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The Beclowning of a Magazine I Once Enjoyed
Oh, I know, it’s nothing new: Scientific American has been compromising both science and America for a long time. I subscribed to it through much of the 1980s, during my ersatz-libertarian years, before finally getting tired of the obligatory left-leaning social-topic article which began every issue. (I eventually abandoned Reason for much the same reason: I don’t mind reading stuff with which I disagree, but I don’t want to fund its distribution.)
But this bit of ham-handed nonsense ended up in my inbox this afternoon, courtesy of one or another of the several conservative news blurbs I receive daily. With it, I think a once entertaining magazine has finally jumped the shark — if it hadn’t already while I wasn’t paying attention. (It probably had.)
Why Human Sex Is Not Binary by Agustín Fuentes
It’s published under the magazine’s “opinion” section, which I guess gives Scientific American plausible deniability, but I’m not going to be so generous. It’s a weaselly bit of equivocation that doesn’t stand up to even casual scrutiny.
Consider the opening paragraph, where the author lays the foundation for the particular brand of sloppy thinking that will be the hallmark of the whole piece:
There are those, politicians, pundits and even a few scientists, who maintain that whether our bodies make ova or sperm are all we need to know about sex. They assert that men and women are defined by their production of these gamete cells, making them a distinct biological binary pair, and that our legal rights and social possibilities should flow from this divide. Men are men. Women are women. Simple.
See what he did there? He’s mixed real science — talk of gametes — with politics and social policy, and implied that the people who believe in the biological basis for human sexual definition are also keen to keep women barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen. While that conflation happens to describe me, I’m sure there are plenty of politicians, pundits, and even a few scientists (perhaps, for example, biologists) who aren’t vicariously nostalgic for 1952, yet who do think that only females produce eggs and only males fertilize eggs.
He continues:
This is bad science. The production of gametes does not sufficiently describe sex biology in animals, nor is it the definition of a woman or a man.
Well, no. It isn’t “bad science.” It’s just science he doesn’t like. Because the science does suggest that the type of gamete one produces is in fact the most reliable indicator of maleness and femaleness we have. It isn’t always reliable, because not all humans are sufficiently whole and healthy to produce viable gametes, but the number of false sexual attributions this method of discernment produces is so vanishingly small as to be essentially nonexistent.
The author is hanging a lot on the word “sufficiently.” He wants the science to support something science isn’t designed to support, in this case his particular view of social policy and culture. All science can provide is a basis for telling the men from the women. It doesn’t have anything to say about whether Dylan Mulvaney should be called “her” or “that mediocre female impersonator who divides his time between mocking real women and bankrupting beer companies.”
The author wants both more and less from science: more justification for the incoherent “trans” movement, and less… well, science.
He goes on to tell us about the sex lives of earthworms and other things that aren’t human, points out that individuals differ in their amounts of body fat and their ability to parallel park interest and aptitude for providing child care.
If his whole point was that these secondary aspects are imperfect predictors of sex in humans, I’d be completely on board with that. But that isn’t his argument. Rather, his argument is that gamete production isn’t an adequate predictor of these things.
He’s right. But gamete production is, in humans, an adequate predictor of sex. That point he never even attempts to challenge.
The entirety of the article is this kind of slipshod argument-by-proxy. We get gems like this:
While sperm and ova matter, they are not the entirety of biology and don’t tell us all we need to know about sex, especially human sex.
Again, he’s right: gamete production is not the entirety of biology, and sex is much (much, much, much) more interesting than just the mechanics of sperm and ova production. No sane person would say otherwise.
Sperm and ova production is, however, pretty much the definition of male and female, respectively.
His closing paragraph:
Today dishonest ascriptions of what biology is are being deployed to restrict women’s bodily autonomy, target LGBTQIA+ individuals broadly and, most recently, attack the rights of transexual and transgender people.
I’ll agree with him that there’s a lot of dishonestly swirling around the topic of human sexuality these days. That’s the only bit of this paragraph with which I agree. He uses the familiar leftist dog whistle of “women’s bodily autonomy” to elide over the indisputable biological reality (and I’m talking real science here) that, as my favorite pro-life bumper sticker says, “abortion stops a beating heart.” He throws in all the letters after LGB, shackling hapless same-sex-attracted men and women with the baggage of those who advocate for child mutilation, letting men into women’s private spaces, and crushing female athletes with superior male strength and stamina.
I don’t know what it costs to send a kid to Princeton these days, but people should know the intellectual caliber and/or integrity of the people Princeton is hiring to indoctrinate them. As for Scientific American… maybe they can hire the Mulvaney guy to jazz up their style section.
Published in Science & Technology
I used to subscribe to Scientific American, though it was in the 90s, I think, a long time ago.
I have the impression that it’s been bad for quite a while, though I’m not sure how long. I noticed with this story in 2020 about the George Floyd autopsy. I remember looking at it, at the time, when it did not have the italicized editor’s note at the beginning which was clearly added after the officer’s trial.
The editor’s note is another example of the twisted view expressed in the linked story, getting things entirely backward, in my view. The story is about “gaslighting” in the allegedly false reporting of the initial Floyd autopsy report, which had significant evidence of death by drug overdose. The actual “gaslighting” is the final autopsy reports which hide this fact, and were used to support a wrongful conviction, in my view.
I should be clear about my opinion of the Floyd case. In my view, there was substantial evidence of death by overdose, making it impossible to honestly conclude that the officer caused Floyd’s death by the applicable standard of proof, beyond a reasonable doubt. I am not certain that Floyd died of an overdose, though I did read all of the reports carefully and thoroughly at the time, and in my view, overdose was the proper conclusion to reach under the preponderance of the evidence standard.
It happened decades ago, though I can’t pick out an exact point. Before it went woke, it went PC, and before that it abandoned its original purpose.
I was 15 in 1967 when SA did a massively detailed study of holography, only a few years old back then, and it was rigorous: light frequencies pegged right down to the angstrom, the chemistry of continuous wave lasers, the type of photographic materials fine-grained enough to produce the effect. A scientist of other disciplines (medicine, cybernetics, you name it) could follow enough of another specialist’s lingo to participate in the discussion. It was beautifully designed and printed–not a scientific virtue, but much appreciated.
Sometime around the early Nineties, I picked up a current issue and it had been dumbed down. “Dumbed” might be putting it too strongly; it was now something more like Popular Mechanics (a magazine I admire, BTW) for NPR listeners, explaining new developments to non-scientists. It was shallow. It wasn’t so much that the information was wrong–it may well have been right–but the magazine’s assumptions about what was important or interesting had shrunk to comic book levels of liberalism.
I miss a lot of magazines from my younger days: High Fidelity, Audio, Esquire, National Review, Audio Amateur. Some are defunct. Others just aren’t what they were. Of the latter, I don’t know if it’s their fault or if they just kept up with the times.
From today’s meme post:
I used to have a subscription in the 80s, but gave it up. Weren’t they bought by some British publisher a long time ago?
Seems like that would have made them less silly, rather than more silly.
A German-British combination thereof.
IOW, at this point, …
Scientific American is neither the former nor the latter.
Like leaving National Review
I don’t recall if Scientific American was part of it, but “settled science” ran aground decades ago during the silicone breast implant lawsuits. That these implants were dangerous was “settled science“ and a giant company ruined. But, even at the time the indicators were there that the “settled science” was a sham. Because the footnotes in all the articles and court findings was that women could still get them in cases of disfigurement from accident or surgery. So they were incredibly dangerous … dangerous enough to bankrupt a company and earn billions for the attorneys and their expert witnesses….unless you really needed them; then they were fine.
And sure enough…a dozen years later … silicone implants were back on the market. It seems the science wasn’t so settled after all.
When someone can explain to me how it is that these daft brushes can claim that sex is non-binary, whilst using examples which claim all humans fall into one of two camps, either:
0) “non-binary” or
1) “binary”
then I might start to listen. (As an aside, how funny is it that–for some reason–numbering must start with “1” in order to make standard numbered HTML lists work? Not sure if this is racist, sexist or transphobic, but surely it is one of the above. IT MUST BE. And if you don’t believe it is, please get off my lawn.)
Yeah. I loved and subscribed to both Scientific American and National Geographic, over the course of so many years.
No more, though.
Speaking of radices, you know that there are only 10 kinds of people, right?
Because each and every one of the eight or so billion of us is unique.
Yeah, I do.
LOL.
I’m thinking your average barefoot, kitchen-dwelling, pregnant wife is actually a lot happier than any of the lefties who use her as a caricature of the supposed victims of chauvinism.
Yep.
Good post.
Wrong, wrong, wrong! If you were any wronger, even Harpo (let alone Karl) Marx would disavow you.
There are, count ’em, 21 (spelled out, in English: twenty one) kinds of people.
First, there’s the kind who actually knows how to change a lightbulb. Figuratively speaking, of course.
And then, there are the other 20 (twenty) distinctive kinds who stand around and critique him (while busily “networking” among themselves), each in their own specific fashion/style, as follows:
Aggressive
Amicable
Descriptive
Inquisitive
Mincing
Blunt
Anxious
Tender
Learned
Off-hand
Emphatic
Dramatic
Admiring
Lyric
Simple
Deferent
Rustic
Military
Practical
Parodical
PS:
Cultural reference involved in the above:
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edmond_Rostand#Cyrano_de_Bergerac_(1897)
No, there are only 10, male and female.
I haven’t subscribed to a political magazine since I let The Weekly Standard lapse. I still have the baseball cap, though. I wish all baseball caps were made that well.
Well, no, I did subscribe to Claremont Review of Books for a year. That was probably more recent.
I’ve also subscribed to National Review and American Spectator, but that was longer ago. And if you go back far enough, I subscribed to Scientific American, but Martin Gardner’s lame (and highly dishonest) treatment of the Laffer Curve in the early days of the Reagan administration put me off.
Heh.
aka, those who know binary, and those who don’t.
City Journal wrote a great article about this. I prefer Mr. Racette’s prose but this article is still excellent.
All taxa? Maybe all taxa of hominids, but there are hermaphroditic plants and animals. Among the animals it’s usually not the warm and fuzzy ones.
I have a friend who considers himself quite “science-driven,” and unfortunately still considers Scientific American (and some of the publication’s peer publications) to be a true science journal, and frequently cites it to “settle” disagreements.
I, too, was a fan of the magazine, and noticed its decline. I didn’t follow closely at the time, but the Wikipedia page notes:
So maybe that has something to do with it.
With article “Scientific American Endorses Joe Biden” in the October 1st 2020 issue, Scientific American shouted out loud that they were no a longer serious publication.
Quote:
I mean, Jeeze Louise, man.
‘
Wait to you see what I am drafting.