Yesterday I wrote a bit (well, more than a bit) about a dire paper in Ecology Letters promoting a unusable “multivariate” view of sex and criticizing the gamete-based definition of biological sex recognized by most savvy biologists as the best definition, corresponding to reality, being universal, and being the most useful definition in promoting research. Sadly, but perhaps understandably, the average person wouldn’t be able to define “biological sex”, though. This was demonstrated yesterday by my colleague Luana Maroja, an evolutionary biologist who works at Williams College in Massachusetts.
This semester Luana is teaching Evolution to undergraduates, and, fortuitously sent me the slide below with a note:
Today I taught about sex binary in Evolution. Here is the clicker slide I presented and the responses:
A. Binary (males and females)
B. Three sexes (males, females, and intersexes)
C. 4 sexes (males, females, intersexes, and hermaphrodites
D. Over 150 sexes (from “agender” to “zoogender”) .
E. Impossible to tell since sex is a continuum.
Note that by far the most common answer was C: four sexes: males, females, intersexes, and hermaphrodites. The correct answer, two, was less than half of that at 21%, followed by a tie of 14% for “three sexes” and “over 150 sexes.” The “impossible to tell because sex is a continuum” answer garnered only 7% of the votes (in this small class that is just one person): I guess the students have not yet been propagandized by the likes of Agustín Fuentes and Steve Novella.
Intersex individuals do not represent a distinct biological sex because their sex is indeterminate, while hermaphrodites are simply individuals that have both sexes (both gamete types) in single individuals. They are common in plants but, since they produce sperm and eggs only, and not any other types of gametes, combine both functions in one individuals. Hermaphrodites are quite rare in animals though more common in groups like worms. “True hermaphrodites”—individuals capable of delivering both types of gametes—are not present in mammals, and I’ve found only a handful humans with both testicular and ovarian tissue, none of which had viable gametes of both types.
These students are smarter than the average American because Williams is a highly rated and selective undergraduate college. Nevertheless, they have no idea that sex in animals and plants is a binary representing two types of gametes: a large immobile gamete, characterizing females, and a small, mobile gamete, characterizing males.
You can see why so many people are susceptible to people who argue that sex is not a binary: they are already predisposed to believe that.
Luana asked me to mention that “the class is small and this is an improvement over what I had two years ago (the last time I surveyed the students). At that time most people chose the last option.” (continuum). When I asked her what the improvement was, she added that, “The improvement is because they are not answering E anymore and many more people are picking the correct response. ‘C’ is not as bad as ‘E'”
But note this other info from Luana, “With a small class like this one, we really don’t know where the bulk of students stand, but it is also important to notice that this is a 300 level class, thus all students already had Biology 102 (organismal biology) and thus should know better.” Bio 102 is apparently not doing its job!
Of course you’ve learned by now that the entire debate about how many biological sexes there are is spurred solely by ideology. If gender activists were not so eager to promote the incorrect idea that sex and gender are the same thing, and that we should confect scientific definitions to match people’s view of themselves, then biologists wouldn’t be arguing about this stuff. Alas, even some biologists (I’ve named two) have been seduced by the sirens of ideology. Others include the Presidents of the three major evolution societies. As I wrote on February 13 of last year:
. . . . the Presidents of three organismal-biology societies, the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), the American Society of Naturalists (ASN) and the Society of Systematic Biologists (SSB) sent a declaration addressed to President Trump and all the members of Congress. (declaration archived here) Implicitly claiming that its sentiments were endorsed by the 3500 members of the societies, the declaration also claimed that there is a scientific consensus on the definition of sex, and that is that sex is NOT binary but rather some unspecified but multivariate combination of different traits, a definition that makes sex a continuum or spectrum—and in all species!
As it happened, a letter with about 125 signers from the evolutionary biology community took issue with the embarrassing “sex spectrum” claim, and the Tri-Society presidents decoded to remove it from the Internet, though I archived it and you can see it at this link. It stands as depressing testimony of how even influential evolutionary biologists can distort science when they want to conform to an au courant ideology.
But enough; the survey above gives you an idea of the extent of public misunderstanding of biological sex.
I would argue (in a tongue in cheek way) that the correct answer was not “less than half of that”, but actually exactly half. It appears slightly less than 50% due to rounding off. Looks like there were 14 students who took the survey.
On a serious note, this nicely demonstrates that it is not only true that most people cannot tell males from females with 100% accuracy, but they don’t even know what the difference is. Even many of the people who ask the snarky question “What is a woman?” don’t know the definition. As you said, this is understandable, and the proxies that we often use to tell are quite accurate. Some (such as Roughgarden) use this to argue that accurate sex determination is not important when it comes to most social interactions, and I partially agree. It is important in some cases though, and we need a good definition for these cases.
One of the most popular criticisms of binary sex is that thinking there’s only male and female is a childish, incomplete understanding of sex easily dispelled by studying biology. I think it’s the other way around.
Nongametic definitions of sex are like claiming that the whale is scientifically a fish because “living in the water” is one of the ways people classify “fish” and science shows us that whales do indeed live in the water.
Great analogy.
Some of these “woke” scientists don’t seem to get it. The point of all of this is to unmoor definitions of sex from actual physical reality, so as to make it easier for people to simply claim to be whatever sex they want. This is how we get to “men can have babies too.”
The scientists who are promoting “sex as a spectrum” are therefore being used as unwitting tools or are cynical operators who are going along to get along.
Sad. I suppose that students—even those who have taken a couple of intro biology classes—are nonetheless very much influenced by their environment, where the sex binary is unfashionable. It would be very interesting to know what the professors are teaching in those introductory classes. Are they teaching the sex binary at all? If so, are they teaching it with confidence? Or are they teaching that the sex binary is embroiled in controversy, signaling doubt? I would love to know how the subject is being taught.
While this may be an improvement over two years ago, the combined answers of “D” and “E” still equal that of the correct answer “A.” After all, there isn’t much practical difference between saying there are “over 150” sexes and “it is a continuum.” Then again, with so many sexes running about, think of the research and publication possibilities for young biologists!
Perhaps the “sex is a spectrum” line is no longer fashionable among the privileged young while others have realized it is complete nonsense. But the majority might still be groping for reasons why such an assertion ever existed in the first place among intelligent and presumably informed people. “Surely things are not as simple as ‘two’?” Surely.
I have some questions.
1. What is being taught on this area in Biology 102? It’s possible that the definition of sex is not clearly laid out. I believe it often is not. Sex might well be brought up in passing a bunch of times, where one mentions males, females, eggs ‘n sperm every few days, with the understanding that everyone knows what these are, but is there a moment where the accepted definition of biological sex is formally stated, like we would define what is a eukaryote cell or define gene transcription?
2. Was this question posed before the lecture on the evolution of sex, or after? Actually, it would be interesting to pose this question both before and after, where the ‘after’ is when they hear about the evolution of sexual reproduction and the primacy of macro- and microgametes in multicellular eukaryotes, and why this evolved.
3. There are different ways to pose questions, and what you get can be quite different depending on how a question is framed. Here, the question is ‘How many biological sexes are there’, and students therefore feel compelled to answer based not on their scientific literacy but on their ideological membership. But if it were re-worded to ask: ‘The consensus among most biologists is that the number of biological sexes is …. ?’, there is reason to hope that you would get a different distribution. This way, students are not asked to stand with their subculture, but rather they are asked to reveal their scientific literacy.
It was posed before the lecture, of course. The lecture emphasized the gametic definition of biological sex. But the students had taken a general biology course before that. If you want your questions answered more accurately, Luana’s university email address is public on her website.
“These students are smarter than the average American because Williams is a highly rated and selective undergraduate college. Nevertheless, they have no idea that sex in animals and plants is a binary representing two types of gametes: a large immobile gamete, characterizing females, and a small, mobile gamete, characterizing males.”
Here’s a hot take. Most students, even the so-called smart ones at selective colleges, don’t learn much about anything, in any subject. That is because the model of passive learning through lectures doesn’t work for most people.
I would say that the only students that come out of college with significantly more knowledge and understanding than when they arrive are students who had to apply what they what they were learning. In other words, lab-heavy courses.
Or, people like music majors who had to spend thousands of hours working on their craft.
The rest cram and forget the material shortly after the exam.
Just when I thought I’d learned all this 100.0%.
BTW Colin Wright has an – IMHO – conversation of epic clarity in a short video clip … I’ll try to find it ASAP … I’m back, here it is :
https://x.com/realdonkeith/status/2031685956617605444?s=46
Get a load of the response.
Spoiler : it’s “Well, I disagree.”
🙄
… BTW #2 :
Whenever there are opposites – or, contradictions – it is guaranteed that dialecticians (e.g. Kant, Hegel, ..) will relentlessly smash or abolish the two together to raise a hidden, inner truth, for e.g. Aufheben der sex.
Relentlessly.
Am i correct in assuming that a 300 level course is a 3rd year course? Thats the way it worked at my institution back in the day. If so that is an incredibly bad result