Aaron
930 posts
@Rongwrong_
“Every word that is uttered creates an angel.”
1/ A new article in @Ecology_Letters by a group of evolutionary biologists—pioneers and leading experts on the evolution of sex. (The article is open access, short, and clear.) "Biological sex is best defined as a binary classification of male and female reproductive strategies rooted in anisogamy, characterised by the production of two discrete gamete types of different sizes." "We call for a more differentiated discourse on sex, one that separates the scientific conception of biological sex from societal discussions regarding the diversity of gender expressions and identities in humans." onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/el…
Jay Dyer on Tucker Carlson: How Medieval Philosophy Nominalism created modern transgender ideology: “Nominalism is the idea that there are only names to things, not essences. So there’s no human nature. No dog nature. The ancient world believed things have real essences. Words described metaphysical reality. Occam started denying that. It influenced Luther. Then Hume, Kant, the Enlightenment… If things don’t have essences, then they don’t have genders objectively — everything is just a name. So I can just name myself he, him, Zer, Z. That’s the logical train from medieval philosophy to postmodern gender ideology. It flies in the face of lived experience. You basically have to be indoctrinated to believe it.”
The president of the anthropologists seems to think that karyotypes are sexes, so that XXY is a different sex from XY. But no birds share my karyotype, yet some are male. So, karyotype ≠ sex. Also, she seems to deny that every XY person is the same sex. So, karyotype ≠ sex.
The key recurring confusion with these types of articles is they say "biological sex refers to binary reproductive strategies in anisogamous species" but a *person* is not *a reproductive strategy* whereas the social debates concern "how should we characterize persons" - so there is a missing step in the argument; when attempts are made to fill it in, it's usually stipulative ("persons should be classified as male or female according to what evolutionary reproductive strategy template their unmodified body plan most closely approximates in terms of capacity to produce sperm or eggs at some point in their lifecourse") but that is a different question and the argument for it is not straightforward. Anyway, here's my take: "On Whether Sex is Binary" pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41484543/
Here's the statement: wemustactnow.ai We Must Act Now A Statement on AI’s Transformation of the Economy 1. AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years. 2. This could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame. It could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards. 3. Economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI and to build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society. It was organized by Ajay Agrawal, @akorinek, @testingham and me.
President of @AmericanAnthro: "All you need to do is literally type into Google and see that we know, factually... the idea that there are two sexes is just factually incorrect" archive.ph/FKjSk
I deleted my earlier, more forceful take, but maybe I’ll just reframe it this way: what else in public life has the same characteristics as seat reclining where the benefit to you for reclining is very small but the downside to the person behind you is very large? Can you think of anything else that has this property and for which we wouldn’t describe engaging in the behavior as antisocial?
