a function of human theories about nature (and therefore incidentally a part of nature, since human beings are part of nature), but truth is not something that nature as a whole seems to be concerned about.
Tim:
Well, Nature is very concerned that her laws be obeyed by all things living and non-living. To deny that is to wade into solipsism. But it is not necessary for any gods, humans or other conscious beings to be around to supervise, interpret, or even just to perceive that natural world obeying gravitation and the other natural laws, however framed by human minds. Gravity operates on the dark side of the moon, and holds stuff to the lunar surface, without anyone being there to perceive it happening. Of that we can be at least 99.9 % certain.
Omar:
I would not anthropomorphise Nature in that way. Nature is not concerned at all that natural laws should be obeyed (just as it is not concerned with truth). There is, after all, no choice. Nature is what it is, and we are part of it, and it is the whole of us: its ‘laws’ are us, and our minds are no less a part of nature than stuff on the lunar surface. And to recognise this is not to wade into solipsism. There is no ‘mind’ that is somehow independent of nature.
Oh, an invisible, moving target. Just like the theists’ definition of God.
Tim @ 19 – well said. Twitter isn’t a great medium for philosophical argument, as you mentioned, and Dawkins isn’t good at it anyway. Maybe that’s why he keeps playing at it on Twitter.
Yes, Dawkins gets on Twitter, and he’s full of phlogiston. I once assumed that scientists had empiricism drummed into their very bones and so learned from their mistakes. I’ve learned from that mistake (on my part).
“He’s full of phlogiston” is quite a nice insult for when in polite company.