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.
I’m sure you remember the fracas at Stanford Law School last spring, when federal judge Kyle Duncan, a conservative, was deplatformed (shouted down and forced to terminate his talk) by Stanford Law Students. The students’ deplatforming was egged on by SLS DEI dean Tirien Steinbach, who interrupted the disruption to give Duncan a lecture about how hurtful his judicial decisions had been.
Things happened quickly. In a joint letter, SLS Dean Jenny Martinez and Stanford’s soon-to-be-ex-President Marc Tessier-Lavigne (he resigned after falsified data was found in papers he authored) apologized to the judge on behalf of SLS, and Steinbach was put on leave and then fired. Martinez (whose classes were also disrupted after she criticized the deplatforming) wrote a long (10-page) letter again criticizing the students and, above all, defending free speech at Stanford, saying that the school will abide by the First Amendment and will develop a program for educating SLS students about free speech and specifying how with disruptive protestors will be dealt with. Have a look at the letter; it’s good.
Now the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Martinez has been named Provost of Stanford University—the school’s highest academic officer. It’s good news for the school and for freedom of speech there.
An excerpt:
Months after her lengthy missive defending free speech made national headlines, Jenny S. Martinez has been named provost of Stanford University.
As dean of Stanford’s law school, Martinez saw the campus through controversy after a student protest of a federal judge in March turned into a cultural flashpoint.
“As dean, she has been a champion of inclusion, and a clear and reasoned voice for academic freedom,” Richard Saller, Stanford’s interim president, wrote in his announcement of Martinez’s promotion. She will take office on October 1.
. . .As leaders across higher ed question how to respond to free-speech flaps, Martinez has served as an example.
National commentaries hailed her memo as a watershed moment, signaling that college leaders were becoming more open to issuing forceful defenses of academic freedom and free speech. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, for instance, called Martinez’s letter a “tour de force.”
That stance often clashes with students, who increasingly say that colleges shouldn’t invite speakers to campuses if their views might be offensive to students of color and LGBTQ students, among other groups.
The only fly in the ointment I see is that Martinez explicitly said that no student who protested would be singled out and punished, and I wonder if that philosophy will be applied in the future. For if there’s no punishment specified for disrupting speech (Chicago has one), then there’s no impetus not to disrupt.
Even so, I think this is an important development, and we’ll see how Stanford deals with disruptions in the future. It hasn’t had a particularly good record on free speech. FIRE puts it at #107 in its college free-speech rankings, gives it a “yellow” light (green is best), and rates its speech climate as “average”. The rankings include 203 colleges, and of course the University of Chicago is #1. Stanford is below the median.
Martinez’s job will be to improve Stanford’s ratings.
As The Chronicle notes:
By elevating Martinez to its top academic post, Stanford is making a statement in the continuing free-speech debate. Leaders across the country will look to Martinez to uphold that stance, particularly as she assumes jurisdiction over not only the law school but also Stanford’s entire student body.
She’ll also be second in command to [Richard] Saller, an interim president who will take the job after Tessier-Lavigne resigned. An investigation found that while Tessier-Lavigne hadn’t personally engaged in research misconduct, he had “failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes in the scientific record.” His resignation is effective September 1.
As you may recall, several years ago I wrote a children’s book called Mr. Das and his Fifty Cats. In 2022, I mentioned it (and my travails finding a home for it) here, where I gave a brief description:
“Mr. Das and his 50 cats” [is] a fictional work that is actually based heavily on a real person: Birendra Das, one of India’s most famous sweetmakers (his business, K. C. Das and company, is famous in Kolkata). I stayed with Mr. Das in Bangalore (now called “Bengaluru”) to do “field work” observing his life and his cats, and found that he indeed had around fifty cats, whose names I learned. Around these facts—and the knowlege that Mr. Das took all of those cats in as strays—I wove a fictional tale about the cats invading the factory in times of famine and eating all the milk, cream, and yogurt. (Indian sweets are heavily laden with sugar and dairy products.) The story of how that led to the closure of Mr. Das’s sweet business, and then how the cats fixed the situation in the end, is the subject of my book.
I quite liked the story, as did others, including parents of small children and school teachers to whom I vetted the book (the story is meant for kids from about first to fourth grades). I got a lot of good suggestions before it arrived at its final incarnation.
Eventually, on the advice of my agent (who doesn’t handle non-science books), I sent the manuscript to a well known agent in England, who worked with a very famous illustrator. They both liked the book a lot and agreed to provide illustrations, which, given the fame of the illustrator, would almost guarantee publication.
I got a few illustrations, but then: radio silence. This lasted for months, and every six months I’d email to ask what was going on. I’d get some reply that finding a publisher was still in the works. Then, more radio silence. This went on for several years, and I grew increasingly depressed.
Sensing that some of the delay was due to a common issue—a white guy writing about an Indian scenario—I asked my Indian friend who had introduced me to Mr. Das to write a brief preface for the book describing Mr. Das and promoting the story. That, I thought, would defuse any notions of “cultural appropriation” that might arise. I also had Mr. Das write (through his nephew, since Mr. Das doesn’t speak or write English very well) giving his permission for me to publish the book. That made me very happy because Mr. Das is in his mid-eighties and I wanted this remarkable man to see the book about him appear before he passed on. I wanted people to know about Mr. Das and his overweening love of animals. His life and actions are absolutely unique—and heartwarming.
I emphasize again that everyone who read the book (though without illustrations) seemed to like it. The delays seemed to be due to other reasons.
Yesterday I found out that this intuition was right: I was guilty of cultural appropriation, and so the book wasn’t even shown to publishers by the agent. I got this email, which I’ve redacted to omit names and identities. It was also copied to the illustrator. I have bolded the sentence that hurts:
Dear Jerry,
I am so sorry for the silence on my end. This has been a painful and difficult situation.
I was concerned that you and ILLUSTRATOR’S NAME REDACTED (who has already had an issue with a book cancelled for reasons that had nothing to do with [his/her] wonderful work, but everything to do with our current publishing culture) would be seen as creators trying to appropriate another culture. I’m sure you’re aware that this is an enormous issue in book publishing these days, and it has only become bigger since you sent me this book.
Over the last year or so, I showed it to several people in the business who all felt it was not a good idea for white authors to be writing about this character in this time and place.
I was at a loss as to how to tell you this and I am deeply, deeply sorry that I allowed my anxieties to keep me from being honest with you sooner. To be clear, I did not submit it to publishers, but asked opinions of others in the children’s book world. Thus, if you wish to approach other agents, you can honestly say that this book has not been submitted to editors, which gives you a better shot if you find an agent with a vision for how to get it published.
Best
NAME REDACTED
So the book wasn’t even vetted to publishers because I’m white. I emphasize again that Mr. Das and his Fifty Cats is a humorous, and affectionate book, respectful towards both Mr. Das and Indian culture, which I love. But in fiction these days—particularly young adult and children’s fiction—you can’t write about one culture if you belong to another. Mr. Das is Indian and I am white: that’s all publishers need to know to reject a book. The contents, apparently, don’t matter.
Now I don’t blame the agent, as he/she is working commercially, and if a book won’t sell because it involves “cultural appropriation,” why even show it to publishers? (Though I thought it should have been vetted.) But because of this misguided and toxic climate of “cultural appropriation,” readers will never get to learn about Mr. Das, who is portrayed as the real, empathic person he is, though the part about his cats is fictional. (Can one culturally appropriate Indian cats?)
So I’m quite down about all this, and I also think about all the great books of the past—both adult and children’s fiction—that wouldn’t have been published had they been vetted for “cultural appropriation.” It hurts doubly because not only do I think that cultures are enriched by appropriation, but also because that ludicrous sanction was applied to me.
Now I do think that giving harder looks to books by minority authors is a good thing—an idea that’s developed in the last decade as we realize that the work of these authors may have been unfairly overlooked. But that’s not the same thing as rejecting books about one culture written by authors from another. If those books are disrespectful of that culture, then yes, they shouldn’t be published. But mine wasn’t.
I posting this for three reasons. First, I want to publicize what’s going on in young-adult and children’s fiction these days. Second, I wanted to show how it affected me in particular (I worked very hard for two years to write a children’s book). If the book had been rejected because it was bad, well, that’s one thing. But it was rejected (or not sent on to publishers) simply because of my skin color. There is nothing disrespectful about India or Indians in it.
Finally, I’m hoping there is someone out there willing to take the chance on publishing, or helping publish, this book. I am proud of it and don’t want to give up, especially in these circumstances. All I ask is that people don’t tell me to self-publish the book, as it needs an illustrator (illustrators are usually chosen by publishers after a book is accepted), and that would be hard (and expensive) to find.
It’s ironic that an Indian author would, I believe, have no trouble writing a story about an American who took care of fifty cats, but the reverse situation is considered racist or bigoted. This situation needs to change. While we do need to consider the work of minority authors more carefully, that doesn’t mean that books should be rejected solely on the grounds of “cultural appropriation”. Such as the tenor or our times.
My second trade book: Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible, is now available in the audio version for a deep discount: only $6.80 (regularly $16.99). To get it, click on the screenshot below and then, to avoid subscribing to a book club, follow the instructions below.
First, go to the site below by clicking on the screenshot below or here.
Then click on the blue button: “get discount”.
Once clicking the blue button, you will get this message:
Then click View Cart and you are taken to the checkout page, where you will see the discounted title in your cart:
Ignore the icon below; you have not joined a book club, though you can if you want by clicking on “learn more”. Otherwise, forget this bit:
Once you click Begin Secure Checkout, you enter your credit card information and complete the purchase, at which point youy will own the audiobook and are not signed up for any subscription:
Now’s your chance to find out why science and religion are NOT compatible, and for mere pennies on the dollar!
I’m gratified that several readers sent in sets of photos, so we’re set for at least four or five more days. This batch comes from reader James Blilie, whose captions are indented. You can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
Here are some landscape shots for your consideration. Most of these are taken on or near our homestead in Klickitat County, Washington.
Wintertime shot of our neighbor’s vineyard (wine grapes) in White Salmon, Washington. Iphone 11 photo.
A shot from last fall using my MEKE 3.5mm f2.8 220 Degree Manual Focus Circular Fisheye Lens: Ponytail Falls in the Columbia River Gorge. I enjoy fisheye lenses. They help me reimagine images.
Rain drops. Winter 2023.
Frost on charcoal. Winter 2023.
A view westwards into the Columbia River Gorge. Very close to our home.
Falls Creek Falls, about 280 feet tall. Washington side, near the town of Carson.
We recently traveled to our old stomping grounds in the US Midwest. As Jamie said, when we arrivedin the heat and humidity, “I forgot how great the weather is in White Salmon!” These are photos of sunflowers in Shawano County, Wisconsin.
Our son Jamie is just starting his engineering education as Washington State University, in Pullman, Washington (Go Cougs!). On the weekend we moved him into his dorm, we went out into the Palouse to make photos of the unique landscape. Whitman County, which covers a large area of the Palouse, produces more wheat than any other county in the USA. These images show wheat being harvested, The unusual fluid shape of the Palouse hills, and a short depth of field shot of wheat ready for harvest.
Finally, my ringer. Jamie and me on top of a local prominence, Chinidere Mountain with Mount Hood in the background. Taken with my circular fisheye lens.
Equipment:
iphone 11
Olympus OM-D E-M5 camera (Crop factor = 2.0)
LUMIX G X Vario, 12-35MM, f/2.8 ASPH. (24mm-70mm equivalent, my walk-around lens)
LUMIX 35-100mm f/2.8 G Vario (70-200mm equivalent)
LUMIX G Vario 7-14mm f/4.0 ASPH (14-28mm equivalent)
MEKE 3.5mm f2.8 220 Degree Manual Focus Circular Fisheye Lens
LUMIX G Vario 100-300mm F/4.0-5.6 MEGA O.I.S
Welcome to the tail end o’ the week, Friday, August, 25, 2023, and National Whiskey Sour Day, an estimable drink if you can’t handle a straight whiskey (or “whisky”). Here’s one with ice cubes and a lemon slice from Wikipedia:
*The NYT reports that the plane supposedly carrying Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin was apparently downed by an explosion, and adds that Putin has hinted that Prigozhin, whose death hasn’t been confirmed, was killed in the crash. A bomb, eh?
U.S. and other Western officials said that preliminary intelligence reports led them to believe that an explosion on board a plane linked to the Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny V. Prigozhin likely brought down the aircraft on Wednesday, killing all the passengers aboard.
Although there has been no official confirmation that Mr. Prigozhin was killed, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Thursday, in his first comments on the crash, spoke obliquely of his death, referring to him in the past tense. “He made some serious mistakes in life, but he also achieved necessary results,” Mr. Putin said in a televised meeting.
. . . Mr. Putin’s comments followed a growing drumbeat of reports that Mr. Prigozhin was dead, with at least one Western intelligence official, several Russian military bloggers and a Telegram account linked to his organization all saying he had been killed. However, Mr. Prigozhin’s mercenary force, Wagner, has not officially confirmed his death.
The U.S. and Western officials who said an explosion was the leading theory behind the crash said the blast could have been caused by a bomb or other device planted on the aircraft, though other possibilities, like adulterated fuel, were also being explored.
. . .The Legacy 600 business jet believed to be carrying Mr. Prigozhin was flying at a constant speed and altitude until it plummeted suddenly, flight-tracking data shows. Embraer, the Brazilian maker of the jet, said that it had stopped providing any support for the aircraft in 2019 because of sanctions. Typically that support is largely related to maintenance.
I wonder what happened? (LOL). Prigozhin should have been savvy enough to NOT gotten on airplanes in Russia, but his life was forfeit anyway.
*Once again, and I think this is the fourth time, Trump has had to turn himself into law authorities (in Georgia) to get fingerprinted and booked. According to Politico’s useful and updated guide to these cases, Trump now faces 91 felony counts in total. (The Politico guide is quite handy as a summary of what’s going on and of the strengths and weaknesses of each case.) Here’s an update from The Washington Post:
Former president Donald Trump departed Atlanta after surrendering at the Fulton County Jail on charges connected to his attempts to reverse the 2020 election results in Georgia. A mug shot of Trump was later released by the sheriff’s office. Trump, who was released on bond, was charged earlier this month with violating the state’s anti-racketeering act and other felonies. Before leaving the airport, Trump told reporters that he had done nothing wrong and has “every single right to challenge an election.”
Former president Donald Trump has returned to X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, posting an image of his mug shot from Thursday’s surrender at the Fulton County Jail and linking to his campaign website. Trump last tweeted on Jan. 8, 2021 — the day he was banned from the platform following the Capitol insurrection. His account was restored by Elon Musk last November.
Donald Trump’s plane is still in the air, but the former president’s reelection campaign is already trying to capitalize on his recent surrender in Fulton County. The campaign is leaning into fundraising off the booking in a variety of ways, including selling a $34 T-shirt emblazoned with Trump’s mug shot above the words “NEVER SURRENDER.”
And his mugshot again, with caption from the WaPo (you can’t see this too many times). Look at the expression he put on!
*I haven’t read much about the Republican primary debate last night, but apparently the candidates, far outweighed by Trump’s numbers, decided to avoid the subject. But that made the debate even more boring: none of the candidates stands a chance unless Trump is somehow ineligible to run because of his indictments or dies from eating hamburgers:
In the first primary debate of the 2024 race, the eight Republican participants tried to create a Trump-free zone — an alternative political universe where the G.O.P. race turned on issues, ideology and biography.
. . . Yet the former president’s absence created an opening, if an illusory one, for a broader array of conservative positions. Republicans have long discussed the far-off notion of what Trumpism without Mr. Trump would look like. For fleeting moments in Milwaukee, that possibility felt almost like a reality.
The Fox News hosts waited nearly an hour to ask only two questions in the entire two-hour debate on Mr. Trump, or, as Brett Baier, one of the moderators, called him, “the elephant not in the room.” Asked whether they would back the former president if he was convicted, all but Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, and Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, indicated that they would.
The Trump-free spell, it seemed, was broken.
. . .But without Mr. Trump dominating the stage, the face-off signaled that the race to emerge as Mr. Trump’s chief rival remains far from set.
Mr. DeSantis failed to cement his place as Mr. Trump’s central foe, finding himself often relegated to the sidelines of the debate. Senator Tim Scott, a rising figure in Iowa, struggled to cut through the fray with his positive, future-forward message. And without the foil of Mr. Trump, Mr. Christie’s case against him — his central campaign argument — fell flatter.
Here are the internecine targets of most of the attacks in the debate (from the WaPo):
Do I care? Nope. We already know who the GOP is going to run.
Donald Trump ducked the first Republican presidential debate Wednesday night, and his absence did the party and country a favor. Voters were able to hear eight other candidates and size up their policies, sparring abilities and differences. GOP voters who want to nominate someone who can defeat a highly vulnerable President Biden have more than one capable non-Trump to choose from.
A few assessments:
Ron DeSantis had to counter the perception that his campaign is in free-fall, and he did a good job of explaining his greatest hits as Florida Governor on Covid and fighting progressive prosecutors. He said he would have sacked Anthony Fauci, a nice contrast with Mr. Trump’s Covid delegation to the doctor.
But the Governor also ducked more than one question, such as whether he’d support a national ban of 15 weeks on abortion. He didn’t raise his hand at first on whether he’d vote for Mr. Trump if he’s convicted of a felony, but then did raise it when he saw others do it. He had to be coaxed into saying Mike Pence did the right thing by counting the electoral votes on Jan. 6.
another:
Vivek Ramaswamy is close to Mr. DeSantis in the polls, and he has the gift of energy and verbal facility. He can sling appealing phrases, and his line that Americans are hungry for purpose will resonate with many voters. But he can also sound like a young man in too much of a hurry, and his rapid-fire one-liners and insults (“I’m the only person on the stage who isn’t bought and paid for”) give him the air of a supercilious grad student.
He seems to have made a calculation that he can prosper by running as Mr. Trump’s biggest defender, almost as if he wouldn’t have to defeat Mr. Trump to get the nomination. But he would be more credible if he weren’t so slavish in his defense. He left himself open for Chris Christie’s roundhouse that landed about being the candidate from ChatGPT.
two more:
Former Vice President Mike Pence often seemed like the adult in the room, especially on foreign policy. He and Nikki Haley pounded Mr. Ramaswamy for his willingness to withdraw support for Ukraine. Mr. Pence was especially good in eviscerating the glib false choice between aiding Ukraine or controlling the southern U.S. border. And Ms. Haley, the former South Carolina Governor, made the moral case against Vladimir Putin’s depredations.
But again, all of these people will be as passé as t.v. dinners after next summer, so this is news only for newshounds.
*Did you know that octopuses were so smart that they use thermal vents in the ocean to help their eggs hatch faster? (Octopus moms incubate their eggs for a long time, and then die immediately after they hatch.) If you can reduce the time to hatching, it gives your offspring a significant survival advantage given that predators sometimes eat the eggs. It also means you have to protect them for less time. From the AP
Most octopuses lead solitary lives. So scientists were startled to find thousands of octopus huddled together, protecting their eggs at the bottom of the ocean off the central California coast.
Now researchers may have solved the mystery of why these pearl octopus congregate: Heat seeping up from the base of an extinct underwater volcano helps their eggs hatch faster.
“There are clear advantages of basically sitting in this natural hot tub,” said Janet Voight, an octopus biologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and co-author of the study, which was published Wednesday in Science Advances.
The researchers calculated that the heated nest location more than halved the time it took for eggs laid there to hatch — reducing the risk of being munched by snails, shrimp and other predators.
The nesting site, which the scientists dubbed an “octopus garden,” was first discovered in 2018 by researchers from the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary and other institutions. The team used an underwater remote vehicle to film the throng of nearly 6,000 octopus nesting 2 miles deep.
The octopus — about the size of a grapefruit — perched over their eggs laid on rocks heated by water seeping up from the sea floor.
“It was completely incredible – we suddenly saw thousands of pearly-colored octopus, all upside down, with their legs up in the air and moving around. They were pushing away potential predators and turning over their eggs,” for an even flow of water and oxygen, said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration marine biologist Andrew DeVogelaere, a study co-author.
Only the hazy shimmer of escaping hot water meeting the frigid sea alerted the researchers to the hydrothermal seep. But they still didn’t know exactly why the octopus had gathered there.
. . .The researchers found that eggs at this site hatch after about 21 months — far shorter than the four years or more it takes for other known deep-sea octopus eggs.
Here’s a photo of the octopus’s garden, with caption from the AP:
This 2019 image from video provided by MBARI shows female pearl octopuses nesting at the “octopus garden” near the Davidson Seamount off the California coast at a depth of approximately 3,200 meters (10,500 feet). Research published Wednesday, Aug. 23, 2023, in Science Advance shows heat seeping up from the base of an extinct underwater volcano helps the octopus’s eggs hatch faster. (MBARI via AP).
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn,
A: What are you doing?
Hili: I’m mortifying myself for a cause.
In Polish:
Ja: Co tu robisz?
Hili: Umartwiam się dla dobra sprawy.
And a photo of the loving Szaron:
********************
From Merilee, hearkening back to Bill Clinton:
From Andrew (click to enlarge): a Matt Groening favorite:
From Bad Cat Clothing:
From Masih. Mahsa Amini was arrested by the Iranian morality police on September 13 of last year for not wearing her hijab as well as “tight pants”. She died in hospital three days later, with witnesses saying she’d been beaten and tortured in the police van. She was 22. (The Iranians claim Mahsa died of the effects of a previous brain operation, which she never had.) It’s a certainty that she was beaten to death for not adhering to Muslim dress codes, and this touched off the protests against the Iranian theocracy that continue today.
The mother of Jina Mahsa Amini, whose tragic murder ignited the #WomanLifeFreedom movement, posted this photo and mentioned how Iranians are visiting her daughter's gravesite from all across the nation. Her message suggests a powerful undertone: people won't remain silent on her… pic.twitter.com/gX0piFJYR9
From Malcolm; two men rescue a feral cat caught in a trap. Traps should be outlawed!
Two men rescue a wild cat with limited tools at their capacity.🦸 This bravery requires nerves of steel. Wild animals ought to live in a world without traps.🙏 pic.twitter.com/4Kv6rrVOUv
Tweets from Professor Cobb. The first is a good memoriam for Michael Ashburner, a lovely fellow who was concerned more with compiling genetic knowledge (in particular, his magisterial edited 12-volume series of The Genetics and Biology of Drosophila, all of which I own) than advancing his own career by writing research papers. As author Gerry Rubin says,
Many scientists are motivated by ‘how will this help me’ or ‘how will this get me another high-profile paper’, not by ‘how is this going to advance the field or help the progress of science’. Michael was different. He was a tremendous force for good in the scientific community through his efforts in research, writing, establishing databases of genetic and genomic information, and teaching. He brought individuals — who otherwise would not have chosen to collaborate — together for the common good. Michael, more than anyone else of his generation, practised and inspired others to continue the great traditions of the Drosophila community established 100 years ago by Bridges, Morgan and Sturtevant.
Thanks to Gerry Rubin for this remembrance of Michael Ashburner, a pioneer of Drosophila molecular genetics and of genomics. It's well worth a read. 1/nhttps://t.co/CRSP02zFDZ
The human Y chromosome has finally been completely sequenced, and it’s very complex: full of inverted regions and repeated sequences, with some regions able to recombine with its X-chromosome partner but most of it not. The new Nature paper is a link in the following tweet:
Assembly of 43 human Y chromosomes reveals extensive complexity and variation https://t.co/W9EORE8vZm
As Matthew says, “These are lovely things.” They are, but what is a tayra? Go here to see that it’s a mustelid native to Central and South America, and a mammal I’d never heard of.
This may again be old news, but after I called attention to Richard Dawkins’s video with Helen Joyce this morning, I found out two things from Twitter (it does have its uses). First, people complained to YouTube about that video on the grounds that it contained “violent speech”. (If you watched it, you’ll see how stupid that complaint is.) Second, that prompted Dawkins to write an article on freedom of speech, and the distortion of language, for London’s Evening Standard. You can see that article by clicking on the screenshot below the tweet.
On July 26, I interviewed Helen Joyce about her book Trans. @YouTube has restricted our video’s licence to advertise. Thankfully, @X /@elonmusk sensibly over-ruled the complaint that I had engaged in "violent speech".
In response to this I wrote an article explaining how…
Dawkins first describes several instances of censorship or deplatforming he encountered, including the American Humanist’s Association retracting his 1996 Humanist of the Year Award for this “discuss” tweet (note his explanation):
I do not intend to disparage trans people. I see that my academic “Discuss” question has been misconstrued as such and I deplore this. It was also not my intent to ally in any way with Republican bigots in US now exploiting this issue .
But what’s relevant today is that the video with Helen Joyce was reported to YouTube as an example of “hate speech”. And there was a punishment levied, though the video wasn’t banned:
On July 26, I interviewed Helen Joyce about her book Trans. The interview is being very well received on YouTube. As it should be, for Joyce is extremely well-informed in her subject and she spoke cogently, soberly, reasonably.
But one of YouTube’s in-house judges heard only hate. And tried to censor the interview.
Short of an outright ban, YouTube has a variety of punishments at its disposal. In this case we got a minor slap on the wrist, a restriction on our video’s licence to advertise. But the real point is, yet again, the ludicrous hypersensitivity of the complainant. Those warped ears heard not reasonable argument deserving a reply, but “hateful and derogatory content”, and “hate or harassment towards individuals or groups”.
Obviously I can’t disprove that here. The interview runs to more than 10,000 words. But judge for yourself, it’s still up on YouTube. I earnestly challenge Evening Standard readers to search diligently for literally anything that a reasonable speaker of the English language could fairly call hateful. Enter it, labelled “Challenge”, in the comments section under the video, and I promise to respond.
I just said “a reasonable speaker of the English language”, and maybe here lies the key: language. If we want a fruitful argument, we’d better speak the same language. In today’s overheated sparring over sex and gender, both sides may appear to be speaking English, but is it the same English? Does “hate” mean to you what “hate” means to everyone else?
The complaints to YouTube, if you’ve seen the video, are clearly from the hyperoffended, and should be ignored. There is nothing “hateful or derogatory” in the entire video. But that leads Richard into a discussion of the debasement of language, in particular the words “hate” and “violence”. We all know how these words have been defanged by the woke or Easily Offended, with “hate” now meaning “any speech I do not like” and “violent” meaning pretty much the same thing. This blurs the distinction between real hatred and discussion that offends someone, as well as between genuine physical violence and, again, something that hurts someone’s feelings.
This blurring is deliberate. It’s hyperbolic, meant to confuse people and make discussion almost impossible because some ideological discusssion (i.e., that which criticizes wokeness) is seen as hateful and violent. It’s telling that these substitute words are used by the woke, not the antiwoke, and are meant to control discourse by shutting up the latter. Dawkins, of course, has something interesting to say about this:
As a textbook example of incitement to real violence, you could hardly do better than “Sarah Jane” Baker’s speech at London Pride this year, where she told the cheering crowd: “If you see a TERF, punch them in the fucking face”. Or Sky News (January 23) has a picture of two SNP politicians grinning in front of a large, colourful sign depicting a guillotine and the slogan “DECAPITATE TERFS”. They claimed they didn’t know the sign was there, and I sympathise. You shouldn’t be blamed for the company you keep. No doubt I shall be labelled “right-wing” for writing this article — and that’s the most unkindest cut of all.
The Guardian (February 14, 2020) reported that police officers turned up at Harry Miller’s workplace to warn him about his allegedly “transphobic” tweets, such as the obviously satirical, “I was assigned Mammal at Birth, but my orientation is Fish. Don’t mis-species me.” One of them told Miller that he had not committed a crime, but his tweeting “was being recorded as a hate incident”. [JAC: The UK police really need to learn the meaning of “freedom of speech”.]
Well, if Miller’s light-hearted satire is a hate incident, why not go after Monty Python, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Rowan Atkinson, Private Eye’s royal romances of Sylvie Krin, the early novels of Evelyn Waugh, Lady Addle Remembers, Tom Lehrer, even the benign PG Wodehouse? Satire is satire. That’s what satirists do, they get good-natured laughs and perform a valuable service to society.
“Assigned Mammal at Birth” satirises the trans-speak evasion of the biological fact that our sex is determined at conception by an X or a Y sperm. What I didn’t know, and learned from Joyce in our interview, is that small children are being taught, using a series of colourful little books and videos, that their “assigned” sex is just a doctor’s best guess, looking at them when they were born.
And so it goes. There’s more in the article, but read it for yourself. I’ll give you just the ending, after Dawkins has noted that we don’t live in an Orwellian society, one with a Gestapo or Stasi:
But shouldn’t we just indulge the harmless whims of an oppressed minority? Maybe, were it not for a strain of aggressive bossiness which insists, not so very harmlessly and not sounding very oppressed, that the rest of us must humour those whims and join in. This compulsion even has the force of law in some states. And alas, we often zip our lips in abject self-censorship because we aren’t as brave as JK Rowling, and don’t fancy becoming a target of Twittermob vitriol. No, we don’t fear Big Brother or the Stasi. We fear each other.
I guess today is a Sex Day, as I think every post will be on sex and gender. Right now I just want to call your attention to an excellent discussion of sex versus gender published at the end of last year. Had I known of it, it would have been cited in the “sex is a binary” section of the paper Luana and I wrote for The Skeptical Inquirer. Well, here’s my chance to let you know about this paper now.
Perhaps you’ve already had the gamete-based biological definition of “male” and “female” drilled into you on this site, but in case you didn’t, or even if you did but want to read about purported exceptions to this binary, the paper below in BioEssays is essential reading. It’s the paper you want to give to your friends who doubt that there is a sex binary. (It’s accessible to laypeople.)
Click below to read it, or you can find the pdf here.
I’ve written enough about the sex binary that I don’t want to say more, but I do want to give some nice quotes from this paper to give you an idea of its contents. If nothing else, they provide a review of what I and many other biologists think about sex and gender. So here they are, indented (I’ve omitted most of the references, which are given in the original paper.
Biomedical and social scientists are increasingly calling the biological sex into question, arguing that sex is a graded spectrum rather than a binary trait. Leading science journals have been adopting this relativist view, thereby opposing fundamental biological facts. While we fully endorse efforts to create a more inclusive environment for gender-diverse people, this does not require denying biological sex. On the contrary, the rejection of biological sex seems to be based on a lack of knowledge about evolution and it champions species chauvinism, inasmuch as it imposes human identity notions on millions of other species. We argue that the biological definition of the sexes remains central to recognising the diversity of life. Humans with their unique combination of biological sex and gender are different from non-human animals and plants in this respect. Denying the concept of biological sex, for whatever cause, ultimately erodes scientific progress and may open the flood gates to “alternative truths.”
. . . Yet, the attempt of influential science journals to re-define sex is done for a laudable cause: namely, they wish to promote a more inclusive environment for gender-diverse people in academia and beyond. However, there is no need to deny the biological concept of sex to endorse the rights of gender-diverse people, because biological sex and gender are two entirely separate issues. The gist of the problem seems to be that the definitions of sex and gender and their relationship are not generally appreciated, promoting the spread of flawed notions among readers of high-impact journals.
. . . Biological sex is defined as a binary variable in every sexually reproducing plant and animal species. With a few exceptions, all sexually reproducing organisms generate exactly two types of gametes that are distinguished by their difference in size: females, by definition, produce large gametes (eggs) and males, by definition, produce small and usually motile gametes (sperm). This distinct dichotomy in the size of female and male gametes is termed “anisogamy” and refers to a fundamental principle in biology (Figure 1).
. . . .Biological sex reflects two distinct evolutionary strategies to produce offspring: the female strategy is to produce few large gametes and the male strategy is to produce many small (and often motile) gametes. This fundamental definition is valid for all sexually reproducing organisms. Sex-associated genotypes or phenotypes (including sex chromosomes, primary and secondary sexual characteristics and sex hormones), sex roles and sexual differentiation are consequences of the biological sex. Genotypic and phenotypic features, as well as sex roles are often used as operational criteria to define sex, but since these traits differ vastly between sexually reproducing species, they only work for selected species.
This biological definition of the two sexes is, however, not based on an essential “maleness” or “femaleness” of individuals, but it merely refers to two distinct evolutionary strategies that sexually reproducing organisms use to produce offspring. Sexual reproduction does not require the existence of separate male and female individuals, though. While in the majority of animals, female and male gametes are produced by different individuals, they can also be produced by the same individual, either simultaneously or at different times. For instance, many corals, worms, octopuses, snails and almost all flowering plants are simultaneous hermaphrodites, combining the production of male and female gametes and functions in the same individual at the same time. Many fish species, on the other hand, are sequential hermaphrodites, that is, they change their biological sex during their lifetime. Clownfish (Walt Disney’s Nemo), for example, start their reproductive career as males and only the largest individual of a group turns into a female. Some cleaner fish, on the other hand, are initially all females and later the largest individuals convert to males.
. . . Lest we are misread, we fully endorse the endeavor to create a more inclusive environment for women and gender-diverse people. Gender equity is a humanistic matter of course and it will also benefit science, which – for much too long – has been dominated by a male perspective. It appears, however, that the rejection or the disregard of the biological definition of sex by some philosophers, biomedical scientists and influential science journals is founded in a short-sighted perspective that only considers humans (or mammals) and neglects all other species.
. . . A widespread misconception among philosophers, biomedical scientists and gender theorists – and now also among some authors and editors of influential science journals – is that the definition of the biological sex is based on chromosomes, genes, hormones, vulvas, or penises, etc. or that biological sex is a social construct. These notions very much reflect our own anthropocentric view. In fact, femaleness or maleness is not defined by any of these features that can, but do not need to be associated with the biological or gametic sex.
. . . One reason for this misconception of the biological sex lies in biomedical practices, in which mammalian sex chromosomes or sex-associated phenotypes are widely used to define sex . . . It is this definition that is targeted by critics of the fact that there are only two discrete sexes. However, sex chromosomes or sex-associated phenotypes do not qualify to define biological sex, as there are many species that do not have sex chromosomes at all. Whereas in mammals, birds, or butterflies sex chromosomes trigger sexual differentiation, in many other organisms, environmental factors, such as temperature or social regulators, initiate sex determination or sex change. Hence, sex chromosomes or other sex-determining systems cannot generally define sex. Instead, as the philosopher Paul Griffiths pointed out, “they are operational criteria for sex determination underpinned by the gametic definition of sex and valid only for one species or group of species”. Sex chromosomes, temperature gradients or social cues from group members can all be ways of making a sex, but they do not define it.
. . . Especially in biomedicine, many people are simply unaware of how evolutionary biologists define sex as biological sex. Another set of academics are fully aware of what biological sex is, but are blurring it on account of a political will to treat all people fairly. This stance seems to be motivated by a naturalistic fallacy (the mistake of a moral judgment based on natural properties), or an appeal-to-nature argument (proposing that something is good because it is natural)*, thereby overlooking that “being natural” is irrelevant for ethics. If these misconceptions are spread by scientists it may lead directly to people rejecting science in general, which will be most damaging for progress in society. Our main aim here is to draw attention to the dangers of scientific journals ignoring scientific facts, and to clarify the concept of biological sex.
. . . It is clear that the biological definition of the sexes cannot be the basis for defining social genders of people, as forcefully pointed out by the philosopher Paul Griffiths. Likewise, the socio-cultural, and thus anthropocentric, construct of gender cannot be applied to non-human organisms. There is a red line that separates humans with their unique combination of biological sex and gender from non-human animals and plants, which only have two distinct sexes – both of which are either expressed in the same or in different individuals. As much as the concept of biological sex remains central to recognize the diversity of life, it is also crucial for those interested in a profound understanding of the nature of gender in humans. Denying the biological sex, for whatever noble cause, erodes scientific progress. In addition, and probably even worse, by rejecting simple biological facts influential science journals may open the flood gates for “alternative truths.”
In our paper, Luana and I attribute the blurring of biological sex, and the claims that animals in nature don’t have a sex binary, to a reverse appeal to nature: the equally mistaken view that “what we see as good in human society (a sex spectrum) must be also what we see in nature.”
