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Lysenkoism and the Ideological Subversion of Biology:
Informative and useful re-post by Lawrence M. Krauss of an article in Michael Shermer’s Skeptic magazine on the corruption of science, biology in particular. A rather sad state of affairs, particularly since it has been precipitated by a pervasive scientific illiteracy and by post modernist grifters who take advantage of that illiteracy:
However, the definitions being touted, if not peddled, by the authors — Jerry Coyne & Luana Maroja — are really little better than folk-biology and are flat-out contradicted by the standard biological definitions “promulgated” in reputable biological journals like Molecular Human Reproduction [MHR].
Rather sadly, much of biology has turned into a clown show — a Lilliputian civil war, Rape of the Lock (Part Deux) — over competing definitions for the sexes: binary, functional or otherwise?; spectrum?; socially constructed? Questions of the hour that most “biologists” are sadly incapable of answering because they lack sufficient knowledge of the scientific, logical, and philosophical principles that such definitions should be based on.
Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder had a rather brilliant and succinctly phrased insight into the crux of the matter:
The maybe most important lesson physicists have learned over the past centuries is that if a theory has internal inconsistencies, it is wrong. By internal inconsistencies, I mean that the theory’s axioms lead to statements that contradict each other. A typical example is that a quantity defined as a probability turns out to take on values larger than 1. That’s mathematical rubbish; something is wrong.
Something is terribly wrong there, something is rotten in the states of Denmark and biology both. Some glaring “inconsistencies” there between the folk-biology of Coyne, Maroja, and Colin Wright — another salient proponent of that “thesis” — and the more solidly based biology of MHR.
And something which another physicist, Sean Carroll, had some useful insights on — largely as a result of tangling with Wright on the question in a salient Twitter spat — even if they were somewhat murkily phrased:
“... some human beings produce ova, big sessile gametes, some human beings produce sperm, tiny mobile motile gametes, and that's more or less a binary. There's not a lot of in between in that. And therefore, as a biologist, you can say, ‘Okay, that's what I mean when I say biological sex, I mean that.’ And that's 100% fine as a term of art in biology, you're very welcome to do that.”
The important point there being that it is quite true that the definitions for the sexes are, in fact, just “terms of art in biology”:
a word or phrase that has a precise, specialized meaning within a particular field or profession.
Coyne & Maroja and Wright all seem to “think” — being charitable — that their definitions were in the first dictionary that Moses supposedly brought down from Mt. Sinai on tablets A through Z. And so qualify as gospel truth — touched by the outstretched finger of Jehovah, Himself. They seem rather pigheadedly committed to definitions that lead to quite risible contradictions — the entire herd of elephants in the living room — that they’re all too quick to try sweeping under the carpet.
In many cases those contradictions aren’t terribly “problematic” — at least at first blush — but in many other cases they are the proximate cause of the corruption of biology and science that both Krauss and Shermer quite reasonably rail against.
More particularly, the “Folk-Biology” Definitions of Coyne & Maroja:
“Sex in humans is not a discrete and binary distribution of males and females but a spectrum. This statement, one of the most common political distortions of biology (e.g., Ainsworth 2018), is wrong because nearly every human on earth falls into one of two distinct categories. Your biological sex is determined simply by whether your body is designed to make large, immobile gametes (eggs, characterizing females) or very small and mobile gametes (sperm, characterizing males).”
Wright, and his partners in crime — biologists Emma Hilton and Heather Heying — elaborate, somewhat usefully, on that definition by specifying that membership in the sex categories is contingent on having gonads of “past, present, or future functionality”:
But, as mentioned, those folk-biology definitions — little better than the Kindergarten Cop versions (“boys have penises and girls have vaginas”) — conflict profoundly with the MHR definitions:
"Female: Biologically, the female sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces [present tense indefinite] the larger gametes in anisogamous systems.
Male: Biologically, the male sex is defined as the adult phenotype that produces [present tense indefinite] the smaller gametes in anisogamous systems."
The salient difference there is the MHR definitions stipulate — as a term of art — that to have a sex is to have functional gonads of either of two types, those with neither being, ipso facto, sexless. They most certainly do NOT include gonads that might work in the future or that maybe worked in the past.
We can certainly create definitions for the sexes that might be more useful for “social justice” applications. However, it seems rather “unwise”, at best, to be basing any sort of social policy on anything that smacks of Lysenkoism; we might learn from the tragic mistakes of Soviet era “biology” in that department:
As Paul Griffiths — university of Sydney, philosophy of biology, co-author of Genetics & Philosophy — put it:
“The idea of biological sex is critical for understanding the diversity of life, but ill-suited to the job of determining the social or legal status of human beings as men or women.”
