Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

I want to be sympathetic to Singal, whose writing always seems to generate shitstorms disproportionate to anything he's actually saying, and whose premise in this piece I tend to agree with (as someone whose politics largely line up with those of the outgoing editor in chief, I've found a lot of what SciAm has posted to be cringe-worthy and destructive).

But what is he on about here?

Or that the normal distribution—a vital and basic statistical concept—is inherently suspect? No, really: Three days after the legendary biologist and author E.O. Wilson died, SciAm published a surreal hit piece about him in which the author lamented "his dangerous ideas on what factors influence human behavior."

(a) The (marked!) editorial is in no way a refutation of the concept of the normal distribution.

(b) It's written by a currently-publishing tenured life sciences professor (though, clearly, not one of the ones Singal would have chosen --- or, to be fair, me, though it's not hard for me to get over that and confirm that she's familiar with basic statistics).

(c) There's absolutely nothing "surreal" about taking Wilson to task for his support of scientific racism; multiple headline stories have been written about it, in particular his relationship with John Philippe Rushton, the discredited late head of the Pioneer Fund.

It's one thing for Singal to have culturally heterodox† views on unsettled trans science and policy issues††, another for him to dip his toes into HBD-ism. Sorry, dude, there's a dark stain on Wilson's career. Trying to sneak that past the reader, as if it was knee-jerk wokeism, sabotages the credibility of your own piece.

Again, the rest of this piece, sure. Maybe he's right. The Jedi thing in particular: major ugh. But I don't want to have to check all of his references, and it appears that one needs to.

† term used advisedly

†† this is what Singal is principally known for

Agreed fully on the JEDI stuff. I was somewhat hoping it was from an April first issue. That was bad.

And I thought I recognized the name. I really do not understand how trans debate has come to dominate some online discourse.

I thought the complaint on the normal distribution was supposed to be claims that many things are not normally distributed? Which, isn't wrong, but is a misguided reason to not use the distribution?

> And I thought I recognized the name. I really do not understand how trans debate has come to dominate some online discourse.

Much of it is pushback against widespread ideological capture, and in particular the authoritarian idea that everyone else has to change and restrict their behavior to accommodate increasingly absurd and harmful requests from an overly demanding identity group.

What is the group demanding that is "over" what you would consider appropriate? How do their demands restrict your behavior?

Personally I've never noticed trans people and their push for rights & recognition having any impact on my life whatsoever. And I say this as a devout member of a rigorous and conservative religious tradition.

Many demands, but probably the most egregious is the insistence that males be incarcerated in women's prisons if they say they are women. Several states now have policy that enables this, and female prisoners have been sexually assaulted, raped and even impregnated as a result of this.

More generally, this graphic has an astute depiction of the problem: https://i.ibb.co/ZcMWLvM/no.jpg

Is sexual assault in prison otherwise a particular concern of yours? I understand it's a massive issue affecting hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people, is activism on that broader issue how you came to be aware of this? Do you have a connection to any prisoner advocacy groups that have policy recommendations on this? I assume the sexual violence outcomes for trans women in mens prisons isn't very wonderful either.

I can't relate to the comic. like I said I have not really felt personally affected by trans people at all on any level ever.

> How many instances of trans athletes in female sports have there been?

If it’s a small number, then presumably it’s not worth fighting over and sport can just have Open and Female categories?

Maybe, yes.

But what is "female"? The Algerian boxer was born female, but has high testosterone due to whatever medical condition, which ruled her out of some previous competitions that had conditions around that. Do you want sports governing bodies to inspect genitalia? Do blood tests? Especially when it gets into kids' sports territory, this gets very iffy very fast.

The available evidence indicates that Khelif is actually male: two blood tests from two independent labs revealing an XY karyotype, a member of Khelif's training team describing problems with hormones and chromosomes and that Khelif has been on medication to adjust testosterone to within the female range, and a leaked medical report which describes Khelif as having the male-specific disorder of sexual development 5-alpha reductase deficiency (5-ARD).

This implies that Khelif is not female but is male, and went through male puberty, therefore having the male physical advantage in sport caused by male sexual development.

So what you're saying is that she transitioned from male to female in Algeria? That sounds unlikely.

No, just erroneously assumed to be female and issued with identity documents stating this.

Same as has happened previously with other male athletes in women's sports, such as Caster Semenya who also has 5-ARD and also competed in the Olympics, back in 2016 in the women's 800m track event, winning gold. The silver and bronze medals were taken by males too.

Khelif does not identify as trans, and described such accusations as "a big shame for my family, for the honor of my family, for the honor of Algeria, for the women of Algeria and especially the Arab world."