Category: book reviews

Kathleen Stock leaves her lane, says that creationist arguments “undermine her faith in science”

October 10, 2025 • 10:15 am

Having read one of her books (Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism), which I liked, and knowing how Kathleen Stock (OBE) was hounded out of the University of Sussex for her gender-critical views, but has stood her ground since, I’ve been an admirer, though I haven’t followed her doings much. I see this from Wikipedia:

On 9 March 2023, Stock, alongside tennis player Martina Navratilova and writer Julie Bindel, launched The Lesbian Project.  The purpose of the Lesbian Project, according to Stock, is “to put lesbian needs and interests back into focus, to stop lesbians disappearing into the rainbow soup and to give them a non-partisan political voice.”

Stock is a lesbian, and you see above, she doesn’t want gay women stirred into the “rainbow soup” with the “T”s  Yet, at least from that book, I don’t see Stock as a transphobe, but rather as someone who thinks hard about the slippery concept of “gender” and who doesn’t see transwomen as fully equivalent to natal women.

But I have to ratchet back some of my admiration for Stock in view of what she has just published: a semi-laudatory review of a creationist/ID book, God, the Science, the Evidence by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies.  The Sunday Times also extolled the book (which is a bestseller, by the way); I dissected some of its arguments here. As far as I can tell—and the book isn’t yet available to me—the authors give the standard creationist guff touting a “God of the Gaps”, arguing that things that science doesn’t yet understand, like how the Universe began or how life began, are prima facie arguments for God. Of course they were once prima facie arguments for God about things we now have a scientific explanation for, like lightning and plague, but the new book apparently sees the existence of a complicated god as more parsimonious than saying “we don’t yet know, but all the evidence given for God that science has investigated has proven to be purely materialistic.”

Sadly, Stock has somewhat fallen for the God of the Gaps, to the extent that the book has “undermined her faith in science”.

If you subscribe to UnHerd, you can read Stock’s hyperbolically-titled review by clicking on the screenshot below, or you can read it for free as it’s archived here.

The very beginning of the review, in which Stocks ‘the eternal truths of religion” gets the review off to a bad start. (Is she joking here? I don’t think so.) There’s the usual incorrect noting that religiosity is increasing in the West. Then she says the god-of-the-gaps arguments have weakened her faith in science. Bolding is mine, and excerpts from Stock’s review are indented”

The eternal truths of religion are having a moment. Church pews are filling up with newcomers. Gen Z is earnestly discussing demons and sedevacantism on social media. This might, therefore, seem like a good time to publish a book which purports to lay out a positive empirical case for the existence of a supreme being.

God, the Science, the Evidence by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies, out this week in English, is already a best-seller in Europe. It comes with endorsements from various luminaries, including a Nobel Prize winner in physics. Reading it hasn’t affected my religious tendencies either way, but it has definitely undermined my faith in science.

Leibniz once asked: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Bolloré and Bonnassie’s answer is that God originally decreed “let there be something”; and they think that 20th-century developments in physics, biology, and history support this hypothesis. Their basic strategy in the book is to keep asking “What are the chances of that?” in a sceptical tone, concluding that only the truth of Christianity can explain otherwise unlikely natural circumstances.

Now Stock isn’t completely laudatory about the book, especially its “Biblical” evidence for God (see below), but saying that her faith in science has been weakened by God-of-the-Gaps arguments means she thinks that their priors have increased to the point where scientific evidence for the Big Bang, the “fine-tuning” of the universe, the complexity of single-cell organisms, and “the stunning efficiency of the double helix”—all of this is weakened, strengthing the evidence for God  or at least something divine.  But even here she waffles, ultimately concluding that these arguments “empty nature of mystery”:

Fine-tuning arguments remain interesting, though. Ultimately, they don’t work to rationally justify Christianity, or indeed any other kind of concrete theology, because of the large gaps they leave. One big problem is about how to calculate the probabilities of physical laws being as they are; for on many secular views of the laws of nature, their being different from the way they are is, precisely, physically impossible. But even leaving aside that technical issue, God’s intentions in designing the universe still look worryingly vague: what was He calibrating the background physical laws for, exactly? Was it just to bring carbon into the universe; or carbon-based life forms, generally; or humans, specifically; or even just one human in particular — Liz Truss, say, or Craig from Strictly? Why did He adopt so painfully indirect and slow a manner of implementation, and not just magic up the Garden of Eden in a trice instead, like a pop-up at the Chelsea Flower Show? The nature of God also looks pretty vague, defined only as whoever it was that came up with the floorplans: are we talking just one cosmic architect, or a committee?

“Why did He not just magic up the Garden of Eden in a trice, like a pop-up at the Chelsea Flower Show?”

Effectively, then, though fine-tuning arguments empty nature of mystery, treating it like a piece of machinery we might one day fully understand, they return all the obscurity to God.

The problem is that although her points against fine-tuning are decent, and she raises several other arguments against a divine origin, she doesn’t like the creationist arguments not because there are materialist explanations for fine-tuning, but because she wants these things to remain a mystery.  I suspect this because she says this at the end of her piece:

Perhaps, then, we are at an impasse: two mutually incompatible explanations of how we got here, each with its own measure of confusion and darkness. We could just stipulate that a creationist God, by definition, gets all the glamorous mystery, while the material world gets rational comprehensibility; He is whatever started things off, but that which we cannot otherwise hope to know. Or perhaps — and this would be my preference — we could give up flat-footed quests to prove the existence of the supernatural by rational means; we could start becoming alert to immanence, rather than simply hypothesising transcendence. That is: we could stop treating the natural world as if it were an Agatha Christie novel, where the only real mystery is how exactly the body got into the library.

I prefer our flat-footed attempts to explain things materialistically instead of becoming “alert to immanence,” whatever that means.  What we see throughout the review is Stock not just sitting on the fence, but pirouetting on it, going from one side to the other.  I still don’t know why her faith in science has been undermined, as God-of-the-Gaps arguments have been around for decades, if not centuries.  I would note that my faith in Stock has been undermined.

But in one area her review is good. As I said, it’s the “evidence” that Bolloré and Bonnassie adduce for God from the Bible. Here’s a bit:

Or take the authors’ argument that the historical Jesus must have been the Messiah, by attempting to rule out more prosaic rival explanations. Jesus can’t have been just another wise sage wandering round the Levant, they suggest, because he sometimes said crazy things. Equally, though, he can’t have been a crazy man, because he sometimes said wise things. The possibility that both sages and madmen sometimes have days off seems not to have occurred. The next chapter is of similar argumentative quality: could the Jewish race have lasted so long, been so intensely persecuted, yet achieved so much — including producing “the most sold book in history” and achieving “many unexpected and spectacular military victories” — had God not been intervening on their behalf all along?

By the time you get to the book’s treatment of the Fatima “sun miracle” — not to mention the authors’ insinuation that God instigated it in order to precipitate the Soviet Union — images of Richard Dawkins leaping around with glee and punching the air become irresistible. As chance would have it, only this week Scott Alexander published his own, much more rigorous, exploration of the Fatima sun miracle than the one offered by Bolloré and Bonnassies in their chapter. I recommend that they take this as a sign from God, and give up the explanation game forthwith.

If you have the patience, do read Scott Alexander’s very long piece on the Fatima “sun miracle,” (Spoiler: he suggests a naturalistic explanation.)

What I don’t understand about Stock and her review,then, are four things:

1.) If Stock, as a philosopher, can skillfully debunk Biblical miracles, why doesn’t she adduce the other naturalistic explanations for fine tuning, the origin of life, and the complexity of one-celled organisms.? Granted, she does raise questions about why God would make the universe as it is, but stops there.

2.) How did the book “undermine her faith in science”. She’s not clear about this. Does she find God-of-the-gaps arguments somewhat convincing?

3.) What does she mean in the title “Science can’t prove the ineffable”? “The ineffable” means “things that cannot be expressed in words.”  But of course stuff we don’t yet understand can’t be expressed in words simply because we don’t understand them, not because there’s something “transcendent” about them. If the title and subtitle are the work of an editor, well, I’ve always had the right to okay titles.

4.)  What is the “immanence” she speaks of? Is this the usual interpretation that God is to be found everywhere in the world instead of outside of it? That is, is she a pantheist?”  If so, what evidence does she have for “immanence,” or is that just something she chooses to believe?   And does she worry about where this “immanence” she accepts comes from?If the Universe is really a god in itself, why could it not be a NOT-GOD in itself—that is, something purely naturalistic?

This is a murky review, ending without the reader able to know what Stock really tbinks. That’s unseemly for a philosopher.

h/t: Chris, Loretta

Science editor of Sunday Times touts book “proving” God’s existence

October 5, 2025 • 10:15 am

In the face of declining belief in God in countries like the US and UK, believers are looking for any evidence that God exists.  But there’s nothing new to support the existence of the supernatural, though as science finds out more truths about the Universe, and we think of more questions about things (e.g., what is “dark matter”), religionists continue to take unanswered scientific questions as the evidence for God they so desperately need. And so a new book simply reprises the “god of the gaps” argument, a shopworn argument that has been tried–and has failed–many times before, both philosophically and scientifically. First, recent data from the US and UK on declining belief in God.

Here are figures from a 2023 Church Times article showing waning belief in the UK since 1981, though belief in life after death has held steady (belief in God is the line at the top in orange).. Click to read article:

And a similar decline from a 2022 Gallup poll showing a decline of about belief in the US of about 18% since 1950.

In both cases the trends are unmistakable, and, with a few hiccups, inexorable.  How do you keep your faith when all around you people are leaving it? You write a book decrying materialism, which of course, like all such books (as well as those recounting “visits to heaven”) become bestsellers due to the many believers desperate for “proof of God.”

This article appeared in today’s Sunday Times of London (h/t Pyers). Click headline to read, or find the article archived here.

The book that gives evidence that God “must” exist is God, the Science, the Evidence, by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies, published by Palomar on October 14 at £22.  It’s already sold more than 400,000 copies in non-English editions (it was published four years ago in France), and U.S. publishers have ordered a print run of 110,000 for the book, which will be published here in a week.

The two authors are both believers, of course (excerpts from the Times are indented):

These authors — like Dawkins and Hawking — consider themselves men of science. Bolloré, 79, from Brittany, is a computer engineer who has founded a series of successful heavy industry, engineering and mechanical firms; Bonnassies, 59, from Paris, studied science and maths before a career as an entrepreneur in the French media industry.

Both are also men of faith. Bolloré is a lifelong Catholic. Bonnassies, who did not find his Christian faith until his twenties, said he thought before his conversion that “believers were irrational people”, adding: “God, the Resurrection, the Virgin Mary — I found it crazy.” Yet it was logic, he said, that won him around: “The surprise was there were many rational reasons to believe in God.”

And here is the book’s argument summarized by the Sunday Times. It amounts to no more than this (this is my characterization.

We do not understand how the universe began or how life began.  If everything occurs by materialistic processes, what caused the Big Bang, and how did life originate? The most “rational” solution is a creator. 

And some excerpts from the laudatory review in the Times (why are they touting superstition?):

Science and religion have never been easy bedfellows. As Thomas Jefferson put it in 1820, priests “dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight”. Five centuries of scientific breakthroughs — from Galileo to Darwin to Crick and Watson — have eroded our belief in the divine.

But now, according to a new book, a “great reversal” is under way. Science, its authors argue over 580 pages, has come full circle and “forcefully put the question of the existence of a creator God back on the table”.

Good Lord: has the argument ever been off the table? William Lane Craig has been banging the drum about it for years. But I digress; here’s more:

In a striking challenge to the academic consensus, two French authors, Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies, argue that the latest scientific theories lead to only one logical conclusion: an all-powerful deity created the universe and all life within it.

. . . .Instead, the authors have written a critique of materialism — the theory that all reality, including our origins, thoughts and consciousness, can be explained solely by physical matter and physical processes.

The materialist narrative for the beginnings of the universe and life on earth is so full of holes, he and Bonnassies argue, that every modern scientific advance increases the strength of the case that a “creator” is the only rational explanation.

The authors insist that their book is not a religious one, or one touting the advantages of faith. No, it’s a critique of one of the underpinnings of science, materialism.

The authors’ ideas have received support from unexpected quarters. The renowned physicist Robert Wilson, who was jointly awarded the Nobel prize in physics for the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation, agreed to write the foreword to the book. “Although the general thesis … that a higher mind could be at the origin of the universe does not provide a satisfying explanation for me, I can accept its coherence,” he wrote. “If the universe had a beginning, then we cannot avoid the question of creation.”

Yes, but if God exists, how did He/She/They/It come into existence? Why terminate the regress of causes at the creator God instead of going back even further. After all, God is not simple, as Dawkins has emphasized, so how do an immaterial being of such complexity and power come about?

Here are the two main arguments described in the Times (my headings, indented matter from article).

The Universe:

For the past century, for example, scientists have known the universe is expanding. If stars and galaxies are always moving further apart, logic dictates, the universe must have started at a single point, in a state of immense density. In 1931 the Belgian theoretical physicist Georges Lemaître termed this the “primeval atom”. We now call it the Big Bang.

But if all matter originates from that single explosion, and materialism dictates there is nothing outside of matter, what caused the bang?

Evolution:

According to the theory of evolution, this incredibly sophisticated data storage system — 40,000 billion times more dense than the most advanced computer today — emerged from the primordial soup quite by chance. The authors write: “While we still do not know how that gap was bridged, or a fortiori, how to replicate such an event, we do know enough to appreciate its infinite improbability.”=

Finally, I find this bit pathetic:

Bolloré acknowledged that the book does not present proof of God’s existence. “You cannot prove it,” he said. “You have evidence for one theory — the existence of God. And you have evidence for the other one, which is the non-existence of God. The best you can do is to compare the two sides of the scale.”

But he said that many areas of science require as big a leap of faith as that demanded by faith in God. “We are all believers,” he said. “Believers in God believe, with some evidence — and believers in materialism, they believe in plenty of things which are a little bit weird.”

Perhaps surprisingly, the biggest critics of the French edition of the book have not been scientists, but priests. “Some theologians say we don’t want evidence of God because it would reduce the merit of faith,” he said. “‘We don’t want proof’, they say. ‘Because proof would mean that we don’t have faith.’”

Here we see that the authors offer only two alternatives: God or not-God, but the alternative is really materialistic processes that we do not understand but might with more work.  And faith in materialism or science is not at all the same thing as faith in religion, an argument I dispelled in Slate some years ago.

The rejection by believers of the need for evidence is what is most pathetic. Faith, some say, is based not on empirical evidence but on revelation or authority (priests, Bibles, epiphanies, etc.) alone. Yet when believers see something that looks like evidence, they glom onto it. That’s why books like this are always best-sellers, why two documented “miracles” are required for canonization of a saint, and why people flock to Lourdes to be cured.  It’s all because unexplained. cures and miracles count as evidence for God. So do books like Heaven is for Real!

And so we get “evidence” from unexplained origins—of both life and the Universe.  To the authors, both of these fit into to a combination of The Cosmological Argument (or “First Cause” argument) and the “God of the Gaps” argument.  Readers should know the problems with both of these, and if you don’t, simply look at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy or the relevant sections of Wikipedia.  Since we don’t know how the Universe came into being (i.e., what is the physics behind the Big Bang?), or how the first form of “life” originated, it’s foolish and impossible weigh ignorance against a belief in God—and not just God, but clearly the Abrahamic God— the god of both authors.

I have spent more than half my life dealing with these arguments, and will say just one more thing before I show a few of the Times readers’ comments. The existence of a creator God, especially of the Christian subspecies, should not be accepted simply because it’s hard at present for materialism to explain some things.  Instead, look to the Universe itself for positive proof of God: do we see signs of a loving, omnipotent creator God in the universe?

Carl Sagan discussed what evidence could count in favor of not just God, but the Christian God, as I do as well in Faith Versus Fact. But we don’t have any of that evidence. Why did God create so much of the Universe that is inhospitable for life? Why do little kids get cancers that kill them? Why do tsunamis and earthquakes happen that kill thousands of innocent people? These things cannot be explained rationally by positing a beneficent and omnipotent creator God.  In the absence of these explanations, and of positive evidence for God (e.g., Jesus coming back and doing real miracles documented extensively by film and newspapers, or, as Sagan noted, the stars arranging themselves to spell “I am that I am” in Hebrew), the best alternative is atheism, the view “there is no positive evidence for God.”  Thus the “god” side of the scales becomes lighter over time, continuing the trend begun when one after another “unexplainable” miracle or phenomenon was been explained by materialism. And of course physicists haven’t given up trying to understand the Big Bang, nor have biologists given up trying to understand how life originated.  Will the authors give up their thesis if one day, under early life conditions, scientists see a primitive form of life originating in the lab, or create a theory of how there could be cyclical universes or multiple Big Bangs creating multiple universes? I doubt it, for they are “men of faith”.

A few readers’ comments. The first one was upvoted the most:

And some more. (The readers are clearly smarter than the authors, though there are some believers in there, too.)

There are 1100 comments, so knock yourself out! As for the Sunday Times, well, they decided to present an argument for God without interviewing detractors.

Richard Dawkins stirs up things again in the Torygraph

September 27, 2025 • 9:15 am

I have to say this about Richard: he is fearless.  Of course he’s in a position to say what he wants and not lose much, though he is sensitive to erosion of his reputation, but that won’t stop him from speaking out. And one thing he will not apologize for is the claim shown in the Torygraph headline below, a headline guaranteed to raise the hackles of millions of gender activists. (By “women”, of course, he means “biological women”, not people who self-identify as women.)

Click the headline to read; you will go to a free archived version:

The quote comes from the book I discussed recently: the anthology The War on Science that I discussed yesterday. Richard’s contribution, which opens the volume, is particularly good.  We authors have gotten a lot of flak because we should have written about ideological erosion of science by Trump and the Right, instead of about incursions from the Left. We should have left the Left alone, say the blockheads.  So be it.  An excerpt from the Torygraph piece:

The slogan “trans women are women” is scientifically false and harms the rights of women, Richard Dawkins has said.

In a new book, the evolutionary biologist warns that scientific truth must prevail over “personal feelings” and argues that academic institutions must defend facts above emotion.

In The War on Science, Dawkins joins several scientists and philosophers contending that academic freedom and truth in universities was being stifled by diversity, equity and inclusion policies that promoted falsehoods under the banner of social justice.

“I draw the line at the belligerent slogan ‘trans women are women’ because it is scientifically false,” he said. “When taken literally, it can infringe the rights of other people, especially women.

“It logically entails the right to enter women’s sporting events, women’s changing rooms, women’s prisons and so on.

“So powerful has this postmodern counter-factualism become, that newspapers refer to ‘her penis’ as a matter of unremarked routine.”

. . . . “Both politics and personal feelings don’t impinge scientific truths and that needs to be clearly understood. I feel very strongly about the subversion of scientific truth,” he said.

“I think part of what’s happened is the move of academia towards postmodernism, which is pernicious, and probably does account for the current vogue for the nonsense lie that sex is a spectrum.

“I think part of what’s happened is the move of academia towards postmodernism, which is pernicious, and probably does account for the current vogue for the nonsense lie that sex is a spectrum.

. . . . “JK Rowling can look after herself, but you look at the way they hounded Kathleen Stock out of Sussex University, and it’s always women who suffer.”

At London Pride demonstration in 2023, Sarah Jane Barker, previously Alan Barker, told a crowd, “If you see a Terf punch them in the f—— face.”

Dawkins said: “I don’t think I’m unduly guilty of sexist stereotyping if I say such language is more typical of the sex that ‘Sarah Jane’ claims to have left that the other she aspires to join.”

The last statement is both judicious and true. Among trans people, it is largely the trans-identified men who perpetuate hatred and violence.  And that, of course, comes from men being more aggressive and domineering. \

There’s more, including quotes from Sally Satel, but you have the link above.

Matt Ridley discusses our anthology (and the wokeness of science) in The Spectator

September 26, 2025 • 11:30 am

In one of the most aggressive and misguided examples of “whataboutery” I’ve been involved with, quite a few people criticized Lawrence Krauss’s anthology The War on Science (in which Luana and I have an altered version of our Skeptical Inquirer paper), for we had the temerity to show that science was being injured by attacks coming from the Left. OMG! What we should have published, said the blockheads, was a book showing how the Right, instantiated by Trump’s attacks on universities and grants, was doing more damage to science.

And indeed, in the short term that may well be the case. But to exculpate the Left is ridiculous, especially because their attacks are not dependent on who is President. The “progressive” infection of science may last.much longer, especially since it’s being passed on from professor to student, and has now metastasized to many scientific journals and societies. “No, no!”, cried the miscreants, “You should have gone after Trump, and Trump alone!” Well, since this website has concentrated largely on the excesses of the Left, since I consider myself on the Left, readers already know the fallacies of this whataboutery. Everybody and their brothers, sisters, and comrades are already criticizing Trump’s attack on science, and I have been among them. But where else but in this book (and this website) will you find a compendium of criticism about how the Left harms science?

Enough said. I have paid little attention to the critics, for none of them have engaged with the book’s arguments. “Look!”, they shout, “There’s even a chapter by Jordan Peterson. That’s enough to make you throw the book in the fire.” Yes, I find the inclusion of Peterson unfortunate, and his message almost impenetrable, but you don’t damn an anthology because of one weird piece, or because you don’t like the politics of some of its authors. No, you must criticize its contents. 

At any rate, Matt ‘Ridley has just mentioned the anthology in The Spectator, and actually seems to like it (cue the attacks on Ridley’s politics).  But what really angers him is the Left-wing attacks on science, the very subject of the anthology.

You can read his original article here, but it’s paywalled. Clicking below will take you to a free archived version.

Ridley discusses several issues; I’ll concentrate on what he says about the book (not all that much) as well as the general “wokery” of science, one theme of the anthology that presumably got Ridley revved up:

My, how we all laughed. Thirty years ago the physicist Alan Sokal hoaxed a social science journal into publishing a paper ‘liberally salted with nonsense’ (in his own words) that ‘flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions’. Its title alone gave away the joke: ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.’

Little did we in the truth-seeking enterprise which is real science realise that verbose and vapid social deconstruction was coming for us too. In a new book, The War on Science, edited by the astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss, 31 scientists and scholars lament the corruption of their field by left-wing ideological nonsense. Whereas once a book with this title would have raged at the conservative right pushing creationism and sexism in the teeth of truth, now it is exposing the woke left pushing identity ideology and intersectionality at the expense of reason.

In 2022, Nature, at the pinnacle of the scientific establishment, published an editorial stating that it would refuse or retract papers that ‘could reasonably be perceived to undermine the rights and dignities of an individual or human group on the basis of socially constructed or socially relevant human groupings’. The editors went on to reassure readers that they would consult ‘advocacy groups’ before doing this, just as they once had to consult popes before denying that the Earth circles the sun. This was an open invitation to activists to censor science they did not like. Sure, scientists always had their prejudices, ideological biases and blind spots, but almost by definition regarded those as bad things to be minimised. Here now was a manifesto for deliberately injecting bias into science.

. . . But surely biology was safe, let alone chemistry and physics? How naive we were! Gender became the new front line. Journals were falling over themselves to declare sex a spectrum, despite the fact that all animals divide neatly into a sex with large, immobile gametes and a sex with small, mobile gametes – and there are no other sexes, just some rare developmental anomalies. Deviate from this new Lysenkoism by saying there are two sexes and you will be excommunicated.

Richard Dawkins once pointed out in a tweet that a mostly white woman had been pilloried for ‘identifying as black’, which seemed puzzling given that race is a spectrum in a way that sex is not. Why is it all right for a man to identify as a woman but not for a white person to identify as black? Just for raising the issue, he was retrospectively stripped of his humanist of the year award by the American Humanist Association. They accused him of implying ‘that the identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent, while simultaneously attacking black identity’.

. . . Hilariously, the ideologues have painted themselves into an awkward corner in their attempts to decolonise mathematics. They demand non-western slants on algebra and algorithms, which are words of Arabic origin, while rewriting exam problems to replace adding up grocery bills (which ‘carry the ideological message that paying for food is natural’) with calculating how many aboriginal people can fit in a tipi, which is patronising to the point of racism. One right-on mathematician admitted this change was insulting, but only ‘because indigenous people would not divide themselves in the way stated in the word problem. Relational and spiritual factors would dominate’. Meanwhile, New Zealand now requires schools to teach indigenous Maori ‘ways of knowing’ as equivalent to scientific ones. So creationism is fine if brown people do it?

. . . Many scientists continue to do good work unperturbed by this revolt against critical thinking. But the sheer volume of funding, publishing and attention that is being siphoned off into this pathology represents a massive opportunity cost. Grants are being spent, papers retracted, scientists sanctioned, hiring practices altered and peer reviews corrupted, while scientists are self-censoring to prevent their cancellation. Four-fifths of students say they self-censor, many more than at the height of McCarthyism.

. . . Science has always behaved like a cult to some extent, enforcing dogma and persecuting heretics, but it has grown far worse with wokery. Science as a philosophy is still great, but science as an institution is about as true to its philosophy as the church was under the Borgias, and as ripe for reformation.

I have crossed swords with Ridley before, in some critical review I wrote of one of his books (I can’t even remember what it was about), but I’ll cut him a break.  Not because he’s on our side, but because he’s right. I’ll let the blockheads go after hm because he doesn’t engage in “whataboutery” in this review.  Note that he doesn’t discuss the book’s contents much, but uses it as a springboard to vent his own take, which is what book reviews often do, and, said H. L. Mencken, was really the purpose of a book review.

Several books to read, and a NYT recommendation

September 22, 2025 • 10:00 am

I am a huge fan of Ian McEwan, and have read most of his novels. While the quality is variable, it’s always high, and books like Atonement (a great movie as well), Amsterdam, and The Cement Garden are world class. I expect he’ll win the Nobel Prize for literature.

Now the NYT reviews McEwan’s latest book, What We Can Know (click on cover below to go to the Amazon page), with reviewer Dwight Garner calling it the “best book [McEwan] has written in ages.” The book comes out formally tomorrow, and here’s a bit of the review:

Ian McEwan’s new novel, “What We Can Know,” is brash and busy — it comes at you like a bowling ball headed for a twisting strike. It’s a piece of late-career showmanship (McEwan is 77) from an old master. It gave me so much pleasure I sometimes felt like laughing.

McEwan has put his thumb on the scale. This is melodramatic, storm-tossed stuff. There is murder, a near kidnapping, a child hideously dead of neglect, multiple revenge plots, buried treasure and literary arson. Writers treat other writers’ manuscripts and reputations the way Sherman treated Georgia. No one is a moral paragon.

Civilization as we know it ends. A pair of scholars in 2120, risking death from roving predatory gangs, travel across what’s left of England in search of a long-lost, epoch-making poem titled “A Corona for Vivien.” They are the last, it seems, historians alive.

This can sound like a bit much, and perhaps it is. But below and beyond these (mostly sly) surface machinations is a different sort of novel, a quite careful one. It’s about what biographers owe their subjects. It’s about the nature of history. It’s about letters, journals, emails and the other things we leave behind.

It’s about the talented wives of certain literary men and their bright resentments and wars against misfortune. It’s about affairs and empty wine bottles and quail with mushrooms and A.I. and animals and how the best poets read their work aloud. The small things scrape against the large. This other book is inky and thinky, as the poet Frederick Seidel said of the offices of Partisan Review.

Some aspects of “What We Can Know” will put readers in mind of McEwan’s early novels, which helped give him the nickname “Ian Macabre.” But the novel this most resembles, its historical sensibility, its metafictional touches and its jumping back and forth in time, is his stately 2001 classic, “Atonement.”

That’s good enough for me, and I’ve already ordered it from our library via interlibrary loan (I no longer buy books as my bookshelves are full to the extent that I must put new books horizontally atop the vertical ones).

I’m on a kick now reading Booker Prize winners, and in the last couple of weeks I’ve polished off two of them, both of which I recommend highly: Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively (Booker winner in 1987), and Disgrace by John Coatzee (Booker winner in 1999). You won’t go wrong with either of these, though I suppose I’d give Lively’s book the edge.

When I run dry on novels to read, I go to lists of literary prizes, and I’ve found the Booker winners more reliable than Pulitzer fiction winners.

After these two, I have started a behemoth history book to read, one recommended by a friend:  Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age, by University of Chicago professor Ada Palmer. I’ve already read a wee bit, and believe me, I’ve never found a history book written in this style (informed but totally informal and lively, almost as if it were a text message).  After a spate of novels, I decided I needed some nonfiction.

So that’s what I’ve read lately, and again I recommend the two novels I just finished.

Now it’s your turn. What have you read lately, and what can you recommend?

Short (?) review: “Sex is a spectrum”

September 11, 2025 • 10:45 am

Reading time: Whatever. . .

You’ll probably guess from the title of this short (150-page) book by Agustín Fuentes (Princeton University Press) that I am not keen on its thesis, and you’d be right.  In fact, the thesis is nothing new, even if you have read Fuentes’s article about it in Natural History and Scientific American or the many attacks on the sex binary coming from woke but misguided people.  These attacks, which assert that sex is really a “spectrum”, have also been launched by Steve Novella at Science-Based Medicine,  the editors of Natural History, the Lancet, and other places that Luana and I discussed in our piece in Skeptical Inquirer (see our point #1).

In fact, it seems more common to see pieces attacking the sex binary than defending it, even though, in terms of biological sex—the binary of male and female, based on gamete type (big and immobile versus small and mobile)—happens to be true. As Dawkins and I (and others) have mentioned, it’s as close to a binary as you can get, with exceptions (“intersex” individuals) having a frequency of about 1 in 5600 or 1 in 6700, depending on how you define intersex. That is lower than the frequency of individuals born with extra or missing digits, but we don’t say that “humans lie on a digit spectrum”.

I won’t go into the numerous reasons why biologists in general see a sex binary in vascular plants and all animals; read Richard Dawkins’s eloquent exposition of the reasons here. Nor will I give a long review of Fuentes’s book, as a good critical one has already appeared, and Fuentes’s recycled arguments have been attacked by many of us. Let me just add that why this has suddenly become a big kerfuffle is not because any new biological facts have surfaced showing that animals actually have three or more types of gametes (they don’t), but because of the rise of gender ideology.

Fuentes wrote his book for the same reason that most others criticize the sex binary: because of the recent increase in the number of people who see themselves as not belonging to either sex, but lying outside the male/female dichotomy –or in between.  This is gender, though, and while people do have these feelings, some of which may even have a biological basis, it does not dispel the reality of the gamete binary, which biologists seized on as the “concept” of biological sex for two reasons. First, the two-gametes reality is sole binary true of all animals and vascular plants; and second, because the binary concept is also deeply explanatory, giving insight into things like sexual selection.  But because some people feel they’re not male or female, “progressive” scientists feel a duty to twist our view of nature so that sex becomes a spectrum. They may mean well, but they damage biology by misleading people about biological sex. They also damage biology by leading people to distrust it because the distorters demand that folks deny things that are palpably real.

And so Fuentes, though he feels the binary is “damaging” (his arguments are not convincing), actually does the damage himself. You can see his ideological motivation in the last two sections of the book, which deal respectively with why trans-identified males should be allowed to compete in women’s sports, and why we should not have bathrooms based on natal sex. (I happen to agree with the latter point but not the former.) But these are questions of politics and ideology, not biology.

So what is Fuentes’s argument? Again, it’s familiar. Sex as “enacted” in the real world of humans (note the concentration on humans) involve the 3 “Gs” (genitals, gonads, and genes), as well as physiology, hormones, reproductive leanings, and psychology (how one “feels”). These don’t always align perfectly, and because they don’t, sex is not binary.  But this is a straw-man argument, since he’s arguing against the biological binary based on gametes, and none of us have asserted that there is always a perfect match between chromosomes, genital morphology, self-concept, physiology, and gamete type (the concordance, however, is often very high).

Fuentes raises familiar and already-rebutted arguments: fish like wrasses and clownfish change sex as sequential hermaphrodites.  Bees have three types of castes, workers, queens, and drones. And so on and so on. But none of this refutes the sex binary. Fish, at a given time in their lives, produce either large or small gametes, and worker bees, as everyone with a brain knows, are females. Although their reproductive organs are underdeveloped, these organs are clearly female, and in fact some colonies of honeybees in South Africa have no queens: the normally “sterile” workers have fully developed female organs and lay parthenogenetic eggs without a need to be inseminated. Those colonies are 100% female.

Every example Fuentes gives falls into the gametic binary, and, as Bogardus’s review notes, Fuentes tacitly ACCEPTS a sex binary. Fuentes shies away from the words “male” or “female” (unless they’re in parentheses after “3G”), but instead constantly refers to “large gamete producers” and “small gamete producers”. Never does he refer to “intermediate gamete producers” or any other type of gamete producers. This is a tacit admission that sex, conceptualized through gamete type, is indeed binary.

As Bogardus said in his review (his bolding)

But there are strong reasons to deny that sex “comprises” multiple traits and processes. There is really only one trait that seems to be necessary and sufficient for being a male, namely having the function of producing a component with the function of producing sperm. And similarly for females, with regard to ova. To be “hormonally female” is to have hormone levels typical of the females of the species, but a male who has e.g. hormone levels typical of females of that species does not literally become a female in any sense of the word. Nor does he have multiple sexes, being both male and female.

Instead, what’s true is that there are many traits and processes that are linked to sex—there are a variety of sex-linked traits. But in order for these traits to be linked to sex, they must be distinct from sex. Fuentes is mistaken, then, to think that sex “comprises” multiple traits and processes: he’s confusing a multiplicity of sex-linked traits with sex itself.

Fuentes spends much of the book in a misguided quest to show that there aren’t really any biological differences between human males and females (or such differences are inconsequential), and so sex becomes a slippery concept. He never actually tells us how he defines “male” and “female”, perhaps because he thinks they don’t exist. Even differences in musculature and bones that mandate the creation of men’s vs. women’s sports, Fuentes suggests, have a social origin, perhaps based on differential training (“gendered training dynamics,” p. 143).

I can see that this is going to get long unless I bring it to a halt, and so I will. I’ll make one more point, involving how Fuentes contradicts himself—not for the first time in this book. Although he argues that any differences between men and women are “biocultural”, based on an interaction between nature and culture (he’s right for some traits), he also argues that it is imperative to take self-identified sex into account when doing medical or scientific investigations.  And that is right, too: some drugs have differential effects on the sexes because of their biological differences (whatever the source of those differences). But if biology is only part  of the reason for those differences, and sometimes a small one, shouldn’t we be dividing up research subjects not by biological sex, but by gender, culture, or even “lived experience”.  Imagine designing a medical study based on experience!

At any rate, I’m done. I did my due diligence in reading the book, even though I already knew everything Fuentes was going to say—because he’d said it before. I’ll add that it’s not only a tendentious book, but a tedious book. The writing is poor, droning on in a hybrid popular + academic style that is hard going.  Fuentes, for example, never cites one area without citing three. (Example on p. 135: “”These conditions represent complex interlacing of physiological, neurological, social, experiential, and individual processes.”) Over and over again you must slog through such sentences. The man needs to learn how to write popular scientific prose.

I’ll finish with the final paragraph of the review by Bogardus, who did much more due diligence than I (plus he’s a biologically-informed philosopher, good at pointing out and refuting muddled arguments):

Though Fuentes offers much sound and fury against “the binary view,” in the end it amounts to nothing: his thesis is either uncontroversially true or obviously false. Even worse, in tragic Shakespearean fashion, Fuentes sows the seeds of his own undoing, unwittingly supplying himself with premises sufficient to prove that the title of his book is exactly false: Sex itself is not a spectrum at all, but rather is binary.

The only thing I’ll add is that you don’t need to read this book if you already know about the “binary” controversy. Fuentes sheds no more light on it.

A review (not mine) of “Sex is a Spectrum” by Agustín Fuentes

September 3, 2025 • 10:15 am

This is not my review, thank Ceiling Cat, but it’s one I agree with. Although I’m doing so reluctantly, I’m reading Agustín Fuentes’s recent book Sex is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary. Its thesis is, well, pretty much what the title says, although, as you’ll see, the evidence supporting that thesis is nonexistent, at least for biological sex.  I’ve read about half of the short book, but then the review below, by Tomas Bogardus (a professor of Philosophy at Pepperdine University) appeared at Colin Wright’s Substack Reality’s Last Stand.  This has blessedly relieved me of the need to write my own review, since Bogardus says pretty much what I’d say given what I’ve read so far.  Although I haven’t yet finished the book, and may weigh in later, Bogardus’s review is thorough, accurate, and very critical. Although Bogardus works in philosophy, he knows the relevant biology, and, in addition, his philosophy training has helped him spot the logical errors in Fuentes’s book.

Sex is a Spectrum is, as you may have guessed, not really a work of science but one of ideology: an attempt to show people who feel nonbinary that nature justifies their feelings (this is what I call “the reverse naturalistic fallacy”). Note, though, that transsexual people almost invariably affirm the binary of biological sex, as they are born having one natal sex but attempt to change their appearance, behavior, and physiology to mimic those of the other sex.  This of course implies two sexes.  It is gender activism rather than sex activism that motivates efforts like Fuentes’s. And in his effort to show that animals and plants don’t conform to a biological sex binary, Fuentes gets himself tangled up in a ball of confusion about what he really means by “binary”, “spectrum”, and even “sex.”

You can read Bogardus’s review by clicking below, and I’ll give some excerpts (indented).


Excerpts (bolding is Bogardus’s):

What is “the Binary View”?

It’s clear that Fuentes means to target “the binary view.” But it’s unclear what the binary view is meant to be. The first possibility is suggested by the back cover, which says the book explains “why we can acknowledge that females and males are not the same while also embracing a biocultural reality where none of us fits neatly into only one of two categories.” So, perhaps this is what Fuentes means by “the binary view”:

  • Binary View 1.0: Some of us are clearly only male, or clearly only female.

Perhaps Fuentes means to deny this, and to claim that none of us is clearly male, or clearly female. But if Binary View 1.0 is what Fuentes means by “the binary view,” it seems hopeless to argue against it. For surely Binary View v.1.0 is true. I myself am clearly only male, for example. And so are at least some of the wild peacocks that roam my neighborhood. No doubt it’s true that many (all?) of our biological concepts admit of borderline cases. Nevertheless, at least some also admit of clear cases. “Male” and “female” are two examples. [JAC: remember, Bogardus is talking here about biological concepts; later in his review he deals with “disorders of sex determination”]

What Fuentes seems to be trying to express is that while some of us are male and others of us are female, nobody is “neatly” one or the other. Because, as he says on page 36, “bodies, physiology, and behavior are not so easily classified, and are queer indeed.” In other words, while I might be clearly only male, nevertheless, Fuentes thinks, at least some of my sex biology—some of my sex-linked traits—will be had by at least some females. This brings us to the second possible meaning of “the binary view.”

Bogardus gives two other interpretations of “the binary view”. The second is confused and wrong, but here’s the third:

  • Binary View 3.0: There are exactly two sexes: male and female.

If Fuentes thinks Binary View 3.0 is false, that would indeed be worth saying, and worth arguing for. That would engage some of the recent discussion in the literature as well as the popular culture. And this interpretation is supported by parts of the text, as we’ll see below. In the book, Fuentes seems to give reasons to think there might be more than two sexes, reasons having to do with mating types, reasons having to do with some birds, and reasons having to do with disorders of sexual development.

Let’s discuss these arguments in turn.

You can see the arguments in turn, but the easiest one to see through, and the dumbest one, is the “argument from birds”. Let’s see what Bogardus says:

 The argument from sparrows:

On pages 30 to 31, Fuentes reasons this way:

Like so many other animals, the patterns of how sex biology varies with bird species is dynamic and multifactorial: there are not simply two uniform sex types…. There are even some bird species with multiple ‘sex’ categories. The white-throated sparrow has some changes to its chromosomes that effectively produce four chromosomal types that have different plumages and a mating system wherein certain types are not compatible with others. So, while there are only two gamete-producing physiologies in the species, there are functionally four sexes in the reality of the actual mating system.

The idea seems to be that this species of sparrow features multiple sex categories, indeed that there are “functionally four sexes” in this species. And the reason is that, allegedly, males with a certain plumage are not reproductively compatible with females of a certain plumage.

First of all, there are only two biological (gametic) sexes in the white-throated sparrow, as everyone who works on it recognizes—and mentions in their publications.  There are, however, two color and pattern morphs of each of the two sexes. There is disassortative mating between the morphs, but it’s not complete, as Fuentes mistakenly says.  Regardless, this, and similar examples of different morphs of the sexes, do not refute the biological sex binary (based, again, on gametes); they just show variation within each of the two sexes.

Here’s where Bogardus’s philosophy expertise enters:

But does Fuentes really think that there are more than two sexes? On the one hand, it seems like he does. Recall that Fuentes says that mating types are often called “sexes,” and there are thousands of mating types. He says that there are some bird species with multiple “sex” categories. And he says that the binary view of sex “does not allow space” for people like Caster Semenya. Together, this seems to me like powerful evidence that Fuentes means to argue that there are more than two sexes. Sarah Richardson (2025, 437), in a recent review of Fuentes’ book, reads him as saying that “there are not only two sexes, and sex can most definitely change.” So, there’s at least one prominent ideological ally who hears Fuentes talk out of that side of his mouth.

But, out of the other side of his mouth, he tells a very different story. On the podcast Academics Write, published on June 19th, 2025, at the 9:25 mark, Fuentes says this about his book: “And so I’m not saying there’s [sic] more than two sexes—there are male and female, that’s how we’re talking about it. But male and female are not essential, distinct entities compared to one another. They’re typical clusters of variation. And within each of those typical clusters, there’s huge variation.”

What are we to conclude from all this?

Unfortunately, it seems me the best explanation is that Fuentes’ view is not clear even to himself, and that he vacillates between a controversial and implausible claim that there are more than two sexes, and the modest and uncontroversial claims that sex-linked traits are often shared among both females and males, and that sex-linked traits vary significantly among males and among females. That is, Fuentes conflates an interesting but false thesis with a trivially true thesis, retreating to the latter when the former is challenged. A motte and a bailey, one might say.

This conflation is the usual argument against the binary:  that because there is variation among individuals of a sex within species in some sex-related traits (e.g., penis length, breast size), and also among species in the way sex is determined or expressed (temperature in some reptiles, chromosomes in homeotherms, but in different ways in birds vs. mammals, haploidy vs diploidy in bees), there must be more than two sexes. But if you’re going after the gametic sex binary, which is how biologists conceive of the sex binary, this is a fallacious form of reasoning.  All of this variation fails to efface the stark fact that there are two types of gametes and no more: eggs and sperm. Although there are some hermaphrodites that make both, most animals have individuals with the reproductive equipment evolved to produce only sperm (males) or only eggs (females). There is no third type of gamete.

And this binary was not made up by biologists who are “transphobes” and want to erase people of non-standard gender: it is an observation that’s been made for well over a century and was clarified when eggs and sperm were discovered. As Richard Dawkins has elegantly pointed out, the gamete-based definition of biological sex is both universal and utilitarian: it holds in all species of animals and vascular plants, and explains a number of otherwise puzzling biological phenomena, like sexual dimorphism that arises from sexual selection.

Yes, of course the carriers of two types of gametes show intra-sex variation, but so what? What is remarkable is that variation is ubiquitous in the natural world—except for the types of gametes produced within most species (we are ignoring “mating types” in some simple organisms, though Bogardus covers that).

Fuentes also stumbles when he encounters sequential hermaphroditism:

What is a sex?

Let us turn now to the question of what a sex is, according to Fuentes. In this book, he seems to endorse a gamete-based account of males and females. On page 1, we read this:

“Imagine you are a fish called a bluehead wrasse… You are what we’d call female, so you produce eggs. There is only one very large member of your group, and they are the group male, so produce sperm.”

And on page 29 he moves seamlessly between these two descriptions:

“There are species [of reptiles] where females are larger than males…, others where males are larger than females…, and yet others where there is little or no size difference… …it’s likely that both competition between small-gamete producers… and environmental constraints on body size (for both small- and large-gamete producers) are involved.”

This happens again on pages 33-4:

“Similarly, there is a whole group of primates that challenges the expected roles of large- and small-gamete producers. Most primates live in big groups of several males and females and young, and others live in groups of one male and many females and young….”

So, it sure looks as though Fuentes admits that the sexes are defined in terms of gamete production: females are “large-gamete producers,” and males are “small-gamete producers.” One might think, then, that Fuentes would define having a sex more generally as the producing an anisogamous gamete-type (sperm or eggs).

And yet he does not do that.

What a pity that someone who is clearly intelligent has twisted up his neuronal wiring to deny what he really realizes!  Like the clownfish, the blue-head wrasse has sequential hermaphroditism: one sex can become another depending on age and social milieu: but there are always just sperm producers and egg produces. Two sexes, no more! And yet there are those benighted individuals, believe it or not, who think that this sequential hermaphroditism refutes the gametic binary. I pity them deeply.

As you see, I’m getting tired of repeating these arguments over and over again, so I’ll draw to a close.  What irks me the most is that this is not an argument about biology, it is an argument about semantics, and one that has already been resolved. It has been revived not because some new biological facts have appeared, but because gender ideology has surfaced. Ergo the desire of people (well-meaning though they may be) to change biology so it conforms to an au courant gender ideology.

And here I’ll leave you to read the review for yourself, and, later on, I’ll wearily drag myself back to the book.