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powerstruggle

@ powerstruggle @sh.itjust.works

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755
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6 mo. ago

Why?

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  • That's an attempt to redefine sex. Which is all well and good and part of the scientific process. It's not going to be adopted in the field of biology though, because then talking about sex across the animal kingdom becomes incoherent. Why There Are Exactly Two Sexes addresses that paper directly:

    Traits are labeled “male-typical” or “female-typical” only because they correlate with organisms already identified as male or female—an identification that, in anisogamous species, is made ultimately by reference to gametes. Once that reference is removed, the typology loses its interpretive footing.

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  • Posted previously with lengthy discussion. I'll copy my comment here again:

    That’s the point of differentiating between sex and gender. Sex is indeed binary, there are exactly two gamete sizes. Gender is what captures everything on top of that base.

    If you want more of an explanation, see this recent comment of mine showing that even for people who want to redefine sex to not be gamete-based, they still acknowledge the reality of the gamete binary.

  • Anti-Trans Groups Want a Bathroom Ban. Judges Aren’t Giving Them One

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  • This ruling was a shitshow and a gift to the GC campaigners. This is a GC site that goes over the issues from their perspective:

    https://wingsoverscotland.com/how-far-to-go-how-far/

    In summary, crucial aspects of the ruling were completely made up, possibly from AI hallucinations. The decision is getting appealed, and will quite possibly get completely reversed in favor of Sandie Peggie.

  • 19 Chinese warships roamed Philippines Exclusive Economic Zone in November

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  • That can't be. I've been reliably informed by lemmy.ml that China is only interested in peaceful activities and can't possibly have any military ambitions 🙃

  • Why do you personally believe in your religion?

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  • No worries, I can also be slow to respond. There's a few things at play here:

    1. Neutral mutations can become beneficial later on. It's not just about the genes, it's also about the environment. Even deleterious mutations can become beneficial, like sickle cell disease likely being selected for due to its protection against malaria.

    2. Following from that, deleterious/neutral/beneficial are pretty loose categories, and it's not even really correct to think of them as categories. It's more about how beneficial it is. Sickle cell disease is bad, but better than dying of malaria.

    3. Beneficial mutations can be really beneficial. Once somebody has them, they can spread like wildfire through the population. One example is the ability to digest lactose as an adult. It's "worth" lots of "failures" to get that mutation (using those terms loosely and without value judgement). An analogy might help here, think about it kind of like this slime mold searching for food. The tips have a lot of churn and waste, but the food it finds is worth doing all that work. You can think of the beneficial mutations as the branches that are kept.

      (Note that evolution isn't directed by "something", even as simple as a slime mold, it's a description of a physical process, like gravity, so the analogy is loose)

    4. We've seen beneficial mutations happen in person, and shows another example of how useful beneficial mutations can be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment. The E. coli evolved the ability to digest a new substance they couldn't before. The experiment also touches on neutral mutations sticking around.

    5. The distinction you're drawing between micro evolution and macro evolution relies on an assumption that either there are different kinds that are inherently distinct, or some sort of "system" that prevents micro evolution from progressing into macro evolution. For the prior, I've never seen a defense of that that doesn't rely on the supernatural, and for the latter, what happens when the system itself changes due to evolution?

    6. In my personal experience, the strongest argument against any radical move away from the current general scientific worldview consensus is that everything generally fits together. Sure, the estimated age of the universe might be adjusted slightly from 13.7B to 13.8B years, or the Jurassic might actually be estimated slightly wrong. But across all evidence we have, the current scientific understanding across a diverse range of disciplines is approximately correct. Nobody is counting tree rings and saying "Wait a minute, these show the Earth is 6,000 years old!". Nobody is dating rocks and saying "Hold on, this dates as twice as old as the universe!". Note that you'll find claims of things like fossilized tracks of humans walking next to dinosaurs, but those don't pan out

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  • I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere if you’re going to respond with an “Oho!”

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  • Don’t bother say “Oho! Here’s where the analogy fails!”. I already know that, thanks.

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  • I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere

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  • Don’t bother say “Oho! Here’s where the analogy fails!”. I already know that, thanks.

  • Why do you personally believe in your religion?

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    1. It's a common misunderstanding, but humans and chimps didn't evolve from each other. We each evolved from a common ancestor. Regardless, it seems like you wouldn't accept anything other than something from the now, so here's a study that agrees with the general mutation rate done by comparing parents and children in Iceland: Parental influence on human germline de novo mutations in 1,548 trios from Iceland Here's also a paper on calculating the distribution of those mutations across deleterious/neutral/beneficial: Assessing the Evolutionary Impact of Amino Acid Mutations in the Human Genome
    2. If a mutation doesn't decrease the reproductive capacity of the carrier, then it's not harmful. If it's harmful, then it will affect the reproductive capacity. That's just how it's defined in this context.
    3. I think it's slightly sloppily phrased, but is a counter to a specific claim found in this book: https://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Creationism-Henry-M-Morris/dp/1982697091. I don't have a copy so can't comment further.
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  • Some amount of that is literal psyops. Every major country is intentionally trying to cause at least some division in their geopolitical rivals. There's also internal psyops where governments will try to fracture any movements that might cause political change. At a smaller level, there's echo chambers built by people that are already sucked into an ideology, hoping to propagate that ideology. This recent thread that had simple biological truth downvoted to hell is an example:

    https://sh.itjust.works/post/50387688/22307005

    All in all it's not new though, it's just gotten more efficient. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism is one example of how it's always been this way. Isaac Asimov also had a pithy quote:

    There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

    When you have your basic needs met and aren't starving to death, you can afford to be irrational and embrace comforting lies. It's just the human condition.

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  • Sorry, I can't help you when you're being willfully obtuse. I'll try one last analogy, which I've been resisting since it can often confuse, but I really don't know how else to get through to you. Don't bother say "Oho! Here's where the analogy fails!". I already know that, thanks.

    Consider a computer program in which its "sex" is determined by the first bit it outputs, either 1 or 0. You run it and the program doesn't output anything. Oh no! What sex is it? You examine the program and find a "output_zero_bit" function that was never called. The program has no other way of writing a bit. There is no code that will output a 1, and it is impossible for the program to do so. That program would be "sexed" as a "0" because although it didn't output a 0, it has the code to output a zero and doesn't have the code to output a 1. If, at some point, we found programs that had no code to output anything at all, and had no concept of outputting either a zero or a one, we'd called those programs sexless. Those programs would be organized around producing nothing. But nothing like that has been found, and it's extremely unlikely that we ever would.

    Again, don't bother responding if you're going to say "humans aren't 1's and 0's!". Already aware, thanks. I don't think we're going to get anywhere if you're going to respond with an "Oho!", but if anyone else reading this is actually curious, that analogy may help clarify the situation.

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  • Posted another link elsewhere that explains the ambiguous terminology a bit:

    https://projectnettie.wordpress.com/

    Although rare, some individuals have disorders of sex development (also referred to as intersex conditions). Most of these disorders are male or female specific and do not cause ambiguous biological sex. Some individuals have reproductive anatomies with both male and female features; here, biological sex classification is a complex process with input from medical professionals and parents. Not one of these individuals represents an additional sex class.

    I think the answer you're looking for is that ambiguous is being used in the sense of "not immediately obvious, requires further investigation", not "impossible to know in principle"

    Either way, thanks for the conversation (and pedantry!)

  • Why do you personally believe in your religion?

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  • That treatment has been done. From the same page:

    https://talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB101.html

    Most mutations are neutral. Nachman and Crowell estimate around 3 deleterious mutations out of 175 per generation in humans (2000). Of those that have significant effect, most are harmful, but the fraction which are beneficial is higher than usually though. An experiment with E. coli found that about 1 in 150 newly arising mutations and 1 in 10 functional mutations are beneficial (Perfeito et al. 2007).

    The harmful mutations do not survive long, and the beneficial mutations survive much longer, so when you consider only surviving mutations, most are beneficial.

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  • Take your pick of people with relevant credentials, such as PhD Developmental Biology or PhD Developmental Genetics, that signed a statement that is exactly what I'm saying:

    https://projectnettie.wordpress.com/

    [..] Biological sex does not meet the defining criteria for a spectrum.

    Or someone else:

    https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/33/2/in-humans-sex-is-binary-and-immutable

    the objective truth is that sex in humans is strictly binary and immutable, for fundamental reasons that are common knowledge to all biologists taking the findings of their discipline seriously.

    Even in your best case, when you look at one of the few extremists pushing for a nonsensical redefinition of sex, they still directly admit that gamete size is binary, directly contradicting the strange claim above about a third gamete size:

    https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-science-of-biological-sex/

    When it comes to gametes, these are strictly binary – egg or sperm

    I mean c'mon, this is just silly. Crack open your textbook and read it.

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  • No.

    The medical professionals examine nearby structures to reveal what sex the body has.

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  • You've illustrated my point exactly. Why are those conditions called ovarian agenesis and anorchia? Think hard about that and what that implies about the fact that, even though the gonads are missing, we can tell what they would be if present. The names literally support my point. MRKH likewise leads to missing ovaries, not testes. Why is that?

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  • I'm sorry, what? You've fundamentally misread that meta analysis if you think it posits a third gamete type. Just what?

    Did you misread this bit? "Whereas some of these traits do typically have a bimodal distribution (some chromosomes, gametes)". That's not positing a third gamete type or saying that gametes aren't binary. A binary distribution is a subset of the set of bimodal distributions. They use the term bimodal in reference to chromosomes, and it's technically correct when applied to gametes, but does not imply that gametes aren't binary. The paper even acknowledges binary gametes elsewhere.

    If you're this wrong about a paper that you think supports your point, I don't think it's worth examining your take on other papers. Suffice it to say, for anyone else reading this, don't take the other commenter's word for it. The paper I linked is a good read.

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  • Well, can you find any such example in any literature of such a completely sexless body? It doesn't exist, but I'm interested in why you think it does