A REMINDER
Yesterday I put up several posts about the binary nature of sex. On one of them I reported that several of us had signed a letter to the Presidents of three ecology/evolution societies who had issued a missive to Trump and all the members of Congress (I don’t think their missive has yet been sent). I wrote this:
Note that the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), the American Society of Naturalists (ASN), and the Society of Systematic Biologists issued a declaration addressed to President Trump and all the members of Congress (declaration also archived here), a statement deliberately aimed at contradicting the first Executive Order by declaring that sex is not binary but a spectrum—in all species!
A first version of our own letter, signed publicly by 20 people (there are now almost 40) can be read here.
If you want us to consider adding your name to our letter above—for we’re still accumulating signatures—please click on the link below, which is an early version of the letter with some signatures.
At the bottom of the letter, you will see this form:
If you want your name to be added to the letter that will be sent to the SSE, ASN, and SSB, please go to the site above and fill in the blanks. And all of them please, as people are leaving off titles, emails and sometimes last names. We’ll track down titles and the like, but that’s about all we can do to recover missing information.
The deadline for signing is a week from Monday: 5 p.m. Chicago time on March 3.
We ask only two things: you be affiliated with biology in some way (training in biology sufficient to adjudicate the issues is sufficient), and that you be willing to have your name publicized, not only to the societies but on this website (I’m not sure if I’ll post the final version, though). Your response will automatically be added to an Excel document from which we’ll draft the final letter. Your email address will always be kept confidential Thanks!
h/t to Luana Maroja for drafting the letter and collecting many of the signatures.
I would like to sign, and I’ve published in the evolutionary psychology literature, but I don’t have a title other than Ph.D. Would my signature help?
YES. If you have biology training, it counts. We even have a few signatures from biology undergraduates. Please sign as per above.
Thanks!
I’ve just added my name. I’m a scientific minnow compared to some of the big fish on that list, but my doctoral research was concerned with reproductive biology and I have published in the field, so I can have confidence in what I’m signing up to.
Nobody cares how big a fish anybody is. We have people of all degrees of training and renown, but the important thing is that biologists as a whole sign if they take issue with the Societies’ statement.
I will be signing.
What could be done to publicize this broadly?
We are pondering that, and are open to suggestions.
Scientific societies have social media pages such as Facebook, etc. One could try to post about this there. Of course the moderators may be captured. Letters to editors, etc. I know that some will say no but it’s worth a try.
I don’t know about there being deadlines, other than being ready to stop vetting signatories. Project Steve ran on for a long time.
The folks over at Project Nettie might be useful
The letter has even attracted attention in Germany. Renowned Axel Meyer has signed it. Congratulations! 🙂
Wish I could sign on but don’t have a biology degree.
I hope this effort gets major publicity – I’m fed up of seeing the media dominated by ideologically captured scientists.
Signed.
Thank you Dr PCC(e) and all the other original authors. It is an honor to be adding my name to a letter you’ve written and with which I wholly agree.
I believe I signed yesterday with my non nom de plume. If I didn’t, I meant to. But yes I was unsure about doing so, as my PhD is in genetics, but of the human variety. But genetics is a subfield of biology, of course. So, I signed, or at least I think I did!
Check out:
https://x.com/nathanlents/status/1892937738187350492
and his article here:
https://secularhumanism.org/2025/01/get-gender-ideology-out-of-biology/
Had a short x chat with him, trying to get some straight answers. He was nice, but the usual non-answers, summed up in something like this: sex is incredible complicated and so on….
I read the article and yes, it is the same old same old: a panoply of distortions and misapprehensions. He recently tweeted that male and female are continuous categories, like age. Shoot me now!
My degree is from U of C. I did take Biology at U of C. However, my actual BS degree is in Organic Chemistry. I would like to sign. Would my signature help?
Any chance of health care professionals signing?
Even a lowly clinical pharmacist?
(sarc) Not that sex affects pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, disease incidence or prevalence nor treatment regimens, of course, not ever! (sarc off)
I’d like to express a minor quibble that doesn’t distract from the main point that biological sex is binary.
The following fact is not in doubt: populations of sexually reproducing eukaryotes need to have an alternation of generations that require the fusion of two haploid cells at some point in their life cycles. In most cases, including humans, there are two different types of haploid cells because it is evolutionarily advantageous to increase the mixing of alleles. This is why biological sex is mostly binary except in those few rare examples where the haploid cells (gametes) are not distinct.
However, just because the two types of haploid cells are distinct doesn’t necessarily mean that they have to be different sizes. That’s an evolved characteristic in many species for reasons that don’t have anything to do with the fundamental properties of biological sex. Yeast and other fungi are a good examples of different haploid types that don’t differ in size.
Why not just say that the biological definition of binary sex means that there are two (and only two) kinds of gametes without complicating it by specifying that they have to be different sizes?
Yes, yeast have two mating types but other fungi have many more. It’s simpler to say that “all animals and plants have two gametes of different size” because yeast and fungi are neither animals nor plants.
Also, it is common knowledge that each human ejaculate contains 200-300 million spermatozoa (or, at least, “a lot of tiny little swimmers”) while ova are almost macroscopic and come out one or a few at a time. Stressing anisogamy builds on knowledge that is part of the public consciousness and, as a happy side effect, stimulates thinking about how anisogamy is (yet more) evidence for evolution.