Batshit biologists

[DdraigGoch]

Apparently researchers should not use the terms "male" and "female" in case it leads people to believe that sex is binary. Instead "sperm-producing" and "egg-producing" should be used, or "XY/XX individual".

I've rolled my eyes so far that they're stuck looking at the back of my head.

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/02/14/words-male-female-should-banned-science-enforce-idea-sex-binary/

Or a terf. Or a Karen. Or a miserable old hag trying to prevent the youth from dismantling the patriarchy through the medium of trans joy…

Also, evolution has led us here. Heterosexuality has ensured the survival of our species and gamete plus egg reproduction has given us an evolutionary advantage. It's not because of social norms that the majority of human beings are heterosexual, but because this is a species imperative.

With 95% of all humans belonging to this category, it is preposterous to frame the fact that heterosexuality is considered the norm and homosexuality the exception as wrong. Homosexuality is the exception. There is no judgment in acknowledging that fact. It is an accurate observation of reality.

There is of course plenty of judgement that derives from that fact, claims about it being unnatural and so on, but we don't have to accept such claims. We can reject illogical conclusions made from accurate observations without rejecting the observations. And that is science.

Well it must e true if there is an illustration. Would there be a pie chart that goes with this? All proper scientists have pie charts and white coats.

CryptoFascistMadameCholet · Today 15:57

Or a terf. Or a Karen. Or a miserable old hag trying to prevent the youth from dismantling the patriarchy through the medium of trans joy…

God, he looks sodding miserable, doesn't he?

TRANS JOY IS JOY

And love is hate, war is peace and freedom is slavery!

I can't see the article.

What are their stated, scientific reasons for their view or does the article not mention any?

Any reference to Canada is a red flag.

The photos of the ‘team’ show young scientists. Sadly, they do appear to be mostly scientists. There’s very little actual information on their website apart from a very glossy image of a forest.

There’s a kind of confused grouping (forced teaming?) of racist language and ‘gendered’ language and by implication the latter is as equally bad as the former.

Interestingly none of the academic papers referenced refer to issues with gendered language, but there’s a link to ‘Gender Inclusive Biology’ website that appears to be solely initiated by 3 people. How do 3 people get to be so influential is beyond me.

It’s the young that have bought into the #bekind aspect of the debate. It’s worrying how stridently and happily the young are dismantling protection for vulnerable women and girls. With nary a backwards glance.

@TomPinch the website is called The EEB Language Project.

Its also a mystery how this became news? It’s 14 people who mean well, but we seriously hope goes nowhere.

PS some of their links for their names seem quite dodgy.

Dd1 is studying Zoology,and has done modules on neuroscience,ecology,biochemistry amongst others. She hasn't told me of any gender nonsense being parotted in her lectures so far,and she would as she doesn't believe in lady brain/ born in the wrong body woo,and she knows of my opinion of it.
I'm of Romany ancestry and Gypsy moth doesn't offend me at all. I knew this article hailed from North America as soon as I saw another poster mentioning that. Non travellers there seem to believe that the word 'Gypsy' is racist and I was told by one of them that I shouldn't use it to refer to myself because it was a slur,which mightily offended me.
Some people have too much time on their hands and not enough between their ears.

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

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

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.

One well known biologist has:
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/02/15/lll-use-every-one-richard-dawkins-says-wades-woke-science-words/

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

😂

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.

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.