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The people who falsely claim authoritative knowledge are being called out, loudly in public. About goddamn time.
“We evolutionary biologists (@SwipeWright
, @Evolutionistrue
, @FondOfBeetles
and others) are fascinated by the immense diversity in body and behavior of male and female organisms. We also understand that mammals come in two sexes, male and female, and that these are reproductive categories that are defined by the body plan for the production of either large or small gametes.@Anthrofuentes
knows what we think about all this, so I am confused about why he says in @sciam
that scientists like us “maintain that whether our bodies make ova or sperm are all we need to know about sex.” Relatedly, he says that “producing ova or sperm does not tell us everything…about an individual’s childcare capacity, homemaking tendencies, sexual attractions, interest in literature…” Um…who is saying that gametes dictate any of this? That sex is binary is obviously compatible with traits like interest in literature varying widely between the two sexes. It is also compatible with the existence of significant differences between the sexes.Unfortunately, Fuentes has tarred all the members of a diverse group with the same brush, denigrating the motives of those who assert that sex is real, biological, binary and meaningful for social policy. “They are arguing for a specific political, and discriminatory, definition of what is ‘natural’ and ‘right’ for humans based on a false representation of biology…[and] dishonest ascriptions of what biology is are being deployed to restrict women’s bodily autonomy…and to attack the rights of transexual and transgender people.”
Sex matters because even though bodies and behavior vary, being male or female does predict a lot. Women in particular understand this, because we are more physically vulnerable than men. We care about gender-diverse people and their basic human rights, and we are *also* concerned about safety and fairness in places like prison cells and women’s sports. These issues can be debated sensibly without relying on “a false representation of biology.”
Clearing up some of the confusion about socialization and being ‘born that way’, Ruth Hubbard in this excerpt tackles the nature/nurture question head on. Read the whole article here.
“We can visualize this kind of interaction or transformation by thinking about the interplay between biological and cultural factors that affects the ways boys and girls grow up in our society. If a society puts half its children into short skirts and warns them not to move in ways that reveal their panties, while putting the other half into jeans and overalls and encouraging them to climb trees, play ball, and participate in other vigorous outdoor games; if later, during adolescence, the children who have been wearing trousers are urged to “eat like growing boys,” while the children in skirts are warned to watch their weight and not get fat; if the half in jeans runs around in sneakers or boots, while the half in skirts totters about on spike heels, then these two groups of people will be biologically as well as socially different. Their muscles will be different, as will their reflexes, posture, arms, legs and feet, hand-eye coordination, and so on. Similarly, people who spend eight hours a day in an office working at a typewriter or a visual display terminal will be biologically different from those who work on construction jobs. There is no way to sort the biological and social components that produce these differences.
We cannot sort nature from nurture when we confront group differences in societies in which people from different races, classes, and sexes do not have equal access to resources and power, and therefore live in different environments. Sex-typed generalizations, such as that men are heavier, taller, or stronger than women, obscure the diversity among women and among men and the extensive overlaps between them for all traits except those directly involved with procreation. Most women and men fall within the same range of heights, weights, and strengths, three variables that depend a great deal on how we have grown up and live. We all know that first-generation Americans, on average, are taller than their immigrant parents and that men who do physical labor, on average, are stronger than male college professors. But we forget to look for the obvious reasons for differences when confronted with assertions like “Men are stronger than women.” We should be asking: “Which men?“ and “What do they do?” There may be biologically based average differences between women and men, but these are interwoven with a host of social differences from which we cannot disentangle them.”
One of the few times that adding beer to the equation will make things better – an analogy between competition and diversity in the forest, and the supermarket.
And no, you may not have a Dude Beer. : )
“Canadian researchers have discovered they can induce supersoldier ants — whose bodies react to stress by expanding in size with huge oblong heads and giant vicious jaws — in the Pheidole ant species.
The findings are significant because they show there is dormant genetic potential that can be invoked by changes in the environment and locked in place for a very long time, said lead author Ehab Abouheif, a McGill University biology professor, whose research was published Friday in the journal Science.”
The fascinating part of this discovery is the way that it highlights the interaction between the environment and genes in a species.
“The authors suggest that hanging on to ancestral developmental toolkits can be an important way for organisms to evolve new physical traits.
“Birds with teeth, snakes with fingers and humans with ape-like hair – these are ancestral traits that pop regularly in nature,” Abouheif said. “But for the longest time in evolutionary theory, these ancestral traits were thought to go nowhere … the Barnum and Bailey of evolution. So they’ve been an unappreciated source of evolutionary variation.”
Typically, supersoldier ants are biological anomalies that occur rarely in nature and only in limited geographical regions. But the McGill researchers found these supersoldiers in unexpected regions and also created them by manipulating hormones.
Pheidole (big-headed) ant colonies contain millions of ants, including minor workers and soldiers. Depending on the food ants are fed, certain hormones are triggered in the ant larvae and they either develop into soldiers or minor workers.”
The Nature vs. Nurture debate is mostly over in scientific circles, but it is nice to have such a clear example to illustrate the interaction between a species and its environment.
“So what we’re showing is that environmental stress is important for evolution because it can facilitate the development of novel phenotypes. Any time you have a mismatch between the normal environment of the organism and its genetic potential you can release them – and these things can be locked in place for 30 to 65 million years.”
Go go mysteries of the genetic code.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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