The real problem is that the modern Democratic Party increasingly aligns with postmodernism, which is inherently anti-science (Postmodernism challenges the objectivity and universality of scientific knowledge, framing it as a social construct shaped by culture, power, and historical context, rather than an evidence-based pursuit of truth).
I don't read SciAm (maybe that's an issue), but I'm a bit suspicious that this could be a political hit piece.
That being said, if any of the claims in the article are true (e.g. calling statistic normal distribution curves an affront to humanity), that would indeed be a travesty (that such makes it through editing).
I think a less impassioned, more objective take would also present e.g. the number of times a needlessly conservatively minded piece made it through editing.
I.e. is it that SciAm is suddenly biased unscientific drivel or is it that society representatively has become more extreme?
Its similar to homophobia - a small (tiny) portion of the population expresses "nominal" preference towards homosexuality, however, there is an outsized fear among those who feel threatened by the concept...
But postmodernism, as a philosophical and larger historical/analytical approach, is not some evil boogieman. Lots of things have been done based on purported science knowledge that was, with historical context and with a proper critical eye, complete nonsense at best, and evil at worst. It was quite easy to make phrenology look like science. Postmodernism studies how it is possible to make something look like science. It's a complicated topic with consequences for the framing and development of scientific knowledge. There's no reason to discredit scientific endeavor in totality because of that though, and, to be honest, those people are far more fringe in academia, for instance, than people realize. And just as well, properly framed, there is no reason to wholesale discredit the critiques made by postmodernism of the uses and abuses of scientific knowledge by scientific institutions, governments, individuals, and the ways that arose out of culture and historical context.
To put it another way: if modernism was actually true and science was an inherently objective process that produced universal truths, then why do we have persistent and ongoing replication crisises in multiple scientific disciplines? Our answer has to come from postmodernism: the current scientific establishment values the production of papers as a way to fill magazines, and people with agendas to push (e.g. the American sugar lobby) will fund the production of scientific papers that produce the answer they want. If that makes sense to you, then you're a postmodernist.
One example that frustrated me as a taxpayer and parent with kids in school: here in California, it was Democratic policymakers who removed Algebra from high school curricula, arguing that it would help address disparities among minority students.
Reason is right-libertarian and has to occasionally shoot at least a few bullets in the direction of the opposing front on the culture war lest the conservative barrier troops[0] shoot them. Likewise there's a lot of right-wing authoritarians who try fishing for new suckers in the right-libertarian pool. This weird interplay between libertarians and authoritarians on the right side of the political compass has been a thing since at least when capital-L libertarian figures were talking about "paleoconservatives" and Ron Paul was paying ghostwriters to write all those hilariously racist newsletters back in the 90s.
[0] Barrier troops are soldiers in an army whose job it is to shoot at their own deserters.
"Professor Saad’s latest book The Parasitic Mind: how infectious ideas are killing common sense takes a wonderful look at some of the ideas which are so prominent in society today. We discuss the granddaddy of ‘idea pathogens’ as Gad calls it Postmodernism, we discuss the fear of biology, ..., the war on science, truth and reason that we all have a stake in and much, much more."
Changing math curricula isn't denying math and reason itself.
As for it being "core policy", I'd need to a see a citation, otherwise it's conjecture. The 2024 GOP platform [1] doesn't mention climate change, global warming, IPCC, et al. once, whereas the DNC's platform [2] discusses it at length.
[1] https://ballotpedia.org/The_Republican_Party_Platform,_2024 [2] https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/FINAL-MASTE...
And, again, tu quoque; even if the GOP was exhaustively comprised of reality-evading lunatics, voters and all, it wouldn't excuse stooping to their level -- the DNC's _explicit_ support of racial identitarianism, benevolent racism, and biological denialism run in direct opposition to this supposed moral high ground they tacitly hold.
It is not fair to say that at all. The primary system is highly undemocratic, and what’s more, the people who participate in it aren’t statistically representative of Republican voters as a whole.
As for postmodernism, it is far from mainstream in academia, and you seem to have a very narrow idea of what it is. I can only recommend the following video (by an actual scientist!): https://youtu.be/ESEFUaEA7kk
Sure, social sciences like anthropology and economics in which human actors are in play will have their "objectivity" challenged.
All of these factors shape the process of doing science. I think it's an amazing (and beautiful!) thing that we can collaborate on such a scale.
Science is done by people, and I think it's silly to pretend that people can somehow operate in a way that's entirely removed from history and culture.
Yes it does. I agree fully.
> the DNC's _explicit_ support of racial identitarianism, benevolent racism, and biological denialism run in direct opposition to this supposed moral high ground they tacitly hold.
I don't think benevolent racism means what you think it means and no one is denying biology. Trans people aren't even denying biology. I would suggest you actually speak to a few trans people in real life.
Certainly in terms of who was able to participate in the discovery, but I doubt the actual discovered structure was shaped much by the discoverers. Put another way, I would be absolutely fascinated to see other accurate greenfield formulations of an atomic model that do not resemble our current one which could have been invented by another set of possible discoverers enabled by fortune to pursue them. I think that the ideas defining the model comprise the “shape” of the discovery more than the discoverers themselves, who merely stumbled upon them and investigated.
Like believing puberty blockers are an effective treatment for gender dysphoria despite historical evidence being extremely weak, ignoring or condemning more modern, rigorous studies [0], and refusing to publish your own studies when they don't confirm your preconceived position [1].
You don't need to convince anyone that Republicans don't care about science. But many of us also see the ways in which the "trust the science" crowd throw actual science out the second it contradicts their position.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/health/hilary-cass-transg...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/science/puberty-blockers-...
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/health/hilary-cass-transg...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/science/puberty-blockers-...
It's more so caught up in the liberal cultural agenda. Which Democrats align with. A square is a rectangle but a rectangle is not always a square.
I think _both_ conservatives and liberals have turned to postmodernist questioning of science. Just as conservatives question climate change science, liberals question biological sex science.
Both are detriments to society and show how we're not exactly moving forward culturally. But it seems the liberals, who tend to embrace a panpolitical ideology (where everything is political) are actively hurting established science. Thus Scientific American would be a much more useful and enduring resource - especially in the social media age - if it kept to science and didn't cross into politics.
Though I agree with you that development is messy. We should be much more concerned about exposing children to endocrine disruptors, micro-plastics, and bizarre social dogmas.
The way I've come to see it, left and right essentially correspond to two modes of reasoning, inductive versus deductive - they are both required to get anywhere worthwhile. The current highly divisive political environment is essentially making everybody think with only half their brains. This is both lucrative (it feels good to have lazy answers validated rather than criticized), as well as disempowering (it keeps individuals from agreeing on substantive political opposition to ever-growing corporate authoritarianism).
I understand the motivation for this denialism: most social institutions that segregate by sex are motivated by the practical effects of physiological sex-linked characteristics, brain wiring isn't a relevant criterion for determining "sex" for these purposes. It is currently impossible for the physiology to match the brain wiring in such case as a matter of science. Since the social institutions around sex segregation are widely viewed to exist for good reason, it motivates denial that physiological sex-linked characteristics actually exist for people that want to be segregated according to their brain-wiring sex.
Criticizing Democrats doesn't necessarily mean one likes Republicans. The two poles of the idiosyncratic US political system aren't the only ideologies or worldviews that exist.
These problems are not a simple matter of funding. One need only at California's High Speed Rail project. Costs have soared from early estimates of $15B to now more than $130B+, despite almost no track being laid over the last 15 years. This is in a one party state with complete Democrat control, so you can't blame Republicans.
Bureaucratic mismanagement and inefficiency are the overwhelming problems now.
Unless the data itself is fabricated, i.e. unscientific, the hard sciences are "hard" because they don't suffer from these flaws of interpretation (as much). There of course issues with observability, replicability, however these are issues that can be dealt largely without invoking any societal biases, aka through the scientific method.
Rejecting the scientific method completely because humans are involved at any step, is a form of absurd-ism, yes, we are not perfect, but our methods are a lot better than a) nothing b) your choice to reject hard science because it doesn't match your personal belief (hard bias).
In my country, most colleges are state owned and free, I had an engineering degree for €600 per year. Skyrocketing tuitions in America is purely a result of profiteering, largely enabled by the republicans and not kept in check by the weak democrats.
But if you still think gutting your public services will improve anything, just look at what austerity did to the UK.
Though I admit that I understand why a researcher would hesitate, knowing that bigoted politicians and Evangelicals would use it as a cudgel against trans rights and trans people themselves.
It's been a rather contentious topic, and sciam has even written about some of the issues: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evidence-undermin... ( https://archive.ph/N1nAR )
"The American Psychological Association and 61 other health care providers’ organizations signed a letter in 2021 denouncing the validity of rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) as a clinical diagnosis" -> https://www.caaps.co/rogd-statement
What would you suggest is the proper treatment for trans children suffering gender dysphoria if they are denied puberty blockers and/or hormone replacement therapy? Do you think that forcing them to develop unwanted secondary sex characteristics is going to reduce their dysphoria? Do you think that you should be responsible for telling another a parent what they should or should not allow their child to do? By what criteria should you or the state be able to overrule a parent? Should a child be allowed any agency at all over their own body? And if not children, should adults?
I don't think that science can even begin to answer these questions and that it is a red herring to frame this debate in utilitarian scientific terms (e.g. science shows that puberty blockers don't statistically improve mental health and therefore should be banned). With this kind of science, we lose the unique individual human being which for me is the loss of everything that truly matters.
Even referring to them as "trans children" comes with the assumption that this is some inherent and unchanging quality rather than a temporary state. Why assume this without evidence?
No such belief exists. Recognizing the existence of bias in a science (with biased input data having detrimental effects on the reliability of the results) or observing the existence of methodological shortcomings is not the same as repudiating the method.
I'm assuming you have a checklist of physical characteristics and genetic attributes in mind, sticking purely with that which can be measured, tested and observed and steering clear of fuzzy concepts.
If you lookup biological adult, it's just someone who has completeled their reproductive development.
So Boy, Girl, Man and Woman are also sex labels.
Also we now know more about how sex is more then just genitalia. This is why we have Sex and a Biological Variable https://www.nature.com/articles/npp2016215
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B97803...!
That's not what the actual developmental science says though.
The strong all humans are either male OR female by { unprovided definition } is simply incorrect.
> If you lookup biological adult, it's just someone who has completeled their reproductive development.
Sure. Some are born and develop into biological adult males. Others are born and develop into biological adult females. And others yet again are born and grow into adults who are neither one nor the other.
Look it up .. start with "intersex".
See your own first link, for example, it's really sloppy, and yet:
Although all cells have a sex, designated by the presence and dosage of X or Y chromosomes, which in most cases will be XX (female) or XY (male),
* most will be XX (female) OR XY (male) (... okay)
* ... crickets ...
Nothing said about those cells that are neither male nor female.
All that aside, you have dodged the question.
What definition do you have for male, for female, and what do you designate the remainder?
Are you even aware that people are born who are neither male nor female by any of the generally accepted physical and genetic attributes?
From the intersection of developmental biology and sports science research we know how male physical advantage in competition arises, and which set of known "intersex" (DSD) conditions confer this. For example, 5-alpha reductase 2 deficiency does. Swyer syndrome does not.
World Athletics' policy document Eligibility Regulations for the Female Classification does a good job of implementing this research into a workable policy: https://worldathletics.org/download/download?filename=2ffb8b...
Rather than trying to label all edge cases "female" or "male", this pragmatic approach optimizes for fairness in competition instead.
As you can see it made no mention of athletics.
I was curious about the self referential circular definitions and enquired of a specific person what their understanding of development biology was.
Thankyou for your response, it might be better directed toward the person who apparently hasn't yet realised that such a thing as intersex categories and conditions even exist.
I didn't dodge the question, you just don't like my answer
Here are the English definitions.
Male: of or denoting the sex that produces small, typically motile gametes, especially spermatozoa, with which a female may be fertilized or inseminated to produce offspring.
Female:of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) that can be fertilized by male gametes. "a herd of female deer"
Now I know what you are going to say, what if they cannot create gametes? That doesn't change anything because even if your reproductive organs don't develop properly nor function properly it doesn't make you neither male nor female.
You still have many other characteristics that needed to be addressed. This is why we have Sex as a Biological Variable.
> Are you even aware that people are born who are neither male nor female by any of the generally accepted physical and genetic attributes?
That's not really true, people are either male or female but didn't develop properly. Doesn't mean that they are neither nor, people with DSDs are documented. I know there are groups trying to push away from the concept of DSDs but there is not a consensus. People have all sorts of development disorders, this is just one kind.
Now even if there were people who were of no sex, it doesn't mean we start changing sex labels for fully developed people because we now consider it a social construct. The people who follow Gender Theory like to use people with DSDs to push the idea that fully developed people can change their sex and they can't.
https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/33/2/in-humans-sex-is...
Your playing with words to try and get the idea of Biological sex thrown out is not going to work here.
Yes, it is true, whether you like it or not.
"if the term intersex is to retain any meaning, the term should be restricted to those conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female"
> people are either male or female but didn't develop properly.
How do you classify that which is unclassifiable by experts in the field?
> Your [sic] playing with words to try ..
I'm not any of the experts in the field looking at natal development and debating the breadth of variation.
Your argument is not with myself but with the documented literature on the subject.
Some people disagree:
https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/33/2/in-humans-sex-is...
Why “Intersex” Conditions Do Not Invalidate the Sex Binary
But what about “intersex” individuals? Unfortunately, confusion and misunderstanding reign when it comes to their existence. Humans are indeed born with a variety of “intersex” conditions at low frequency, but that does not mean that these conditions are part of normal healthy variation. Humans are also born with a great variety of devastating congenital deformities and diseases, and if alien exozoologists were to write a description of Homo sapiens based on extensive observations of the population, such a description would never feature, for example, anencephaly, and neither would it include anything else but binary sex.
Extremely deleterious phenotypes, especially when their fitness is invariant with respect to environmental conditions, cannot be part of that description, as they are by definition actively eliminated from the population. The mathematics of natural selection is remorseless. For the human population, even an allele with an initial frequency as low as 0.01 and selection coefficient s = 0.05 is nearly ensured fixation. On the other hand, that should not be taken to mean that natural selection is all powerful. First, even if an allele is strongly deleterious, its frequency will not be zero, as it is constantly reintroduced by mutations at some rate µ. Second, alleles with small selective (dis)advantages are not ensured fixation. Genetic drift can lead to fixation of alleles with small selective coefficients irrespective of their effects, as long as s < ~1/Ne (Ne is the effective population size).
Therefore we cannot expect “perfection” from biological processes. Imagine that a biochemical reaction runs with a given accuracy in a finite population. The selective advantage of mutations improving its accuracy will generally be at most the fractional improvement that they confer. Thus it is not possible for selection to push the system towards absolute perfection as further fractional improvements are “invisible” to it if smaller than the selection barrier ~1/Ne. Errors are thus expected to occur everywhere, and indeed they do. This is why important genes get mutated, developmental processes get disrupted, and the results are newborns with very low fitness.
These facts bear on how we are to think about “intersex”' people. The great diversity of such conditions cannot be explored here in detail. These include Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome (feminization of males due to androgen receptor mutations), Klinefelter's syndrome (47,XXY karyotype), XX male syndrome (46, XX “males” due to translocation of the master regulator SRY to the X), Turner's syndrome (45,X0) and many others.
These conditions present with a variety of phenotypes intermediate between typical male and female features, but they have one crucial commonality—individuals afflicted are almost invariably sterile;20 on the few occasions where fertility is possible, the phenotypes are mild and it is hard to even call them “intersex.” Their evolutionary fitness is therefore as negative as fitness could possibly be short of being stillborn (s = -1 for sterile individuals). Importantly, these fitness reductions are invariant to environmental variables. It is possible for a condition that is a debilitating disease under some circumstances to be beneficial under others (e.g. sickle-cell anemia and malaria). But this does not apply to the inability to produce viable gametes which makes one unable to reproduce under all circumstances.
All “intersex” conditions, when examined, clearly arise from single-gene mutations or chromosomal aberrations on a genetic background that would have indisputably been producing male or female gametes had these mutations not occurred, and, rarely, due to chimerism (i.e. individuals made up of both male and female cells). True hermaphrodites possessing both sets of functional gonads and genitalia have never been observed in Homo sapiens.
Therefore the “intersex” argument against the sex binary is simply not valid. Intersex individuals exist only because of continuous de novo reintroduction of the relevant mutations in the population, recessive genes becoming unmasked, or disruptions of normal embryonic development.
Sex in mammals is on a fundamental level binary and immutable, and claims that “intersex'” individuals disprove that can only be made in the absence of any consideration of the biological nature of humans and how our evolutionary history has shaped our biology. Which brings us to the most worrying aspect of the widespread adoption of such denial
This person is not alone.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10265381/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5824932/
I know there is a ongoing social debate about this, and there are people withing the field who disagrees. So it's not like you are showing me anything I haven't already seen.
The idea that there is a consensus is not accurate. There are people who disagree and they have been writing about it.
Expect to see more.
If you were arguing with me in the 11th century perhaps you'd have a valid concern, at the point at which we've been successfully doing this for almost a whole millennia, I strongly disagree with your assertion(s).
I'm sorry but the text you quoted is nonsense. Alien exozoologists could very well write about Homo sapiens "rarely they are born without brains, and die quickly." They would be correct to do so. However, this is quite a minute and usually irrelevant feature of the species. If they go into enough detail, they would write it.
There are more transgender people born than anencephalic people (... if they can even be called that).
And sterile people aren't non-people. They are people, so a very detailed description of the species would say that some people are sterile, sometimes because they are intersex.
> All “intersex” conditions, when examined, clearly arise from single-gene mutations or chromosomal aberrations on a genetic background that would have indisputably been producing male or female gametes had these mutations not occurred
so what? this is meaningless. This is searching for plausible sounding arguments to justify a desired conclusion.
> Therefore the “intersex” argument against the sex binary is simply not valid. Intersex individuals exist
therefore sex is not completely binary. It doesn't matter why. You are reaching for plausible sounding arguments, that on closer inspection still make no sense. Some people are male, some are female, and some are neither, therefore, it is not true that all people are male or female. QED. This is very basic logic. Defying very basic logic is nonsense. You might as well argue that 1+1=3, we just haven't seen it yet.
> Sex in mammals is on a fundamental level binary and immutable
What would it take to disprove this for you? I have a feeling that if someone designed a gender change ray that could convert a human male into a human female, in all aspects including cellular genetics, genitals, and brain structure, you'd still say sex was immutable and the ray didn't really do that.
> claims that “intersex'” individuals disprove that can only be made in the absence of any consideration of the biological nature of humans
Claims that sex is strictly binary, rather than bimodal, can only be made while looking the emperor in the eye and saying his clothes are gorgeous. Intersex people exist, and they are not male or female - that's the definition. But you don't want to hear it, and would rather pretend they somehow don't count. That's the denial here.
Alternatively, perhaps you believe that sex is a property that is not shared by all people. That is, perhaps you believe that some people do not have a sex. Is this the case?
Keep in mind: just because something is on pubmed, doesn't make it true. "Trust the science" is bullshit, right?