Alice Roberts - what the hell?

[GenderApostate19]

I can’t tell you how utterly disappointed I feel by her comments about Sex and reproduction not being binary. She knows the truth, what the hell is she doing? I’m even more upset by her than by Sarah Champion, she’s a Scientist ffs.

I'm a scientist.
There are more than two sexes. There are people who have two XX chromosomes and a Y.
There are humans with three XXX

XXY humans are male. XXX humans are female.

Identification as a scientist does not imply any specific scientific knowledge.

The Humanists are a big disappointment too.

They behaved disgracefully towards Maria MacLachlan (whose assault by transactivists woke me up to what's going on).
www.peaktrans.org/why-i-resigned-from-humanists-uk/

@GCAcademic

This is what happens when people stop believing in religion. They have to find some other bollocks to believe in instead. It seems to be a human compulsion. Even academics, some of them scientists, aren’t immune.

When people stop believing in God , they don't believe in nothing ; they believe in anything . GK Chesterton. Seems to apply in this case

When people stop believing in God , they don't believe in nothing ; they believe in anything . GK Chesterton.

Amen!

Also makes me think of the late great Terry Pratchett - on Discworld when they removed an existing focus of Belief namely the Hogfather, they didn't get less Belief; instead they had excess Belief sloshing around and people ended up Believing in the Verruca Gnome and the Sock Eater.

I don’t know how she can reconcile these opposing standpoints in all seriousness

I heard a recent podcast on classification of species on 'The curious Case of Rutherford and Fry' which explained how theories about classification of species have evolved, and I think this is where Alice Roberts might be coming from when she talks about Clown Fish and everything being more complicated than we think. People talk about sex, and she just hears people who don't know about seahorses.

However, she doesn't seem to have appreciated that from a practical point of view (and regardless of how she wants to classify sex) it's still possible to predict with almost perfect accuracy which humans have which type of reproductive organs, and which will experience which kind of puberty, and that this has a huge impact on how people live their lives and this is why women need specific services, protections and rights.

It's possible that the fox that tried to enter the Maugham chicken house was a new species (Canid veganus), but it was perceived by Maugham to be a fox and was therefore treated like a fox, regardless of scientific classification or identity.

If there are more than two sexes -male and female, what are the ones for?

She's a quack. And the Guardian is quack central right now.

Just reviving this. I saw her book today and want to read it but refuse to give her a penny as she’s such a dick pandering handmaiden. Will borrow from the library or buy second hand.

My son went to GCSE Science Live show recently. I was wondering if there were any interesting backstage conversations between scientists.

gcsesciencelive.net/speakers/

@MrsOnions

Fucksake, I really liked her!

We like her in this house too. Very disappointed.

Just seen this is an old thread.

[quote Plasmodesmata]My son went to GCSE Science Live show recently. I was wondering if there were any interesting backstage conversations between scientists.

gcsesciencelive.net/speakers/[/quote]
That's a really interesting lineup. Dawkins & Winston have both made it clear they are not moving from 2 immutable sexes. Ben goldacre has deliberately said nothing. He has kept schtum. Alice Roberts has gone be-kind & sex-is-not-binary-you-unsophisticated-bigot. Don't know about the others.

Science washing.. thought to only exist in alternative Holland & barrats and general quackery, now extends to people you'd think would know better.

Or, perhaps equally likely but requiring less of a conspiracy and thus being a more reasonable explanation, science has left you behind and your simpler understanding no longer fits with what specialist experts in biology, psychology, and gender studies understand about our world.

If we had specialists in biology who could explain gender in a purely biological fashion I would be interested - but most of these scientists are the pseudo science types - wrap rubbish up as science and hope to fool people

There is no explanation of gender outwith the match of societal expectations based on sex

Do you mean experts like Robert Winston. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/transgender-surgery-mutilation-robert-winston-b2122965.html

Simpler understanding

Please do point us to the Nobel Prize citation for the scientists who've found a man, i.e. an adult human male who went through male puberty, and who's gestated a baby and given birth. Then we can talk.

RE: The 'Simpler Understanding' comment

Colin Wright explains it better than I can in this podcast, but essentially what biologists have been doing is bending their research, creating strange and complex narratives to try and incorporate gender ideology. Sex is defined by individuals with the propensity to produce large gametes and those who produce small ones. It's a definition that works when comparing the sex differences of all sexually dimorphic species and has done for a long time.

What gender ideologues are doing is the equivalent of when we believed (again for ideological reasons) that the earth was the centre of what we now know to be the solar system. To explain this, they built models with complex movements of the planets around us; they kind of worked but they were so ridiculously complex and had the occasional flaw that then had to be explained, the model had to be tweaked and the planets had yet more complex trajectories. When you build a model of the solar system with the sun at the centre, it's simple; and now we've been to space, it works.

Simplicity doesn't equal wrong. In fact, in nature (and often in many other areas) it equals correct.

Ooh I know this one your talking about people who produce speggs aren't you

science has left you behind and your simpler understanding no longer fits with what specialist experts in biology, psychology, and gender studies understand about our world

Thats one of the funniest sentences I've read here.

CrazyHormoneLady What gender ideologues are doing is the equivalent of when we believed (again for ideological reasons) that the earth was the centre of what we now know to be the solar system. To explain this, they built models with complex movements of the planets around us; they kind of worked but they were so ridiculously complex and had the occasional flaw that then had to be explained, the model had to be tweaked and the planets had yet more complex trajectories. When you build a model of the solar system with the sun at the centre, it's simple; and now we've been to space, it works.
Simplicity doesn't equal wrong. In fact, in nature (and often in many other areas) it equals correct.

CrazyHormoneLady, that's one of the most telling comparisons I've come across, thank you!

It also matches up well what I think when faced with all these fanciful ideas of spectra and shapeshifting, spergs and speggs - I channel Galileo and think to myself 'E pur si muove' - it is the Earth that moves around the Sun, and not vice versa, and no amount of pseudoscience, neologisms or Inquisitorial bullying will make me think otherwise.

Well said, CrazyHormoneLady👏

All this stuff about retrograde motion and planets going backwards and in the opposite direction to all the other planets and so on just shows that it's complicated. Of course the Earth is the centre. Scientists have moved on from this heliocentric narrative. Heliocentrism arose at the same time as Capitalism, and is therefore a patriarchal, cis-normative ideology created to disempower marginalised identities. Do try to keep up.

Oh, and you know the bit about clownfish changing sex? Well, as far as I understand, it only works from male to female. Females never turn into males.

How do they know? Imagine being a male clownfish, and you decide to transition to female. Then you change your mind. Well, you're stuck.

woman
man
womanan
manmanman
manamanah
manamanahdoodoodoodoodoo
moomin
wombat
womble
ian

with more to be discovered as the scionce improves!

It's not all that easy to know from observation on the Earth, that the Earth goes round the Sun, rather than the opposite.

A lot of the weird motions introduced were more to do with trying to maintain circular motion, which Galileo himself wanted to preserve. It was the possibility of elliptical motion that helped simplify the observations. Which was one of the reasons other scientists didn't simply accept his theory (along with concerns like, if they Earth moved, why didn't the atmosphere get left behind.)

I don't really think a period of a lot of new observed phenomena being worked through is quite the same as what is going on with people like AR and deliberate construction of ideological theories.

science has left you behind and your simpler understanding no longer fits with what specialist experts in biology, psychology, and gender studies understand about our world.

LOL not seen one of these for a while.