Batshit biologists

I misspoke. There's enough there to trigger everything needed for creation of a male or female body.

It isn't.

You can make a human with the full set of autosomes plus 1 X chromosome, so it's 'all the information to complete making a human once you've got all the non-sex ones sorted' (that is, you don't require anything from the Y; whereas you can't make a human with a full set of autosomes and just 1 Y without an X).

No human has ever had structures for production of both sperms and ova

I am not sure that is completely correct. There have been reports of people with ovotesticular syndrome producing both gametes, (though, as it's such a phenomenally rare condition and can have more than one karotype, increasing the potential for confusion, I am not sure how accurate these are). I guess this is logically possible, especially for a 46,XX/46,XY chimera.

I totally agree with all your other points, and am not trying to contradict them - am just anticipating a gotcha from some TRA.

No, I think the poster worded it badly. We have 22 pair of autosomes which carry a huge amount of information and we would miss every one of these autosomes. We can't make a human just with an X chromosome.
The surprising finding of the human genome project was that we have fewer genes than predicted, but that can be explained.

Isn't that the current mystery of genetics ? Plus number of chromosomes has no relation to the resultant complexity.

There was a fascinating Monkey Cage a while back about "unknown unknowns" and the panel geneticist submitted the real mystery is how chromosomes lead to organisms. With the suspicion that DNA is a sideshow. to the main event.

My guess is so that you don't make exactly the same human each time, but I may be wrong.

What are all those other chrosomes for if all the information required to make a human is on the X chromosome?

Yep. You deserve a mic 🎤 drop for that.

The X chromosome contains all the information needed to construct a human being, either male or female. The genes for constructing a male are switched off by default. The Y chromosome is a tiny runt of a thing that contains very few genes, but the most important one is the SRY master gene. If the chromosomes are XX the process normally proceeds to the production of a female body. This is called the Mullerian process. If the chromosome are XY the SRY gene switches off the genes responsible for the production of specifically female body parts and switches on the production of specifically male body parts. This new pathway is called the Wolfian pathway.

What can go wrong? If the SRY gene on the Y chromosome is defective the switch to the Wolfian pathway does not take place and some ends up female but with XY chromosomes. If the chromosomes are X only (Turner syndrome) obviously there is no switch and the body is female. If the chromosomes are XXY (Klinefelter syndrome) the SRY is still present and the presence of an extra X doesn't prevent the switch to Wolfian, so the body ends up male. Similarly XYY. Very rarely the SRY gene can end up on an X chromosome instead of a Y chromosome and the Wolfian process is followed to a male body in an XX person.

Sometimes the Wolfian process is followed and the relevant male-producing hormones are produced but the androgen receptors are not working so the conversion to male never happens. That's another case of a female body with XY chromosome.

Lots of possibilities, but only ever two sexes and everyone is one or the other.

Almost everyone who has XX chromosomes is female and almost everyone who has XY chromosomes is male, but 'male' and 'female' are not defined by the sex chromosomes XX and XY. Some people have rare chromosomal development disorders and can end up with X, XXY, XYY or other complexities. These people are not new sexes, they are all either male or female.

Male bodies are those that are structured towards the production of sperms. Female bodies are those structured towards the production of ova. I say 'structured towards' because such a body might not actually manage to create the relevant gamete, but infertile people are not considered sexless.

The Galapagos giant turtle was once endangered and scientists took some eggs and hatched them under tightly controlled conditions with a view to releasing them into the wild. All of the baby turtles turned out to be female. It turns out the turtles' sex is not determined by chromosomes, but by the temperature at which the eggs hatch. The concept of sex is distinct from chromosomes.

Chromosomal anomalies in humans do not imply extra sexes. There are just two types of gamete: sperms and ova (eggs) so there just two sexes. No human has ever had structures for production of both sperms and ova.

To biologists, we're all just masses of cells. Biology is all about de-mystifying life. In addition, the claim that "male" and "female" are arbitrary categories has some "truth" to it, in the sense that all words just mean, whatever we agree they mean.
If all the familiar words were taken away, biologists would just invent new ones, define them, reference them to earlier work, and would keep on trucking as before: individuals that are adapted to generating the large gametes could be called goobleglorks for all a biologist cares. You just need one paper that says, "The individuals adapted to generating large gametes were formerly known as female, see references 1 through 12. These individuals will be referred to here as goobleglorks, however possess all the same features as in the category 'female' as described in references 1, 3, and 11. For further details see references 2, 4 through 10, and 12."

What scientists do will not change with the elimination of female as a coherent category. What will change is the public's understanding of what scientists do, a la kids in my children's high school friend groups telling me (a qualified biologist!) that male can too become female duh what century was I born in? Boomer!! That is what bothers me, is that scientists are colluding with misleading the public about what it really means to be male and female, by nodding along when we're told that the categories are meaningless.

I do think that one factor is that scientists' jobs are maintained by "funding." Someone has to approve of them and their research. So they don't have the power over what passes for "truth" that we think they do. Also they are generally quite privileged people in the sense that to get to be a working research scientist a lot of things have to have gone right in your life. So their idea of what is "true" socially is filtered through the lens of their experiences.

😂

Seriously, I really hope he doesn't write that book. Dawkins is a biologist and a very fine one indeed, but he's not a philosopher or a theologian, and he's not a sociologist. In fact he's really very very poor indeed at acknowledging the value of anything outside his own field.

Which is why the book would just make him look like a complete idiot of a grumpy old white man. It would be two barrels right into the foot of his own cause.

Well said. No doubt some are fully captured and have completely soaked themselves in cognitive dissonance. Others are just unaware BeeeeeeKind because they're narrowly focused on their own specialised fields and don't give much thought beyond that.

But I also know that there are senior academics who feel they can't speak out because they still need to pay a mortgage and if TRSOH come baying for blood, they damn well know that everybody else will hang them out to dry for fear of suffering the same fate themselves. It's a circular firing squad.

Possibly they don’t care.

or, actually, they may be worried about speaking out too. Most senior academics are not untouchable like dawkins is (see what happened to Kathleen stock) and will be wary of being ostracised by their peers and poorly evaluated by students (who DO rate modules poorly because they’ve decided they don’t like the lecturer rather than anything to do with the quality of the teaching).

Universities are pretty well captured. Even more so in North America. And senior scientists need to maintain their networks, funding opportunities and ability to publish (because blind peer review in teeny tiny specialist fields is rarely truly blind, plus editor interpretation of review and decision making is most definitely not blind).

The risk of being demonised silences even senior academics in the same way it silences people in politics, the media, and all sorts of areas where you would hope people would be standing up to things. There’s considerable risk to speaking out against this stuff - so many people just stay silent and hope they can keep their head down.

Looking forward to Richard Dawkins' next book: The Woke Delusion

But there are also senior scientists in those institutions who bring in big research grants and who the universities are desperate to hang on to. Often working in biomedical fields. Why aren’t these senior guys issuing a collective statement about the importance of scientific FACTS.

Many, many academics are in very precarious employment. It often often takes scientists a long time to get a permanent job. And even then, they’re junior and have to tip toe around the sensibilities of students and colleagues. Accusations of bigotry or racism would be a real problem. Especially when the whole institute in steeped in ‘be kind’ etc in quite uncritical ways.

Someone like Richard Dawkins can speak up about anything he likes. He’s in an unusually powerful position even among senior academics. Being ‘controversial’ is part of his thing.

Brilliant.

As an aside, I often think that those who insist the meaning for a particular noun has evolved to include its opposite, should experience a similar "inclusivity" with lots of other nouns in their lives. Especially if they're a young person still living with their parents. The category of chocolate could be inclusive of things like brown sauce; the concept of time is definitely a social construction, so you can set alarms for whenever; parents would be wise to consider identifying as children around birthdays and Christmas for gift purposes.

I think you'd have to kick them in the shins repeatedly and explain that, on the atomic scale, nothing is solid, so there's no point in them saying that it hurt.

Why on earth aren’t real biologists getting together as a group and denouncing this utter garbage for the unscientific and dangerously stupid nonsense that it is?

Maybe they just figure that you can't argue with stupid. I remember Robert Winston's facial expression on Question Time, after he was booed and told by Fiona Bruce that his opinion was very controversial - when he'd made the 'outrageous' assertion that you were male or female and couldn't change that (immediately after calling for compassion and freedom for people to identify socially as they choose).

Suppose you were telling somebody about how 'obviously' soaking wet you'd got on the way there, as you got caught in a sudden downpour of rain - and they persisted in calling you a bigot and ignorant of science for assuming that all water is automatically wet - would you even bother trying to argue with them, or would you just groan loudly inside and not waste your time in trying to show your priceless pearls to swine?

If this is the same list that I saw on a ....less salubrious publication's website, they had 'Man & Woman' in the verboten list, ordering them to be replaced by 'Male & Female' - and then, a few rows down, 'Male & Female' were anathema too!

Why on earth aren’t real biologists getting together as a group and denouncing this utter garbage for the unscientific and dangerously stupid nonsense that it is? They’re doing young people a disservice by remaining silent. It’s bad enough that university humanities departments have been totally captured by Queer Theory woo, but honestly scientists need to speak up for the truth.

Yep, because human biology (and most plant and animal biology too) IS sex binary.

So a man who doesn't produce sperm isn't even a proper anything? Even if everything else about him is totally masculine?