Fatalism, Islam, Innovation and Modernity

This also ties into the myth of the Islamic Golden Age:

"The Islamic view of the relative insignificance of everything we see with our own eyes is that this world is merely a way station. While martyrdom is the extreme reaction, it is not the only reaction to this view of the world. The question arises: Why bother, if our sights are trained not on this life but on the afterlife? I believe that Islam’s afterlife fixation tends to erode the intellectual and moral incentives that are essential for “making it” in the modern world.

As a translator for other Somalis who had arrived in Holland, I saw this phenomenon in various forms. One was simply the clash of cultures when immigrant Muslims and native-born Dutch lived in close proximity to one another. In apartment complexes, the Dutch were generally meticulous about keeping common spaces free of any litter. The immigrants, however, would throw down wrappers, empty Coca-Cola cans, and cigarette butts, or spit out the remnants of their chewed qat. The Dutch residents would grow incensed at this, just as they would grow incensed by the groups of children who would run about, wild and unsupervised, at all hours. It was easy for one family to have many children. (If a man can marry up to four wives and have multiple children with each of them, the numbers grow quickly.) The Dutch would shake their heads, and in reply the veiled mothers would simply shrug their shoulders and say that it was “God’s will.” Trash on the ground became “God’s will,” children racing around in the dark became “God’s will.” Allah has willed it to be this way; it is there because Allah has willed it. And if Allah has willed it, Allah will provide. It is an unbreakable ring of circular logic.

There is a fatalism that creeps into one’s worldview when this life is seen as transitory and the next is the only one that matters. Why pick up trash, why discipline your children, when none of those acts is stored up for any type of reward? Those are not the behaviors that mark good Muslims; they have nothing to do with praying or proselytizing.

This, too, helps explain the notorious underrepresentation of Muslims as scientific and technological innovators. To be sure, the medieval Arabic world gave us its numerals and preserved classical knowledge that might otherwise have been lost when Rome was overrun by the barbarian tribes. In the ninth century, the Muslim rulers of Córdoba in Spain built a library large enough to house 600,000 books. Córdoba then had paved streets, streetlamps, and some three hundred public baths, at a time when London was little more than a collection of mud huts, lined with straw, where all manner of waste was thrown into the street and there was not a single light on the public thoroughfares. Yet, as Albert Hourani points out, Western scientific discoveries from the Renaissance on produced “no echo” in the Islamic world. Copernicus, who in the early 1500s determined that the earth was not the center of the universe but rather revolved around the sun, did not appear in Ottoman writings until the late 1600s, and then only briefly. There was no Muslim Industrial Revolution. Today, there is no Islamic equivalent of Silicon Valley. It simply is not convincing to blame this stagnation on Western imperialism; after all, the Islamic world had empires of its own, the Mughal as well as the Ottoman and Safavid. Though it is unfashionable to say so, Islam’s fatalism is a more plausible explanation for the Muslim world’s failure to innovate.

Significantly, the very word for innovation in Islamic texts, bid’a, refers to practices that are not mentioned in the Qur’an or the sunnah. One hadith translated into English declares that every novelty is an innovation, and every innovation takes one down a misguided path toward hell. Others warn against general innovations as things spread by Jewish and Christian influences and by all those who are ruled by misguided and dangerous passions. Those who innovate should be isolated and physically punished and their ideas should be condemned by the ulema. It was precisely this mentality that killed off astronomical research in sixteenth-century Istanbul and ensured that the printing press did not reach the Ottoman Empire until more than two centuries after its spread throughout Europe.

Zakir Naik, an Indian-born and -trained doctor who has become a very popular imam, has argued that, while Muslim nations can welcome experts from the West to teach science and technology, when it comes to religion, it is Muslims who are “the experts.” Hence, no other religions can or should be preached in Muslim nations, because those religions are false. But look more closely at his point: Naik is implicitly acknowledging the success of the West in this world. All Muslim nations have to offer, he concedes, is a near-total expertise on the subject of the next world."

--- Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now / Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The Olympics Could Have Avoided the Ugly Boxing Debate

The Olympics Could Have Avoided the Ugly Boxing Debate - The Atlantic

"In the past few days, Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting, the two boxers at the center of a storm over their eligibility to compete in the women’s category at the Olympics, have been subjected to brutal public scrutiny and appalling abuse. But the International Olympic Committee should never have allowed the ugly spectacle to happen. Both athletes are now guaranteed to win medals—Algeria’s Khelif as a welterweight, Taiwan’s Lin as a featherweight. But both still face questions, a year after the International Boxing Association (IBA) publicly raised the issue, over whether they have XY chromosomes and a disorder of sexual development—also known as an intersex condition—which give them an unfair advantage over other women. Some boxers who have lost to Lin or Khelif at the Paris Games have protested by making double-X gestures, a reference to female chromosomes, with their fingers.

The Olympic bosses have screwed this one up with their ill-preparedness, buck-passing, and passion for incomprehensible language. (The “Portrayal Guidelines” issued ahead of the Paris Games instruct journalists that the phrase biologically male is “problematic,” but without that phrase, explaining the debate becomes impossible.)...

Last year, the IBA disqualified both Khelif and Lin from its Women’s World Championship, saying that the boxers had failed tests to determine their eligibility to compete. The IBA’s leadership has since indicated without providing detail that these were genetic tests that revealed that the two women have XY chromosomes. The IBA and the Olympics fell out several years ago over claims of corruption and mismanagement, and boxing federations in the United States and Britain have broken with the Russian-led association. The IOC argues that the IBA’s testing is flawed and used its own eligibility guidelines for women’s boxing—a passport check, which both Khelif and Lin passed. The Olympic rules state that, as a general principle, athletes “should be allowed to compete in the category that best aligns with their self-determined gender identity.”

In boxing, though, biology really matters. One of the most established sex differences between male and female bodies is upper-body strength, which in boxing means that men can punch much harder. The women’s category is not just about fairness, but about safety. That is why it was such an incendiary moment when Italy’s Angela Carini stopped her match against Khelif after taking a punch to the face, telling reporters afterward, “It could have been the match of a lifetime, but I had to preserve my life as well in that moment.” (She has since apologized for how she handled the fight.)

Olympic bosses have taken to giving press conferences where they seem annoyed to be asked questions, which they then answer inaccurately. Why have the IOC’s statements been so misleading and nebulous? Perhaps because it does not want to compromise the athletes’ privacy by discussing their medical details without consent. And perhaps because the IOC’s leaders are not prepared to defend their own rules, which state that even if Lin and Khelif do have XY chromosomes, they are allowed to compete in Olympic women’s boxing...

A simple cheek swab could clear this up, revealing the presence (or not) of a second X chromosome. If either athlete was XY instead, she could have further genetic testing to get a precise diagnosis and determine if it affected her ability to participate fairly. If Lin and Khelif are straightforwardly female athletes with XX chromosomes, they could have appealed their IBA bans to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, an independent body based in Switzerland...

In recent years, most controversies over eligibility for women’s sports have involved trans athletes. IOC President Thomas Bach dismissed the past week’s debate as a “culture war,” which might be true—many newly minted women’s-boxing enthusiasts have emerged with strong opinions—but ignores the fact that addressing intersex conditions is an ongoing challenge in women’s sports. Trying to suppress people’s questions doesn’t work, and just makes life harder for the athletes involved.

For years, doubts over the South African runner Caster Semenya were deemed to be racist, and rival runners who questioned her eligibility in the female category suffered abuse and death threats. Yet the court’s judgment in her case revealed that she was not simply, as she had often been described, a female runner with “naturally high testosterone.” She had male XY chromosomes and a condition called 5ARD.

Although genetically male, people with the condition lack a crucial enzyme, 5-alpha reductase, which means that as fetuses, their bodies cannot process a masculinizing hormone called DHT, which helps determine how the reproductive system develops. They are therefore born with internal testes but external female genitalia—and thus many are raised as girls. At puberty, their internal testes start to produce a different masculinizing hormone, testosterone, which their bodies are able to metabolize. And so they develop typically male muscle mass and proportions, and their genitalia take on a more male appearance. At this point, some people with 5ARD feel more comfortable identifying as men rather than as women.

This is why the IOC’s insistence that Lin and Khelif were “born as women”—a phrase banned by its own guidelines, but never mind—is unenlightening. With 5ARD, a child can be registered as female at birth, but later develop a significant athletic advantage during puberty from the effects of testosterone. Some other intersex conditions, such as complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, in which a genetically male body is completely unable to process masculinizing hormones in the womb and throughout puberty, provide no edge in sports and so are not a barrier to competing as a female.

After the court ruling, Semenya was asked to reduce her testosterone levels to compete in the female category; she declined. “For me I believe if you are a woman, you are a woman”...

World Athletics, the governing body for running, track and field, and related sports, has tightened its rules since Semenya was competing, as have authorities in other sports—and the IOC defers to them, having scrapped its own sex testing in the 1990s. World Rugby, in particular, should be praised for holding a long and impressive consultation period during which the organization heard from all sides. Sporting bodies regulate the use of shoes and swimsuits that give competitors even a tiny boost, so it’s no wonder that they would need policies governing athletes who identify as women but have male chromosomes and high testosterone levels. “The performance gap between males and females becomes significant at puberty and often amounts to 10–50% depending on sport,” the academics Emma Hilton and Tommy Lundberg found after analyzing the data. The fastest women’s 100-meter sprint time is 10.49 seconds, a record held by Florence Griffith-Joyner; the men’s record, held by Usain Bolt, is nearly a whole second faster, at 9.58 seconds. Victory hinges on far smaller margins; 0.005 seconds separated the gold and silver medalists in the men’s 100-meter sprint earlier this week.

Now, one can argue that the benefits of male puberty are overstated: The sports scientist Joanna Harper, who is herself a runner and a trans woman, has queried just how big an advantage biologically male athletes who suppress their testosterone really have. That’s a question that can be investigated and answered empirically. But too many people who have sprung to Khelif’s and Lin’s defense have assumed that bigotry is the only possible motivation for their opponents. “Challenge: find a single person whining about trans people in women’s sports who has done or said anything supportive of women’s sports previously,” David Roberts, a popular science influencer, posted on X. Okay then, challenge accepted: the tennis legend Martina Navratilova. The boxing champion Nicola Adams. The former swimmer Sharron Davies. Shall I go on?

This debate is not about whether to accept someone’s sense of their own gender, or about an intolerance of gender nonconformity—both Navratilova and Adams are lesbians who faced abuse for their appearance during their career. After all, a transgender boxer is competing in these Games with absolutely no pushback at all. Hergie Bacyadan, a Filipino trans man—a biological female—is competing in a women’s event. He has no sporting advantage, because he has chosen not to take testosterone to masculinize his body. During the same American collegiate swimming season when the transgender woman Lia Thomas became a national talking point, another trans swimmer was competing in the female division. His name was Iszac Henig, and he was a trans man who had undergone a mastectomy but stayed off hormones. Henig also competed fairly against other biological females, with no backlash at all.

Those two examples show that the current debates over gender and sports are not simply driven by prejudice—although the subject has undoubtedly attracted bigots and provocateurs. The debate should be a respectful one grounded in evidence about the effects of testosterone and male puberty. Sporting categories are not inherently offensive or degrading: We don’t let flyweights take on heavyweights. Having clear, transparent, and well-accepted rules would stop individual athletes from being subjected to cruel and embarrassing questions—and would prevent the discussion from being hijacked by culture-war bomb-throwers."

 

 

 

I'm pretty sure some of those proclaiming confidently that it's been "proven" that Khelif is female were proclaiming confidently a few years ago that Caster Semenya was proven to be female.

How the NYT undermined mask evidence

As with covid hysteria in general, mask fetishism is about left wing neuroses, not science: 

How the NYT undermined mask evidence

"“Listen to the scientists, support masks,” Biden said at a campaign rally, four years ago, berating Trump for not wearing a mask after he had caught Covid. “Support a mask mandate nationwide,” Biden thundered to cheers and adulation. His campaign message captured a “follow the science” sentiment among Left-leaning American voters who derided anyone questioning mask effectiveness with the label “anti-mask”. This, despite a smattering of articles in Scientific American, Wired, New York Magazine and The Atlantic reporting that scientific studies found masks didn’t seem to stop viruses.

The debate over mask effectiveness took an odd turn last year when ardent mask advocate, Zeynep Tufekci, wrote a New York Times essay claiming “the science is clear that masks work”. Tufekci’s piece denigrated and belittled a scientific review by the prestigious medical nonprofit, Cochrane, for concluding that the evidence is “uncertain”.

Shortly after Tufekci published her essay, Cochrane’s editor-in-chief, Karla Soares-Weiser, dashed out a statement, to assure mask advocates that Cochrane would update the review’s language. Cochrane reviews are widely considered as the “gold standard” for high‐quality information to inform medicine, and their process is laborious, with multiple rounds of internal checks and expert peer review. Having Cochrane’s head make a personal pronouncement about a published review is unprecedented — akin to having the executive editor of The New York Times write an essay expressing personal opinions about one of the paper’s own deep-dive investigations.

The incident also marked an odd point in the timeline of mask use. Before the pandemic, few, if any, prominent organisations promoted masks to stop influenza or other respiratory viruses. As the WHO concluded in their 2019 pandemic preparedness plan: “There have been a number of high-quality randomised controlled trials (RCTs) demonstrating that personal protective measures such as hand hygiene and face masks have, at best, a small effect on influenza transmission.” So, it was not surprising that both Tufekci’s claims “masks work” and Karla Soares-Weiser’s allegations that something was wrong with the Cochrane mask review were later found themselves to have no real evidence.

Earlier this year, Soares-Weiser issued another statement, this time explaining the mask review was fine and no changes would be made. Despite the 180, damage to Cochrane’s mask review had already been done. Google sends you straight to Tufekci’s New York Times essay alleging problems in the Cochrane review.

But why did Soares-Weiser change her mind?

I have discovered, through hundreds of emails provided to me by freedom of information requests and a Cochrane whistleblower, that Tufekci bumped Soares-Weiser into making the statement against Cochrane’s own mask review — a move that landed like a grenade inside the organisation.

While Soares-Weiser runs Cochrane, scientists with expertise in each specific subject matter write and edit the reviews. When she rushed out her statement complaining about the mask review, the review authors charged that Cochrane had thrown science under the bus by working with “controversial writer” Zeynep Tufekci; meanwhile, the editor of the mask review reminded Cochrane’s leadership that changes were only being considered because of “intense media coverage and criticism”, not because there were any problems in the review’s science. “I had a very challenging meeting with the [governing board] yesterday,” Soares-Weiser wrote a few days afterwards. “I am holding on, stressed, but OK.”

But the story doesn’t end there. Because the attack by Soares-Weiser and Cochrane’s leadership on their own mask review is illustrative of how media and political pressure undermined and suppressed inconvenient scientific conclusions during the pandemic — and are still attempting to do so. The incident also raises questions about media ethics and whether Cochrane’s leadership is still fit for purpose.

When Cochrane published their 2023 mask review, it was the seventh iteration of a process that began 18 years previously. Back in 2006, Cochrane researchers raked through the scientific literature to see if they could determine what interventions could halt the spread of viruses. They found no good evidence that masks work. The scientists then updated their review in 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2020.

With all six updates, each time scouring any new peer-reviewed studies, Cochrane researchers concluded the same: there is no good scientific evidence that masks work to control viruses. And each time, the scientific community yawned. Because until the Covid pandemic, nobody had conceived of a political movement to advocate for masks. Not even Zeynep Tufekci.

“Don’t worry if you cannot find masks,” Tufekci wrote in a February 2020 article for Scientific American. “For non–health care people, washing your hands often, using alcohol-based hand-sanitiser liberally and learning not to touch your face are the most important clinically-proven interventions there are.” Promoting the article on X, Tufekci reiterated this point: “Clinical studies show hand-washing is the crucial step not masks.”

But the following month, a New York Times media reporter praised Tufekci for reversing her former opinion in a 1 March tweetstorm. This was followed by a 17 March essay for The New York Times that convinced the CDC to alter federal guidance and advise Americans to mask.

What makes this all alarming is that Tufekci is an academic sociologist, with no training in medicine or public health. And yet, she managed to alter public health policy with a bunch of tweets and an essay followed, two months later, by a co-authored scientific preprint that promoted mask mandates...

The study’s lead author is Jeremy Howard, a mask advocate and Australian software entrepreneur, who, like Tufekci, has no training in public health or medicine. The review was later published in a medical journal and remains the only article I could find that Tufekci has published in the scientific literature on masks.

Despite such a thin publishing record in the scientific literature, the Raleigh News & Observer (an influential paper among academics) anointed Tufekci a Covid media hero who had challenged the medical and public health establishment and got the facts right — but with essays, not science...

In retrospect, it’s hard to read this article — celebrating an academic for doing science by essay — and not wonder if it’s a satirical piece for The Onion: “Monkey Solves Grand Unified Theory of Physics in a Single Tweet.” Nonetheless, Tufekci played along with the gag, amazed at her magical ability to solve complex scientific problems without doing any actual science — just writing essays.

“I never thought in a million years I’d be writing something that basically said the World Health Organization and CDC and medical establishment in the United States and Europe are wrong,” she told the paper. But one tiny obstacle stood between Tufekci and full acceptance of mask mandates: Cochrane.

When Cochrane released their mask update in January 2023, which again said the efficacy of masks was uncertain, critics of pandemic policies naturally used these scientific conclusions to cast doubt on the mask advocates. “Mask mandates were a bust,” wrote New York Times columnist Brett Stephens, citing an interview by Tom Jefferson, the lead author of the Cochrane mask review. “Those skeptics who were furiously mocked as cranks and occasionally censored as ‘misinformers’ for opposing mandates were right.”

Tufekci’s rise to public prominence is tied closely to her mask advocacy. Reading this column in The New York Times, the most prominent paper in the country, and where she also worked, must have been irksome for her...

The Times published Tufekci’s “masks work” essay. Given the way American journalism works, the piece had most likely been written and edited before she had contacted Jefferson the night before for comment. Although 12 different scientists had been involved in writing and researching the Cochrane mask review, Zeynep singled out Jefferson. She named him several times in her essay for making alleged false statements about the pandemic. Hours later, Cochrane rushed out Soares-Weiser’s statement, and then apologised to the review authors. “We hoped to inform you all before publication but have been blindsided by the NYT and have scrabbled to upload our statement,” Cochrane emailed the review authors.

This did not go down well with the authors. “I will not speak for the others but am deeply distressed by this course of events which have occurred without our knowledge,” replied Jon Conly, a professor and former head of the department of medicine at the University of Calgary. He insisted that Cochrane had thrown the review authors under the bus. “Very naive to think you and the [editor in chief Soares-Weiser] spoke to the media at NYTs (without informing us) and would trust them and that they would not immediately publish what you said, especially with this woman who is well known as a controversial writer.”...

Conly confirmed to me later that Tufekci — who did not respond to repeated requests for comment — never contacted him, even though he is named as the review’s corresponding author, who Tufekci should have contacted for comment. “Not sure who Tufekci would have corresponded with to find any of the authors who would have agreed with her,” Conly said.

As I have seen from internal correspondence, Cochrane’s editors then began discussing how to manage blowback from Soares Weiser’s statement. Brown reminded them the update used the same language from 2020 and that revisions were now being suggested because Cochrane was flinching from media critics, not because the science was wrong...

The review had already undergone extensive, detailed peer review. “If the editor-in-chief and ethics officer were colluding to find criticism afterwards,” he told me, “that would appear to be unethical.”

Meanwhile, Soares-Weiser’s statement and Tufekci’s article were having a significant effect outside the organisation, spurring several news articles as well as ridicule of the mask authors on social media. Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of several books on pandemics, Laurie Garret, accused the mask authors of fraud. “[T]hese bozos have undermined public faith in [masks] & biz/govt willingness to promote use,” she posted on X. (It is notable that, prior to the pandemic, Garrett posted on X in 2018 that masks don’t work for influenza and other respiratory viruses. “We have also known for 100+ years that masks do no good.”)

The argument was even reverberating through politics. Testifying in her final appearance before Congress, CDC Director, Rochelle Walensky, cited Soares-Weiser’s statement, falsely stating that Cochrane had “retracted” the mask review. Congressional staff were forced to correct her testimony: “The lack of trust in public health officials is becoming an enormous problem,” a congressional staffer later wrote.

Word of Soares-Weiser’s actions even reached the highest levels of the British government. That summer, while she was in London for a Cochrane event, an MP invited her to Parliament’s Portcullis House to explain her statement. However, according to a staffer in Parliament, Soares-Weiser dodged the invite and never appeared.

Although he was noted prominently in the “masks work” essay, Cochrane’s Michael Brown told me the Times had engaged in a lot of of “spinning” of his comments and he hadn’t been aware that Tufekci had campaigned for mask mandates, nor that she had published a review whose conclusions contradicted those of Cochrane. In her initial email to Brown, Tufekci had highlighted her ostensibly scientific background, introducing herself as both a New York Times columnist and an academic with a background in statistics and causal inference, and an interest in scientific reviews. “I use and participate in reviews myself (I’m writing one in my own field soon) and thus am familiar with many of the challenges and issues.”

This is something of an embellishment of Tufekci’s bona fides. According to Google Scholar, she has published no academic articles this year and the only one she published in all of 2023 was an opinion piece in Nature. As for the review article Tufekci had pointed to, it has never appeared.

“I’m a trusting person,” Brown told me, explaining that he had never looked up Tufekci’s history before speaking with her. “She’s definitely more of a journalist than a scientist. I didn’t agree with her, the way she then spun it: masks work.”

“The bottom line is that [our] review was well-done,” Brown said. As for the proposed changes to review’s language, Brown explained that the summary language had been written by Cochrane staff reporting to Karla Soares-Weiser, not Tom Jefferson and the other review authors...

Brown made his views on the science clear last September when he emailed the organiser of a talk he was giving that masks “do not make a major impact at the community level when promoted as a public health intervention”. He also told me that a recent scientific review in the Annals of Internal Medicine complemented the findings of Cochrane. “In the end, the conclusions were the same.”

But while Cochrane has ceased attacking its own mask review, The New York Times continues to promote the “masks work” narrative — despite evidence to the contrary. Last May, the paper ran an essay by Tulane University’s John M. Barry. In his piece, Barry wrote: “Masks present a much simpler question. They work. We’ve known they work since 1917, when they helped protect soldiers from a measles epidemic.”

And yet, we know this is not true. Even Barry does. As he wrote his bestselling tome, The Great Influenza: “The masks worn by millions were useless as designed and could not prevent influenza. Only preventing exposure to the virus could.”

But as has become clear, and as Brown confirmed in our conversation, masks are no longer about science: “Instead of just talking about the science, it became a political thing. And people fell on one side or the other,” he said. “And they said some things, and then they have to back up what they’ve said previously. And they’re just digging a hole deeper and deeper.”

What The New York Times did was to embrace a scientific opinion — masks work! — and then defend that notion like a divine ruling — ignoring contrary evidence and attacking researchers such as Tom Jefferson who have spent decades toiling away on a once-obscure topic. “This is what the future holds,” Jefferson told me. “It’s an upside-down world. It’s the death of science.”"

Trust the "experts" - when they push the left wing agenda

Kat Rosenfield on X

"Reading about the behind-the-scenes drama over the Cochrane review on masking, still pretty mad that we all had to spend 3 years in damp, muffled, chapped-chinned suffocating discomfort just so a bunch of terminally online public health people could own the cons"

Unscientific American

Unscientific American

"Michael Shermer got his first clue that things were changing at Scientific American in late 2018. The author had been writing his “Skeptic” column for the magazine since 2001. His monthly essays, aimed at an audience of both scientists and laymen, championed the scientific method, defended the need for evidence-based debate, and explored how cognitive and ideological biases can derail the search for truth. Shermer’s role models included two twentieth-century thinkers who, like him, relished explaining science to the public: Carl Sagan, the ebullient astronomer and TV commentator; and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who wrote a popular monthly column in Natural History magazine for 25 years. Shermer hoped someday to match Gould’s record of producing 300 consecutive columns. That goal would elude him.

In continuous publication since 1845, Scientific American is the country’s leading mainstream science magazine. Authors published in its pages have included Albert Einstein, Francis Crick, Jonas Salk, and J. Robert Oppenheimer—some 200 Nobel Prize winners in all. SciAm, as many readers call it, had long encouraged its authors to challenge established viewpoints. In the mid-twentieth century, for example, the magazine published a series of articles building the case for the then-radical concept of plate tectonics. In the twenty-first century, however, American scientific media, including Scientific American, began to slip into lockstep with progressive beliefs. Suddenly, certain orthodoxies—especially concerning race, gender, or climate—couldn’t be questioned.

“I started to see the writing on the wall toward the end of my run there,” Shermer told me. “I saw I was being slowly nudged away from certain topics.” One month, he submitted a column about the “fallacy of excluded exceptions,” a common logical error in which people perceive a pattern of causal links between factors but ignore counterexamples that don’t fit the pattern... the common belief that sexually abused children grow up to become abusers in turn. He cited evidence that “most sexually abused children do not grow up to abuse their own children” and that “most abusive parents were not abused as children.” And he observed how damaging this stereotype could be to abuse survivors; statistical clarity is all the more vital in such delicate cases, he argued. But Shermer’s editor at the magazine wasn’t having it. To the editor, Shermer’s effort to correct a common misconception might be read as downplaying the seriousness of abuse. Even raising the topic might be too traumatic for victims.

The following month, Shermer submitted a column discussing ways that discrimination against racial minorities, gays, and other groups has diminished (while acknowledging the need for continued progress). Here, Shermer ran into the same wall that Better Angels of Our Nature author Steven Pinker and other scientific optimists have faced. For progressives, admitting that any problem—racism, pollution, poverty—has improved means surrendering the rhetorical high ground. “They are committed to the idea that there is no cumulative progress,” Shermer says, and they angrily resist efforts to track the true prevalence, or the “base rate,” of a problem. Saying that “everything is wonderful and everyone should stop whining doesn’t really work,” his editor objected.

Shermer dug his grave deeper by quoting Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald and The Coddling of the American Mind authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, who argue that the rise of identity-group politics undermines the goal of equal rights for all. Shermer wrote that intersectional theory, which lumps individuals into aggregate identity groups based on race, sex, and other immutable characteristics, “is a perverse inversion” of Martin Luther King’s dream of a color-blind society. For Shermer’s editors, apparently, this was the last straw. The column was killed and Shermer’s contract terminated. Apparently, SciAm no longer had the ideological bandwidth to publish such a heterodox thinker.

American journalism has never been very good at covering science. In fact, the mainstream press is generally a cheap date when it comes to stories about alternative medicine, UFO sightings, pop psychology, or various forms of junk science. For many years, that was one factor that made Scientific American’s rigorous reporting so vital. The New York Times, National Geographic, Smithsonian, and a few other mainstream publications also produced top-notch science coverage. Peer-reviewed academic journals aimed at specialists met a higher standard still. But over the past decade or so, the quality of science journalism—even at the top publications—has declined in a new and alarming way. Today’s journalistic failings don’t owe simply to lazy reporting or a weakness for sensationalism but to a sweeping and increasingly pervasive worldview.

It is hard to put a single name on this sprawling ideology. It has its roots both in radical 1960s critiques of capitalism and in the late-twentieth-century postmodern movement that sought to “problematize” notions of objective truth. Critical race theory, which sees structural racism as the grand organizing principle of our society, is one branch. Queer studies, which seeks to “deconstruct” traditional norms of family, sex, and gender, is another. Critics of this worldview sometimes call it “identity politics”; supporters prefer the term “intersectionality.” In managerial settings, the doctrine lives under the label of diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI: a set of policies that sound anodyne—but in practice, are anything but.

This dogma sees Western values, and the United States in particular, as uniquely pernicious forces in world history. And, as exemplified by the anticapitalist tirades of climate activist Greta Thunberg, the movement features a deep eco-pessimism buoyed only by the distant hope of a collectivist green utopia.

The DEI worldview took over our institutions slowly, then all at once. Many on the left, especially journalists, saw Donald Trump’s election in 2016 as an existential threat that necessitated dropping the guardrails of balance and objectivity. Then, in early 2020, Covid lockdowns put American society under unbearable pressure. Finally, in May 2020, George Floyd’s death under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer provided the spark. Protesters exploded onto the streets. Every institution, from coffeehouses to Fortune 500 companies, felt compelled to demonstrate its commitment to the new “antiracist” ethos. In an already polarized environment, most media outlets lunged further left. Centrists—including New York Times opinion editor James Bennet and science writer Donald G. McNeil, Jr.—were forced out, while radical progressive voices were elevated.

This was the national climate when Laura Helmuth took the helm of Scientific American in April 2020... Rarely in the magazine’s history had so many Americans urgently needed timely, sensible science reporting: Where did Covid come from? How is it transmitted? Was shutting down schools and businesses scientifically justified? What do we know about vaccines?

Scientific American did examine Covid from various angles, including an informative July 2020 cover story diagramming how the SARS-CoV-2 virus “sneaks inside human cells.” But the publication didn’t break much new ground in covering the pandemic. When it came to assessing growing evidence that Covid might have escaped from a laboratory, for example, SciAm got scooped by New York and Vanity Fair, publications known more for their coverage of politics and entertainment than of science.

At the same time, SciAm dramatically ramped up its social-justice coverage. The magazine would soon publish a flurry of articles with titles such as “Modern Mathematics Confronts Its White, Patriarchal Past” and “The Racist Roots of Fighting Obesity.” The death of the twentieth century’s most acclaimed biologist was the hook for “The Complicated Legacy of E. O. Wilson,” an opinion piece arguing that Wilson’s work was “based on racist ideas,” without quoting a single line from his large published canon. At least those pieces had some connection to scientific topics, though. In 2021, SciAm published an opinion essay, “Why the Term ‘JEDI’ Is Problematic for Describing Programs That Promote Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion.” The article’s five authors took issue with the effort by some social-justice advocates to create a cute new label while expanding the DEI acronym to include “Justice.” The Jedi knights of the Star Wars movies are “inappropriate mascots for social justice,” the authors argued, because they are “prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution (violent duels with phallic light sabers, gaslighting by means of ‘Jedi mind tricks,’ etc.).” What all this had to do with science was anyone’s guess.

Several prominent scientists took note of SciAm’s shift. “Scientific American is changing from a popular-science magazine into a social-justice-in-science magazine,” Jerry Coyne, a University of Chicago emeritus professor of ecology and evolution, wrote on his popular blog, “Why Evolution Is True.” He asked why the magazine had “changed its mission from publishing decent science pieces to flawed bits of ideology.”

“The old Scientific American that I subscribed to in college was all about the science,” University of New Mexico evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller told me. “It was factual reporting on new ideas and findings from physics to psychology, with a clear writing style, excellent illustrations, and no obvious political agenda.” Miller says that he noticed a gradual change about 15 years ago, and then a “woke political bias that got more flagrant and irrational” over recent years. The leading U.S. science journals, Nature and Science, and the U.K.-based New Scientist made a similar pivot, he says. By the time Trump was elected in 2016, he says, “the Scientific American editors seem to have decided that fighting conservatives was more important than reporting on science.”

Scientific American’s increasing engagement in politics drew national attention in late 2020, when the magazine, for the first time in its 175-year history, endorsed a presidential candidate...

Scientific American wasn’t alone in endorsing a presidential candidate in 2020. Nature also endorsed Biden in that election cycle. The New England Journal of Medicine indirectly did the same, writing that “our current leaders have demonstrated that they are dangerously incompetent” and should not “keep their jobs.” Vinay Prasad, the prominent oncologist and public-health expert, recently lampooned the endorsement trend on his Substack, asking whether science journals will tell him who to vote for again in 2024. “Here is an idea! Call it crazy,” he wrote: “Why don’t scientists focus on science, and let politics decide the election?” When scientists insert themselves into politics, he added, “the only result is we are forfeiting our credibility.”

But what does it mean to “focus on science”? Many of us learned the standard model of the scientific method in high school. We understand that science attempts—not always perfectly—to shield the search for truth from political interference, religious dogmas, or personal emotions and biases. But that model of science has been under attack for half a century. The French theorist Michel Foucault argued that scientific objectivity is an illusion produced and shaped by society’s “systems of power.” Today’s woke activists challenge the legitimacy of science on various grounds: the predominance of white males in its history, the racist attitudes held by some of its pioneers, its inferiority to indigenous “ways of knowing,” and so on. Ironically, as Christopher Rufo points out in his book America’s Cultural Revolution, this postmodern ideology—which began as a critique of oppressive power structures—today empowers the most illiberal, repressive voices within academic and other institutions.

Shermer believes that the new style of science journalism “is being defined by this postmodern worldview, the idea that all facts are relative or culturally determined.” Of course, if scientific facts are just products of a particular cultural milieu, he says, “then everything is a narrative that has to reflect some political side.” Without an agreed-upon framework to separate valid from invalid claims—without science, in other words—people fall back on their hunches and in-group biases, the “my-side bias.”

Traditionally, science reporting was mostly descriptive—writers strove to explain new discoveries in a particular field. The new style of science journalism takes the form of advocacy—writers seek to nudge readers toward a politically approved opinion.

“Lately journalists have been behaving more like lawyers,” Shermer says, “marshaling evidence in favor of their own view and ignoring anything that doesn’t help their argument.” This isn’t just the case in science journalism, of course. Even before the Trump era, the mainstream press boosted stories that support left-leaning viewpoints and carefully avoided topics that might offer ammunition to the Right. Most readers understand, of course, that stories about politics are likely to be shaped by a media outlet’s ideological slant. But science is theoretically supposed to be insulated from political influence. Sadly, the new woke style of science journalism reframes factual scientific debates as ideological battles, with one side presumed to be morally superior. Not surprisingly, the crisis in science journalism is most obvious in the fields where public opinion is most polarized.

The Covid pandemic was a crisis not just for public health but for the public’s trust in our leading institutions. From Anthony Fauci on down, key public-health officials issued unsupported policy prescriptions, fudged facts, and suppressed awkward questions about the origin of the virus. A skeptical, vigorous science press could have done a lot to keep these officials honest—and the public informed. Instead, even elite science publications mostly ran cover for the establishment consensus. For example, when Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya and two other public-health experts proposed an alternative to lockdowns in their Great Barrington Declaration, media outlets joined in Fauci’s effort to discredit and silence them.

Richard Ebright, professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, is a longtime critic of gain-of-function research, which can make naturally occurring viruses deadlier. From the early weeks of the pandemic, he suspected that the virus had leaked from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. Evidence increasingly suggests that he was correct.  I asked Ebright how he thought that the media had handled the lab-leak debate. He responded:

Science writers at most major news outlets and science news outlets have spent the last four years obfuscating and misrepresenting facts about the origin of the pandemic. They have done this to protect the scientists, science administrators, and the field of science—gain-of-function research on potential pandemic pathogens—that likely caused the pandemic. They have done this in part because those scientists and science administrators are their sources, . . . in part because they believe that public trust in science would be damaged by reporting the facts, and in part because the origin of the pandemic acquired a partisan political valance after early public statements by Tom Cotton, Mike Pompeo, and Donald Trump.

 During the first two years of the pandemic, most mainstream media outlets barely mentioned the lab-leak debate. And when they did, they generally savaged both the idea and anyone who took it seriously. In March 2021, long after credible evidence emerged hinting at a laboratory origin for the virus, Scientific American published an article, “Lab-Leak Hypothesis Made It Harder for Scientists to Seek the Truth.” The piece compared the theory to the KGB’s disinformation campaign about the origin of HIV/AIDS and blamed lab-leak advocates for creating a poisonous climate around the issue: “The proliferation of xenophobic rhetoric has been linked to a striking increase in anti-Asian hate crimes. It has also led to a vilification of the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] and some of its Western collaborators, as well as partisan attempts to defund certain types of research (such as ‘gain of function’ research).” Today we know that the poisonous atmosphere around the lab-leak question was deliberately created by Anthony Fauci and a handful of scientists involved in dangerous research at the Wuhan lab. And the case for banning gain-of-function research has never been stronger.

One of the few science journalists who did take the lab-leak question seriously was Donald McNeil, Jr., the veteran New York Times reporter forced out of the paper in an absurd DEI panic. After leaving the Times—and like several other writers pursuing the lab-leak question—McNeil published his reporting on his own Medium blog. It is telling that, at a time when leading science publications were averse to exploring the greatest scientific mystery of our time, some of the most honest reporting on the topic was published in independent, reader-funded outlets. It’s also instructive to note that the journalist who replaced McNeil on the Covid beat at the Times, Apoorva Mandavilli, showed open hostility to investigating Covid’s origins. In 2021, she famously tweeted: “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not yet here.” It would be hard to compose a better epitaph to the credibility of mainstream science journalism.

As Shermer observed, many science journalists see their role not as neutral reporters but as advocates for noble causes. This is especially true in reporting about the climate. Many publications now have reporters on a permanent “climate beat,” and several nonprofit organizations offer grants to help fund climate coverage. Climate science is an important field, worthy of thoughtful, balanced coverage. Unfortunately, too many climate reporters seem especially prone to common fallacies, including base-rate neglect, and to hyping tenuous data.

The mainstream science press never misses an opportunity to ratchet up climate angst. No hurricane passes without articles warning of “climate disasters.” And every major wildfire seemingly generates a “climate apocalypse” headline. For example, when a cluster of Quebec wildfires smothered the eastern U.S. in smoke last summer, the New York Times called it “a season of climate extremes.” It’s likely that a warming planet will result in more wildfires and stronger hurricanes. But eager to convince the public that climate-linked disasters are rapidly trending upward, journalists tend to neglect the base rate. In the case of Quebec wildfires, for example, 2023 was a fluky outlier. During the previous eight years, Quebec wildfires burned fewer acres than average; then, there was no upward trend—and no articles discussing the paucity of fires. By the same token, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center, a lower-than-average number of major hurricanes struck the U.S. between 2011 and 2020. But there were no headlines suggesting, say, “Calm Hurricane Seasons Cast Doubt on Climate Predictions.”

Most climate journalists wouldn’t dream of drawing attention to data that challenge the climate consensus. They see their role as alerting the public to an urgent problem that will be solved only through political change.

Similar logic applies to social issues. The social-justice paradigm rests on the notion that racism, sexism, transphobia, and other biases are so deeply embedded in our society that they can be eradicated only through constant focus on the problem. Any people or institutions that don’t participate in this process need to be singled out for criticism. In such an atmosphere, it takes a particularly brave journalist to note exceptions to the reigning orthodoxy.

This dynamic is especially intense in the debates over transgender medicine... Families facing treatment decisions for youth gender dysphoria desperately need clear, objective guidance. They’re not getting it.

Instead, medical organizations and media outlets typically describe experimental hormone treatments and surgeries as routine, and even “lifesaving,” when, in fact, their benefits remain contested, while their risks are enormous. In a series of articles, the Manhattan Institute’s Leor Sapir has documented how trans advocates enforce this appearance of consensus among U.S. scientists, medical experts, and many journalists. Through social-media campaigns and other tools, these activists have forced conferences to drop leading scientists, gotten journals to withdraw scientific papers after publication, and interfered with the distribution of Abigail Shrier’s 2020 book Irreversible Damage, which challenges the wisdom of “gender-affirming care” for adolescent girls. While skeptics are cowed into silence, Sapir concludes, those who advocate fast-tracking children for radical gender therapy “will go down in history as responsible for one of the worst medical scandals in U.S. history.”

In such an overheated environment, it would be helpful to have a journalistic outlet advocating a sober, evidence-based approach. In an earlier era, Scientific American might have been that voice. Unfortunately, SciAm today downplays messy debates about gender therapies, while offering sunny platitudes about the “safety and efficacy” of hormone treatments for prepubescent patients. For example, in a 2023 article, “What Are Puberty Blockers, and How Do They Work?,” the magazine repeats the unsubstantiated claim that such treatments are crucial to preventing suicide among gender-dysphoric children...

Fortunately, glimmers of light are shining through on the gender-care controversy. The New York Times has lately begun publishing more balanced articles on the matter, much to the anger of activists. And various European countries have started reassessing and limiting youth hormone treatments...

Scientific American has yet to offer an even-handed review of the new scientific skepticism toward aggressive gender medicine. Instead, in February, the magazine published an opinion column, “Pseudoscience Has Long Been Used to Oppress Transgender People.” Shockingly, it argues for even less medical caution in dispensing radical treatments. The authors approvingly note that “many trans activists today call for diminishing the role of medical authority altogether in gatekeeping access to trans health care,” arguing that patients should have “access to hormones and surgery on demand.” And, in an implicit warning to anyone who might question these claims and goals, the article compares today’s skeptics of aggressive gender medicine to Nazi eugenicists and book burners. Shortly after the Cass report’s release, SciAm published an interview with two activists who argue that scientists questioning trans orthodoxy are conducting “epistemological violence.”

There’s nothing wrong with vigorous debate over scientific questions. In fact, in both science and journalism, adversarial argumentation is a vital tool in testing claims and getting to the truth. “A bad idea can hover in the ether of a culture if there is no norm for speaking out,” Shermer says. Where some trans activists cross the line is in trying to derail debate by shaming and excluding anyone who challenges the activists’ manufactured consensus.

Such intimidation has helped enforce other scientific taboos. Anthony Fauci called the scientists behind the Great Barrington Declaration “fringe epidemiologists” and successfully lobbied to censor their arguments on social media. Climate scientists who diverge from the mainstream consensus struggle to get their research funded or published. The claim that implicit racial bias unconsciously influences our minds has been debunked time and again—but leading science magazines keep asserting it.

Scientists and journalists aren’t known for being shrinking violets. What makes them tolerate this enforced conformity? The intimidation described above is one factor. Academia and journalism are both notoriously insecure fields; a single accusation of racism or anti-trans bias can be a career ender. In many organizations, this gives the youngest, most radical members of the community disproportionate power to set ideological agendas.

“Scientists, science publishers, and science journalists simply haven’t learned how to say no to emotionally unhinged activists,” evolutionary psychologist Miller says. “They’re prone to emotional blackmail, and they tend to be very naive about the political goals of activists who claim that scientific finding X or Y will ‘impose harm’ on some group.”

But scientists may also have what they perceive to be positive motives to self-censor. A fascinating recent paper concludes: “Prosocial motives underlie scientific censorship by scientists.” The authors include a who’s who of heterodox thinkers, including Miller, Manhattan Institute fellow Glenn Loury, Pamela Paresky, John McWhorter, Steven Pinker, and Wilfred Reilly. “Our analysis suggests that scientific censorship is often driven by scientists, who are primarily motivated by self-protection, benevolence toward peer scholars, and prosocial concerns for the well-being of human social groups,” they write.

Whether motivated by good intentions, conformity, or fear of ostracization, scientific censorship undermines both the scientific process and public trust. The authors of the “prosocial motives” paper point to “at least one obvious cost of scientific censorship: the suppression of accurate information.” When scientists claim to represent a consensus about ideas that remain in dispute—or avoid certain topics entirely—those decisions filter down through the journalistic food chain. Findings that support the social-justice worldview get amplified in the media, while disapproved topics are excoriated as disinformation. Not only do scientists lose the opportunity to form a clearer picture of the world; the public does, too. At the same time, the public notices when claims made by health officials and other experts prove to be based more on politics than on science. A new Pew Research poll finds that the percentage of Americans who say that they have a “great deal” of trust in scientists has fallen from 39 percent in 2020 to 23 percent today...

Unfortunately, progressive activists today begin with their preferred policy outcomes or ideological conclusions and then try to force scientists and journalists to fall in line. Their worldview insists that, rather than challenging the progressive orthodoxy, science must serve as its handmaiden. This pre-Enlightenment style of thinking used to hold sway only in radical political subcultures and arcane corners of academia. Today it is reflected even in our leading institutions and science publications. Without a return to the core principles of science—and the broader tradition of fact-based discourse and debate—our society risks drifting onto the rocks of irrationality."

The 2022 article mentioned in the post was where "Scientific" American was claiming the lab leak theory was a "conspiracy theory" and "disinformation" and called it dangerous. Clearly science proceeds by ignoring and censoring alternative views. 

Related: "Scientific" American's claim that saying that you can't sleep in public is somehow criminalising human biology.

From Banana Slugs to Human Beings, There Are Just Two Sexes

From Banana Slugs to Human Beings, There Are Just Two Sexes
An examination of 18 supposedly ‘trans animals’ disproves activist claims that we all live on a non-binary gender ‘spectrum.’

Pity the poor clownfish—a brightly coloured creature, once made famous by the 2003 animated film Finding Nemo, which has now been reduced to a prop in the ongoing debate about sex and gender identity. That’s because, unlike mammals (including humans), clownfish are what scientists call “sequential hermaphrodites” of the protandrous variety. What this means is that while every clownfish starts out as male, some switch sexes if a female is needed by the school.

 Anyone who’s followed the debate about transgender rights will immediately understand why this type of fish now has a starring role in advocacy materials designed to convince the broad public that sex-switching is a common feature in the natural kingdom, including among humans. In Canada, for instance, the publicly funded CBC is airing a documentary titled Fluid: Life Beyond the Binary, in which the self-described “non-binary” host, Mae Martin, invokes the existence of clownfish, and various other creatures, to argue that “each of us are on the gender spectrum.” Not surprisingly, Martin is explicitly promoting the documentary as a paean to social justice, and as a rebuke to anyone seeking to put limits on “gender-affirming health care” (such as the double mastectomy that Martin publicly announced in 2021).

This week, British human-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell tried to advance similar arguments in a widely read tweet referencing—as the linked Gay Times article put it—“18 animals you didn’t know were biologically trans.”

“These animals show that gender is not a simplistic binary, male and female,” Tatchell gushed. “Trans and intersex are real. Get used to it!”

Indeed, the article that Tatchell cited goes further, denouncing the very idea of “biology” as a “pseudo-intellectual” fixation of “lesbian separatists” and “right-wing lobbyists.” The author, one Fran Tirado, warns that even mentioning terms such as “biological sex,” “biological male,” and “biological female” is a problematic affront to the supposedly non-binary, gender-bending nature of life—which, the author claims, has been in evidence since “the earliest recorded histories of the earth.”

Then comes the promised 18-point catalogue of “animals you didn’t know were biologically trans”—starting with the above-pictured clownfish (often described by scientists as anemonefish).

So let’s take a look at the list. Are these really examples of animals that are “biologically trans”? And what do they tell us—if anything—about the associated activist claims that sexual dimorphism in humans is just a myth created by transphobic bigots?

Clownfish

As indicated above, some male clownfish (typically, the most dominant specimens within a school) change their sex to female. We know they’ve switched sex because they’ve change their gonad tissue, and so start making eggs instead of sperm (which is to say that their gonads are now ovaries instead of testes). As with humans, there are only two gonad types in clownfish, and two gamete types—one male and one female—and nothing in between.

• Sexes? Two.
• Sex change? Yes, because clownfish are sequential hermaphrodites.
• Could I be a hermaphodite trapped in a mammalian body? Very doubtful.

Ruff

This is a highly polyandrous wading bird found across much of Eurasia. It got included on the Gay Times list because some male ruffs mimic female traits as a means to covertly gain mating opportunities with lady ruffs. But this ruse doesn’t change the fact that these ruffs are still male. We know this because they make sperm, not eggs. Their misleading form of “self-identification” doesn’t alter their bird biology any more than putting on a dress turns a man into a woman.

• Sexes? Two.
• Sex change? No.

  Swallowtail butterfly

In the case of swallowtail butterflies, it’s the female that has the power of mimicry. But they don’t mimic male Swallowtail butterflies. Rather, they mimic the traits of completely different butterfly species, so as to fool predators into thinking they’re toxic. And so it’s not entirely clear how this winged insect got on to the Gay Times list. (At this point, it might be instructive to note that the author of that Gay Times article, the aforementioned Tirado, seems to have no relevant scientific expertise, but rather is known for articles with titles such as We Should All Do Relationships Like Polyamorists, and How Getting Drawn Nude Helped Me Learn to Love My Body). Perhaps the publication was taken in by the fact that this sex-linked swallowtail trait is associated with a gene called doublesex, which admittedly sounds vaguely queer.

• Sexes? Two.
• Sex change? No

Seahorse

The male seahorse carries up to a thousand babies while his female mate—to use the technical scientific term—fucks around. We know it’s the male carrying the babies because he’s the one who made the sperm that fertilizes the eggs that the absent mother produced and then lodged inside his body. So it’s the same old boring story of sperm and egg, just with the twist that it’s dad who gets big and bloated instead of mom.

• Sexes? Two.
• Sex change? No.
• Girls night out? Every day of the week.

Spotted hyena

The female spotted hyena has a long, retractable clitoris. This anatomical feature makes sex a matter of hope for the male, and birth quite dangerous for her babies. We know clitoromegaly (scientists have a name for everything) is a feature of female hyenas because they’re the ones with the ovaries and the eggs. A large clit doesn’t change them into males any more than a strap-on sex toy changes a woman into a man.  

• Sexes? Two.
• Sex change? No.

Skink

These are lizards whose development is affected by temperature, with some skinks possessing XX chromosomes (a type that is typically associated with females) undergoing an in utero transition that causes them to develop as males. We know these XX skinks are male because they make sperm when they become older.

• Sexes? Two.
• Sex change? Yes—though only during gestation.

Boyd’s Forest Dragon

This is an arboreal lizard that made the list because at least one specimen—an aquarium-housed female in Australia—appears to have changed sex following the death of a male companion, switching up its testes for ovaries.

• Sexes? Two.
• Sex change? Yes.
• Non-binary? No.

Komodo dragon

This enormous lizard uses a ZW (not XY) chromosomal determination system; females are ZW, males are ZZ. There is no evidence that they change sexes, but the fact that males possess a pair of the same type of sex chromosomes (like human females) seems to have qualified them for the Gay Times list.

Also, the females can reproduce asexually via a process known as parthenogenesis, whereby an embryo is produced without the egg being fertilized with sperm. But that’s an exclusively female trait (not just in komodo dragons, but in all creatures capable of parthenogenesis). So it certainly doesn’t make them trans.

• Sexes? Two.
• Sex change? No.
• Family pet suitability: Low.

Jellyfish

Gelatinous zooplankton are far too squishy to wear pronoun pins. But jellyfish do tend to get namechecked on this sort of list due to their status as both sequential hermaphrodites (like clownfish) and simultaneous hermaphrodites. (In the former case, an organism switches from one sex to the other. In the latter case, it can exhibit both sexes simultaneously.) We know this because jellyfish, being translucent, aren’t very good at hiding their private parts from researchers.

• Sexes? Two.
• Sex change? Yes.
• Trans “gender identity”? No, because they don’t have brains.

Starfish

Starfish reproduction is a complex topic. But for our purposes, suffice it to say that many of these star-shaped echinoderms have the charming habit of spraying sperm around by waving their many arms (usually five). They also can reproduce by splitting in half, which does indeed sound “queer,” though not in the LGBT sense of the word.

• Sexes? Two.
• Sex change? No.
• Trans “gender identity”? Again, no brain. 

Oyster

These salt-water bivalves combine the hermaphroditic nature of jellyfish with the unsettling sperm-spigot sex techniques of starfish—meaning that they release a big sperm cloud that then serves to allow self-impregnation.

• Sexes? Two.
• Sex change? Yes.
• Sexual autonomy level: Extreme.

Black sea bass

Another sequential hermaphrodite, the black sea bass starts as an egg-making female and—by now, you know how this works—can then switch gonad type to testes, which allows the (now male) fish to start making sperm.

• Sexes? Two.
• Sex change? Yes.
• Boldly defies the settler-colonial heteronormative construct known as the sex binary? Nope. 

  Banana slug

Exactly what it says on the tin: a slug that looks like a banana. Here we get another simultaneous hermaphrodite, whose banana-esque body possesses both male and female reproductive capabilities. We won’t get too much into the unsettling BDSM details of banana-slug sex, except to note that the banana slug doing the male role (i.e., providing sperm) will sometimes have its penis gnawed off by the banana slug performing the female role (providing eggs).

• Sexes? Two.
• Sex change? No.
• Queer? Only in the sense that the penis comes out of its head.

Marsh harrier

The marsh harrier puts more sneaky bird behaviour on display, with some males pretending to be females. However, unlike the above-referenced ruff, which performs this mimicry as a means to trick females into mating, these male harriers are refugees from harrier-on-harrier violence, which can apparently be quite vicious. As usual, we know these are males pretending to be females, due to the tell-tale sperm.

• Sexes? Two.
• Sex change? No.
• Toxic masculinity level: Problematic.

Green honeycreeper

These birds can, in rare cases, be half-male and half-female. We can tell which half is male by the testes and which half is female by the ovaries. In effect, these are birds with disorders of sexual development (sometimes referred to as DSDs or “intersex” conditions). As with humans afflicted with DSDs, there is no intermediate form of gonad or gamete—just the two varieties associated with males and females.

• Sexes? Two.
• Sex change? No.

Mandarin duck

Females ducks of this type have one functional (i.e., egg-producing) ovary and another gonad they keep as a spare. If a female loses the functioning ovary due to illness or injury, the other gonad can activate. And here we get to the bit that interested the Gay Times: At least one Mandarin female is known to have activated her “sleeper ovary” into a testicle and made sperm (thereby transitioning from female to male in the process).

• Sexes? Two.
• Sex change? Yes.
• Do humans come with spare gonads? Alas, no. 

Whiptails

Back to the lizard world. These reptiles perform parthenogenesis (much like the Komodo dragon, which we’ve already met), whereby an unfertilized egg can develop into healthy offspring. This means that female whiptails don’t need males to reproduce—which is why male whiptails, as in some feminist science-fiction tale, no longer exist.

• Sexes? Just one.
• Sex change? No.
• Non-binary? Only in the sense that one is half of two.

Slipper limpet

This sea snail has a special kind of shell that, once inverted, looks like a slipper. They’re male-to-female sequential hermaphrodites, which you’re already no doubt quite bored of hearing about.

• Sexes? Two.
• Sex change? Yes.
• Queer? No, but their sex lives are quite interesting—some might even say, orgiastic—as described by biologist Susan Pike:

If [a slipper limpet] is the only [one] around, it will develop into a female and send out chemical signals to attract other slipper shells to come settle on her, forming a stack of slipper shells with the oldest female on the bottom and younger males on top of it…The males are able to directly fertilize the female beneath, even if separated by four or five other males! Adult slipper limpets can live in stacks of up to 20 individuals.

  Summary

Do some creatures change sex? Absolutely. But this isn’t new information. It’s a fact that biologists have known about for a long time.

What is also well-known is that none of these sex-changing creatures are mammals, much less human. Rather, they’re insects, fish, lizards, and marine invertebrates whose biology is different from our own in countless (fascinating) ways.

What’s more, in every single case described above, there are always (at most) just two distinct sexes at play—no matter how those two sexes may switch or combine. One of those sexes is male, a sex associated with gonads that produce sperm (testes); and the other is female, with gonads that produce eggs (ovaries). There’s nothing else on the menu. It’s just M and F.

Yes, there’s a “spectrum.” But it’s not the imaginary sex spectrum that activists such as Martin, Tatchell, and Tirado are trying to conjure. Rather, it’s the extraordinary spectrum of traits, behaviors, and evolutionary adaptations that all of these creatures exhibit as part of nature’s grand pageant.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Qubits vs Trans People

From Controversial Political Memes for Anti-Establishment Human Beings, a reliable source for left wing nonsense (not to mention a key study in irony, given that the left is the establishment):

"Instead of using binary bits, quantum computers use qubits (quantum bits) to solve mathematical problems and to prepare datasets. The traditional bit is based on binary code. A bit can have only
one of two states: 1 or 0. Qubits, on the other hand, are non-binary and can have both states at the same time: 1 and 0.

MAGA people: 'Hnnnngggh stop making Science WOKE! It's binary and it will stay binary none of this Disney movie crap ... MAGA is God !'

'And that's how you destroy the right wing garbage agenda ladies and gentlemen'"

Comment 1: "Nice! Just a few things. A qubit is “non-binary” in that it can inhabit multiple states at once. The existence of a qubit relies on the fact that the “on” state (1) and “off” state (0) are definite states that exist in physical space as with a classical bit.

When the qubit exhibits both “on” and “off” this is called a superposition. This superposition can be described by a linear equation as can be seen in the picture below. The alpha and Beta variables (α, β) are “complex” numbers (or imaginary numbers in math).

The equation itself represents the probability that the qubit will be in one state or the other and then when it is measured, the probability wave collapses into one of the “real” states.

Conversely, the “non-binary” “gender” has a different definition to anyone who uses it. It has no rules other than “not being inside the gender binary.” It is based on a gender-abolitionist theory that critically claims that gender itself isn’t real as we know it and is nothing but a collectively constructed fiction.

This is quite literally the opposite of what non-binary means in quantum mechanics because a superposition by definition means that both states HAVE to exist. QM shows they exist SO much that something outside our ability to fully measure in our four dimensional time space can only manifest in this reality as a probability wave of both and literally nothing else we observe.

TLDR; Not only is this post implicitly calling the “non-binary gender” mostly reliant on imaginary parts, it’s affirming a definition that there are only two genders.
Conservatives absolutely.. OWNED…??

To be fair though, if you ignore 100% of every single thing about quantum mechanics, qubits, and linear algebra this post is based on, the post makes complete sense!!
Cheers!!"


Comment 2: "as someone who has a masters in Quantum Computing. I will try to explain this a little easier.

This post oversimplifies quantum mechanics by using the "if not observed, it has multiple states" argument to losely justify a weird claim that conservatives fear spectrums. Not only does it incorrectly interpret quantum mechanics - which I don't blame them! It's difficult! - quantum computing uses binary choices to determine an action. It is still 1s and 0s when directly observed. It's simply based on probability that it is either a 1 or a 0. Biological sex supports this same ideology. You have a probability of being a woman or a man when you're born, based on a list of biological and genetic factors.

TLDR; This isn't the "gotcha" that you think it is."