Videos: Dawkins on sex differences; Neil deGrasse Tyson on sport and sex

October 13, 2025 • 9:30 am

The first article in the new anthology The War on Science (compiled, edited, and with an introduction by Lawrence Krauss) is a piece by Richard Dawkins called “Scientific truth stands above human feelings and politics.”  It’s basically a two-part essay on how ideology has distorted science, with the first part being about Trofim Lysenko’s distortion of Russian genetics under Stalin, and the second bit being about sex and gender, concentrating on the biological nature of sex. In the UnHerd interview below, Richard dilates on the part about sex and gender, but concentrating on the evolutionary biology of sex.  As I’ve said, the book has been attacked by miscreants—many of whom hadn’t read it, but damned it nonetheless because some of the authors were deemed politically unpalatable and because the topic was how the left has damaged science. (“We should”, say these miscreants, “have written only about the damage that Trump and his minions have done to science.”)

Dawkins is one of the people who has brought opprobrium down on the book, because, after all, he’s an “old white man”, a member of the most oppressive group at all. But his age, sex, and race are irrelevant to his essay, which is one of the very best in the anthology.  In his characteristically clear and eloquent writing, he explains what he calls the “universal biological definition of sex” (“UBD”): the now-familiar claim that biological sex is based on relative gamete size. This definition leads ineluctably to the view that sex is binary: there are two and only two forms of gametes in a given species. He underlines something that I’ve also emphasized: the UBD is not only ubiquitous, applying in binary form in all animals and vascular plants, but is also explanatory: the sex binary is the only concept of sex that can explain, usually via sexual selection, a number of phenomena that puzzled biologists before Darwin proposed this form of selection in 1871.

In the UnHerd video discussion with Freddie Sayers shown below, Richard runs through 14 of these phenomena, making an airtight case for the utility of the UBD.  He also takes up issues raised by the Miscreants to try to show that sex is a spectrum: the sequential switching of sex by clownfish and wrasses (they’re still male or female), the presence of intersex individuals, whose frequency is very low and no damaging to a binary view, and the fact that male seahorses can get “pregnant,” holding fertilized eggs in a pouch until they hatch (notice I say “male seahorses”, for these individual still produce only small, mobile gametes).

Because advocates of the “spectrum of sex” view are ideologues, who hold their position simply because they think the sex spectrum buttresses transsexual and nonbinary individuals, Richard’s talk here, or his essay in the book, won’t convince these opponents. (By the way, these people never tell us how we can define the sexes given that “sex is complicated.)  But if you’re open minded, have a listen, or better yet, buy the book, as the essay has a lot more than does the interview below. The universal and explanatory advantages of the UBD make it far superior to any other concept of biological sex.

h/t: Luke

In the short (4-minute) clip below from The Rubin Report, astrophysicist and science popularizer Neil deGrasse Tyson takes another point of view. Interviewed by Michael Shermer, Tyson gets all worked up on the topic of sports, finding it deeply weird that we split males and females when it comes to athletic competition. Two women, broadcaster Sage Steele and former swimmer Riley Gaines, weigh in on Tyson’s confusion.

Finally, below is the full interview of Tyson by Shermer. It’s on sex and race, and I’ve started it when they begin discussing sex (31:15).  You can see that Tyson apparently thinks from his astrophysical background that nature is structured against binaries, which he sees to consider an argument for the continuum of sex. He seems to deny, in fact, that there’s any value in discussing biological sex, and that gender is what’s important. (Remember Tyson’s famous “today I feel 80% female and 20% male” statement?)  As far as sports is concerned, Tyson suggest dividing sports up in to “hormone categories”, so people compete against others having with similar hormone ratios. (That’s problematic for several reasons, not the least being that people who take hormone supplements, like trans-identified males, may still have a strength advantage over biological women having a similar hormone titer, because the advantage is already there at puberty,  before most takes testosterone).

Then, pressed by Shermer, Tyson says that maybe we should use a combination of body weight and hormone titer. It’s a mess, which becomes simplified if you have three categories: “bioloigcal [natal] female,” “biological [natal] male,” and “other”. Alternatively, you might stipulate that anyone who is not clearly a biological female compete in the men’s class. (That too has problems, like a higher risk of injury for trans-identified females in competitive sports.)

At any rate, this discussion is really an add-on to the Dawkins video above, so listen if you have the time.

43 thoughts on “Videos: Dawkins on sex differences; Neil deGrasse Tyson on sport and sex”

  1. I once met someone who trotted out the clownfish. I played dumb and asked, “What is special about the reproductive biology of the clownfish?” The person explained that the clownfish can switch sex from male to female. I replied, “You just said that the fish is male before the transformation. What do you mean by that? And by what criterion do you call the fish female after the transformation?” The person called me a transphobe and left.

    1. They always resort to ad hominem because there is no logic to their argument.

      I have over thirty questions that I made in meme form in a series called #QuestionsTheyNeverAnswer.

      I have asked the questions innumerable times, and no TRA has ever answered even one. They are actually quite handy memes, because as soon as a TRA sees them, they leave the thread, because they know they can’t answer. 😁

      A few examples :

      004 How can a 14 year old girl undressing to swim tell whether the penis beside her is on a ‘safe’ transwoman or a male predator just pretending to be trans to watch her undress?

      005 What is the difference between the crime of indecent exposure and a transwoman exposing their penis to girls and women in a women’s changing room?

      009 If we must affirm a dysphoria by agreeing children are the wrong sex, why shouldn’t we affirm those with anorexia by agreeing they are fat? Both are dysphorias.

      027 When is it acceptable to ignore or override a woman’s consent?

      016 If gender dysphoria is a reason to allow males to compete in women’s Olympic sport, why isn’t body integrity dysphoria a reason to allow able bodied people to compete in the Paralympics? What is the medical difference?

      1. Ooh, your 016 is one I hadn’t heard or thought of before! Very good. Must remember that one.

        1. I have thought this for a ling time. Able-bodied people invading the Paralympics would cause justifiable outrage.

          1. Decent people wouldn’t think to do such a thing. It shows that men pushing into women’s sports aren’t decent people.

          1. It happens a lot more than you’d think. There are many cases of body dysphoria and there are also people who see being disabled as a fetish.

          1. Do you have them posted as text somewhere (much easier to put into other formats!). Thanks for posting them!

          2. @Jim Blilie i don’t have them in text format any more, sorry, but Android Gallery lets you extract text from images very easily and I assume that iPhones have something similar?

  2. Novella, Gorski, Myers and Tyson. All willing to fold for popularity, to ignore plain scientific fact for clicks.

    1. I would have asked Tyson, “Why didn’t you ask Pluto how it feels and self-identifies before you insisted on categorizing it as a dwarf planetoid rather than a planet?”

      1. 😂 If Pluto self identifies as Earth, would he go and live there without breathing apparatus?

    2. I don’t think any of them are deliberately ignoring scientific facts to be popular or get woke points or whatever. They’re otherwise good skeptics. But when you start with a conclusion but convince yourself you’re not starting with a conclusion — the OTHER side is the one starting with a conclusion, thank you very much — then it’s easy to twist the scientific facts towards the conclusion you certainly didn’t start with. The more counterintuitive it is, the better. Science often overturns accepted conventions, so here we are again.

      Had people who identify as transgender not claimed to be in agony over the “mismatch between sex and gender” — if gender dysphoria had been described as a vague sense of unease or mild concern — I don’t think any of these arguments on sex not being binary would have been made. Considering the significant scope of that claim, that seems significant.

      1. In Tyson’s case I think he has I child that is trans or supports trans activism. A child can be a significant influence on a loving parent.

    3. Very disturbing, Novelle & Gorksi in particular, since this detracts from the important Science Based Medicine site — it was a bastion against quacks and cranks for years. I was dumbfounded when they censored Harriet Hall. I don’t see their trans-nonsense increasing their popularity, but I don’t go to that site much anymore and their trans-stuff figures in that.

      1. Steve Novella I’m familiar with. Is “Gorski” the same Dr. Gorski who wrote what Doug aptly described as a caffeine-fueled polemic against RFK Jr at SBM that Jerry excerpted Sunday? That was unhinged. It was the absolute surgical certainty of his predictions and his presumption to read Secy. Kennedy’s mind that alienated me. I kept waiting for the proof that Kennedy really is coming for all your vaccines, and it never came, just the certain guarantee that he is.

        Dr. Gorski must be a terror in the O.R.

        1. It was also humorous that a surgical oncologist with a specialty in breast cancer was railing against those who lack “any significant experience in public health or vaccine policy” while he then ranted about public health and vaccine policy.

          I may not be a specialist, but even I know a boob when I see one.

  3. Tyson is over-rated as a thinker. He’s a TV personality, a presenter of TV shows. And while having people who present TV shows about science is a good thing, the contrast between his muddled thinking and the clarity of Dawkins is marked.

  4. Tyson seems to have lost his ability to think, assuming he had the ability in the first place.

    If we split sports by capabilities, as he suggests, we will STILL end up with most men in one layer of competition and most women in another, because we are not of equal strength.

    Trans identified men will rank alongside other men, Lia Thomas will rank with other men. Veronica Ivy will rank with other men. Imane Khelif, while not trans, will rank with other men. This is what we currently have by separating sport by sex.

    It will cost a fortune to process and rank people, and keep reviewing those rankings annually for every individual in sport, but men will STILL end up competing against each other, and women will STILL compete with women on a different level. All that money and admin will be completely wasted as we will end up with basically the same thing 🤦‍♀️ Just because a few men won’t accept their sex.

    1. 🎯
      Tyson is an advocate, a propagandist arguing for a side. He doesn’t have to believe what he says. He doesn’t even have to care if it’s wrong. All he has to do is hope that people who oppose him can be intimidated into silence. He’s proposing a “solution” that will be so unworkable that everyone will just throw up their hands and revert to self-ID as the “only way forward”, i.e., paralysis.

      Ergo, the route to victory is not to get Tyson to admit that he is wrong and hope he will tell his followers to change their minds, too. He won’t do this because there is no cost to him in holding his position, no IDF preparing to drown him in the tunnels he is hiding in, now hostage-less, if he doesn’t come out with his hands up. Rather, the route is around him, through legislation: men cannot compete in women’s sport, and the test of whether you’re a woman is with genetically based sex testing … or physical examination by female nurse-marshals if the women are down with it. If the legislators don’t want to wade this far into the eels and muck, they can just amend their human rights laws to erase gender as a prohibited ground for discrimination. Then the athletic bodies (and everyone else like prisons and violence shelters) can reform their own houses without worry of ruinous lawsuits.

      Ignore Tyson or laugh at him, just as the British guffawed at Lord Haw-Haw during the Second World War. (They hanged him afterward, though, so don’t carry this too far….)

      1. “Tyson is a stupid man’s idea of a smart person”

        Ok, so I’m stupid 😂 but I have since seen the errors of my ways, so maybe I qualify as not-quite-so-stupid now 😉

    3. Yes. One of the questions I always ask in these kinds of discussions: “Why are there men’s and women’s divisions in sports?”

      Typically, interlocutors will either refuse to answer or come up with some BS such as: It’s just a cultural artifact.

  5. “He doesn’t have to believe what he says.”

    I think that’s what stings me most. I was a big fan, a long time ago, and I thought he was a decent guy. But he’s been a huge disappointment. I don’t believe that a decent guy would think one thing and then say another, to me that’s immoral behaviour. I know politicians do that, but I thought skeptics had more decency. More fool me.

    I don’t think his ego will let him admit he’s wrong, so you are right that we have to move forward and just ignore him. I think he is the old man sitting on the stoop, and not Shermer. Several sporting bodies here are now reverting to allowing women only sports. It only needs a cheek swab and I haven’t seen any women objecting to that. I think it’s also happening in some states in the USA? I’m sure I read that Lia Thomas isn’t going to be allowed to participate in women’s sports any more.

    It will take a long time to get this infestation out of sports and academia etc, but I have seen some movement towards sanity.

    1. I put it this way:

      Access to women’s single-sex domains must have clear and effective criteria for entry. These should be based on scientifically valid methods, such as genetic analysis, physical examination, and blood chemistry analysis.

      I am opposed to the idea of self-identification for qualifying for entry into women’s single-sex domains. It is not a fair or accurate criterion and it allows men to invade women’s single-sex domains and dominate the women.

      1. Trans identified men (TIMs) insist that they should have access to women’s spaces, but none of them has ever said how they plan to keep out the men who aren’t trans identified. That’s because they can’t, because there is no way to tell the difference between a man in a dress who identifies as trans, and a man in a dress who just wants to watch little girls undressing.

        TIMs claim to be scared of being assaulted by men in the gents, but what would stop violent men from claiming to be TIMs and just following them into women’s spaces? They didn’t think that through.

        It never ceases to amaze me how it’s ‘valid’ for men to be scared of men in the Gents, but ‘transphobic’ for women to be scared of men in the Ladies.

      2. The only test you need is physical examination, Jim. If the female athletic community would assent to this it would entirely solve the problem. Once you erase gender as a thing distinct from sex, no person with male genitalia can be a woman. All post-pubertal people with female genitalia and no male development are women. Ambiguous genitalia would have been referred at birth or at puberty for medical evaluation. The difficulty with this straightforward approach is that women don’t want to have someone look at their vulva to clear them for competition, so we are stuck, by women’s insistence with surrogate testing that imputes “a body plan organized to produce large non-motile gametes”, i.e., female sex. Any deficiencies in the chosen testing protocol that allow men to game it are on the women. We did this so you didn’t have to pull down your pants — once in your life to get a certificate — for a (female) marshal, Ladies.

        For all intents and purposes (subject to appeal as in any fair process because there are well-known exceptions) a Y chromosome excludes an athlete from female competition. Technically, it is simpler and cheaper these days to look for the SRY gene by PCR than it is to grow cells to metaphase for a karyotype and detect the Y chromosome itself by microscopy. (Nuclear Barr bodies show only that there are at least two X chromosomes but don’t rule out a Y.)

        Biochemical analysis is part of anti-doping testing, not sex testing. Hormone levels can be manipulated, and were, back when we accepted low testosterone levels as evidence of female eligibility. (A few sports still do, the ones who really want to keep their male athletes eligible for their women’s divisions.)

        It becomes more difficult for other single-sex spaces like violence shelters and recreational gymnasium changing rooms that don’t have access to immediate PCR testing. There you have to give the local security people the authority to reject people on the spot who appear to a reasonable person to be male, and insulate the staff and the organization from discrimination complaints. The hard part is not detecting who is male — we’re really good at that — , but undoing years of trans-activist “queering” of our institutions that make it dangerous legally to purge men from women’s spaces. Right now, the system punishes the furious father of a nine-year-old girl who complains there was a naked man in her locker room at her public swimming pool — he and his daughter will be banned —, and indulges the naked man instead. (Why? Because the pool doesn’t want a lawsuit which it knows it will lose or to lose its funding from the government’s athletic and cultural heritage ministry.)

        That’s where the termites are, not in the science of sex determination.

  6. It has become clear that Jordan Peterson was absolutely correct in drawing the line at the seemingly small matter of “pronouns”—and we should likewise draw the line at other misuses of language, such as ” “assigned” at birth”. Small deformations of conventional language are the first step by which propaganda captures sensibilities.

    The galaxy far away demonstrated this principle abundantly, and with Leftish clichés similar to those revived more recently by our wokies. A virtually clinical example is the language the galaxy adopted in regard to Israel after about 1950, when Stalin decided to align with the Arab world—language that persists to this day in Wokery.

    2. This is the same story that Jerry posted earlier today in the Hili Dialogue. I dead-frog-commented on it at #12.

      Even if you believe there are such people as transwomen, there is no basis for you to assume these male players were indeed transwomen, Mark. In Ontario, male athletes (or athletes-adjacent) can simply register to play in women’s events without any affirmation even by themselves that they are transgendered. There is no ceremony by which a man becomes a transwoman. He doesn’t even need a change in his birth certificate or driver’s licence. Best just to call them “men”.

      It’s OK. For now, the Ontario Human Rights Commission can’t punish you as an individual for misgendering, even if they could reach you in the United States. However when you visit Canada to watch the Blue Jays beat the Mariners, I can’t guarantee the Canadian Border Services Agency won’t deny you entry if they find misgendering posts on your phone, so there is that….

  8. Just watched the interview with Dawkins. Excellent and clear as always. I just hope that he is right that the tide has turned back toward reality.

  9. Tyson is a pop science communicator who, imo likes to hear his own voice. He cannot lie about cosmology/ science so there is that, most assuredly if he did he would be shouted down. Some physicist are vicious heh heh…
    He wants to ‘science’ & novel his way in and out of the trans issues and no one calls him out! because basically he is a nice guy with an opinion, his right but we wish he didn’t.
    He fails and burns his reputation (I’ve learnt a bit from him) in so much he doesn’t recognize the damage he’s doing to science.

  10. It’s almost always males (yes, Tyson is 100% male) who campaign vociferously to get males into female sports.
    Even ultra-liberal females hold back on this aspect of wokery.

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