The Free Press reveals the inner workings and biases of NPR

April 10, 2024 • 11:15 am

If you’ve listened to National Public Radio (NPR) in the past few years, what you’ve heard is basically a progressive, left-wing radio station, not a station that represents American diveristy of opinions and viewpoints. Several of my friends have canceled their subscriptions, even though they’re Democrats and consider themselves on the Left.

But NPR is also publicly funded to some extent. Although it claims that it gets less than 1% of its funding from the government (i.e., from taxpayers like you and me), The Hill notes that “NPR may receive little direct federal funding, but a good deal of its budget comprises federal funds that flow to it indirectly by federal law.”

Regardless, NPR is suppose to be a radio station that all Americans can listen to with profit, not a megaphone for progressive Leftism. Yet, according to this new article in the Free Press by Uri Berliner, the senior editor of NPR’s business desk (and still with the station!), NPR has not only tilted increasingly leftward, with a changing demographic, but has become more “white” as elitist listeners tune in while blacks (and conservatives) don’t listen much. Further, it has bought into stories that were later found dubious or even debunked, yet has never corrected itself. Right now subscriptions are falling, the local branches are laying off workers, and NPR’s future seems uncertain.

Click to read: I’ll summarize it briefly and give a few quotes. Note at the bottom that NPR has officially responded, and I’m unsure whether Berliner has a future at the institution.

First, the changing demographic of listeners:

For decades, since its founding in 1970, a wide swath of America tuned in to NPR for reliable journalism and gorgeous audio pieces with birds singing in the Amazon. Millions came to us for conversations that exposed us to voices around the country and the world radically different from our own—engaging precisely because they were unguarded and unpredictable. No image generated more pride within NPR than the farmer listening to Morning Edition from his or her tractor at sunrise.

Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.

By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.

An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.

Berliner then goes into three stories in which NPR took positions that ultimately seemed dubious or even indefensible; but in no case did it ever correct itself (three points below are my take):

1.) NPR glommed onto the idea that Trump colluded with the Russians during the 2016 election. No evidence supporting that came out, and NPR quietly dropped the story without any corrections.

2.) NPR poo-pooed the “Hunter Biden laptop story,” barely covering it at all because it didn’t believe the notion that Hunter Biden would use his dad’s name to advance himself. It turned out that, of course, he did. NPR never corrected itself.

3.) NPR bought big-time into the “wild virus wet-market” theory for the origin of COVID, dismissing the idea that the virus came from a leak in a lab in Wuhan, China. As time progressed, the lab-leak theory became more credible, and now, though we still don’t know for sure, the lab-leak seems more credible than the wet market. NPR, however, utterly rejected the lab-leak theory and hasn’t corrected its earlier insistence.

According to Berliner, after the death of George Floyd the station adopted a form of Critical Race Theory, even accusing itself of complicity in racism. Of course if any station is lily-white, it would be this station with its elitist and progressive listeners carrying NPR tote bags and driving Volvos. But it’s startling how quickly the issue of race came to dominate every aspect of NPR:

And we were told that NPR itself was part of the problem. In confessional language he said the leaders of public media, “starting with me—must be aware of how we ourselves have benefited from white privilege in our careers. We must understand the unconscious bias we bring to our work and interactions. And we must commit ourselves—body and soul—to profound changes in ourselves and our institutions.”

He declared that diversity—on our staff and in our audience—was the overriding mission, the “North Star” of the organization. Phrases like “that’s part of the North Star” became part of meetings and more casual conversation.

Race and identity became paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace. Journalists were required to ask everyone we interviewed their race, gender, and ethnicity (among other questions), and had to enter it in a centralized tracking system. We were given unconscious bias training sessions. A growing DEI staff offered regular meetings imploring us to “start talking about race.” Monthly dialogues were offered for “women of color” and “men of color.” Nonbinary people of color were included, too.

These initiatives, bolstered by a $1 million grant from the NPR Foundation, came from management, from the top down. Crucially, they were in sync culturally with what was happening at the grassroots—among producers, reporters, and other staffers. Most visible was a burgeoning number of employee resource (or affinity) groups based on identity.

They included MGIPOC (Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color mentorship program); Mi Gente (Latinx employees at NPR); NPR Noir (black employees at NPR); Southwest Asians and North Africans at NPR; Ummah (for Muslim-identifying employees); Women, Gender-Expansive, and Transgender People in Technology Throughout Public Media; Khevre (Jewish heritage and culture at NPR); and NPR Pride (LGBTQIA employees at NPR).

And I read this next bit with utter dismay. Along with the absence of viewpoint diversity in its programs, something that the station simply ignores when it comes up, they’ve bought into gender activism to the point where they can’t use the term “biological sex”! Oy! And of course in the Hamas/Israel war, the station is tilting towards Palestine, because that’s what progressives want to hear: Israel is the white colonialist oppressor. I myself have noticed this even on my short drives around Chicago. Bolding below is mine:

The mindset prevails in choices about language. In a document called NPR Transgender Coverage Guidance—disseminated by news management—we’re asked to avoid the term biological sex. (The editorial guidance was prepared with the help of a former staffer of the National Center for Transgender Equality.) The mindset animates bizarre stories—on how The Beatles and bird names are racially problematic, and others that are alarmingly divisive; justifying looting, with claims that fears about crime are racist; and suggesting that Asian Americans who oppose affirmative action have been manipulated by white conservatives.

More recently, we have approached the Israel-Hamas war and its spillover onto streets and campuses through the “intersectional” lens that has jumped from the faculty lounge to newsrooms. Oppressor versus oppressed. That’s meant highlighting the suffering of Palestinians at almost every turn while downplaying the atrocities of October 7, overlooking how Hamas intentionally puts Palestinian civilians in peril, and giving little weight to the explosion of antisemitic hate around the world.

The inevitable result is that people are tuning out and listening instead to the many podcasts on tap:

These are perilous times for news organizations. Last year, NPR laid off or bought out 10 percent of its staff and canceled four podcasts following a slump in advertising revenue. Our radio audience is dwindling and our podcast downloads are down from 2020. The digital stories on our website rarely have national impact. They aren’t conversation starters. Our competitive advantage in audio—where for years NPR had no peer—is vanishing. There are plenty of informative and entertaining podcasts to choose from.

Berliner offers a solution, which is to return to “traditional” journalism, but in the engaging way it used to. They need to broadcast more diverse viewpoints, perhaps even debates. Since NPR has a new CEO, businesswoman Katherine Maher, only 40, it might change course. I can’t tell enough about her to guess if she’ll change the direction of NPR’s broadcasting.

You may well ask yourself, as I did, “Why on earth does Berliner stay at such a dysfunctional station?” Well, maybe he’s hoping that Maher will effect a big change. But judging from his own narrative, buttressed with emails, names, and evidence, his tenure at NPR now seems to be one big tsuris. And he doesn’t explain why, given this large kvetch, he’s still with the organization.

Sadly, some liberals are dismissing this piece; after all, it’s in the “conservative” Free Press. As one reader wrote me:

A response to it from a friend, a fellow academic:

“This guy sounds like a disgruntled MAGA Republican boohoo.”

Liberalism is doomed!

*********

Now NPR has pushed back, and it’s not much of a response:

NPR’s chief news executive, Edith Chapin, wrote in a memo to staff Tuesday afternoon that she and the news leadership team strongly reject Berliner’s assessment.

“We’re proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories,” she wrote. “We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world.”

She added, “None of our work is above scrutiny or critique. We must have vigorous discussions in the newsroom about how we serve the public as a whole.”

A spokesperson for NPR said Chapin, who also serves as the network’s chief content officer, would have no further comment.

But there are also heated denials from NPR employees rejecting Berliner’s claims. Read the piece to see them. Still, the best way to judge whether NPR is doing what it should do is simply to listen. And, thank Ceiling Cat, you no longer have to listen to the uber-woke and deeply spiritual Krista Tippett, who was let go. As I always said about her, she was so moved by her own profundity that she often came close to tears. Just sayin’.

Now the ideologues are going after the nucleus as the CEO of a cell factory, a view supposedly supporting hierarchies and the patriarchy

March 28, 2024 • 9:45 am

There’s more DNA-dissing is going on, this time in a piece in Aeon arguing that it is bad for society and for biology to think of the cell as an assembly line of molecules controlled by a “boss” in the nucleus. The cell, after all, is more socialistic!

Author Charudatta Navare, whose short bio is given below after his name, advances his thesis that the cell is NOT an entity “controlled” from the top down by the capitalistic nucleus, as if the cell were a “factory” with its sweating workers—the contents of the cell—lashed by the whip of the nuclear DNA. To Navare, that’s simply an invidious capitalistic/patriarchal/classist metaphor. Instead, the “workers”, including everything in the cytoplasm like the ribosomes, mitochondria, vacuoles, vesicles, endoplasmic reticulum, and ribosomes, are independent entities with their own heredity, all cooperating in a genial manner to make the cell function smoothly. As Navare asserts, “the nucleus is only a tiny subset of the hereditary material.” The cell, it seems, is more like a collective farm than a car factory.

The message, which Navare repeats at length, is THE CELL IS NOT A HIERARCHY. The motivation for the misguided view that the Big Boss Nucleus controls the workers is, consciously or not, to read into nature the hierarchy of modern patriarchal society. To Navare, the hierarchical view of the cell not only buttresses a maladaptively structured society, but, most of all damages biology by distorting our understanding.

Navare’s big mistake is this: the nucleus, which contains the genes, really is the boss. Even the mitochondria, which replicate themselves and contain their own genes, interact intimately with the nucleus to perform a number of functions. (The mitochondria, as you may know, are derived from original endosymbiotic bacteria that have, though evolution, been integrated into the cell as an essential organelle. Chloroplasts, essential for photosynthesis, have a similar origin and interact with the nuclear in the same way.) But both of these organelles can function only with the help of nuclear genes. And they’re the sole exception to the notion that prganismal DNA is the recipe for the cell and the organism.

The rest of the organelles in the cytoplasm, then, ultimately derive from genes, as does the spatial organization of the egg that helps set off development. This is not to say that random factors, like chemical concentration in different parts of the egg, can influence development, but at bottom, yes, everything in the cell save the mitochondria and chloroplasts ultimately come from the DNA in the nucleus. Without the Nuclear Boss, the workers lose their jobs and the factory goes kaput. Figuring out how this all evolved, of course, is a difficult issue. But evolve it did, via changes in the DNA.

Click below to read the article in Aeon:

Here’s the thesis (Navare’s words are indenteed):

In short, the textbooks paint a picture of a cellular ‘assembly line’ where genes issue instructions for the manufacture of proteins that do the work of the body from day to day. This textbook description of the cell matches, almost word for word, a social institution. The picture of the cytoplasm and its organelles performing the work of ‘manufacturing’, ‘packaging’ and ‘shipping’ molecules according to ‘instructions’ from the genes eerily evokes the social hierarchy of executives ordering the manual labour of toiling masses. The only problem is that the cell is not a ‘factory’. It does not have a ‘control centre’. As the feminist scholar Emily Martin observes, the assumption of centralised control distorts our understanding of the cell.

A wealth of research in biology suggests that ‘control’ and ‘information’ are not restricted at the ‘top’ bu

t present throughout the cell. The cellular organelles do not just form a linear ‘assembly line’ but interact with each other in complex ways. Nor is the cell obsessed with the economically significant work of ‘manufacturing’ that the metaphor of ‘factory’ would have us believe. Instead, much of the work that the cell does can be thought of as maintaining itself and taking ‘care’ of other cells.

Why, then, do the standard textbooks continue to portray the cell as a hierarchy? Why do they invoke a centralised authority to explain how each cell functions? And why is the imagery so industrially loaded?

It’s capitalism and the patriarchy, Jack! But in fact, the textbooks make DNA the boss because it is the boss. But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself:

All of this coded information in the cytoplasm leads us to ask: why do modern textbooks, which are supposed to present the standard, well-accepted knowledge of the day, continue to portray the cell as hierarchical in structure? Why do science journalists continue to refer to the codes and programs of genes in the nucleus when discussing how life develops and evolves?

I believe that the hold of the centralised view comes from how it resonates with the human social order. The nucleus providing instructions and the cytoplasm performing the labour of ‘nurturing’ sounds ‘natural’ and even ‘obvious’ in a patriarchal society. The central nucleus ordering its ‘underling’ cytoplasm to actually carry out tasks sounds obvious in a class-stratified society.

. . .The reason we find centralised functioning everywhere is not necessarily because it is everywhere. It just appears to be everywhere because of the lens through which we view the world. When scientific narratives, using all the authority of science, project the social hierarchy onto nature, they can reinforce the same hierarchy as ‘natural’. The centralised model from cells to animal social groups suggests that everything in nature is centralised, and that centralisation works. The ‘truth’ about nature is influenced by our values, and this ‘truth’ can then play a role in doubling down and reinforcing the same social values in the world.

. . . I believe that the hold of the centralised view comes from how it resonates with the human social order. The nucleus providing instructions and the cytoplasm performing the labour of ‘nurturing’ sounds ‘natural’ and even ‘obvious’ in a patriarchal society. The central nucleus ordering its ‘underling’ cytoplasm to actually carry out tasks sounds obvious in a class-stratified society.

And this metaphor, says Navare, damages our understanding of biology. I can’t think of how, since scientists have been beavering away at understanding the cell, and I haven’t sees them impeded by a bad metaphor. Perhaps they have, but I can’t think of one example. Navare keeps saying that the view is an impediment, but gives no examples of how. Here are more of his lucubrations:

How science conceptualises the cell also gives us insight into how we think of scientific objectivity. We often think that, when values interfere with science, the quest for truth and accuracy is put at risk. Scientists are supposed to leave their values and beliefs outside their labs. However, research in feminist science studies suggests otherwise. One does not necessarily need to be free of values to do good science, but denying their influence undermines the quality of scientific work. Instead of denial, reflecting on values and biases would help researchers steer clear of the pitfalls. Self-reflection can help scientists identify how their values are shaping their science, and think of better experimental designs that could ‘catch’ their assumptions before they compromise results.

. . .But the trouble with doubling down on this kind of metaphor as a stand-in for science is that assumptions about how a cell ought to function prevent us from understanding how the cell really functions. What is more, when science projects social hierarchies onto the cell, it also reinforces the notion that social hierarchies are ‘natural’.

In fact, Navare says that there are other metaphors that could serve equally well:

. . .Unfortunately, the centralised and hierarchical metaphor, so pervasive in textbooks, is often the only one for the internal workings of the cell.

One alternative metaphor for the cell nucleus, I tentatively suggest, could be a ‘collaborative notebook’. The cell keeps this notebook, and all the cell’s components use it to keep track of their activities and help maintain the cell. The cell ‘writes’ in the notebook, writes in the ‘margins’ and ‘refers’ to its own notes. Cellular organelles sense each other’s needs and take ‘care’ of each other. While the ‘factory’ metaphor attributes control and information to the nucleus, the ‘nucleus as a collaborative notebook’ shows agency on the part of the cell. While the factory metaphor makes the cell seem obsessed with ‘production’, alternative metaphors can highlight the mutual aid among the cellular components and the labour of maintaining the cell.

Try as I might, I fail to see how the Notebook Metaphor is more helpful than the “factory”metaphor, but of course it fits right into the Kropotkin-esque tendency to see mutual helpfulness (one could also see it reflectiong socialism). But truth be told, I’m not that enamored of the factory metaphor, either. All I care about is how the cell works, and you can’t do that without appreciating the overweening effects of genes whose action produces almost everything in the cell, influences how the organism develops, and is, in the end, the result of the selection among genes. Every adaptive aspect of development, including cell structure and function, depends on adaptive changes in the DNA put in place by natural selection (this holds also for how the mitochondria and cytoplasm interact with nuclear DNA).

Here’s how Navare minimizes the effects of genes.

The nucleus, of course, does make some hereditary contribution, and we understand it in great detail. But the nucleus is only a tiny subset of the hereditary material. If we don’t even search for hereditary information in the egg cell – if we never describe that information as hereditary – we will keep propagating the idea that biological inheritance is restricted to the nucleus alone.

Now I’m not sure what he means by “hereditary material.” Yes, the mitochondria and cytoplasm do replicate themselves by fission (and duplication of their DNAz0, but none of the other organelles are self-replicating, or “hereditary” in that sense. The organelles and cytoplasmic constituents, like vacuoles and ribosomes, are made by recipes written in the DNA (ribosomes, for example, the site of protein synthesis,m are largely made of RNA sent out from the nucleus). Without the DNA coding for proteins, we have no enzymatic pathways, no means of constructing organelles, and no way of building up the constituents of a cell.

Now this is not to say that the construction of a cell or an embryo doesn’t require anything other DNA, but it does require the products of DNA. For example, how does a fertilized egg know which end is going to be the head end and which the tail? And given that, what about the back from front? (Once these are determined, of course, left versus right has already been specified.) It is because the mother’s DNA makes RNAs that are distributed asymmetrically in the egg, and those differential distributions of RNA, via the proteins they make, are what starts the anterior-posterior and dorso-ventral axes from forming. Now these RNAs are moved through the egg cell by microtubules, part of the “cytoskeleton”, so the microtubules must also be there in the egg. But ultimately, it’s the DNA that contains the recipe for these microtubules—and of course the axis-forming RNA.

And all of this has evolved by natural selection causing the differential proliferation—of genes. In the end, everything save some parts of the mitochondria and chloroplasts, is the product of evolution, and that means of changes in DNA. In both evolution and development, it’s DNA all the way down. Even the response of an organism to its environment, like cats growing longer hair in the winter, is an evolved response based on changes in genes in the DNA. The environment is the cue, but the response lies in the genome.

One more example of gene-dissing:

We are told that the genes contain blueprints to make proteins. However, genes do not contain all the information needed to make proteins. They only specify a one-dimensional protein chain; the three-dimensional structure that the proteins take, which is vital for their function, is determined by the cellular environment as well. Further, the way proteins behave also varies with where they are in the cytoplasm. The genetic ‘information’, on its own, is nowhere near enough for the cell to function.

No the proteins largely fold on their own once they are made. But does Navare not realize that the information that makes the linear structure of a protein into a three-dimensional structure rests largely already in the linear arrangement of amino acids, which creates the linear structure of a protein? Once that’s made, the proteins largely fold spontaneously into the appropriate three-dimensional structure, which is of course crucial for enzymes to work and proteins like hemoglobin to function. But without the correct linear structure, specified by the DNA, the right spontaneous folding won’t happen. So again the DNA is largely the boss, and has evolved to produce proteins that fold up the right way. The DNA is even more bossy because sometimes proteins are helped in their folding, or retain their folding, through their interaction with enzymes. What are enzymes? Proteins made by DNA. Again, it’s DNA all the way down.

That aside, Navare manages to get in a timely word for how DEI can help our understanding as well:

Science is undoubtedly a human endeavour. The feminist philosopher Donna Haraway describes science as a conversation between partial perspectives that each individual gets from the vantage point of their position. As Just’s science shows, people with different life experiences might have different perspectives and may ask different questions. [JAC: E. E. Just, one of the only well known black scientists working in the early 20th century, made notable contributions to understanding the cell.] Admittedly, the connections between scientists’ backgrounds and their work are not always so direct. But the social position of scientists can still serve as one of the factors that influence their work. We often say science is self-correcting. We think that science changes its views when new information comes to light. But this new information doesn’t emerge from a vacuum. It doesn’t emerge only from new techniques. It is also generated when diversity and representation are important in their own right from the perspective of equity, diverse perspectives would benefit science most of all. Objectivity is not an individual burden but a collective one. While diversity and representation are important in their own right from the perspective of equity, diverse perspectives would benefit science most of all. Objectivity is not an individual burden but a collective one.

And clearly class has conditioned our view of the cell as well:

Historically, the majority of scientists have been male, upper class, and belonging to the dominant castes and races. It is possible that the social position of scientists helped them relate to the notion of a nucleus that continues discharging instructions while taking for granted the knowledge and skills required in actually doing the work. The Nobel laureate David Baltimore described genes as the ‘executive suite’ and the cytoplasm as the ‘factory floor’. The executive suite appears more valuable and deserving of more remuneration, while the toiling masses on the factory floor are thought to be merely executing the instructions, undervaluing the wealth of explicit and tacit knowledge and skill.

Poor Baltimore, bamboozled by a view of the cell. I guess it was all the dosh that comes with a Nobel Prize that has warped his viewpoint.

There’s a feminist point of view, too, one that presumably sees the cell as more cooperative than a patriarchy would make us think:

Science is often described as objective and value-free, but philosophers of science have pointed out that values can guide the questions that scientists ask, the hypotheses they make, and the way they interpret their results. The field of feminist science studies, in particular, has called into question the sole role of the nucleus where heredity is concerned.

. . . . How science conceptualises the cell also gives us insight into how we think of scientific objectivity. We often think that, when values interfere with science, the quest for truth and accuracy is put at risk. Scientists are supposed to leave their values and beliefs outside their labs. However, research in feminist science studies suggests otherwise.

There are no references for either of these statements. My own view is that we need to draw scientists from throughout society (giving everyone equal opportunities to suceed), but concentrating on merit, which also includes the ability to “think outside the box”. That said, with one exception I haven’t seen fruitful sex-, class- or race-specific ways of approaching biology. The one exception my feeling that women evolutionists helped us concentrate more on female preference as opposed to male traits in sexual selection.

Finally, Navare issues a dire warning of the dangers inherent in a metaphor that, in the end, is only a metaphor. (Bolding is mine.)

If we are unable to conceive of the cell, the basic unit of organisms like ours, without coercive hierarchies, we will never fully appreciate the complexity of nature. If we fail to imagine society without a centralised authority, we will find it difficult to understand or empower the oppressed. Unless we reflect on our assumptions, our science will be loaded with so many landmines it may never unravel all the mysteries of life.

In the end, Navare manages to connect the “factory” view of the cell with oppression in society. We can only free workers from their chains if we free our view of the cell as having a DNA Boss. This, of course, is music to the ears of “progressives”.

Sorry, I can’t agree. If you can find one example of how our understanding of life has been impeded by the “factory” metaphor—which after all isn’t something that biologists hold in their heads as a controlling mantra while they do research—do let me know.

The journal Cell endorses the view that sex isn’t binary

March 17, 2024 • 10:00 am

In a scientific journal, especially one as prestigious as Cell, publication of a paper is a kind of endorsement of its content, for the paper has to be vetted for accuracy and cogency. This is why I say Cell “endorses” the view of the paper below, which maintains that sex isn’t binary, and in fact that the very concept of “sex” is incoherent, harmful, and should be jettisoned. This is clearly an invited paper, but the standards of accuracy and rigor should still apply. They don’t.

What makes me even more sure that Cell endorses this message is that the journal itself is woke and rejects the sex binary in instructing authors (see below). Plus the article is part of a series of five papers in the journal under “Focus on sex and gender” (May 14), all of which reflect gender activism. In rejecting the sex binary, both via this article and in its own behavior, Cell is rejecting science in favor of ideology. That’s very sad, but it’s what’s happening—and not just in biology. The ideological camel is sticking its nose into the tent of science—and actually, the whole head is now inside.

This article was written by Beans Velocci, assistant professor of History and Sociology of Science and Core Faculty in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. There’s little doubt that its motivation is ideological because Beans goes by “they/them” and specializes in research that buttresses the thesis below. You can see Velocci’s c.v. here.

You may read this short (3.5-page) paper by clicking on the headline below, or reading the pdf here.

First, here’s how Velocci tells us that the journal itself doesn’t agree on a scientific definition of sex:

Some scientists are already contending with this problem. Cell itself has taken steps in that direction: the author guidelines for submission include a note addressing the multiplicity of sex. “[T]here is no single, universally agreed-upon set of guidelines for defining sex,” the guidelines point out. “‘[S]ex’ carries multiple definitions” including genetic, endocrinological, and anatomical features.

Contributors should therefore reduce ambiguity by specifying their methods for collecting and recording sex-related data to “enhance the research’s precision, rigor, and reproducibility.” The Cell guidelines are aligned with a broader conversation that names increased precision when talking about sex as a solution to these problems.

Yes, but one definition is far more universally agreed on than others, at least among biologists (last time I looked, Cell was a biology journal). But of course if researchers don’t mean natal sex when specifying “males” and “females”, then they are obliged to tell us how they recognize people. After all, if it’s solely via “self-designation”, then we have to be careful. Even so, Cell could have said this the way I just did.

Here are the main problems with Velocci’s paper:

It conflates sex differentiation, sex determination, and the definition of sex
It argues, wrongly, that no progress has been made in understanding the nature and definition of biological sex
Its argument is ideological rather than scientific, yet is given the trappings of science
It argues that the binary nature of sex, which the author rejects, somehow erases transgender and nonbinary people
And, as usual, its supposed examples that make sex nonbinary, like the long clitoris of the hyena, are wrong. But where are the clownfish? Send in the clownfish!

Since the whole paper is motivated by ideology (and by now you should know what that ideology is), here are a few quotes to demonstrate the gender-activist underpinnings. Binary sex is a tool of white supremacy, for one thing!

In the present, this means that sex—a key research variable in the life sciences, not to mention its role in structuring our everyday lives—is not a singular and stable entity. This has real, practical ramifications. On one hand, it introduces a tremendous lack of specificity and rampant imprecision to scientific research; on the other, it fuels ongoing arguments about the purportedly biological reasons that transgender (and especially nonbinary) people are not deserving of rights or do not even exist.

This of course is nonsense. The argument that sex is binary, and defined by whether you produce small mobile gametes (sperm in males) or large immobile gametes (eggs in females) has no bearing at all on whether people who are transgender or nonbinary deserve equal rights. Of course they do. (There are a very few exceptions for trangender people involving things like athletics, incarceration, or rape counseling.) Further, both transsexual and nonbinary people are, biologically, either male or female, even if they feel like they’re a mixture of both, a member of their non-natal sex, or something else.

But wait! There’s more:

Binary sex, too, continued to structure day-to-day life throughout the United States and Europe, with science serving as justification for a whole array of patriarchal and white-supremacist social arrangements. The point is this: even as scientific inquiry produced endless evidence that sex was neither straightforward to identify nor binary, sex continued to function as a foundational classification system for science and everyday life.

But the facts are the fact, even if they’re misused by bigots to denigrate people. As Steve Pinker has pointed out, we don’t say that architecture itself (or chemistry, for that matter) are bad and should be ditched because Nazis used them to construct gas chambers. But wait! There’s more:

We live in a social world that is fundamentally structured around the idea that sex is a binary, biological truth. Scientists are therefore constantly conditioned to ignore anomalies that do not fit into that scheme. Precision and rigor are incredibly important. They’re also not enough to counter hegemonic social forces.

Here Velocci argues that scientists ignore anomalies in sex (e.g., intersex or other conditions that affect secondary sexual traits) because we’re conditioned by the sex binary. But Velocci has spent the whole paper before this arguing that there is no agreement on the definition of sex, so how can Velocci claim that the world is structured around the sex binary? At any rate, I don’t understand what Velocci means by saying that the world “ignores anomalies”. They are the subject of a huge activist literature as well as an extensive medical literature.

One more:

Questioning fundamental truths is, in its most aspirational form, the point of any knowledge-producing enterprise. Imagine what we might find out if we were to let go of a category that hundreds of years of history demonstrates to be more useful for maintaining social hierarchies than for generating scientific knowledge.

This last point not only argues that we hold onto the false sex binary because it helps reinforce the social hierarchy (e.g. “transphobia”, white supremacy, and so on), but also that it impedes the acquisition of scientific knowledge. That’s a lie, of course: we wouldn’t know about sexual selection, parental care, etc. without the binary sex definition. Finally, Velocci tells us that we should just deep-six the entire category of sex.

Here’s another of Velocci’s arguments for dumping the category (but then what do we replace it with? Nothing?):

The answer to the question “What is sex?” is, in both theory and practice, just about everything, and therefore also nearly nothing. This exercise demonstrates that sex is an incoherent category, one that has perhaps outlived its use.

Another:

Paisley Currah noted in his recent book on government sex classification, “is what a particular state actor says it means.”

So, too, for scientific approaches to sex—because it is so many things at once, all we can say for sure about what sex is is what a given scientist does with it. This is not merely a historical quirk but a use of sex that persists into the present. The term “sex” has collapsed entire constellations of traits and processes into one point. As a result, it functions as a nearly universally accepted research variable with little consistency in its conceptual definition, and less in its usage.

I’m not really going into the argument for why sex is binary in all animals and plants, with exceptions being only in groups like algae and fungi. You can read or hear the arguments for it by Colin Wright, for example here and here, or read Alex Byrne’s new book Trouble With Gender. But if you’ve been reading this website, you’ll already know the arguments. In humans, only one person in 5600 (.018%) is intersex and doesn’t fit the binary. Even so, such people are not considered members of a third sex (see Alex Byrne on this issue here). All I’ll say are two things:

First, Velocci maintains that sex is a gemisch of different things: hormones, chromosomes, secondary sexual traits like genitals or breasts, physiological phenomena like menstruation, and differential behavior like parenting and psychology. To prove that, Velocci asks the students in class, “What is sex?”, and their answers, written on the board, look like this.

Figure 1. Diagram of student-provided responses to the question, “What is sex?”

But so what? Velocci hasn’t given them the reason why most biologists define sex by gamete type, which is not a simple argument that can be grasped instantly. The figure shows only that sex determination and differentiation involve a lot of stuff, both upstream (incubating temperature affects sex in some turtles, and of course there is the societal determination of sex in those fricking clownfish) and downstream (most of the other traits on the chart). Like all aspects of an organism, the genetics, morphology, and physiology of traits are complicated. The figure above, as I’ve noted, conflates the definition of sex, the determination of sex, and the differentiation of organisms based on sex.

Second, Velocci implies repeatedly that all the work of scientists over the centuries has not led to any increased understanding of sex. Apparently biologists have vacillated among chromosomes, gametes, hormones, and genitals, and other stuff but in the end. . . no new understanding. This is perhaps the most ridiculous thing that this sweating professor is trying to say. After going through how sex was regarded for the last two centuries or so, Velocci says this (note the ideological slant as well):

So, too, for scientific approaches to sex—because it is so many things at once, all we can say for sure about what sex is is what a given scientist does with it. This is not merely a historical quirk but a use of sex that persists into the present. The term “sex” has collapsed entire constellations of traits and processes into one point. As a result, it functions as a nearly universally accepted research variable with little consistency in its conceptual definition, and less in its usage. This does not make for accurate or reproducible science. As several scientists have pointed out, these contemporary uses of sex—simultaneously attached to an oversimplified binary, yet in practice depending on a vast, rarely analyzed multiplicity—actually make it harder to understand biological variation. There are also human costs: a broader cultural idea of “biological sex” as binary, imagined to be backed by science, is routinely deployed to exclude trans and intersex people and indeed anyone with bodily characteristics that do not fit neatly into male and female norms. The status quo, built on the history sketched above, therefore generates unsound research results that falsely uphold cis- and heteronormative assumptions.

But just because ideas, concepts, and knowledge change over time doesn’t mean that the object of study is elusive, ambiguous, or incohent. As Alex Byrne said in the link above (which uses the same diversion of historical change):

Naturally one must distinguish the claim that dinosaurs are changing (they used to be covered only in scales, now they have feathers) from the claim that our ideas of dinosaurs are changing (we used to think that dinosaurs only have scales, now we think they have feathers). It would be fallacious to move from the premise that dinosaurs are culturally constructed (in Clancy et al.’s sense) to the conclusion that dinosaurs themselves have changed, or that there are no “static, universal truths” about dinosaurs. It would be equally fallacious to move from the premise that sex is culturally constructed to the claim that there are no “static, universal truths” about sex. (One such truth, for example, is that there are two sexes.) Nonetheless, Clancy et al. seem to commit exactly this fallacy, in denying (as they put it) that “sex is…a static, universal truth.”

Here, for example, are some of the things that we now know from using a definitional binary for “biological sex”

The binary is useful in all animals and vascular plants. No other definition of sex holds for almost the entirety of the species we know. The binary is thus, except for a few groups. universal.
Why natural selection has resulted in a sex binary rather than a single self-reproducing sex or in three or more sexes. No matter what produces sex, be it environment, genes, or chromosomes, the end result is always two of them
The binary has utility. Without it, we cannot begin to understand how sexual selection works. And sexual selection has resulted in the following phenomena, which we pretty much understand

Sexual dimorphism in appearance (why males are most often the aggressive and ornamented sex
Sexual dimorphism in behavior (why, in humans, are males more often the risk-takers, why females are more interested in people than things, and why males compete for females (seahorses are the exception that proves the rule
Why organisms care more for their relatives than for unrelated conspecifics
Why females are more often the caregivers of their children

I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point.

In the end, as we wade through all Velocci’s unsound but familiar arguments, we have only casuistry motivated by ideology. Velocci’s intent is to show that because some humans feel as if they’re not male or female, or feel that they’re members of the sex other than their natal sex, then sex in nature must reflect these human feelings. This is what I call the “reverse naturalistic fallacy”, which can be defined as the view that “whatever we see as moral or good in humans must be seen in nature as well.”

There’s even a section of the paper called “other ways of knowing”, which argues that scientists should partner with those in the humanities, including queer studies, and this partnership is the way forward:

Many of the scientists currently pushing for critical thinking about sex are engaged with STS [science and technology studies] scholars—many of us humanists and social scientists coming from disciplines like history, anthropology, and sociology, and fields like Indigenous studies, Black studies, and queer studies. We in STS are poised to offer life scientists additional conceptual and practical ways forward. Knowing the history of science is, of course, part of this equation: it shows us that knowledge production of all kinds (including the history of science!) is an iterative process, where what we know is always changing.

Well, make of that what you will, but I’d maintain that, like the definition of “species”, the definition of ” biological sex” is the purview of biologists. Yes, philosophers can help us think more clearly, and historians can tell us about the history of studies of sex, but I don’t know how indigenous studies, Black studies, or queer studies can contribute much to a concept that, in the end, is about biology. The fact that biology is thrown into a gemisch with “studies” disciplines only serves to show how ideological Velocci’s argument is. As Alex Byrne (a philosopher who knows his biology) said of the American Scientist paper he reviewed, this Cell paper is “rubbish”, and shame on the journal for publishing it. There is no place for catering to ideological currents in a serious scientific journal, for reports about empirical discoveries should remain “institutionally” neutral.

Now, do I have to go through the other papers in Cell‘s Panoply of Horrors? If not, who will? Or should we just ignore them? That doesn’t seem wise since gender activism is infecting science in a big way, and few people criticize it. If dumb arguments keep being made over and over again, then it seems wise to refute them over and over again.

_____________

Velocci, B. 2024 The history of sex research: Is “sex” a useful category? Cell, online, May 14,2024. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2024.02.001

Colin Wright corrects P. Z. Myers about the sex binary

February 18, 2024 • 9:20 am

For a considerable time, blogger and biology teacher P. Z. Myers has been attacking the sex binary (e.g., here and here), arguing that because characteristics used to recognize sex—”secondary sexual traits”— aren’t binary (e.g., chromosome constitution, genital configuration, body color and so on), sex itself therefore can’t be binary. Here’s are two specimens of Myers’s arguments, which also show their ideological underpinning:

It should be obvious that you cannot define people by their gametes. If this were true, there would be no debate about trans participation in sports: the only effect of sex is to specify which of two flavors of gametes they produce, and the only sports where it would matter are those that are carried out in a petri dish between single cells. But no! Everyone is aware that sex contributes to all kinds of differences beyond their gametes. The whole problem is that we KNOW that there are far-reaching developmental changes that occur after fertilization and as a consequence of sex differences, which are both more subtle and more complex than the anti-trans contingent wants to allow.

. . . Somehow, an awful lot of biologists study sexual behavior — like lekking, or sexual displays, or fidelity, and on and on — that don’t necessarily involve sperm collection or measuring ovulation or that kind of thing. It is absurd to insist that only gametes define sex. I recognize spider sexes by the morphology of their palps, and by their differences in behavior, not gametes. I see the birds flying outside my window, and I discriminate sexes by color, primarily. To say that biologists have better things to do than study gender is ridiculous. Every biologist who looks at the plumage of birds or watches the courtship of spiders is studying a phenomenon far removed from basic gamete formation yet is an indispensable, unavoidable, intrinsic consequence of sex in that species…and the animal isn’t getting a semen count before engaging in it.

I’ve explained before the fundamental error here: the conflation between defining biological sex and recognizing biological sex (we encounter the same issue when defining versus recognizing biological species). The definition of biological sex is based on gamete size and mobility, and those are binary: you produce either eggs or sperm, and which developmental system you have for producing those gametes makes you either a male or a female. There is no third type of gamete, ergo no third sex. Secondary sexual traits, however, need not be binary.

This is not, as some activists imply, a definition that nefarious and transphobic biologists have concocted to somehow erase folks of nonbinary gender. Rather, it’s a fundamental definition that holds throughout animals and plants, and one that helps us make sense of an enormous amount of biology and evolution. Sexual selection, for example, cannot be understood without knowing about the differential investment the two sexes make in gametes of different size

But I’ll let Colin Wright, who’s just published a corrective of Myers’s errors, give a better explanation of the situation. Wright was disturbed that after he gave a really good talk on the sex binary (here), his lecture was praised by Richard Dawkins, one of many well-known evolutionists that Myers disdains. Here are Richard’s tweets (note that Scientific American also buys into the idea that the sex binary is a myth):

Superbly clear & totally correct lecture by Colin Wright @SwipeWright. There are only 2 sexes & they're defined by gamete size. Convoluted attempts to deny binary sex are like Ptolemaic epicycles.https://t.co/LS3PG54JBi

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) January 30, 2024

This ridiculous article (shame on the once-great Scientific American) ignorantly misunderstands the nature of the sex binary: “Actual research shows that sex is anything but binary”.

Sex is not defined by chromosomes, nor by anatomy, nor by psychology or sociology, nor by…

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) January 30, 2024

Myers then went after both Dawkins and Wright for their supposed misunderstandings of sex and their nefarious view of sex as binary. Colin, disturbed by such apparently willful misunderstanding, just published a correction of Myers’s biology on Colin’s website Reality’s Last Stand. It’s the equivalent of a huge slap on Myers’s knuckles by the Ruler of Truth. Click on the headline below to read, and I’ll give a few excerpts (thanks to the many readers who sent me this link):

Excerpts:

. . . as gender ideology gained a foothold within the atheist movement, the brains of many prominent and once-rational figures began to melt. Philosopher Peter Boghossian has poignantly characterized this shift among Left-wing intellectuals from being quick to point out the limits of their knowledge to a tendency to pretend to not know what is undeniably known.

This trend is exemplified by Myers, as I will illustrate.

Recently, Richard Dawkins shared on 𝕏 the lecture I delivered at the Genspect conference in Denver, CO, last year, titled “The Sex Binary: What It Is and Why It Matters.” Dawkins praised my talk as “superbly clear & totally correct,” and reaffirmed the reality of the binary nature of sex. Following this, gender activists bombarded Dawkins with absurd articles challenging the binary concept of sex, including a particularly misleading piece in Scientific American titled “Stop Using Phony Science to Justify Transphobia,” which asserts that “Actual research shows that sex is anything but binary.”

In response to this onslaught of dubious science, Dawkins countered the article directly: “This ridiculous article…ignorantly misunderstands the nature of the sex binary.” He went on to underscore the important distinction between how sex is “determined” versus how it’s “defined” in biology that I outlined in my talk.

At this point you should listen to Colin’s 35-minute talk, if you haven’t already, and then proceed. He begins with how the sex binary helps us understand reverse sexual dimorphism (rare cases in which males help gestate young or in which the females rather than the usual males are the ornate and decorated species):

. . . . how do we know that male seahorses are the ones that gestate young and give birth? Or that in northern jacanas (J. spinosa), it is the females who are larger, more ornate, territorial, and exhibit less parental care than males? This knowledge stems from understanding that male and female are categories that exist independent of mere morphology and behavior.

Myers makes an uninformed argument:

Somehow, an awful lot of biologists study sexual behavior — like lekking, or sexual displays, or fidelity, and on and on — that don’t necessarily involve sperm collection or measuring ovulation or that kind of thing. It is absurd to insist that only gametes define sex. I recognize spider sexes by the morphology of their palps, and by their differences in behavior, not gametes. I see the birds flying outside my window, and I discriminate sexes by color, primarily.

Myers could not be any more confused here. How does he recognize that it is typically males who form leks, or that males often display more elaborate mating behaviors and exhibit less sexual fidelity? This knowledge comes from studying these species and correlating these behaviors with the type of gametes an individual produces. Once we discover that males of the Vogelkop superb bird-of-paradise (Lophorina niedda) possess highly decorative plumage and engage in elaborate sexual displays, we no longer need to continuously verify this. We know it’s the males because we learned that only those with decorative plumage and elaborate sexual displays in this species produce sperm.

However, Myers insists that defining an individual’s sex based solely on gametes represents an “extreme reductionist” approach, and suggests we should consider “all the other valid signals they openly display.”

Dawkins is just being an extreme reductionist to the point he’s making himself and his position look silly. Go ahead, all you reactionary biologists, rant about how there can be only two true sexes because people have some cells that are almost never seen in public, in defiance of all the other valid signals they openly display. Better biologists will go on recognizing all the factors that define sex without your self-imposed, narrow-minded blinders.

And then, very concisely, Wright summarizes the problems with Myers’s criticisms:

The core and critical flaw in Myers’ argument for using other traits to determine the sex of an individual is that these traits are only reliable indicators of sex in species where we already know which individuals are males and females, based on their gametes. In humans, we associate breasts with females and facial hair with males because adult human females typically develop breasts and adult human males tend to grow facial hair. But how would Myers propose to identify males and females in a newly discovered species without any prior knowledge of their secondary sexual characteristics?

Consider a hypothetical new mammal species with some individuals small and blue and others large and brown. Since we know mammals are anisogamous (i.e., reproduce via fusion of a sperm and an egg), we can be as certain as possible that this species also exhibits males and females. But how do we determine which is which? Should we assume the blue ones are males and the brown ones females, as is the case with blue groper fish? But in blue gropers the males are large and the females are small. Should we therefore consider the blue individuals of our new mammal species female because they are small? But in spiders the males are smaller than the females, suggesting perhaps the small individuals should be considered males?

Do you see the absurdity of the approach? We know human males tend to be hairier, male blue gropers are blue, and male spiders are usually smaller, because being male is a trait independent of hair, color, or size. What unites these males is the type of gamete they have the function to produce. That is what makes them male.

Thus, the only way we can know which individuals of our new species are the males and which are the females is to find out which individuals produce sperm and which produce eggs. The. End.

Myers has to understand this, but he is too afraid to tell the truth.

And that’s about all there is, and all ye need to know. The last line implies that Myers understands that there really are two sexes, but is afraid (presumably because he’d be a “transphobe”, which is what he calls those who accept the sex binary) to say it. I can’t judge whether this is the case, because I won’t try to psychoanalyze Myers. But I can say that he’s distorting a biological definition that’s held for well over a century, and is used because it is not only true, but also gives us a deep understanding of biology and evolution. As I’ve always said, recognizing the binary nature of sex should not for a second demean those who are of nonbinary gender, or people who become transgender. The truth is the truth, and to impose your ideological preferences on nature is to commit what I call the reverse naturalistic fallacy: the bogus claim that what be ideologically palatable must also be seen in nature.

Our new paper in Skeptical Inquirer on the ideological subversion of biology

June 20, 2023 • 9:00 am

The free link to a new paper by Luana Maroja and me in Skeptical Inquirer has now appeared, and you can access it by clicking the screenshot below. It’s the cover story and is about 9300 words long (I am unable to furnish “reading times”!). It’s also in the paper magazine, where they give the full references since you can’t use the hyperlinks on paper.

The opening photo is subtle, and I like it a lot.

Our purpose was to demonstrate how “progressive” ideology is worming its way into organismal and evolutionary biology, impeding research and promoting misconceptions about science to both the public and scientists themselves. We do this by discussing six areas: the sex binary, evolutionary psychology, sex differences, individual differences, group differences, and the sacralization of indigenous knowledge. (I believe I’ve discussed all of these topics on this site). I won’t say any more about the piece, but if you read it I hope you enjoy it.

Here’s the summary from the beginning of the paper:

SUMMARY: Biology faces a grave threat from “progressive” politics that are changing the way our work is done, delimiting areas of biology that are taboo and will not be funded by the government or published in scientific journals, stipulating what words biologists must avoid in their writing, and decreeing how biology is taught to students and communicated to other scientists and the public through the technical and popular press. We wrote this article not to argue that biology is dead, but to show how ideology is poisoning it. The science that has brought us so much progress and understanding—from the structure of DNA to the green revolution and the design of COVID-19 vaccines—is endangered by political dogma strangling our essential tradition of open research and scientific communication. And because much of what we discuss occurs within academic science, where many scientists are too cowed to speak their minds, the public is largely unfamiliar with these issues. Sadly, by the time they become apparent to everyone, it might be too late.

By “too late,” of course, I don’t mean that science will be gone or swallowed by ideology. Rather, I mean that the character and practice of science may have changed permanently—and for the worse.

Our thanks go to the many people from whom we sought advice about our ideas (too many to list!) and especially to Robyn Blumner, who encouraged us to submit the paper to the magazine, and to interim editor Stuart Vyse and managing editor Julia Lavarnway for shepherding the paper to print and e-space while making really useful edits.

Oh, and as Steve Job would say, “There’s one more thing.” This paper grew out of the Stanford Academic Freedom conference panel on “Academic Freedom in STEM,” where both Luana and I talked (you can see our short presentations here). I presented these six topics, but Luana also talked about them in a very different piece she wrote for Bari Weiss’s Free Press. We decided to join forces and write a longer and more comprehensive paper.

Colin Wright dismantles Zemenick’s claim that sex isn’t binary

June 8, 2023 • 12:30 pm

A few days ago I criticized an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle by Ash Zemenick, a biologist who is self-described as “non-binary.” You can see an archived version of his piece by clicking on the screenshot below:

I later wrote a short letter to the editor, which was published, refuting Zemenick’s idea that sex is not a binary, and reproduced the letter on my site.

But I’m getting tired of trying to correct people about what biologists consider to be the definition of “the sexes,” and it’s a never-ending task because gender activists keep telling people that sex is a “spectrum”—that there are more than two sexes. Since most people don’t know much biology, they simply buy what the activists say, a false and ideologically-based claim designed to read the gender spectrum back into nature. If gender is a spectrum, they think (and it is, but a BIMODAL spectrum), then biological sex must be too. I call this the “reverse naturalistic fallacy”: an example of the idea that what is good to humans must be what you see in nature.

But there’s a man more tired than I of this incessant correction, for he’s devoted a lot of his career to questions of sex and gender: biologist Colin Wright, who has a Substack column called “Reality’s Last Stand“. Like me, when Colin sees such an obviously misguided piece as Zemenick’s, he sighs deeply, thinks a bit, and then and gets to work refuting it. It’s an onerous and never-ending job, but somebody has to do it! (Other major participants in these corrections are Carole Hooven at Harvard and Emma Hilton at Manchester.)

Wright’s own refutation of Zemenick’s piece, which is far more thorough than mine, was just published at Queer Majority, and you can read it by clicking on the screenshot below. I’m not going to reprise his biological arguments, some of which I’ve made, and I give two more links below to his writings on the sex binary. Rather, I’ll give a couple of excerpts about ideology. Colin’s words are indented:

Why is the binary nature of biological sex being questioned now? And why is emphasizing the truth important?

Over the last decade, we have observed a striking shift in the politics of LGBT issues. There has been a move away from broadly supported principles based on equality toward the imposition of radical, pseudoscientific ideologies concerning biological sex. A growing genre of articles in high-profile news outlets, magazines, and scientific journals is signaling the end of a binary and immutable perspective on biological sex. The appeal of these pieces lies in the belief that rejecting the binary concept of sex provides society with a liberating opportunity for self-definition, unfettered by material constraints.

One might consider these debates too arcane to have any real significance. However, the pseudoscientific notion that biological sex is mutable and exists on a non-binary continuum serves as a key justification for allowing males who identify as women to compete in female sports and access female prisons, and for administering treatments such as puberty blockers and “gender-affirming” (i.e., body modifying) hormones and surgeries to adolescents and adults alike to fix a perceived misalignment between their sex and “gender identity.” The implications are serious, as these recommendations make women’s sex-based rights unenforceable and directly impact the healthy bodies and minds of children. It is of utmost importance that such actions are grounded in reliable science, not in fashionable political ideologies.

This is not, in other words, just an argument about biological facts. Those facts are known; they’ve become “conventional wisdom” among biologists. Instead, the real argument is about who has the power to dictate societal views on gender and gender rights. The ideologues hold the postmodern view that the truth is just what you think is the truth from your own standpoint, and there are not absolute truths. To these people, what’s important is who holds societal power.

Why do activists make huge overestimates of the number of “intersex” people? People keep quoting Anne Fausto-Sterling’s figure, published in 2000, that 1-2% of the population are intersex, even though Fausto-Sterling herself retracted that claim years ago. This is a prime example of how people keep insisting on “facts” that they know are wrong simply because those “facts” buttress their ideology. But here are the real data:

Zemenick’s claim that 1-2% of the population has intersex conditions vastly overstates the reality, exceeding the actual figure by nearly 100 times. This statistic originated from Anne Fausto-Sterling in Sexing The Body: Gender Politics And The Construction Of Sexuality (2000), and was reiterated in an American Journal of Human Biology article titled “How Sexually Dimorphic Are We?” Fausto-Sterling and her colleagues reached their 1-2% estimation by applying an arbitrary and excessively broad definition of “intersex” as “an individual who deviates from the Platonic ideal of physical dimorphism at the chromosomal, genital, gonadal, or hormonal levels.” To convey the absurdity of their strict criteria, females with unusually small clitorises and males with unusually large penises were classified as intersex.

Most critically, the vast majority of the people Fausto-Sterling categorized as intersex exhibited no sexual ambiguity whatsoever. When a clinically relevant definition of intersex is applied, such as when “chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female,” the incidence of intersex conditions dwindles to approximately 0.018%, or about 1 in 5500. Nevertheless, the prevalence of intersex conditions is immaterial to the binary nature of sex. The occurrence of sexual ambiguity, regardless of its frequency, does not constitute a third sex.

I’ve put the last two sentences in bold because they show that the frequency of intersex individuals has nothing to do with whether or not biological sex is a binary trait. Somehow, though, the ideologues think it does, and on top of that they keep spouting Fausto-Sterling’s hundred-fold overestimate of the frequency of intersex individuals.

If you want a lucid description of why sex is binary, and about the falsity of using traits other than gametes to define sex, read the piece. I’ll add that Colin has written two other good takes on this problem, which I’ve put below with links:

“Sex Is Not a Spectrum” and

“Understanding the Sex Binary”

NYT: David French on disrupting speech and “the law of polarization”

March 26, 2023 • 9:30 am

This piece by David French, published in the New York Times on March 23, is another hopeful indication that the paper is becoming a little less woke. They’ve defended their publication of an objective article on gender transition and chastised their staffers who criticized the author, they’ve added John McWhorter to their list of regular columnists, and they’re starting to publish more articles like this, defending not only free speech but criticizing those who shout down speakers.

French is identified this way by Wikipedia:

David Austin French (born January 24, 1969) is an American political commentator and former attorney who has argued high-profile religious liberty cases. He is a columnist for The New York Times. Formerly a fellow at the National Review Institute and a staff writer for National Review from 2015 to 2019, French currently serves as senior editor of The Dispatch and a contributing writer for The Atlantic.

Click below to read:

This is one of many articles that appeared after students at Stanford Law School (SLS) shut down a talk by conservative Appellate Court Judge Kyle Duncan—not because they didn’t like his talk (which was to be about the relationship between his court and the Supreme Court on issues like covid and guns), but because they didn’t like his conservative decision and judicial philosophy. I don’t like them, either, but neither would I try to prevent him from speaking. Indeed, I’d probably go to hear him, mainly because his topic is of interest—and should have been of greater interest to law students.

French first goes after the students for disrupting a talk that should have been important to them:

. . . How do lower courts decide cases on legal issues in which Supreme Court case law is unsettled or changing?

It’s a particularly important topic for aspiring litigators, many of whom will argue cases in front of judges like Duncan, one of the hundreds of Republican-appointed originalists who account for a high percentage of the federal judiciary. After all, a lawyer’s job is to try to win over judges, no matter who appointed them and no matter their ideology.

Insights into a judge’s thinking are especially valuable if the judge is coming from a different ideological perspective. We often instinctively know how to reach people who share our views. It can be a struggle to understand our philosophical opposites.

Indeed, to the extent that the SLS students are going to litigate cases, they have to be able to listen to the other side, think about the other side’s best arguments, and then counter them. They cannot be rude nor interrupt, and above all they cannot go after the judge! SLS has to teach its students to respect free speech and, at least in court, give their opponents a hearing. The school is indeed creating a unit to teach the law students what free speech really means, though I’m not sure it will temper their juvenile tendency to censor opponents. French throws in a good quote by Frederick Douglass

Robust protest should be welcome in the academy, and it is entirely appropriate to ask any judge difficult questions during the question and answer session after a speech. But protests that go so far as to shout down or disrupt speeches or events aren’t free speech but rather mob censorship.

This is an ancient principle of American liberty. My right to protest does not encompass a right to silence or drown out another person. As the abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote in 1860 after an antislavery event was disrupted in Boston by a violent mob, “There can be no right of speech where any man, however lifted up, or however humble, however young, or however old, is overawed by force, and compelled to suppress his honest sentiments.”

Douglass of course was black, and I’d be curious to see how the SLS students counter his arguments. In fact, perhaps SLS should, as part of its new program, hold a debate between those students who think it was right to shut down speakers like Duncan, and those who don’t.

At any rate, the chastising of law students is widespread now (I haven’t seen any articles approving of what they did), but French adds something more: a theory (which is not his) about why the SLS fracas occurred. He first establishes that “America’s elite law schools are overwhelmingly progressive”, citing a study showing how lawyer’s political affiliation is skewed to the left compared to the general population.

Below a diagram from Sunstein’s paper; on the X axis is the “conservatism score” of lawyers, based largely on their campaign contributions. They linked the public record of contributions with the national directory of attorneys, producing this histogram. The X-axis scale going from liberal (left) to conservative (right), and the height of the bars representing the number of lawyers in each class. You can see that this histogram is based on hundreds of thousands of lawyers. And you can also see that it’s skewed to the left. If you looked at professors in general, I’m betting it would be far more skewed to the left.

(from paper): Figure 1 displays the ideological distribution of all American lawyers, oriented from most liberal (negative on the CFscore scale) to most conservative (positive on the CFscore scale).9 The histogram bars here—and in subsequent figures presented in the article—represent frequencies. Taller bars mean that more lawyers fall within a given ideology, and shorter bars mean that fewer lawyers fall within a given ideology.

Given this, French then presents an idea floated by Harvard professor Cass Sunstein that, says French, explains why when you have groups or “tribes,” their association tends to make them more extreme. (I haven’t read all of Sunstein’s paper, but you can see it at the link below (download pdf here).

French:

One of the most helpful frameworks for understanding American division and polarization comes from Cass Sunstein at Harvard Law School. In a 1999 paper he identified and described a phenomenon he called the “law of group polarization.” The law is well stated by the first sentence of the abstract: “In a striking empirical regularity, deliberation tends to move groups, and the individuals who compose them, toward a more extreme point in the direction indicated by their own predeliberation judgments.”

In other words, when like-minded people gather, they tend to become more extreme. If you’re opposed to gun control and gather with other gun-rights advocates, you’re likely to become more committed to gun rights. If you’re attempting to raise awareness of climate change and gather with other climate activists, you’re likely to become more committed to your cause.

This law of group polarization helps, as Sunstein writes, “to explain extremism, ‘radicalization,’ cultural shifts and the behavior of political parties and religious organizations; it is closely connected to current concerns about the consequences of the internet; it also helps account for feuds, ethnic antagonism and tribalism.”

The tie to the academy is obvious. A coalition of like-minded people who study together, often live together and learn from other like-minded people can often radicalize. And when they radicalize, they have trouble not just understanding opposing points of view but also seeing their opponents as decent human beings.

In a strange way, the culture of the legal academy is at war with the culture of the legal profession. While the profession is left leaning, it channels conflict into rules-based legal arguments that feature forced civility and grant each side the full opportunity to make its case. There is no such thing as shouting down opposing counsel in court. You certainly cannot heckle a federal judge into silence. There is no option but to fully understand your opponents’ legal arguments and grapple with them on their merits.’

Here’s how Sunstein explains it in his paper, and goes on to document this explanation and cite psychology experiments that support it:

Two principal mechanisms underlie group polarization. The first points to social influences on behavior; the second emphasizes limited “argument pools,” and the directions in which those limited pools lead group members. An understanding of these mechanisms provides many insights into legal and political issues; it illuminates a great deal, for example, about likely processes within multimember courts, juries, political parties, and legislatures – not to mention insulated ethnic groups, extremist organizations, student associations, faculties, workplaces, and families. At the same time, these mechanisms give little reason for confidence that deliberation is making things better than worse; in fact they raise some serious questions about deliberation from the normative point of view. If deliberation simply pushes a group toward a more extreme point in the direction of its original tendency, do we have any systematic reason to think that discussion is producing improvements?

Of course that argument militates against jury deliberation, as well as other things we take for granted.

What is French’s solution? How can we prevent debacles like the one at Stanford? He suggests a greater diversity of opinion in schools, and the teaching of a more “rational conservatism”:

There is no quick or easy fix for the problem of group polarization — in the academy or elsewhere. Law schools should make sure that they’re not discriminating against conservative applicants, either in admissions or in hiring, and as the Claremont McKenna College professor Jon A. Shields wrote eloquently today in The Times, progressive professors should intentionally start teaching the best of the conservative intellectual tradition.

Given the left lean of the entire legal profession, however, conservative students and scholars should expect to be in the minority. Yet no matter the ideological composition of the faculty or student body, students can still take the initiative to seek out the best expression of opposing points of view and listen respectfully even if they intend to challenge their opponents firmly.

It’s true that schools should strive for diversity of philosophy and thought, for, as Mill argued, you can’t really have faith in your own beliefs until they’re tested on the whetstone of opposing beliefs—and against the best arguments of your opponents. Debaters always prepare for debates by imagining what the other side is going to say.

There is a solid educational rationale for this kind of diversity, though ideological diversity isn’t the kind of “diversity” for which schools are striving. When a university says it’s “diverse” or “striving for greater diversity,” it really mean either sex diversity (though now women predominate as students in higher education), and, importantly, ethnic diversity. But given the lack of evidence that different ethnic groups tend to have different (and within-group homogeneous) ways of looking at the world, the educational importance of ideological diversity would seem to be greater than that of ethnic diversity. (The latter, however, is important if you conceive as the mission of higher education to effect political and societal change.)

But what French’s solution doesn’t explaion—at least to me—is why things have become more polarized in recent years. After all, the titer of Republicans and Democrats in Congress (and voters on both sides), hasn’t changed much recently, so the tribes have pretty much existed in their present proportions. So why has everything become more polarized lately? (And surely it has!). And why would striking a greater ideological balance in colleges help alleviate the polarization? To me it would seem to increase it by creating larger tribes on the conservative side.

No, what French seems to be calling for is a more anodyne solution: students inculcated with the desire to hear their opponents—and do so respectfully. To me, at least, the “law of polarization” offers neither explanation of what happened at Stanford nor any kind of solution. But again, I haven’t read Sunstein’s paper, and perhaps reader can explain the fix that French suggests.

Enforced orthodoxy in Texas science departments

January 20, 2023 • 11:45 am

In case you’re thinking that requiring DEI statements for academic job applicants was a passing fad, well, you’re wrong. They’re only going to get more pervasive. This report from Texas, in particular Texas Tech University, shows that DEI statements are not only mandatory, but primary: they can be used (as they are at UC Berkeley) to weed out candidates who aren’t with the program—people who have Wrongthink about DEI, like saying that “they don’t discriminate at all on the basis of race.” (This is the worst thing you can say in a DEI statement, since they want to discriminate in favor of minority races.)

Click on this piece from City Journal by John Sailer to read it (it’s short, but I refuse to specify a “reading time”). The part that bothers me most is that it applies largely to science departments.

Statements from Saller’s piece are indented.

In 2020, the Department of Biological Sciences at Texas Tech University adopted a motion on “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” (DEI), promising to “require and strongly weight a diversity statement from all candidates” during the hiring process. This amounts to a striking statement of priorities.

Many would be surprised to learn that cell biologists and immunologists might be passed up for a job because they were not sufficiently enthusiastic about DEI. But the policy illustrates a trend across Texas universities. Increasingly, a commitment to a vague and often ideologically charged notion of diversity, equity, and inclusion has become an effective job requirement for professors in Texas.

Have a look at his first link above: it goes to a Department of Biological Sciences statement, saying that the department. .

REQUIRES DBS faculty search committees to: i) require and strongly weight a diversity statement from all candidates and provide an evaluation rubric; ii) provide questions to all candidates prior to off‐campus interviews; iii) provide a report to the DBS faculty that includes diversity metrics and a report on the evaluation of the required diversity statements and strategies implemented.

Not only is your fealty required, but it is STRONGLY WEIGHTED. Further, you have to answer questions from the department, and you better answer them in an ideologically approved way!

One more except from Saller’s piece before I pass on:

In September 2021, the Department of Biological Sciences at Texas Tech announced that it was hiring four assistant professors. Faculty members in the department took to Twitter to advertise the new position, emphasizing a unique feature of the application: per its new resolution, the department makes DEI an explicit priority in hiring. The resolution commits to “recognizing, acknowledging, and rectifying individual conscious and unconscious biases.” To that end, it promises to weigh heavily every job candidates’ contributions to the cause, as laid out in mandatory diversity statements.

The department even released a rubric for evaluating diversity statements, which demonstrates the danger of the requirement. Biologists applying to work in Texas Tech must have a specific, well-delineated understanding of DEI, receiving a low score for “[conflating] diversity, equity, and inclusion without distinguishing among them.” They must also espouse an understanding of diversity that focuses on race, gender, and granular intersectionality. The rubric mandates a low score if a candidate shows little “expressed knowledge of, or experience with, dimensions of diversity that result from different identities (for example, intersections between experiences of women scientists and Black scientists).”

Have a look at Texas Tech’s rubric, which evaluates candidates on a 1-5 point scale in three areas: Knowledge about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; Track Record in Advancing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; and Plans for Advancing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. (This is similar to Berkeley’s system.)

Your maximum possible score is 15 and your minimum is 3. And by god, you’d better have an extensive record of diversity-advancing records to get the higher score you need to get a job offer. I surely wouldn’t have gotten a job had this system been in place when I was hired. While I was active in political and anti-racist movements as an undergraduate, I had no record of DEI activities in academia.

Sailer continues:

A DEI evaluation for hiring almost inevitably weeds out candidates on the basis of their political and social views. Someone who opposes, say, racial preferences in admissions or hiring would likely run afoul of the Texas Tech rubric. This is one reason why the Academic Freedom Alliance recently announced its opposition to diversity statements.

But an even more fundamental problem remains. Prioritizing DEI in hiring means downplaying other, more important criteria—most obviously, basic academic prowess. UT–Austin recently released its “Strategic Plan for Faculty Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity,” which charges each college within the university to develop mechanisms for rewarding DEI contributions. How many highly qualified professors will ultimately lose out on promotions or tenure because they chose not to embrace the fad?

The purpose of higher education is to facilitate the pursuit of truth. By prioritizing social goals as a key feature of a professor’s job, diversity statements and evaluations detract from that mission. Alas, the policy is alive and well in Texas.

There is absolutely no doubt that such initiatives turn the traditional system of academic success on its head. You no longer have to be a great scientist to get a job; you have to have a great track record in DEI. And absent that track record, your chance of getting a job, whatever your scientific accomplishments, is nil. Those who say that DEI and merit are not in conflict at all—and those who label initiatives as “inclusive excellence”—are fooling nobody.

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