Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
The title of Richard Dawkins’s new article in Areo (below) is one I pretty much agree with, and in his analysis he covers a lot of ground. His main point, though, is that determining one’s “race”, which is said to be a social construct with no biological basis (that part isn’t true) is far more … Continue reading Richard Dawkins in Areo on race and sex
Reading time: However long it takes. (I hate these “reading time” indications, since they steer people away from long pieces and individuals vary tremendously in their speed of reading.) *************** The eminently sensible Cathy Young has a pretty balanced article in Bulwark on trans athletes, dealing with what criteria we should use to allow transexual … Continue reading Cathy Young on trans athletes
The question of how we compare someone like Rachel Dolezal, who assumed the identity of an African-American although she was white, with someone like Caitlyn Jenner, who transitioned from a male to a female, is a philosophically interesting ethical question that, unfortunately, has been declared almost taboo. If you even raise it, as Richard Dawkins … Continue reading A new comparison of transgender and transracial identities
I still don’t have a firm opinion about, or anything much to add to, the case of Jessica Krug, who resigned her history professorship at George Washington University yesterday after revealing that she wasn’t really the Afro-Latina woman woman she’d pretended to be her whole academic career, but a white Jewish woman from Kansas City. … Continue reading What to make of Jessica Krug?
Although this is a family-friendly website, there are times when I myself feel uncivil and have to withhold epithets and cursewords that fight to emerge onto paper. This usually occurs when I see someone who should know better distorting facts to further his/her/their ideology, creating a misleading argument. In this case that “someone” happens to … Continue reading The Friendly Atheist becomes the Misleading Atheist
The Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, isn’t being very friendly, nor charitable, to Richard Dawkins. This is based on a tweet that Dawkins made comparing “trans-racialism”—as in the case of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who pretended she was black—with transsexualism. Hemant has thus deemed Richard “transphobic” and implicitly demanded that he be removed from the … Continue reading The Friendly Atheist is not so friendly, damns Richard Dawkins as “transphobic” for comparing transexualism with transracialism
Eve Fairbanks is a journalist from South Africa, and her national origins play a substantial part in this rather weak essay on free speech in the Washington Post (click on the screenshot). Increasingly, I find long-form op-eds in both the New York Times and the Washington Post—the two sources I’m subscribed to besides Andrew Sullivan’s … Continue reading Another weak argument against the Harper’s letter
Well, here we are back the start of the week: n = n + 1 on Monday, July 27, 2020. Is anyone dispirited like me, or is everyone ebullient? If so, why? At least we have lots of cat pictures today: all of the Polish cats including Hili, Szaron, Leon, and the tiny new kitten … Continue reading Monday: Hili dialogue (and Leon monologue)
