I have a trans flag flying from my house but I completely understand concerns by women that they’re being set back 60 years if someone born a biological man starts setting female swimming or boxing records. Women have their own sports because we turned scientific differences into policy. It created fairness.
If you’re in a binary world you may have decided one thing about my beliefs in the first eight words of that paragraph and then something else after the rest of it. If you insist there is no binary in biological sex, I hope you at least consider the existence of irony in making sweeping generalizations about the psychology of people based on one issue.
Language is attributing meaning to words and it can be subjective. Even written and spoken forms are open to differing interpretation. Tone is difficult in writing.
Not everyone makes sweeping generalizations in a binary way that but for some, an easily-understood concept, ‘the exception proves the rule’, codified 2,000 years ago, has become ‘any exceptions invalidate rules’ and if you don’t agree you are MAGA, while to someone on the other side if you do agree you hate women.(1) However,what Cicero actually stated was exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis – the exception only verifies that there is a rule, not that the rule is false.
Understanding language matters. Or does it? Has postmodernism undermined critical thinking, so exceptions do not prove rules, because there are no rules, only subjective opinions, or have we gotten more nuanced since Cicero? Or is it simply time to stop letting a few people on the fringes of issues create the impression they represent the entire continuum of giant tribes and determine rules and exceptions?
In “The Sexual Evolution”, evolutionary biologist Professor Nathan Lents tackles the issue. My greatest fear is knowing just enough on a topic to get it all wrong and I’d rather we get things right so when I got the email requesting that Science 2.0 review the book, I immediately asked Professor Joan Roughgarden, who wrote here in 2007 to address discussions by psychologists Seth Roberts and Michael Bailey about transgender people, if she might take a look for us and she replied promptly that she’d already provided a blurb for the cover.
Professor Roughgarden wrote the first definitive work in this area of biology so providing an endorsement makes it basically unimpeachable from a critical-thinking point of view and I had HarperCollins send it over. Does that belief mean I have bias? Perhaps, but we make decisions for billions of stimuli each day only by inference. We learn to ignore background noise and play the odds on things like driving a car.
Professor Lents begins with an example of how our need as humans to define things using language shapes our thinking; a group of students who really want to know the difference between a quiz and a test. There is no meaningful difference to most, any more than if I use gasoline in my car and you use petrol the internal combustion is different. The grade and personal achievement and getting a scholarship are not impacted by what the metric is called, making it ‘a distinction without a difference.’
He argues that it may not be a distinction without a difference, perhaps a ‘test’ seems more planned and serious and therefore may mean more pressure than a ‘quiz’, so the name matters to them, and why some students really need to know if it is a test or a quiz.
Okay, then they should call it what they like. Someone else can call it what they like. It makes no difference in the result. A problem with that can arise if one wants to call it a quiz and someone else wants it to be a test and they leave their own personal continuum and want to make the other use their preferred verbiage. And then the other may dig in and not use that term out of rebellion and things escalate.
Thus we get culture wars, and name-calling, when most people truly don’t care whether it is a quiz or test. The conversation becomes dominated by loud extremists.
Science 2.0 is in its 19th year and for most of that time it was widely accepted that the English language had two different words, sex and gender, because they were two different things. Sex is based on one chromosome, gender is who you are.
Yet once trans issues became more prominent, biologists on social media began to note that there are lots of cases of exceptions to that in nature, and therefore any exceptions invalidate the rule.
To ruin Shakespeare, a rose by any other name would not smell as sweet. No one is truly objective that way, of course, and the science issue blends into the cultural one when we see that lots of things we think are human behavior are all over the animal kingdom. Cross-dressing, sure, and birds are doing same-sex stuff all of the time. Is that weird? We have hundreds of thousands of people who watch them do it. For fun.
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And it doesn’t seem to impact what we generally call their “family values.” There are too many examples, it needs 300 pages to go through them all, and that’s what you get.
Philosophers will note that if the premise is humans needing to quantify and name things, and that shapes biology, how does it not undermine the book’s premise that science can settle the discussion using examples throughout nature and throughout evolutionary epochs? I consider science one of those great apolitical meritocracies but one time I had progressive militants asking me if I ‘want to die on that hill’ because I said the stars are not different based on the person viewing them. The threats and vitriol toward me numbered in the thousands with only a few noting that my goal of science being open to everyone was a pretty innocuous statement. Yet if you only read Twitter comments about what I wrote rather than what I actually wrote you had a completely misguided perception thanks to their language.
How can an author declare they’re giving the science an “unbiased look” a few words after declaring they were going to be “forcefully pulling up a chair?”
Because language is not a free-for-all, or we’d never get anywhere.
We don’t want to fall into a trap where we are actual postmodernists and parsing language ad infinitum, as President Clinton attempted during his sex scandal and resulting impeachment when he declared he had a different definition of what “is” is. We do have to draw definitive lines somewhere, not everything can be a continuum. A second-grader who learns about frogs is not just as valid as an evolutionary biologist when it comes to biology, even if they feel smart.
I never want to know just enough to be wrong but I like feeling that I got a little smarter, and this book accomplished it.
Where you will draw lines between empiricism and language I cannot say, but that you will do so numerous times while reading “The Sexual Evolution” makes it a good read.
There is no end to the debates about some of these things precisely because language is not science, and the mark of a good popular science book is that every other page you’ll find something to support or refute, even if you would argue the opposite if another person definitively tried to convinced you they were ‘taking a test and not a quiz.'(3)
To deniers of science, arguments that make you think and agree or disagree depending on the milieu are a weakness, the way they think any person who had a reaction to a vaccine means vaccines are bad, or that if any landscaper got cancer weedkillers must be killing us.
To me, it’s the kind of strength that separates solid works from ones that a cabal of insiders want to wrap in a halo and outsiders want to shred. Which is why you should buy it.
NOTES:
(1) To use another cliché for context, all politics is local, so I have a trans flag because a friend of mine with a trans child had their house vandalized. I don’t like bullies and that guy isn’t stealing any sports trophies from anyone else, they just want to be who they are. I can debate the issues and infuriate both sides but go after someone in my tribe who’s doing no harm to anyone and you’re going on your ass.
(2) ‘Any exception invalidates the rule’ is not new, environmental lawyers have used it forever to claim science is wrong if they can create any epidemiological correlation in any large pool of data to create a lawsuit. They’re a $3-billion-per-year industry because corporate journalists uncritically reprint homeopathic claims about PFAS, weedkillers, seed oils et al. and never learned Paracelsus and ‘the dose makes the poison.’ They insist any detectable amount of any chemical they can “correlate” to cancer, from plastic spatulas to pizza boxes, should be banned. There is no nuance or language in that, they are wrong, and lying to make money. I hope they don’t think I mean that on a continuum.
(3) Some things are a world I don’t recognize. He suggest to readers that just two generations ago you were expected to marry as a virgin. I grew up two generations ago in a town of 200 white people with 5 churches and no bars and I never heard anything of the kind. Obviously there is artistic license in a book about the science behind terms, but it is an example of how you can find something to argue for and against in every chapter, which means it is probably right where it needs to be.