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The latest issue of Science contains three ideological articles on how teaching of science must be reformed to be more inclusive and antiracist. Most of the authors of all three pieces are affiliated with departments or institutes of science education, and this may explain the mission-oriented tone of the pieces. I’ll discuss one of them today and another one soon.

This article argues that genetics education remains systemically racist, and must be attacked, dismantled, and made explicitly antiracist.  In fact, the article could have been written by an Ibram Kendi—if he knew anything about genetics.  As usual with such pieces, the problems it raises occurred largely in the past and are not currently “systemic” in genetics education. The article gives no evidence that today’s genetics classes are rife with racism, white supremacy, advocacy of eugenics, and other bad behaviors that create divisions between people. On the other hand, the article nevertheless wants to emphasize divisions between people—most notably “races:—as they see these divisions, conceived as “socially constructed”, as groups having differential power that must be recognized and effaced.

Besides being divisive, my main objection to the piece is that it assumes genetics is taught today as it was seventy years ago, which it isn’t, and, most of all, it tries to turn a science class into a class in ideology: a course in “dismantling” modern genetics to eliminate its white supremacy and then re-infusing it with “antiracist” values.  Having taught genetics and sat in on other genetics classes, the authors are dealing with a non-problem, and their solutions will only make genetics education worse: turning out a generation of ideologues who know less about genetics than the previous generation.

Click on the title to read, and you can find the pdf here. Excerpts from the piece are indented

First, the problem, stated in postmodern terms. Note the jargon:

The methods of conducting genetics research and its outcomes are steeped in, and influenced by, power and privilege dynamics in broader society. The kinds of questions asked, biological differences sought, and how populations are defined and examined are all informed by the respective dominant culture (often Eurocentric, white, economically privileged, masculine, and heteronormative) and its predominant ways of knowing and being (3). Findings from human genetics and genomics research subsequently play into existing sociopolitical dynamics by providing support for claims about putative differences between groups and the prevalence of particular traits in particular groups (3). Historically, such research has been used in support of eugenic movements to legitimize forced sterilization and genocides.  [JAC: this happened in the past and is not happening now.[ Yet it would be a mistake to assume that such research is merely a discredited past relic, a stain on the otherwise objective and rational track record of genetic research. Rather, it was mainstream work conducted by prominent researchers and supported by major professional societies. The reality is that some modern human genetics is still informed by the same racist logic (4). [JAC: no examples given.]

I’m not sure what the “racist logic” is here. If you look up reference (4), you don’t find evidence of “racist logic” in modern science, but a description of its use in older teachings and then a discussion about how one should conceive “ancestry”.  In fact, that reference gives evidence that there are average genetic differences between “races” even though populations vary continuously with geography and there are no diagnostic and fixed differences between named “races” (I prefer to use the term “geographic population”, a claim that Duncan et al, deny.  Luana Maroja and I, in our recent paper on ideology and science, show that even in America, typological “races” of “white, East Asian, Hispanic, and black” (“Hispanics” aren’t normally considered a race, but in America are distinct because they’re largely from Mexico), are not sociopolitical constructs lacking biological meaning, but do differ on average in traits and constellations of genes. From knowing only an American’s genes, you can guess their self-reported ancestry with over 99% accuracy.

What these differences mean for traits, behaviors, and medical outcomes is only beginning to be explored, but they reflect the geographic distribution of ancestors, for geographic isolation leads to genetic diffrences via natural selection and genetic drift. This is why genetic ancestry companies can give you a pretty accurate view of your genetic ancestry (I, for example, am nearly 100% Askhkenazi Jew). This wouldn’t work if geographic populations were genetically identical.

The purpose of the paper, then, is to expose and then dismantle the systematic racism of modern genetics education.  You must be “antiracist” rather than “race-neutral”— something that Kendi emphasizes in his book on antiracism—and must at every turn deny that human races or populations differ biologically, for that leads inevitably to ranking and racism. In other words, it’s bad for society to even study genetic differences between populations:

Genetic distinctions between human populations are not natural; they are the consequences of categorizations developed by geneticists for the purposes of their research and the questions they pursue.

. . . The search for genetic differences among populations, even when not done using explicit racial categories, can still yield findings that are problematic in that they can make social hierarchies appear “natural”. , ,  [JAC: they then cite the caste divisions in India, and I know little about that. But the point—that differences equal ranking and racism—is the same.]

. . . . Our contention here is that successful genetic education has to be antiracist, it cannot be race-neutral. Therefore, a core learning objective for human genetics education should be understanding that neither the environment nor scientists’ definitions of genetic populations are neutral but rather that they are shaped by the historical, social, and political contexts in which they exist.

Actually, one can parse out genetic groupings using statistics alone, free from “historical, social, and political contexts.”  Now what you call these groupings—races, ethnic groups, or populations—is arbitrary.

Further, the goal of genetics education must be dismantling this racism, not so much teaching how genetics works:

First, if one wishes to dismantle racism (and other systems of oppression) in science and society, then one needs to understand the ways in which such oppression is woven into the fabric of genetics research and disrupt and counteract these practices early and often through education.

But, as I said, the evidence for the ongoing racism of genetics is nil, and, in fact, the authors have to resort to making doubtful statements like this:

In this sense, the Human Genome Project was developed in, and sustained by, a sociopolitical context that upheld (and still upholds) value-laden group differences.

So the “sociopolitical context” was supposedly based on showing group differences that could be the basis of bigotry (not the case), but this “fact” is even used to tar the Human Genome Project, which was supposedly not only developed in the context of bigotry, but sustains that bigotry! To wit:

To dismantle racism, you must first recognize that racial differences are purely a social construct, but at the same time must recognize them, probably because these socially-constructed differences are correlated with well-being. (I of course don’t deny that racism has lowered the well-being of minorities, but also recognize that even to practice racism, one has to somehow recognize different populations, and that’s partly genetic, even if the genetic differences we see were only used as platforms for historical racism and bigotry.

And so we must avoid color-blindness because recognizing color (which of course is largely genetic) is said to be the key to eliminating disparities between races. (The authors barely mention hardly anything about socioeconomic differences within populations; their entire focus is on race.):

The understanding that race is not genetic (or biological) does not automatically translate into an understanding that race is a social construct, or that it can, and does, shape our biology. Moreover, knowing that race is a social construct does not automatically explain racial disparities in health or any other arena because it ignores the systemic nature of racism and the resulting inequities. Solely countering beliefs in race-based genetic differences and focusing on the similarities between racial groups obscures the real and devastating differences in the well-being of minoritized racial groups. This can lead to racial “color blindness” of a genetic flavor that sees everyone as the same and turns a blind eye to the impact of racism on people’s biology. Finally the authors give three recommendations of how to teach genetics in both secondary (middle and high school) and postsecondary (college) genetics classes.

 

1.) Emphasize the sociopolitical context of the environment

2.) Entangle environment and biology.

3.) Scrutinize the sociopolitical categorization of human populations.

Point 1 is made to emphasize the debilitating effect of racist environments on minorities, point 2 is to show how the environment, which imposes differences on people via racism, has biological effects on people, and point 3  is to show how the definition and use of races has served the political ends of gaining power over others. The authors recommend some textbooks that will help create “brave and safe spaces” for students:

 There are powerful exemplars of curricula at the high school level that engage students with ambitious science, its sociopolitical dimensions, and a focus on social justice (13, 14). There is a growing number of excellent books (15) and online resources for anti-racist genetics and biology education—for example, the LabXchange’s “Racism as a Public Health Crisis” curriculum, and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center’s materials on “Race, Racism, and Genetics.” These resources include supports for teachers in creating brave and safe spaces for discussions about race and genetics. Funding and committed support of national and professional science and science education organizations will also be instrumental for these efforts.

Of course using these books turns a genetics course into a course in antiracist ideology, so that there is less time for students to learn “race-neutral” genetics. But the authors don’t really care how much genetics students learn; they are far more concerned with propagandizing a generation of students to create the kind of social change they see as salubrious:

In the short term, we see scientists’ role in the education of future scientists and teachers as one powerful lever for change. Undergraduate coursework in biology and genetics, often taught by faculty in those departments, is a space where we can begin “sowing the seeds” of sociopolitical awareness in genetics.

Now I think it’s great to work to rid the world of what racism that still exists, though I don’t see much of it in genetics courses.  And I see nothing wrong, when you teach human genetics, with revealing the flaws in the old diagnostic “big-genetic-difference” view of human races, and emphasizing instead that they are populations that now intergrade, so the delineation of specific races becomes arbitrary. But one has to also tell the truth: races are populations that evolved in ancient geographical isolation, and there are real biological differences between them.  And, of course, one should at least insert the caveat that the differences that do exist do not efface the moral dictum that members of different groups have equal rights and deserve equal treatment.

The worst part of this paper—and the two papers that accompany it (one here, the other here)—is that it’s part of a nationwide drive to turn education into propaganda, and of to change the purpose of all education from teaching students the truth to teaching students the temporary and political “personal truths” of their woke overseers.

Please send in your wildlife photos if you got ’em. Save Robert Lang’s Antarctic photos, I have little backup, and that would be disastrous. Thanks!

Today regular Mark Sturtevant gives us a passel of insect photos. His captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

This post starts the pictures taken last season, but I am terribly behind in my post-processing so these were only recently made ready to share. It was another great year, and praise to the gods of light that my energy for going out as often as possible shows no sign of abating.

The pictures were taken either in or around my house, or from parks in eastern Michigan. I use an extremely worn out Canon t5i body (a consumer-grade crop sensor camera. Nothing fancy). Lenses include the Canon 100mm f/2.8L macro lens + a Raynox 250 diopter lens for extra power, and at times I use the Venus/Laowa 2.5-5x super macro lens, which is fully manual. My external flash is the Kuangren dual head flash with home-made diffusers. Readers can see all that on my odds-and-ends Flickr page if they like.

From an outing to an area park, here is an unknown caterpillar on Ash. I don’t yet have an ID:

Here is a small Dung Beetle with an interesting color. I suspect the genus Onthophagus:

A Soldier Beetle Podabrus flavicollis:

Next up are Scorpionflies (Panorpa sp), weird insects commonly seen on low foliage in forests. They are generally scavengers on dead insects. The scorpion-like tail is only seen in males, and it is simply their enormous genitalia. I stuck with this one for a long time, and he became quite used to me so I could get closer and closer:

As shown in the next picture, female Scorpionflies lack the impressive tail equipment:

A Cobweb Spider (Steatoda sp.) is shown in the next picture. This could be one of about two species in my area, but they are tricky to tell apart. I had inquired about its ID in a spider-centric Facebook group, and the resident experts weren’t sure of the ID either:

This set closes with an adorable Dimorphic Jumping Spider (Maevia inclemens). There were lots of these around the house last summer. This cute little male was fun to photograph in a staged session on the dining room table, and these are two closely cropped pictures of the little guy. Their common name reflects the fact that males come in two color forms. Some males are like this one, while others are pale all over but with orange markings. Those males therefore look more like females. I always have a soft heart for Dimorphic Jumper males since they are always moving around, bobbing their cute little pedipalps, and hoping with all their hearts that a female will signal back:

Thank you for looking!

I’m adding here, with permission, some short videos sent by Tom Gross in his latest newsletter. His descriptions (bolding is his) are indented.

At the very moment Brits lit up Big Ben in de facto support of Hamas, brave crowds in Gaza risked their lives to denounce Hamas:

American Ivy League students praise Houthis while Houthis crucify and stone gays to death:

NYPD finally make arrests as Columbia University students intimidate Jews, call for end of Israel:

Red Crescent helps Hamas terrorists escape, while Red Cross fails to visit even one Israeli hostage or provide medicines:

UNICEF – open to helping all children except Israeli ones:

Freed female teenage hostage speaks of Hamas sex crimes against Israeli girls still in captivity:

IDF releases newly captured Hamas footage of the red-haired Bibas kids, the world’s youngest hostages:

Working-class Latinos in LA who actually have jobs to get to, clear the freeway of middle-class Palestine supporters blocking their road to work:

Pro-Hamas mob chase & threaten to behead Iranian who expresses sympathy with Israeli victims:

The BBC called these pro-Palestine demonstrators in London yesterday “peaceful”:

And one I found: the brave and vociferous Noa Tishby on the sexual violence of Hamas (WARNING: Some disgusting crimes described):

We’ve discussed the fact know that most biologists define “sex” in animals by the type of gamete they produce: males produce small mobile gametes (“sperm”) while females produce large, immobile gametes (“eggs”).  Of course not all biologists use that definition, but it’s the most wide-ranging one, covering virtually all animals and plants save some protists,  algae or fungi, as well as a very fruitful definition, which helps resolve previously mysterious aspects of evolution, like “why, in many species of animals, is the ornamented or colorful (or ‘armed’ sex) nearly always male, while the less colorful, less ornamented, or less armed sex nearly always female?This is the issue of sexual selection, first discussed by Darwin.

Definitions using chromosome type, genital configuration, and so on, don’t cover the world of most eukaryotes, nor do they give answers to evolutionary questions.  And methods for “determining” sex may be the worst definer of all. As Luana Maroja and I wrote a few months ago:

We can see the stability of the two-sex condition by realizing that what triggers the development of males versus females varies widely across species. Different sexes can be based on different chromosomes and their genes (e.g., XX vs. XY in humans, ZW vs. ZZ in birds, individuals with like chromosomes being female in mammals and male in birds); different rearing temperatures (crocodiles and turtles); whether you have a full or half set of chromosomes (bees); whether you encounter a female (marine worms); and a host of other social, genetic, and environmental factors. Natural selection has independently produced diverse pathways to generate the sexes, but at the end there are just two destinations: males and females. And so we have an evolved and objectively recognized dichotomy—not an arbitrary spectrum of sexes.

In just the past two days I’ve tried to track down the earliest formal gamete-based definition of sex, and, thanks to MIT philosophy professor Alex Byrne, I’ve got one, which happens to turn exactly 100 years old this year.

First, though, it’s likely that sexes have been either implicitly defined or recognized for a lot longer than a century.  One colleague wrote me this:

I can see how this was always kind of known, since antiquity – as birds lay eggs and mammals give birth, while males seems to pass only liquids, but not produce anything.  But scientists studying algae, yeast or protists try to force a more familiar “sex” into their favorite critters and thereby muddy the waters.

Two other colleagues said they couldn’t lay hands on a formal definition, but the gamete-based definition had been used implicitly for about fifty years. And it’s hard to find formal definitions of “the sexes” as opposed to “sex” itself. Consulting my go-to college text, the third edition of Evolution by Doug Futuyma (1998), sex is implicitly defined as gamete type since, as he writes, males and females appear only after the evolution of anisogamy (two different types of gametes), which, he says, “explains the origin of distinct sexes” (p. 613).

As for the number of sexes, the only people who claim that there are more than two in humans, other animals, and vascular plants are ideologues, and we need not discuss these malefactors here.

But back to the main question: when do we find an early definition of sex based on gamete size?  Alex Byrne dug one up from 1924, and it comes from a University of Chicago biologist, the once-famous zoologist and geneticist Horatio Hackett Newman. As Alex says, “This is from his 1924 Outlines of General Zoology. [p. 330],” adding that “You can download the book from Google Books, or read the second edition here.”

So, here is a copy of the text. There may be earlier ones, and if you find one, email me. There may be a prize for the earliest one. I’ve put a red box around Newman’s definition:

Note that in the last sentence in the box he emphasizes the binary nature of the sexes. We’ll have a bit more to say about this tomorrow, assuming I’m able to dissect about the muttonheaded paper I’ve seen in Science this year.

The Biological Species Concept, or “BSC,” was devised and refined by evolutionist Ernst Mayr in the 1930s and 1940s as a way to conceptualize the distinct groups—”species”—that we see in most plants and animals. It runs as follows (in my words), which also includes how we conceptualize different biological species.

A biological species consists of a group of populations that, where they coexist in nature, exchange genes through reproduction. Two populations that coexist in one area but do not exchange genes are considered members of different biological species. 

One of the advantages of the BSC is that it enables us to immediately solve the species problem that eluded Darwin: why is nature divided up into distinct clusters rather than existing as a continuum, clusters most visible where they coexist?  Under the BSC, the problem of the “origin of species” simply becomes the problem of “the origin of those barriers that prevent interbreeding”—and that is a tractable problem.  Again, see Coyne and Orr for our best take on how these clusters form.

Of course there are problems with this concept (it’s not an a priori definition, but an attempt to conceptualize in words what we see in nature). These problems include judging populations that live in different areas like islands of an archipelago, how we deal with groups that hybridize just a little where they coexist, and, most important for this article, what we do with species that are asexual, lacking the possibility of exchanging genes. We discuss all these issues in the first chapter of my book Speciation (2009) written with Allen Orr, but one issue we didn’t resolve properly was that of asexual organisms.

So what about those pesky “asexual” organisms? How can we conceptualize species in groups like bacteria? Well, the first thing we need to determine is whether they form distinguishable clusters like birds or turtles. If they don’t, then there’s no need to conceptualize nonexistent clumps. In our 2009 book, we reviewed the literature, which was scant at that time, and decided that the evidence was mixed about whether bacteria (considered asexual) formed species, but there are surely some clumps among them. So we restricted the rest of the book to sexually-reproducing organisms. Still, bacterial “species” are given names, like E. coli, but do all bacteria considered E. coli really comprise members of a distinct cluster? If so, how?

The literature has expanded since then, and the paper below, which I’d missed and which is now seven years old, makes a pretty good case that in bacteria, at least, there are species, and, more important, they are conceptualized in a way similar to that of the BSC. In other words, there are bacterial clusters, and each cluster is characterized by its ability to exchange genes among individuals. Members of different clusters, however, don’t exchange genes. In other words, bacteria do consist largely of genetically isolated clusters. The authors, though examining only bacteria (there are other asexually reproducing organisms, like bdelloid rotifers), conclude that life in general conforms to the BSC. That’s a bit too expansive a conclusion (see the title!), but their results for bacteria seem good.

Click to read, or see the pdf here.

The key to this paper is recognizing that bacteria are not in fact completely asexual, though they often reproduce that way. But they also have a form of sex in which genomes of two different individuals can sidle up to each other and recombine to produce new genes. This process, called homologous recombination, occurs via cell-to-cell contact or transfer of DNA through tubes (“pili”) connecting different individuals. This process is called conjugation.

Here’s a photo from Wikipedia showing two bacterial cells moving DNA through pili:

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

This movement is one-way: the DNA (a single chromosome with double-stranded DNA) from one individual moves to the other. After that, there can occur a form of “sexual” reproduction in which different copies of the same gene can line up and recombine, producing a new gene. A similar process happens during meiosis (gamete formation) in sexually-reproducing organisms.

In bacteria this mixing-up between similar genes is called homologous recombination because it changes the composition of a gene by recombining its DNA with the DNA from a similar gene in another bacterium.  There are other forms of DNA exchange in bacteria in which a bit of DNA or a “plasmid” from one individual simply inserts itself somewhere else in the genome of another individual, but this is not recombination in the traditional sense, for it doesn’t involve two different copies of the same gene recombining to form a new gene.  The paper by Bobay and Ochman deals with homologous recombination,

Their method of determining whether two individuals in a named bacterial species can recombine their DNA in this way is complicated, and I’d best leave it for the experts here. But I will say that it involves showing that individuals in a group share the same variants in a given gene segment (10,000 bases were sequenced) as do other individuals in a group. For example, in one ten-base stretch of DNA, an individual may have  GTTACTCTAA, another would have GTTAGTCTAA, and another GTTACTCTAC, and still another GTTACTAC, representing combinations of DNA bases that could occur by recombination.

If you see this pattern among individuals of a named bacterial species, that’s indicative that homologous recombination—bacterial “sex”—is going on. This form of recombination is called “homoplasic” recombination because the variants all come via mutation from a single original genome present in the individual that founded the species.

One alternative is that we are dealing with two related species in which similar DNA sequences only look as if they’ve undergone homologous recombination because two groups shared a common ancestor and then the descendants had similar (“convergent”) mutations. This, called  “nonhomoplasic recombination”, is not caused by genetic exchange.

The authors have ways to distinguish these two types of recombination, and devise a ratio they call “h/m”, showing the ratio of the degree of homoplasic recombination (true sex) from nonhomoplasic recombination (independent mutations in different groups that superficially mimic sex).  The higher the h/m ratio, the more sex individuals in that group are having.

The authors calculated h/m ratios for 91 named bacterial “species”, using, of course, a large number of genomes sequences for each species, because one needs to survey the variation among individuals in that 10,000-base segment. (They also did simulations to verify that they could tell “h” from “m”.)  It turns out that over half of the 91 named bacterial species they examined conformed to biological species in which there was evidence of “h” recombination among individuals. Here’s one below, in which the h/m ratio increases. reaching an asymptote, as they looked at more strains. (This increases your power of detecting shared variants). 54 of the 91 named bacterial species looked like this, so the BSC holds for at least half of named bacterial species, and the authors sampled widely in bacteria.

A biological species in bacteria:

Here’s what was thought to be one species but, when they added more strains, they saw two clusters, one that behaved as like the one above, but the other, relative to the other group, showed very low h/m ratios, indicating that the two groups didn’t have homologous recombination between them. That is, they were different “biological species”. When they took out the low h/m group, B. pseudomallei behaved nicely. Here, then, we have two species that were given the same name, perhaps because they had similar morphologies or culturing requirements, or because the genetic distance between them (indicating the time of separation) was pretty low, suggesting a recent origin. These “cryptic species” were seen in 21 of the 91 named bacterial species.

Two biological species in bacteria that went under one name:

And the third group by itself had low h/m ratios no matter how many strains they included, so that there was no ability to assess gene flow at all—perhaps because these species simply don’t undergo any homologous recombination. Here’s one:

Thus 73/91 groups tested showed patterns consistent with a reproductive-isolation based species concept.

To test that their method did indeed detect groups analogous to biological species in more familiar animals, the authors did the same kind of h/m test for two pairs of related but clearly distinct biological species; one was the related species Drosophila melanogaster and D. simulans, and the other Homo sapiens and the chimp Pan troglodytes. As you see below, they were able to detect reproductive isolation between the group using a similar 10,000 base-pair fragment. (In all cases they looked at many replicates of the species on the left and a single sequence for the species on the right, which is why the “other” species forms a straight line: we have one sequence compared to many sequences in the other species, and all comparisons show a low h/m ratio.)

 

Humans vs. chimps, also good biological species:

The conclusion, then, is that the BSC is pretty good in conceptualizing species in bacteria: there are groups that exchange gene segments, and other groups (different “species”) that do not exchange DNA via homologous recombination. Remember: all of this was judged from looking at DNA sequences, not seeing gene exchange directly.

The big conclusion (from the paper):

That species can be universally defined based on gene flow implies that many of the same factors are operating in the process of speciation across all lifeforms. Differences in genomic properties (such as ploidy, recombination frequencies, and reproduction, and rates of gene acquisition) and demographic parameters (such as population sizes, geographic distribution, and rates of migration) will impact the pace at which microbes speciate relative to sexual organisms. However, the application of a single genomic-based BSC criterion to delineate species makes it possible to define species and study speciation under a similar framework across the tree of life.

Well, they need to look at other putatively asexual groups to see if this method also shows the existence of interbreeding groups reproductively isolated from other such groups, but at least for bacteria we see that many of them form clusters.  Two questions remain:

1.) What is “speciation” in bacteria, then?  One of the paper’s most intriguing results is that if you take pairs of bacterial “species”, the degree of reproductive isolation between them isn’t positively correlated with the time separating them, as judged by the “genetic distance”, or whole-genome divergence, between them. This is hard to understand because it implies that, unlike sexually reproducing organisms like fruit flies and mammals, reproductive barriers don’t form as a simple byproduct of the time of divergence from their common ancestor. This is the case because in those groups reproductive barriers are usually byproduct of divergence between populations by natural selection and genetic drift, which drive species apart genetically as time passes.

Why isn’t this the case in bacteria? I have no idea! My only suggestion is that “species formation” might be so quick in bacteria that you simply don’t get a correlation of time with reproductive isolation. That would imply that it’s virtually instantaneous.

2.) Why do bacteria form clusters?  In more familiar animals, clusters arise because after reproductive barriers arise, an interbreeding group is free to adapt to its environment without “pollution” from other species that would efface the clusters. The genetic divergence is reflected in not just reproductive isolation, but in the way organisms look or behave.  This may also be true in bacteria: each cluster might represent a group adapted to a particular ecological niche.  This would be hard to test for naturally-occurring bacteria, but might be tested in pathogenic bacteria, whose habitat (us) is more easily studied. As I recall, each bacterial species does its own thing in its own way, but that’s not really an answer to the question.

A final note: this paper was difficult, and I may have made some errors in summarizing its results. (I could read it only twice before I had to write about it here.) Perhaps the authors will read my summary and correct any mistakes.

_______________

Reference: Bobay LM, Ochman H. Biological species are universal across Life’s domains. Genome Biol Evol. 2017 Feb 10;9(3):491–501. doi: 10.1093/gbe/evx026.

Today we have the final installment of John Avise‘s photos of the birds of South Africa. The captions are indented and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them:

South Africa Birds, Part 9 

This week’s post is the final of my mini-series on birds that I photographed in South Africa during a seminar trip in 2007.  It shows another dozen or so species from that avian-rich part of the world.  Perhaps next Sunday we‘ll begin posting bird photos from some other spots I’ve visited around the world.

Tawny-flanked Prinia (Prinia subflava):

Wattled Starling (Creatophora cinerea):

White-crested Helmetshrike (Prionops plumatus):

White-backed Mousebird (Colius colius):

White-backed Vulture (Gyps africanus) flying:

White-bellied Sunbird (Cinnyris talatala) male:

White-breasted Cormorant (Phalacrocorax lucidus):

White-browed Sparrow-weaver (Plocepasser mahali):

White-faced Whistling Duck (Dendrocygna viduata):

White-fronted Plover (Charadrius marginatus):

White-necked Raven (Corvus albicollis);

White-throated Robin-chat (Cossypha humeralis):

Whitefronted Bee-eater (Merops bullockoides):

Yellow-bellied Greenbul (Chlorocichla flaviventris):

Yellow-billed Duck (Anas undulata):

One thing that bothers me about the war between Hamas and Israel is the large number of manifestly dumb beliefs that pervade the discourse. This is also true about Israel itself.  Here’s a list of a few, all them wrong and all of them easily refuted.

A two-state “solution” will end Palestinian terrorism towards Israel as well as the antagonism between Palestinians and Israelis.

Likewise for a permanent ceasefire.

The IDF deliberately targets civilians.

The IDF rapes Palestinian women and children (see Tlaib, Rashida).

Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

Israel is an apartheid state.

Jews are not indigenous to the land of Israel, while Arabs have lived there from time immemorial (This is embodied in the recent slogan, “Jesus was a Palestinian”).

Israelis are pretending to like and tolerate gays (this is called “pinkwashing”), but only to cover up their horrible crimes against Palestinians.

There are two discrete groups of Gazans, easily separated. Those who actually belong to Hamas or other terror groups, and then the peaceful Gazans who don’t support terrorism.

Gazan civilians in Rafah have nowhere to escape to, and so an Israeli assault on Rafah will mean the deaths of thousands of civilians.

Add your own if you wish, or refute the ones above.  I know that Douglas Murray had a podcast late last year called something like “Five lies about the war,” but I haven’t listened to it.

I have a Rule of Life, which is mine, and it goes as follows. . . . here it comes (and I’ve probably said it before):

“When engaged in conversation, you are allowed to say only 1-3 sentences before you must allow the other person to say something.”

This derives from conversations I’ve had since the pandemic began, conversations in which people yammer on forever, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they’re engaged in a DIALOGUE.  This allows two or more people to actually have a conversation instead of a monologue.

Now there are of course exceptions: if someone is telling you a joke or a story, or giving a lecture, then one’s allowed to break the limit. There are other circumstances, too, as when someone is telling you their woes. But it would be salubrious if people abided in general by the rule above.

But I always wonder whether those people who speak forever are aware of their misbehavior. And I realized that you learn a lot more by listening than by speaking. As I grow older and less reserved, I try to gently nudge people to stop long monologuing by interrupting, which I don’t like to do, or, when I’m particularly splenetic, by saying, “Get to the point.”

Here are some other of my Rules for Life, of varying importance, that I’ve suggested over the years:

Button your shirt from the bottom up; that way you won’t mis-button it. (This comes from the movie “Cheaper by the Dozen,” about an efficiency expert.)

When running water for a bath, start with the cold water and then gradually turn on the hot tap. This way you won’t burn yourself.

If two people point out the same fault in your persona, they’re probably right. Fix it!

The amount of toothpaste you need to put on your brush is less than you think: about the volume of a pea. (This is from a dental hygienist.)

If a female is telling you of their troubles, they are often looking for a sympathetic ear rather than a solution. Males, on the other hand, are often looking for a tangible solution.  When I have troubles and am looking for someone to comfort me rather than get a solution, I turn more readily to my women friends rather than to men, who often become prescriptive immediately.  (This of course is a generalization based on sex-differential behavior, and is not universal—even among my own friends.)

Here is some real wisdom that I’ve learned, and it’s a shame it took me so long:  “If you are telling someone about a behavior they have that bothers you, do not be accusatory. Simply say how that behavior makes you feel. That way they are not put on the defensive, and friendships are less likely to rupture.”

Please add your own rule(s) for life below. But don’t monologue!

 

It’s been hard times for my alma mater in the past year. Harvard’s President was excoriated and then removed, there were protests and illegal sit-ins over the war, a Supreme Court decision came down ruling that Harvard’s admissions policies were racist, and now Jewish students have brought a Title VI lawsuit brought against the school for creating a climate of antisemitism. But surely, I thought, the students are still good.

Well, yes, maybe “good:, but also woke. One of these is E. Matteo Diaz, an opinion writer for the student newspaper Harvard Crimson. Diaz has taken on the burden of correcting generations of scientists who have lied to us, saying that in humans, as in other animals, there are only two sexes.  (Biologists define sex as binary, with males having small mobile gametes and females large immobile ones.)

It’s important to realize that some of the slant of the op-ed may come from the fact that Diaz is transgender, as he notes in the second paragraph, and so the article is likely written to buttress a gender ideology, one claiming that biologists promulgate a definitional binary of sexes because we’re a bunch of transphobes who want to erase transgender people or folks who identify as non-binary.

That is nonsense, of course, but once again I’ll show you not only how widespread is the false claim that sex isn’t binary in humans, but also that the reason for this lie is purely ideological. It is a prime example of how ideologues try to foist their nonsense onto nature, adopting what I call the “reverse appeal to nature”:  sayint that what is considered good and moral in humans must also be what we see in nature.

On to the piece:

Diaz pulls no punches, but gives at the outset why he thinks biologists see sex as binary:

“There are only two sexes.”

At a moment when transgender people face unprecedented visibility and vulnerability, this claim pervades the discourse surrounding our identities. We hear it everywhere: in the media, in our legislatures, and, yes, at our very own university.

Even when it is not being used to categorically deny the existence of trans people, this claim is weaponized to qualify our validity. The argument goes as follows: “Trans people can ask to be called whatever they want, but they can’t change the fact that there are only two sexes.”

The idea that sex is binary is presented as an irrefutable fact of life, the most natural truth in the world. Anyone who dares question this “fact” is quickly discounted as a “radical, woke ideologue” or an agent of the “liberal DEI agenda.”

This line of thinking is dangerous and deeply alarming. The truth of the matter is that sex is not a simple binary. To claim otherwise is overly simplistic, flawed, and harmful.

No, biologists have defined sex this way for decades for a reason: it’s a universal in plants and animals, and, moreover, it helps us understand a great deal about their behavior and evolution. No other definition of sex is either so universally applicable or so useful. And no, we don’t hold that definition because we want to erase trans people or those who identify as non-binary.  Neither of the latter two groups are somehow outside the purview of the sex binary, which, by the way, has only 0.018% of people as exceptions, not the “1.7%” mentioned by Matteo. (The higher figure was suggested by Anne Fausto-Sterling in a 2000 paper, and she later said her claims were wrong.)

After disposing of the sex binary as ideological, Diaz tells us why sex really is nonbinary:

Let us first clarify what the claim “sex is binary” actually means. This framework organizes the human sex into two distinct categories: male and female. These categories encompass a variety of biological characteristics. Males have a penis, testes, higher levels of testosterone, and XY chromosomes. Females have a vagina, ovaries, higher levels of estrogen, and XX chromosomes.

At least, that’s what they teach you in sex ed.

But this is not the full story. What about people who don’t fit neatly into one of these two categories? What about people with ambiguous genitalia, or those who have the genitalia typical of one sex but the chromosomes and anatomy typical of the other?

These are not abstract what-ifs. As many as one out of every fifteen hundred babies is born with ambiguous genitalia. Many more are born with another type of sex variation, though some are more subtle or late to manifest.

People whose sex falls outside of the binary are known as intersex, and experts estimate that they make up as much as 1.7 percent of the population.

Here Diaz conflates traits that are used as imperfect but pretty good diagnostics for biological sex in humans, but they’re not definitions of biological sex. This is the most common ploy to get around the sex binary. But of course the binary also holds in animals that don’t have chromosomal sex determination (turtles), have no external genitalia (corals), and in which sex is determined by haploidy/diploidy (bees) or environmental circumstances (fish). No matter which traits are used to diagnose sex in animals and plants, there are still only two sexes: one with sperm and the other with eggs. Diaz has yet to learn some biology. Instead, he says that sex is “socially constructed”! Either he’s referring to gender, or he’s simply wrong:

This is where the sex binary fails us. How can it be an undeniable, natural truth that there are only two sexes if we consistently observe a myriad of naturally-occurring variations in sex?

The answer? It isn’t. Saying there is only male and female is like saying there’s only blond and brunette — the sex binary is a social construct, not a biological fact.

. . . The sex binary is a human invention — one that is driven, at least in part, by political motives. As a society, we are deeply invested in this invention, having imbued the binary with immense power and influence. This raises several points of concern.

I won’t even bother to answer that ridiculous assertion. Readers who want to know why there’s really a biological binary of sex should watch this video by Colin Wright.  I guess birds and fruit flies are also deeply invested in the sex binary, since when it comes to mating time, you don’t see a male bird copulating with another male, or a male elephant courting another male. Reproduction in plants and animals occurs ONLY when a male gamete unites with a female one. Pollen lands on and fertilizes eggs—did plants also invent the sex binary? What are their other social constructs?

After dismissing the scientific definition of sex—and implying that humans have an infinite number of sexes—Diaz once again says, without any evidence, that the sex binary is “harmful”. Yes, trans people may be derided by bigots because they don’t fit the “norm”, but those who deride them are doing so based on what they see as the norm, not how biologists define sex, which few laypeople know anyway:

The sex binary is a human invention — one that is driven, at least in part, by political motives. As a society, we are deeply invested in this invention, having imbued the binary with immense power and influence. This raises several points of concern

First, it is bad science. Treating the sex binary as an immutable fact ignores the ample evidence that calls it into question, producing biased research design and results.

Peer-reviewed research contradicts a strictly binary interpretation of sex [NOTE: no references given.]. We have yet to uncover a precise causal mechanism that definitively and consistently guarantees an individual’s sex. [NOTE: a “cause” is not important when delineating a binary. And, as we know, there are many causes that result in the sex binary.]Though many suggest that chromosomes are the determining factor, science supports that sex differentiation is a much more complex process.

Second, in failing to account for the wide range of human variation, it harms anyone who does not fit neatly within it — namely, intersex and transgender people.

The presumed verity of the binary is weaponized to force conformity upon those who are different. This is what allows conservative politicians to pass harmful laws that ban gender-affirming care for trans people (under the guise of protecting children) while maintaining carve-outs allowing damaging “corrective” surgeries on intersex babies.

When you want to redefine scientific facts to conform to your ideology, just say that those facts are weaponized against marginalized groups.  And, in fact, there may be some misguided and bigoted politicians who try to pass laws trying to force people into conforming to gender stereotypes. But that’s a problem of morality, not of science. You might as well blame chemistry as being responsible for the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Poor Harvard! The misguided Diaz even claims that he’s promulgating the truth:

We must never stop striving for truth — even when it is difficult, even when it requires us to challenge the status quo. This should not be any different when it comes to sex.

Or math! Remember in Nineteen Eighty-Four when Winston Smith was forced, under torture, to admit that 2 + 2  =  5 because it was in Big Brother’s interest to have Smith believe lies?

h/t: Michael

To counteract all the bad news, which is making me depressed and cranky, here’s a lovely 22-minute video of different type of bird nests (including the “bowers” of bowerbirds, which aren’t nests). But both bowers and nests are aspects of an organism’s evolved “extended phenotype”, as Dawkins emphasizes in his eponymous book.  Some of the nests discussed are quite complicated, and all are adaptive: clearly genes that control nest-building behaviors have left more copies than alternative forms of those genes.

I’m amazed by some of these nests, especially the nests of hummingbirds, eagles, horned coots, great hornbills, and, most of all, the penduline’s nest described beginning at 19:35. The hidden and close-able entrance evolved to foil predators is amazing.

The last nests, those of sociable weavers, are also stunning.

I am so bloody sick of the kind of hatred instantiated in this article, where someone gets deplatformed not because of what they were going to say, which is bad enough, but simply because of who they are.  From Cycling magazine we get a disgusting tale of a championship cyclist booted out of an International Women’s Day event, with her keynote speech canceled, explicitly because she was an Israeli, and one who fought—as was required for someone her age—for the IDF.  Meet the accomplished athlete Leah Goldstein, whose crime was being Israeli:

This will be short and not-so-sweet, reflecting poorly on Canada. The details:

Former pro cyclist Leah Goldstein, who lives in Vernon, B.C, will no longer be the keynote speaker at an International Women’s Day event in Peterborough, On., in March, apparently because of her time spent working for the IDF. In September, she was offered the role and she accepted. However, in January, she was told she was being removed from the role.

Goldstein, 54, was born in Canada to Israeli parents. At 17, she moved to Israel, where she spent several years, and served her mandatory military service. In 1989, she was world bantamweight kickboxing champion. After an injury, she began cycling, riding for teams such as the Canadian squad, Symmetrics Pro Cycling. After her career in road cycling, she then began ultra-endurance cycling. In 2011, Goldstein took the victory in the women’s solo category of the Race Across America. Notably, she attained second place in the women’s group and fifth overall in 2019. However, it was in 2021 that she etched her name in history by winning the overall solo division, beating not just all the women, but men too.

On Thursday, after the decision began to circulate on social media the organization put out a formal statement saying that she would no longer be involved with the event, amid the Israel/Gaza war.

Look at this weaselly pronouncement!

“Our focus at INSPIRE has been and will always be to create safe spaces to honour, share, and celebrate the remarkable stories of women and non-binary individuals,” the statement read.“In recognition of the current situation and the sensitivity of the conflict in the Middle East, the Board of INSPIRE will be changing our keynote speaker.”

No safe space can be created with an Israeli Jew on the dais!

They don’t dissimulate in their explanation!  By the way, Goldstein is also a professional speaker, so she doubtless would have given a good talk.  She was of course greatly disappointed, but kept her dignity when reacting to this slight. (She was not, according to what’s below, going to speak about the war.)

It has taken me a while to wrap my head around your decision to remove me as INSPIRE’s International Women’s Day ‘Inspire Inclusion’ keynote speaker. I was hurt. I was angry. But most of all I was heartbroken,” she said. “I’ve been a speaker for nearly 10 years and have told my story in front of real estate agents, business managers, garbage collectors, CEOs, motorbike dealers, government agencies and many diverse women’s groups. Not once has someone (to my face, to the organizers, nor anonymously) ever claimed to have been offended by my presentation. Not once.”

During her speeches as a motivational speaker, Goldstein, frequently recounts how her mental resilience enabled her to triumph over injury, discrimination, and bullying in various arenas, including sports and her service in Israel. She proudly states her distinction as the inaugural female elite commando instructor in the IDF, alongside her tenure as an undercover police officer in Israel. However, she says her presentations are never political.

“I am zero political when I speak,” she told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.“Honestly, there is nothing political about my presentation. I just talk about the crap that I went through and the crap that most women go through, and they still do, and how I handled it.”

Goldstein added she would never have a problem if a Palestinian woman spoke at a similar event.

“As a Jewish woman, I would never be offended if a Palestinian woman were to speak about her obstacles and life journey,” she aded. “I thought that’s what women were supposed to do for each other – listen and support!”

Indeed. Goldstein had one crime: she was a Jew who lived in Israel, even though she was born in Canada.  Can this be seen as anything other than anti-semitism?

Leah Goldstein (photo from the article); courtesy of Leah Goldstein @NoLimitsLeah

 

h/t: Paul

Yes, it was inevitable. Now that birds and other animals are undergoing woke scrutiny to see which names are problematic (though scientific names cannot be changed), the Pecksniffs have begun to examine the names of dinosaurs, too. And according to this article from Nature (which contains a blatant misspelling), they have found some “bad” names, though not many. Click to read.

First, remember that the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature has decreed that, for purposes of scientific communication, the Latin binomial names of animals (e.g., Anas platyrhynchos—the mallard) cannot be changed, though “mallard” could be changed. (The equivalent plant group hasn’t yet weighed in.) Thus what has been at issue is “problematic” common names, seen as being non-inclusive and fostering bigotry and racism (example Wallace’s owlet, named after the supposed miscreant Alfred Russel Wallace). See all my posts on this fracas here).

The problem with dinosaur names is that the common name and the scientific name are often similar, like Stegosaurus, a genus containing three recognized extinct species of dinosaurs. That one isn’t named after a person (the Latin name, based on its dorsal plates, means “roof lizard”), so it’s not problematic. But if it were, I suppose the woke could cancel the common name and call it something other than Stegosaurus.

In fact, dinosaur names can be problematic for reasons other than the person after whom they’re named (eponyms).  And, sure enough, the Perpetually Offended are trawling through dinosaur names to find the bad ones. Nature carries the article, even though this effort hasn’t been published in the scientific literature.  Below (indented) are some excerpts of this risible endeavor. Note the common error, due to ignorance, that I’ve put in bold. Of course you know that it’s “free rein”, referring to letting go of a horse’s reins. It has nothing to do with kings and the like.

It’s been 200 years since scientists named the first dinosaur: Megalosaurus. In the centuries since, hundreds of other dinosaur species have been discovered and catalogued — their names inspired by everything from their physical characteristics to the scientists who first described them. Now, some researchers are calling for the introduction of a more robust system, which they say would ensure species names are more inclusive and representative of where and how fossils are discovered.

Unlike in other scientific disciplines — such as chemistry, in which strict rules govern a molecule’s name — zoologists have a relatively free reign over the naming of new species. Usually, the scientist or group that first publishes work about an organism gets to pick its name, with few restrictions. There is a set of guidelines for species naming overseen by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN). These include the requirements that the name is unique, that it is announced in a publication and that, for dinosaurs, it is linked to a single specimen.

Screenshot proof before the journal wises up:

But I digress, simply because this kind of stuff irks me.  Examples of “problematic names” are few, and in fact they don’t give a single one. The Pecksniffs simply decry the lack of dinosaurs named after indigenous people or the places where the bones were found. Further, if there were gendered names, most were male—as one expects when the field was dominated almost exclusively, as was the case a while back, by men.

To explore how dinosaur naming has changed over the past 200 years, Emma Dunne, a palaeobiologist at Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen–Nuremberg, Germany, and her colleagues analysed the names of all of the dinosaur fossils from the Mesozoic Era (251.9 million to 66 million years ago) that have been described, around 1,500 in total.

The authors wanted to know how much effort it would take to address what they saw as problematic names, which they describe as those “emanating racism, sexism, named under (neo)colonial contexts or after controversial figures”. They found several such names, equating to less than 3% of the dinosaurs they looked at.

Some of the names the team identified derive from the colonial names for lands where species have been discovered. Indigenous-language names of places or researchers are often not used or are mistranslated, the authors say.

For example, many of the dinosaurs discovered during a series of expeditions between 1908 and 1920 by German explorers in Tendaguru in Tanzania, which was then part of German East Africa, were named after German people rather than local expedition members, and the samples remain in Germany.

Now the ICZN says it’s not changing any of these names, though, disturbingly, its president says it could be open to “introducing different naming systems.”  But the article implies that this isn’t impending. And there aren’t that many dinosaurs that haven’t been found.

The main issue, of course, is whether changing 45 dinosaur names (3% of 1500) will make a substantial—or even a detectable—difference in the inclusivity of paleontology. Will people of color and women, previously repelled by the bigotry and patriarchy of dinosaur names, now come pouring into paleontology after 45 common names are changed?  If you believe that, I have some land in Florida to sell you. Regardless, the Pecksniffs think they’re doing a lot of good:

“The problem in terms of numbers is really insignificant. But it is significant in terms of importance,” says Evangelos Vlachos, a palaeontologist at the Museum of Paleontology Egidio Feruglio in Trelew, Chubut, Argentina, who also worked on the study. He wants future naming systems to be more rigorous. “We don’t say that tomorrow we need to change everything. But we need to critically revise what we have done, see what we have done well and what we have not done well, and try to correct it in the future.”

Besides the redundancy of “it is significant in terms of importance,” the fact is that changing 45 dinosaur names won’t accomplish anything except enable the re-namers to feel good about themselves. And this is the problem of all the biological renaming initiatives. They apply only to common names, which aren’t the same from country to country, and it’s ludicrous to expect that changing some of the “problematic” ones will actually make a field of science more inclusive.

This kind of effort would be much better spent tutoring or giving lectures to underprivileged kids. But that’s too much work.

h/t: Alex

A “soft” landing of an uncrewed vehicle, built by NASA in conjunction with a commercial company, will take place this afternoon: 5:30 4:24 p.m. EST Jim Batterson gives the details and links where you can watch/hear it live.  This landing has hardly been in the news, but it certainly deserves our attention.

NASA/Intuitive Machines -1 Landing on the Moon Thursday Afternoon

by Jim Batterson

NASA, in collaboration with Intuitive Machines, is scheduled to soft-land an uncrewed payload near the Moon’s South Pole at 5:30 4:24PM EST this afternoon [RESCHEDULED].  If successful, this will be the first U.S. soft landing on the moon since the final Apollo mission of the early 70’s.

The mission was launched last week on a Space-X Falcon rocket from Cape Kennedy and, after several successful mid-course maneuvers is, as of this morning, orbiting the moon just 57 miles above the Lunar surface.  About an hour before the planned landing, a series of onboard rocket motors are scheduled to fire and take it out of orbit to a steady one meter/secpmd touchdown on the Lunar surface. The lander will take photographs, make soil measurements, and carry out scientific experiments.  In carrying out this mission, U.S. capabilities in space are extended to a commercial company as a part of NASA’s efforts to support more robust launch and landing capabilities by the private sector and to test and validate—on uncrewed missions—new technologies that can be used in the Artemis human crews to the moon program.

As a part of NASA’s return to the moon for a planned permanent presence, the NASA Artemis Program is developing a heavy, crew-rated launch system.  Many of us watched a major uncrewed launch in that program a bit over a year ago as a huge rocket sent an Orion capsule, which will be used to fly and land a human crew on the moon in the next few years, around the moon and back to Earth with a successful splashdown and recovery.  It is my understanding that a post-flight review of the capsule’s heat shield showed excess sublimation (melting and conversion to gas) over what was expected and that resolution of this issue and other abnormalities may delay the crewed Artemis 2 launch and circumlunar trajectory currently planned for Fall 2025, which of course would impact the crewed Artemis 3 launch—one that will carry a crew and soft-land them on the Moon in Fall of 2026.  A Wikipedia listing of the currently planned Artemis Program missions through the mid-2030’s can be seen here.

This current mission, IM-1 (Intuitive Machines 1) is the second in a series of uncrewed Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) missions that support the development of technologies to be incorporated in the Artemis crewed missions.  CLPS is a NASA program that, as its name implies, enlists commercial vendors to build, integrate, and operate compact, uncrewed space missions to prepare hardware on a fast pace parallel with the development of the main Artemis Mission crewed landings on the moon.  The idea is that using several commercial vendors creates capacity and know-how more quickly and cheaply than doing in situ testing of new space technologies.

The first of the CLPS series, Peregrine One, experienced a failure after launch last month.  The next scheduled launch after IM-1 will be in the Fall of this year and will be operated by commercial vendor, Firefly Aerospace.  This current mission, operated by the commercial vendor, Intuitive Machines was launched early last Thursday morning and is scheduled to soft-land near the South Pole of the Moon this Thursday afternoon.

As of 0830 EST this morning, the vehicle is in a circular orbit 57 miles above the moon. About an hour before the planned 1730 EST landing on Thursday afternoon, retrorockets will elongate its orbit to 67mi x 6 mi with the 6 mile high point being just above the landing site.  When the orbit reaches the 6 mi altitude point, another retrorocket firing and braking will be started and the vehicle will drop down to a soft landing in the region of the South Lunar Pole with touchdown expected at 1730EST. . . if all goes well!  Live updates are provided at the Intuitive Machines mission website, where there’s a nice write-up and link to live coverage of landing, coverage that should start about one hour before the expected 1730EST touchdown on Space.com at the site below:

One last thought:  One factor prompting this U.S. project is a bit different than the main cold-war driver of the Apollo program in the 1960’s.  Then we had a single competitor, the USSR, but that was seen as a competition for technological success of a democracy versus a Communist dictatorship.  After World War II, nobody else had the economy and technology to attempt a feat like a manned moon landing.  Today there are five nations that have hit the moon: China, Russia, Japan, India, and the U.S.  (Only the U.S. has actually landed humans on the Moon.) It turns out that there are concerns about any of these nations claiming possession of locations and minerals via landing there.

Here’s Wikipedia’s rendering of the Nova-C lander on the surface of the Moon (from Wikipedia and the Smithsonian Institution)

A lot of readers and heterodox colleagues have sent me this link to Bari Weiss’s interview with Harvard economics professor Roland G. Fryer, Jr., often accompanied by big encomiums. Despite my unwillingness to watch long videos, I did watch all 77 minutes of it.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t mesmerized, or even much interested. There are interesting bits in it, but I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it. Readers who see it, or have seen it and feel otherwise, please weigh in below.

Fryer is famous for two things: his prize-winning economic and sociological work, which sometimes produced counterintuitive results, and also for his suspension from Harvard for two years for sexual harassment. (He’s now back again.) I have only a few comments, but here’s the intro from the Free Press on YouTube:

Roland Fryer is one of the most celebrated economists in the world. He is the author of more than 50 papers—on topics ranging from “the economic consequences of distinctively black names” to “racial differences in police shootings.” At 30, he became the youngest black tenured professor in Harvard’s history. At 34, he won a MacArthur Genius Fellowship, followed by a John Bates Clark Medal, which is given to an economist in America under 40 who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge.

But before coming to Harvard, Fryer worked at McDonalds—drive-through, not corporate.

Fryer’s life story of rapid ascent to academic celebrity status despite abandonment by his parents at a young age, and growing up in what he calls a “drug family” is incredibly inspiring in its own right. Because based on every statistic and stereotype about race and poverty in America, he should not have become the things he became. And yet he did.

He also continues to beat the odds in a world in which much of academia has become conformist. Time and time again, Fryer refuses to conform. He has one north star, and that is the pursuit of truth, come what may. The pursuit of truth no matter how unpopular the conclusion or inconvenience to his own political biases.

He’s also rare in that he isn’t afraid to admit when he’s wrong, or to admit his mistakes and learn from them.

Bari Weiss sat down with Roland at the University of Austin for this inspiring, courageous, and long-overdue conversation.

The parts I found most absorbing are these:

1. Fryer’s rough upbringing, raised without a mother and with most of his acquaintances being killed. And, of course, working at the McDonald’s drive-though before college.
2. His famous paper showing that although there is police bias against blacks for some legal infractions, there is no racial bias in the Big Issue: police shootings. Fryer describes how he had to get police protection for over a month after that paper came out, for its conclusion violated the Aceepted Narrative and angered many people.
3. His suspension from Harvard and closure of his lab. Fryer appears to have taken it well, but does explain that the incident involved his failure to understand “power dynamics”, for which he’s apologized. It’s curious, and has been pointed out by many, that Claudine Gay, who was a dean at the time (and later President of Harvard), was instrumental in getting Fryer punished. This makes Weiss ask Fryer at one point, “do you believe in karma?”  I can’t say much more about this as I haven’t followed the controversy, but I know many people think Fryer’s punishment was unduly harsh.

A Q&A session begins 49 minutes in.

In general, one can’t say that chromosomes “determine sex” in animals, as there are other genetic or environmental features that determine what sex an individual becomes.

As Coyne and Maroja (2023) note:

Different sexes can determined during development bybe based on different chromosomes and their genes (e.g., XX vs. XY in humans, ZW vs. ZZ in birds, individuals with like chromosomes being female in mammals and male in birds); different rearing temperatures (crocodiles and turtles); whether you have a full or half set of chromosomes (bees); whether you encounter a female (some marine worms); and a host of other social, genetic, and environmental factors.

But note that we’re talking about what “determines” sex—setting off the developmental program that results in a male or female—but the “definition” of sex, ubiquitous in animals and vascular plants, still depends on whether they make large immobile gametes or small and mobile ones.

Still, it’s true that the gene that sets off the sex-determining cascade in humans and most other mammals is based on chromosomes. In particular, if a mammal carries a Y chromosome, which harbors the sex-determining gene SRY, whose action initiates development of testes, that individual is a male. Without a Y, you nearly always develop female reproductive equipment.

All in all, it’s accurate to teach students that sex is determined (but not “defined”) by chromosomes: the normal karyotypes are XX for females and XY for males. Yet for teaching that simple fact, adjunct professor Dr. Johnson Varkey, was fired from St. Philip’s College in Texas in January of last year.  As the Fox News (where else?) article below recounts, Varkey has now been re-hired after filing a lawsuit against the Alamo Community College District.

 

Excerpts:

A biology professor who was fired from a Texas community college for teaching students that X and Y chromosomes determine sex has been reinstated.

First Liberty Institute, a law firm that defends religious liberty for Americans, announced in a Tuesday press release that St. Philip’s College in San Antonio, Texas, had reinstated Dr. Johnson Varkey, a former adjunct professor, a year after he was terminated.

The law firm noted they had filed a charge of discrimination at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against St. Philip’s and the Alamo Community College District (ACCD) earlier this year.

Here’s what Varkey said that got him canned:

“When teaching the human reproductive system, Dr. Varkey also stated that human sex is determined by chromosomes X and Y, and that reproduction must occur between a male and a female to continue the human species,” First Liberty stated last June. “In the course of teaching Human Anatomy and Physiology, he made these statements in every class for 20 years, without any incident or complaint.”

Now you can imagine how some gender activists could get upset by that.  If it takes a man and a woman to make an offspring, what do you do with those who assert that “transwomen are women” or “transmen are men”? If the trans people aren’t sterile, they could still reproduce according to their biological sex, but an activist might assert that a woman and a woman could produce a baby. (I wouldn’t say that, of course.).  Further, activists might argue that sex is not determined by chromosomes, but by one’s inner feelings.  So a simple statment like Varkey’s would of course be inflammatory. It’s telling that he taught this same thing for 22 years, but only last year did it rile up the students:

Complaints against Varkey that ultimately led to his firing said he had engaged in “religious preaching, discriminatory comments about homosexuals and transgender individuals, anti-abortion rhetoric, and misogynistic banter” and that his teaching “pushed beyond the bounds of academic freedom with [his] personal opinions that were offensive to many individuals in the classroom,” according to a letter from the law firm.

Here we have another example of the ideological erosion of biology: a simple fact about human reproduction gets a professor fired simply because it contravenes the ideology of gender activists. It surprises me even more because it’s happened in conservative Texas, and the college is historically black.

I’m glad the buck stopped after a year, but the professor still went a year without teaching (and presumably salary). And this example may chill other people from teaching the truth about human sex and sexuality as well. After all, look at what happened to Carole Hooven at Harvard.

You’ll remember that Claudine Gay, the ex-President of Harvard, was grilled, along with the Presidents of MIT and Penn, in a House hearing on antisemitism. And all three Presidents were correct in saying that, if they applied the First Amendment on their campuses, calling for the genocide of Jews would often be considered free speech, but in some situations it wouldn’t. (One example of impermissible speech would be shouting “Gas the Jews” in front of a crowd of Jews if it would lead to predictable “imminent lawless action.)

Nevertheless, the professors were damned by the largely Republican panel—mainly because they spoke the truth, but there were two problems. First, the campuses didn’t explicitly have a speech code that comported with the First Amendment (they’re all private schools, too, so they aren’t required to). Further, they applied what speech codes they had unevenly, punishing much less serious offenses. In other words they were guilty of speech hypocrisy.

After the House debacle, Penn President Liz Magill resigned, while Gay, desperate to make amends, issued two statements plus a video explanation and apology.  That might have saved her job, but in the end she was brought down by numerous and credible examples of plagiarism in her scholarly work. An interim President, Alan Garber, was appointed to replace Gay, and the search is on for a long-term replacement.

Now, six Jewish students at Harvard have filed a federal Title VI lawsuit against the school, alleging that it was a “bastion of anti-Jewish hatred.” In other words, the school had by its behavior created a climate of antisemitism. The suit will take a while before it works its way through the courts. but Harvard is clearly on notice that it has to do something about its speech hypocrisy. In a Boston Globe op-ed, Steve Pinker suggested five actions that Harvard could take to “save itself,” including adopting institutional neutrality and disempowering DEI.

Unfortunately, Harvard can’t seem to stop disseminating antisemitic tropes, and incidents like this one (click the NY Post linke below to read) will only contribute to finding Harvard culpable in the lawsuit.

An excerpt:

The Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine reposted the cartoon Monday after it was shared by two student groups, the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and the Africa and African American Resistance Organization, according to the student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson.

It shows a hand with a dollar sign inside a Star of David holding nooses around what appear to be Muhammad Ali and former Egyptian President Gamal Nasser — with “third world” printed around a black arm swinging a machete with the words “liberation movement” on it.

Note that faculty are participating here.

The groups said they shared the poster, which is originally from 1967, to show how “African people have a profound understanding of apartheid and occupation.”

Instead, it added to accusations that the Ivy League school fails to protect Jewish students from hate.

More:

“The cartoon is despicably, inarguably antisemitic,” Rabbi David Wolpe, a Harvard Divinity School scholar who resigned from the school’s antisemitism advisory committee in December, posted to X.

“Is there no limit?”

[Alexander] Shabbos Kestenbaum, a Divinity School student who is suing the university for discrimination, also shared outrage at the offensive poster being reshared.

“Harvard *faculty* just posted an explicitly antisemitic poster depicting a Jewish hand controlling the black mind,” he wrote.

“With professors like these, it’s easy to see why Jewish students don’t feel safe in class.”

So here’s the cartoon at issue, which undeniably uses antisemitic tropes. Look at the Jewish hand (with a $ sign inside the Star of David) being a puppeteer. The cartoon was ultimately withdrawn with apologies by the issuing groups, but it was too late.

 

Now if you ask me, this is free speech, although of course bigoted and hateful speech. Were this to happen at the University of Chicago, it’s likely that no official statement would have been issued. But, under the gun, Harvard’s interim President issued this statement yesterday; I got it as an alum. There was also a short Harvard Press release condemning the cartoon and its antisemitism.

Dear Members of the Harvard Community,

A few groups purporting to speak on behalf of Harvard affiliates recently circulated a flagrantly antisemitic cartoon in a post on social media channels. The cartoon, included in a longer post, depicted what appeared to be an Arab man and a Black man with nooses around their necks. The nooses are held by a hand imprinted with the Star of David, and a dollar sign appears in the middle of the star. Online condemnation of this trope-filled image was swift, and Harvard promptly issued a statement condemning the posted cartoon. While the groups associated with the posting or sharing of the cartoon have since sought to distance themselves from it in various ways, the damage remains, and our condemnation stands.

Perpetuating vile and hateful antisemitic tropes, or otherwise engaging in inflammatory rhetoric or sharing images that demean people on the basis of their identity, is precisely the opposite of what this moment demands of us. As members of an academic community, we can and we will disagree, sometimes vehemently, on matters of public concern and controversy, including hotly contested issues relating to the war in Israel and Gaza, and the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it is grossly irresponsible and profoundly offensive when that disagreement devolves into forms of expression that demonize individuals because of their religion, race, nationality, or other aspects of their identity.

The members of the Corporation join me in unequivocally condemning the posting and sharing of the cartoon in question. The University will review the situation to better understand who was responsible for the posting and to determine what further steps are warranted.

Reckless provocation draws attention without advancing understanding. Jewish, Israeli, Muslim, Palestinian, and Arab members of our community have reported feeling targeted, rejected, and ostracized. The war and its effects on the lives of people directly affected by the conflict demand our profound concern and sympathy. We must approach one another with compassion, open minds, and mutual respect, our discourse grounded in facts and supported by reasoned argument.

Sincerely,

Alan M. Garber © 2024 The President and Fellows of Harvard College | Harvard.edu

Harvard University | Massachusetts Hall | Cambridge, MA 02138

Taking an official stand against this stuff would violate Chicago’s institutional neutrality mandated by the Kalven Report, but Harvard doesn’t adhere to that. Ergo, to save its reputation, the school could hardly have done other than issue such a long screed, though I think the short press release is sufficient.

Note two things about the statement. First, it looks as if Harvard’s going to sniff out the perps with an eye to punishing them. Punishment for free speech! Notice further that besides condemning antisemitism, Harvard also has to condemn bigotry against Muslims, Palestinians, and Arabs. This “both sideism” is somewhat offensive to me: if you’re going to condemn an incident of antisemitism, you don’t have to throw in stuff about the other “side” as well. After all, Harvard isn’t being sued for creating an “Islamophobic atmosphere”.  And I, for one, find it difficult to approach loud and aggressive pro-Palestinian demonstrators with “compassion and mutual respect”, so that part of the letter seems patronizing.  As for “discourse grounded in facts,” fuggedaboutit!

In my view, Harvard should adopt Pinker’s “Fivefold Way” immediately, or it will be issuing statements like the one above every time there’s an incident involving people’s politics and identities. And you can see that it’s still violating the First Amendment, threatening punishment for flyers like the one above.

The Harvard Crimson also has a story about the image and Harvard’s reaction, but it largely mirrors the Post‘s story.

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “grasp”, shows the boys discarding their sacred books on very bizarre grounds. Does this mean the strip will end now? (I don’t think so!)

Science posts are hard to write, and now I’m tired.  So here’s some lagniappe: the latest comedy monologue from Bill Maher.  The theme: the endless kvetching of Republicans about Biden despite the fact that Biden (and the economy) is doing pretty well.  However, there should have been more audience reaction to Maher’s comment on Afghanistan’s “war on women.”  What’s with that?

And three minutes of his stand-up bit:

By Jerry Coyne and Greg Mayer

Yesterday Carl Zimmer wrote a piece for the NYT on species concepts and conservation. Both Greg and I, who discussed the piece and are coauthoring our take on it, found that while Zimmer does not take a position on species concepts (which is good thing), it does have a theme.  And the theme seems to be this: that conserving biological diversity depends critically on what biologists decide a “species” is.  Now this argument is not, in our view, correct, because you can conserve biological diversity regardless of your species concept, even though some biologists seem to feel that we must be conserving species.  If you take that latter point of view, which we see as misguided, then you’re screwed, as there are, as Zimmer notes, dozens of species concepts, and each will lead you to a different decision about populations of an animal or plant. Is a population of owls long isolated on an island a different species from its relatives? That is largely a subjective judgment.

As we mentioned above, Zimmer does not sign on to any particular species concept, which is okay, as different concepts are useful for different purposes.  But he often neglects to tell us when a judgment about whether a population is a different species (and presumably worth conserving) is pretty much subjective, which is often the case for populations that are geographically isolated from one another. That is, he implies that once we hit on a species concept, problems of subjectivity largely disappear, which isn’t the case.  We would recommend that readers take in chapter 7 of Why Evolution is True, which Jerry immodestly thinks is the best existing popular discussion of speciation, but since few are going to do that, we’ll briefly reiterate what we, as evolutionists, use as a species concept.

Click to read:

 

As Jerry emphasizes in WEIT, the species concept one uses depends on what question one is asking. To evolutionists, the main question about the diversity of nature is this: “Why is it lumpy?”  That is, why do animals and plants appear not as a continuum, but in pretty discrete groups.  Look at the birds out your window and see if you have any problem telling which is which. And so it is with most animals and plants—so long as they live in the same place, i.e., are “sympatric”. (For populations that are not sympatric, but live in different areas—i.e., “allopatric”—problems arise. and these are the problems that Zimmer describes in his piece.

At any rate, the explanation for the lumpiness in one area began to be solved when biologists adopted what we call the “biological species concept”, or BSC, devised by several biologists in the 1930s, notably Ernst Mayr. (Zimmer describes him as a “German ornithologist” but he really was a German-American evolutionist—the “Darwin of the 20th century”—who held forth on far more things than birds.) The BSC is basically this:

Two populations are members of different species if they live in the same area in nature but do not produce fertile hybrids in that area.

That is, they do not exchange genes because of what we call “reproductive isolating barriers” (RIBs) that prevent genetic interchange. These barriers keep populations distinct, and allow them to undergo evolutionary divergence without being held back by gene flow.  It is this feature—reproductive isolation—that leads to nature’s lumpiness, and it is the origin of these barriers that explains, to an evolutionist, the origin of species.

It turns out that these barriers usually form when populations evolve in different places. Then, when the evolutionary divergence has proceeded to the extent that there is reproductive isolation between the populations when they come back together in sympatry, we now have evolved two species from a single ancestor.  RIBs come in many forms: hybrid inviability, hybrid sterility (the mule), ecological isolation (related species prefer to live in different sub-areas of the environment, or are confined there, and thus do not meet), temporal isolation, so that populations mate at different times (common in marine organisms), and differences in mate preference, so members of each species prefer to mate with individuals of their own “kind,” forming substantial barriers to gene flow.

If we can understand how one ancestral species forms two populations that cannot exchange genes, then we’ve solved the problem of the origin of species—a problem that, despite the title of his great book, Darwin didn’t come close to resolving.   Now most evolutionists realize that the answer is the origin of RIBs. In fact, neither of us have ever found a scientific paper on how species form that doesn’t involve the origin of RIBs: a tacit but telling admission that the BSC is the answer to most questions about speciation.

The problems that Zimmer outlines largely involve animal populations that are geographically isolated from one another, so the BSC can’t really be applied: the populations don’t coexist. Some of them, like the giraffe populations, breed with each other like gangbusters in zoos, but that’s a very weak test of conspecificity, because some species that live in the same area without interbreeding have their RIBs broken down in captivity (this is true of many fruit flies and of species isolated by ecological preferences). One thing we can say is that if two populations in captivity produce hybrids, but that those hybrids are inviable or sterile, then, yes, they are members of different species. But breeding in captivity, something usually impossible to test, is at best a one-way test.

In 2016, Jerry wrote about the giraffes here: the populations, which look different, live in complete geographic isolation, but breed like crazy in zoos, producing viable and fertile offspring.  What do we call them? We don’t know, but we’d say that they’re subspecies rather than full species. It’s a judgment call. The non-BSC people have simply raised the rank of all the traditional giraffe subspecies to species. Nothing prevents people from wanting to conserve subspecies– we sure do! People tried desperately to conserve the two subspecies of white rhinos, well before it became fashionable to raise the subspecies to species.

The giraffes demonstrate the near impossibility of using a species concept when you want to conserve populations. Our own view would be to save all the populations, regardless of whether you call them species, subspecies, or simply different populations. There are measures, other than breeding data, like genetic difference between populations, that can serve as a proxy for biological speciation. If we know that populations usually produce sterile hybrids when the difference in their DNA is greater than X%, then the “greater than X% criterion”, as used in European frogs by Christophe Dufresnes, is fine. Here’s what Zimmer says:

In recent years, Christophe Dufresnes, a herpetologist at Nanjing Forestry University in China, has used this concept to classify different species of frogs in Europe.

Some of the groups of frogs interbred a lot, whereas others had no hybrids at all. By analyzing their DNA, Dr. Dufresnes found that groups with a recent ancestor — that is, those that were more closely related — readily produced hybrids. He estimates that it takes about six million years of diverging evolution for two groups of frogs to become unable to interbreed — in other words, to become two distinct species.

“This is very cool,” Dr. Dufresnes said. “Now we know what the threshold is to deem them species or not.”’

Well, Dufresnes is still using a proxy for the BSC, but his concept of conspecificity: the “ready production of hybrids”, is a bit off. In fruit flies, species can readily produce fertile hybrids in vials in the lab yet they don’t do so in nature. Still, Dufresnes’ approach is better than just judging by genetic distance alone, or, worse, by the degree of morphological difference between isolated populations, which may be the worst way to make a species call.

Zimmer describes the intriguing finding that polar bears and brown bears have had several episodes of genetic exchange over the last 120,000 years even though they split from a common ancestor about half a million years ago.  What do we call them? Our view is that they are biological species that have had their ecological isolation (polar bears “prefer” to live in colder habitats) broken down several times by climate change. The fact that there is historical gene exchange doesn’t mean that reproductive barriers don’t exist, for speciation can be either fully or partly reversible if RIBs change—in this case by changes in ecological isolation caused by climate change.

But our point is that we don’t have to make a a strict call about whether brown bears and polar bears are different species before we can decide whether to protect them as separate entities, or only protect one of them. Conservation decisions shouldn’t rest heavily on a particular species definition; rather, we have to decide exactly what we want to conserve: nature’s lumps (biological species), geographically isolated populations of a single species, like the giraffes, or even just populations of a single species that differ by one or a few traits, like color. As Zimmer quotes:

“They [the two bears] clearly demand separate strategies for conservation management,” Dr. Shapiro said. “It makes sense to me to consider them distinct species.”

But separate management strategies do not demand that they be considered distinct species– US law allows protection of subspecies and “distinct population segments” of vertebrates. From the ESA: “(16) The term “species” includes any subspecies of fish or wildlife or plants, and any distinct population segment of any species of vertebrate fish or wildlife which interbreeds when mature.”  In other words, conservation strategies don’t depend on fixing on a hard definition of “species.”

Zimmer writes this on barn owls:

Even a common species like the barn owl — found on every continent except Antarctica, as well as remote islands — is a source of disagreement.

The conservation group BirdLife International recognizes barn owls as a species, Tyto alba, that lives across the world. But another influential inventory, called the Clements Checklist of Birds of the World, carves off the barn owls that live on an Indian Ocean island chain as their own species, Tyto deroepstorffi. Yet another recognizes the barn owls in Australia and New Guinea as Tyto delicatula. And a fourth splits Tyto alba into four species, each covering its own broad swath of the planet.

This is no big deal: it’s just the standard difficulty of ranking allopatric populations.  We can just call all the populations members of a “superspecies” and then try to keep all the populations from going extinct. This strategy will of course conserve both genetic diversity and the presence of endemic wildlife.

Zimmer mentions a botanist who is using a “triage” method:

Thomas Wells, a botanist at the University of Oxford, is concerned that debates about the nature of species are slowing down the work of discovering new ones. Taxonomy is traditionally a slow process, especially for plants. It can take decades for a new species of plant to be formally named in a scientific publication after it is first discovered. That sluggish pace is unacceptable, he said, when three out of four undescribed species of plants are already threatened with extinction.

Dr. Wells and his colleagues are developing a new method to speed up the process. They are taking photographs of plants both in the wild and in museum collections and using computer programs to spot samples that seem to cluster together because they have similar shapes. They’re also rapidly sequencing DNA from the samples to see if they cluster together genetically.

If they get clear clusters from approaches such as these, they call the plants a new species. The method — which Dr. Wells calls a “rough and ready” triage in our age of extinctions — may make it possible for his team to describe more than 100 new species of plants each year.

A triage approach is fine– there are many approaches to trying to document and preserve biodiversity quickly. But the clear implication that debates about species concepts delay publication is just wrong. The delays discussed by Wells are all about collecting decent samples of specimens, which takes time!  We have both written about the importance of museum collections, including continued collecting, for understanding and conserving biodiversity. So, we are all for accelerating collection and description of biological diversity — before it’s gone, and to try to prevent its loss.

We’ll come to an end now, but we find Zimmer’s discussion somewhat incomplete, and for the reasons we mentioned at the beginning. First, conservation need not depend on what biologists call a “species”. Second, for populations that are geographically isolated, any decision on species status will usually be arbitrary, and so we can leave aside applying fixed species concepts and instead decide what it is, exactly, that we want to conserve. We might want to save as much genetic variation as we can, or perhaps conserve morphological traits (based of course on genetic variation) that affect how a species looks or lives (e.g. coat color in mice), or even evolutionary history as reflected in genetic distance. But none of this relies particularly heavily on adhering to a particular species concept.

From the Washington Monthly we hear of a brand-new book published by the prestigious American Psychiatric Association (APA), a book dealing with (and all gung ho for) “gender-affirming” care. You know what that is: it’s the care that goes to a child with gender dysphoria, taking him or her directly to a therapist or doctor who affirms the child’s feelings of being born in the “wrong” body, then to prescribing puberty blockers and other hormones, and, then if the patient wants it, to excision of body parts: operations on genitalia and removal of breasts, along with hormone treatment that eliminates a patient’s ability to have an orgasm.

Click below see the book on Amazon. It’s $58 and, as you see below it, the 18 ratings on Amazon so far aren’t very laudatory. But according to Amazon it came out only on January 7, and the gender activists haven’t yet weighed in. But they will after they read psychiatrist Sally Satel‘s critical take.

x

Why such poor reviews? Perhaps, as Sally notes in her description of the book in Washington Monthly, because it’s written by gender-affirming advocates and is woefully short on warnings about possible dangers of this kind of medical and psychiatric care. Nor does it appear to offer any alternative care that doesn’t wind up with hormone therapy.

Click to read:

Although the book is published by the APA, it doesn’t constitute “official APA guidance.” But here’s psychiatrist Sally Satel’s take (excerpts indented, bolding is mine):

Last fall, the APA’s publishing arm issued a textbook called Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care. Described in accompanying promotional material as an “indispensable” resource, the book is written for mental health and primary care clinicians. The publisher, American Psychiatric Association Publishing, APPI, hails it as “the first textbook in the field to provide an affirming, intersectional, and evidence-informed approach to caring for transgender, non-binary, and/or gender-expansive (TNG) people.”

The “affirming, intersectional” textbook is not official APA guidance. Still, APA Publishing describes it as “rigorous” and “an expert view from fields that include psychiatry, psychology, social work, nursing, pharmacy, public health, law, business, community activism, and more. And because each of the 26 chapters features at least one TNG author, wisdom gleaned from lived experience bolsters the professional perspective provided throughout the book.” One would hope that “lived experience” might enhance the scholarship, but that is not the case here.

Affirming care for children with gender dysphoria, a condition that, according to the APA, refers to individuals who suffer from “a marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender [at birth],” is a major subject of the book. Unfortunately, though billed as a compendium of “best practices,” Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care, instead of providing even-handed analyses of the controversies within a still-evolving topic of great clinical and social importance regarding the science of treating gender dysphoric youth, the volume approaches it as a settled matter when it is not.

The textbook’s treatment philosophy is that if a child or teen desires transitional steps, then the physicians should proceed, taking the patient’s request on its face. According to the authors, “Clinicians should … always allow patients autonomy in their care.” The authors further advocate for puberty blockers (chemicals that suppress the natural hormonal development and the appearance of secondary sexual traits) and then cross-sex hormones (estrogen or testosterone) to produce the physical characteristics aligned with the patient’s gender identity.

When it comes to gender-affirming surgery (which, for natal girls, can entail the removal of breasts, uterus, and ovaries, as well as penile construction; and for natal boys, involves the genital removal and the creation of a vaginal canal), patients first require a psychiatric evaluation before surgical consultation. In this evaluation, the authors say that “the [mental health] clinician should never place barriers to surgery, only identify those that exist and assist with overcoming them.” (Emphasis added.) While the final decision to operate ultimately lies with the surgeon, who is tasked with obtaining informed consent from the patient and guardian, a psychiatric greenlight is also necessary. Surely, there are times when a yellow or red light is appropriate. It’s telling that a book of 420 pages only mentions guardians once and in the context of saying that guardians and parents (who get five mentions) should not be part of decisions concerning their transitioning kids’ medical data. Parents are referenced only in the context of being unsupportive to their children’s desire to transition.

Satel has other beef. The book doesn’t cover the fate of youths who aren’t given this kind of care, many of whom become gay or no longer gender-dysphoric without affirmative treatments; the book doesn’t cover those who de-transition or reverse the process when it’s going on before medical treatment (“desisters”); the book doesn’t describe alternative treatments in which therapists don’t automatically buy into the patient’s wishes and narratives; and, most important, and, most important, the book doesn’t warn of the potential dangers of some of the medical treatments—dangers recognized by other Western countries.

First is the need for more objective care:

As a practicing psychiatrist, I would expect this volume to probe how to conduct productive interviews with all patients, especially children and young teens, who consider themselves candidates for a gender-affirming approach. After all, this is a book from the American Psychiatric Association’s publishing arm. As such, it should advise clinicians to examine, over many sessions, patients’ experiences and developmental struggles (such as emerging sexuality and identity formation), to learn about their home lives and social worlds, as well as to treat them for the frequent co-occurring issues, such as depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder, which sometimes manifest as gender dysphoria in youth.

This would seem to be at the heart of any responsible psychiatric assessment of whether chemical intervention (which can be irreversible) and procedures as life-altering as “confirmation surgery” should be recommended. However, oddly, such foundational steps are ignored.

Here’s Satel on the lack of discussion of the dangers of affirmative therapy (again, we’re talking about young people who may not be mature enough to make such important decisions). To me, this almost verges on academic malpractice:

Finally, a reader gets no sense that gender-affirming care is the subject of vigorous international scientific debate. Remarkably, the textbook does not mention that in 2020, the United Kingdom’s National Health Service commissioned a comprehensive review of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and concluded that “the available evidence was not deemed strong enough to form the basis of a policy position” on their use.  Similarly, in 2022, Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare suspended hormone therapy for minors except in very rare cases and limited mastectomies to research settings. Likewise, the Norwegian Healthcare Investigation Board now defines all medical and surgical interventions for youth as “experimental treatment,” and the French National Academy of Medicine advises caution in pediatric gender transition.

Regardless of the authors’ personal views, a textbook that is advertised as “rigorous—and timely” as well as “informative” should, at the very least, acknowledge, and ideally explore, the tension between the European and American approaches and elucidate the concerns raised by European medical authorities.

Why the lacunae? As Satel notes, every chapter has at least one likely gender-activist author (“TNG”), and this has resulted in the sorry situation where the APA gives its imprimatur to treatment that might be dangerous or, at best, ineffective. Do note, however, that Satel also opposes state-imposed bans or limits on treatment for adults.

Gender activism is one thing, but when it comes with the imprimatur of the APA and without mention of either alternative therapies nor warnings about the dangers of medical care that have been recognized by other countries, that activism is irresponsible.

The worst thing one can say about this book is that it’s probably going to be highly recommended by ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio.