#120 What is a Woman? (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 120th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens. This week, we discuss the definition of woman. What are women? Adult human females. What are adults, and humans, and females? Are we suffering a plague of sophistry? (Yes.) Must we turn this around? (Yes.) Are humans ever hermaphroditic? (No.) What about banana slugs? (Yes. What about them?) And clown fish? (Also yes—...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast live stream coming to you from Dark Horse headquarters here in Portlandish.
Something.
In any case, it is live stream number, is it 120?
It's 120.
It's 120.
And you, I feel like we have not mentioned this for a while, you are Bret Weinstein.
Yes.
And I am Heather Hying.
I am Dr. Bret Weinstein, you are Dr. Heather Hying, and this may become relevant in this year's podcast.
As we are biologists, most of you know that.
Yes, doctors of philosophy, which many PhDs do not actually take seriously, nor do their departments.
In fact, I once had a historian, I believe it was, laugh at me when I suggested that actually the PhD that scientists, that academic scientists earn, is precisely because one ought to be schooled in the philosophy of science.
And she thought that was hilarious because so patently untrue.
And I have to say, largely it is untrue, but not in our case and not in any other scientist's case.
You had ought to be schooled in the philosophy lest you get schooled by the philosophy.
That's what happens if you don't understand the philosophy of science.
Is that right?
It is.
We've seen this again and again.
All sorts of people walking around with PhDs who skipped the philosophy of science and then turn out to say absurd, foolish things and have no idea that's what they're doing.
You know, we're going to talk about all sorts of woman stuff today, but afterwards we both have one or two other things we want to talk about, and I actually don't know what's on your list.
But on my list is sharing an op-ed that was just published in the BMJ, the British Medical Journal, and just a paragraph out of which, in which they invoke Karl Popper, one of our favorite, not infallible, but one of our favorite philosophers of science from the mid-20th century.
So we're going to go back circle on there.
Initially a skeptic of Darwinian adaptation.
Indeed.
Or at least a skeptic that it could be rigorously studied who then later came around.
Which many people do not realize because in his early writings that skepticism is front and center.
But you know who else was early on a skeptic of what would become known as Darwinian selection was Darwin.
Quite right.
Right.
Quite right.
So, you know, people, as evidence comes in and as they have other experiences in the world, change their minds.
Yeah, which we call flip-flopping.
Is it?
Only if we're fish or politicians.
Yeah.
Flopping.
Yeah.
All right, so announcements.
Announcements before we get into all that womanly stuff and philosophy of science and various other things that you want to be talking about.
We will, at the end of this intro section, be bringing you three ads, as has become our want.
We are as ever grateful to our ad sponsors, which this week are Blinkist, Sorry, MD Hearing Aid and Ned.
So we'll get to that in a couple of minutes.
We continue to get great feedback and the translation rights are selling.
I don't know if translation rights could sell like hotcakes because it's sort of a slower rate than that.
But to our book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, and if you are a If you're interested in how biologists come to understand things like sex and what it takes to be a woman, for instance, I recommend our book.
I do not have what it takes.
No, you don't.
No.
No, and you never will.
We don't have that.
Yes, we do, and I'm grateful for that.
I'm grateful that we know that and also that you don't have what it Takes.
Because, you know, if you did, our producer wouldn't exist.
Neither would his younger brother in the next room.
Over.
That's right.
We would not be his producers as we are.
He would not be our producer as he is.
Right.
This is getting confusing quickly, isn't it?
That's what happens when you start talking about what it is that makes a woman.
No.
We're streaming live on both YouTube and Odyssey, and the chat is live on Odyssey if you want to join it there.
And shortly after the stream is over, we will of course be doing our Q&A.
You can ask questions at www.darkhorsesubmissions.com.
for the Q&A, and actually both this main episode and the Q&A will go out on Spotify.
That started happening and people seemed to be liking that, so there were requests.
So Spotify has both the video and the audio.
Tomorrow on my Patreon is our monthly private Q&A, which we have a ton of fun with.
It's small enough that we actually do engage with the chat and do engage with people who were there at the time, and then we leave it up for patrons.
So you can join with the questions that have already been asked.
We will go through those, or I will go through those tonight, and Prioritize them, and then we'll go through them, but also veer off in various directions for our two-hour Q&A tomorrow at 11.
Questions have been asked, but they are maturing, and then we will get to them tomorrow.
They are, yes.
I've uncorked them, and they are breathing as we speak.
Yes.
Bye before we come!
I swear we're sober.
I mean, it's early.
Why wouldn't we be?
Of course we are.
We're not the sort of people who wouldn't be at this point.
Or have we ever been?
No.
Before we come back to you next week with episode 121, you will have one of your two Patreon conversations of the month, the Saturday one being the Coalition of the Reasonable.
Okay.
And it is full of very reasonable, awesome people.
Excellent, excellent.
And let's see, what else?
Various other things.
We have the same stuff that we've had for a while, but there's a diversity of it at store.darkhorsepodcast.org.
Get your t-shirts and your I posted this week, as I do every week, on naturalselections.substack.com, probably this upcoming week.
I haven't written it yet, but it's going to be something related to the vein of what it takes to be a woman, because that does seem to be one of the things that is grabbing a lot of people's attention.
Strangely confusing to people who, until yesterday, knew this because it was obvious.
Ever more so.
Yeah.
And before we get into the ads, we wanted to introduce you guys to a new venture called the Digital Public Square, which I have a little script for, but you wanted to specifically introduce it.
I wanted to say that a number of us have noticed the encroachment of tyranny in various places.
It has been widely discussed on social media.
Interesting stuff happened this week actually.
Tucker Carlson and the Babylon Bee were both suspended on Twitter.
Really?
Yeah, it's pretty... I heard about the Babylon Bee.
They took Tugger Carlson and the Babylon Bee at the same time.
They realized that one of those is a parody account and one of them's not, right?
No, parody.
Parody is wrong.
Sarcasm?
I don't even know what... One of them is a parody account.
Irony?
And the other one is somebody who is hardly going to be silenced by suspending him on Twitter.
So anyway, yeah, it's fascinating stuff.
And they were suspended for Effectively, I've forgotten the term that Twitter uses, but basically means spiritedness.
Or were they not being hateful conduct?
They weren't being collegial, maybe.
Right, which raises a certain question.
We've heard that in academic context.
Do we really want an entity like Twitter Being the arbiter of when content is hateful, right?
I certainly don't I think that sounds incredibly dangerous But Twitter apparently does think that's the appropriate role for it.
So anyway People have noticed that this is not a stable place for anybody with an opinion that is Contrary to the mainstream even when the mainstreams opinion is generated out of bullying and it's not even the mainstream opinion it's just masquerading as the mainstream opinion, so
We have teamed up with folks over the course of years trying to figure out what the way out and the recent spasm of tyranny surrounding all things COVID and other team blue phenomenon has lit a fire under several of our friends and they are hard at work on a project which Heather is about to describe.
Yeah, so we will link to simonsdapp.com where you can learn more in the show notes.
But in the meantime, we have this little bit of introduction.
Heterodox thinkers have cause for concern about censorship and manipulation on the social web.
A handful of centralized platforms have cornered what should have been the digital public square.
And now have outsized influence over our public conversation.
Exactly as Brett was just talking about.
Decentralized alternatives offer freedom from this influence, but full participation tends to require more digital elbow grease than most people have patience for.
There are some solutions, but it requires really paying active attention to your tech life, and by and large, people want to be able to forget that to background it.
The SamizDap project is bringing a plug-and-play experience to the decentralized web.
Just like Roku adapted internet streaming to TVs built around cable providers, SamizDap is adapting the decentralized web to phones and tablets built around central servers.
The Samisdap team knows that the decentralized web is larger than they can survey alone, which is why they've asked us to reach out to our audience for recommendations of projects that are aligned with the vision of creating the digital public square that we all deserve.
If you're already sold and bursting with suggestions, visit suggestions.samisdap.com.
That's s-a-m-i-z-d-a-p-p.com.
Suggestions.samisdap.com to tell them what you know.
If you're interested in the concept and want to learn more, visit samisdap.com.
And read the manifesto.
And if you have a better name for the project, email stopbeinganerdatsamizdap.com.
That's included last minute, I believe.
Anything more you want to say about it?
I mean, I think so.
It actually doesn't look like the Substack link, but they've also produced the manifesto, I guess, on the Substack.
I believe that link does take you there to the rationale.
samizdap.com.
I like it.
is a play on some is dot and app yeah so anyway a better name is in order but some is done very much the right I like it and so I was kind of pronouncing it Sam's dap to make it clear that it's the app not the not the I don't even know what to call Sam is that What kind of a thing is it?
Well, in any case, the dissident literature from behind the Iron Curtain is the concept, is the trope.
So in any case, very interested to see how this project develops, very excited for it, and it's not a moment too soon.
We are in danger.
Indeed.
All right.
So now, without further ado- Hold on.
Couple more announcements.
Oh, okay.
One, several of you wrote in with what I took to be a brilliant suggestion that I move my microphone so that when I talk to Heather, which is something I have enjoyed doing for decades, Yeah, mine is usually, but mine has been readjusted in my absence I guess.
Don't know, can't say what happened.
I don't think it was you, I think it was the cats.
Second thing, I don't want to forget to mention that Akira the Don, you all know who Akira the Don is, Akira the Don has taken my Dr. Seuss poem and has turned it into, I don't know what to call it, is it a song?
I guess it's a song.
It's a musical circus act.
He's turned it into a thing.
The poem was already sort of a circus act.
But you all will remember when we were, the powers that be were trying to convince us that there was something wrong with Dr. Seuss and therefore something wrong with those of us who still like the guy.
And anyway, I delivered a poem right here on Dark Horse and Akira the Don has done things with it.
So check that out.
We will put a link in the description and you can all Enjoy.
Probably Akira the Don needs a name for the genre that he seems to be inventing.
Let's see.
Was there another announcement?
Maybe that's it?
All right.
All right.
As I mentioned, we have three ad sponsors this week.
And we are grateful to all of them.
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So we're going to talk a little bit about woman-ness.
Because Ketanji Brown-Jackson, who is Biden's pick to be the next member of the Supreme Court of the United States, who is, you know, well qualified for the job.
She has an incredible, I don't know if they call it a CV in legal circles, but an incredible Yeah, I don't think it's a CV, I think it's a resume.
Yeah, okay.
But, somewhat famously, she was asked in the hearings this week if she could, after a little bit of back and forth, if she could define what a woman is, and she said no, in this context, she could not define what a woman is because, quote, I'm not a biologist.
Well, lucky for all of you, we are biologists.
And we can define what a woman is, but I should say it doesn't take a biologist to define what a woman is.
And before you interrupt, I want to just say that I was going to cede the floor because, of course, what it is to be a woman is to be sort of deferential and to always let the man take the lead and to, you know, probably go clean some stuff up or maybe make a cake or something.
What it is to be a woman?
Is that right?
Well, uh, not an expert exactly, though I'm gonna splain it, because that's what it is to be a man.
But you're a biologist, which is the expert that we've been called on to seek, and we are both biologists, and yet, clearly, your man-ness should trump my woman-ness in answering the question on account of... What now?
Well, alright, let me start my interruption and splaining.
Do explain.
I'm gonna explain.
I actually think her answer was perfectly justified.
It's not that I think she couldn't have given the obvious answer and that would have been equally justified, but at the current moment I certainly understand that
From the perspective of somebody for whom this is not their Their core interest in the world that being asked the question to define a term like this, you know, it's not it's not a Simple well, it is a simple matter But it's not necessarily obvious that it would be a simple matter because people have raised all sorts of complexities, which I will point out are irrelevant to the definition So I'm going to interrupt you now.
Alright.
We're going to go back and forth a lot because there's a lot to say here, but I went ahead, you know, first what rang in my ears was Kelly J. Keene, right?
The awesome British feminist, also a woman, who also goes by Posie Parker.
We've both been on her show.
Somehow not a biologist, and yet she seems to have a really good grasp of this.
Famously says, adult human female, adult human female, right?
It's just not that hard.
So I didn't know if this was her formulation, so I went ahead and looked it up a few places, okay?
I went on to dictionary.com, adult female person, okay?
Merriam-Webster online, also adult female person.
And then I pulled out, I went for the big guns and In fact, I had to wake our producer up this morning to pull out the OED, okay?
So we happen to have a hard copy of the OED.
We actually had two hard copies of the OED because both of our parents got these for us when we were children, and at some point we're like, we're in this for the long haul.
We do not, in fact, need two hard copies of the Oxford English Dictionary in our homes.
We only have the one at this point.
Here it is.
This is, of course—the box is falling apart—the second volume.
This is P through Z plus the supplement and bibliography.
And their definition of woman is—also, just take a look at the text here.
This is It Ain't Big.
Women in this book have been belittled along with everything else.
Yeah, and in fact rather than use the handy magnifying glass that they include, I have magnifying glasses built into my eyes by virtue of being both myopic and presbyopic at this point.
So I'm going to read their definition of woman, and it goes on for a while, but the very first definition is an adult female human being.
Okay.
So wait, I want to leap in and make a point.
Go for it.
I noticed, barely saw anything on the internet this week, but Neil Oliver tweeted something about basically banking hard copies of books and documentaries and movies, things that can't be retconned, right?
Because the... What does that stand for?
Retroactive continuity.
So part of the problem... How is retroactive... I don't get that as the part of speech there, but okay.
Well, let's just put it to you this way.
Those who wish to change a definition and pretend that it was always defined in some other way have lots of opportunity on the net.
They do not have an opportunity to go back and change some book that's been collecting dust for however many decades.
I was pleased to find that the two most common dictionaries online had basically the same definition.
That Kelly J. Keene uses and that the OED has been using.
Right.
For now.
For now.
And we have seen things like the definition of vaccine changed subtly in recent months.
And anti-vaxxer, things like this.
Right, all these things.
So anyway, hard copies of books are coming back because they can't be changed remotely.
Yeah, so I know you're going somewhere.
You were busy explaining stuff.
I'm going to explain just a little bit more about this seemingly very simple definition.
No, you're going to double explain.
Yes, I am.
Yeah.
Yes, I am.
So, adult, human, female, right?
Yeah.
There will be those then that will say, okay, then you need to define those three words.
Fair enough.
Can do.
Adult.
Of reproductive age or post-reproductive age.
In any organism, right?
We talk about juveniles, we talk about adults.
Post-attainment of reproductive age.
Yeah.
Is the border going to be somewhat fuzzy?
Are there differences even within the United States about what the age of consent is?
Is reproductive age at the point of first menses, or is it the point of peak fertility?
It's not peak fertility, but Or the average age of first reproduction in the species, as it turns out, for senescence purposes.
Yeah, and given that we're just marching that earlier because we're overfeeding and overharmonizing our girls in particular, then, you know, that's changing.
Harmonizing.
Yes, it's not a word, but I just tried it out.
It doesn't really work.
But adult, okay?
I think probably this is going to be it.
The average age of attainment of reproductive capacity in a species.
That does mean that there will be species where adults of males and females are going to be different, right?
There's going to be some years in some cases where usually it will be the females have attained reproductive capacity before the males.
Human, or person, because we see both of those in these very simple three-word definitions of what it takes to be a woman, of what a woman is.
And, you know, there's going to be a lot of ink spilled as to exactly what this is, but the simplest thing, I would say, is any living organism in the genus Homo is a human.
Okay?
You know, that's going to exclude a whole lot of humans, but you know, in terms of like, hmm, are we looking at a woman here?
Like, if it's a living person, if it's of a living organism in the genus Homo, that's a person you're looking at.
Those are pretty simple.
Female is going to be the one where people get their panties in a wad.
They're out of shape.
They're knickers in a twist is the way we say that without getting evicted from the internet.
No, but if we were across the pond we would get evicted from, you know, we'd have to just keep hopping across the pond depending on which of these we want to say.
Okay.
So, female.
Okay?
Adult human female is what a woman is.
And that does hinge on what you take to be the definition of female.
And luckily this is a place where biologists know a thing or two.
The answer is not complex.
There's lots of complexifying things around the edges, which I'm sure we'll get to talking about.
But the fact is that the female of a species is that individual that can or will or has in the past produce Eggs.
Eggs being gametes, the sex cells, that are larger than the other kind of gamete and tend to be sessile.
They're rich with cytoplasm and they don't tend to move around much.
By comparison, the male of the species produces gametes that are little and tend to be mobile or motile in the language of sperm.
So in plants we call them pollen, And in animals we call it sperm.
But if you have, or will, or have in the past, had the capacity to produce little tiny zippy gametes, then you're male, and therefore not a woman.
And if you have, or will, or have in the past, had the capacity to, or could have had the capacity to, absent some other problem, So, a number of things.
One, if I wanted to, I could throw all sorts of challenges at the definitions you just gave.
Please do, then.
then you are female.
And thus, if the other two things apply, if you are both an adult and a human, you're a woman.
So a number of things.
One, if I wanted to, I could throw all sorts of challenges at the definitions you just gave.
Please do then.
Well, this would be an exercise in sophistry.
And I think once again, we have to recognize that the central question here is one of sophistry, right?
The whole idea that we are somehow compelled to define woman, a term that everybody knows the definition of, right?
And a lot of people are now pretending they don't.
But the point is that we get dragged into this is, Is the result of sophistry now, I think it's very important that we actually respond in this case because Because of the claim that it's because I'm not a biologist that I can't answer the question Although again, I will defend that answer.
I think that was probably the right thing for her to say Because The problem is a lay person does not know what to do with the meaning of the ambiguities, right?
In other words, if I take, you know, let's say Sarah from the Bible, right?
Okay.
Is Sarah a woman?
Don't know the Bible.
I don't know if you've picked a weird example here.
Well, I've picked a person that we don't know existed, right?
She may be a Bible story, right?
And therefore she may be a depiction of an adult human female, but that doesn't mean that she is a woman or if the story... Does the story of Sarah in the Bible include her having born children?
No, no.
The person in the Bible—I'm not picking—I'm picking Sarah because she is a female biblical name, right, who shows up in the Bible, I believe, in adulthood.
Now, if the story depicts her entire life—she is born, which probably it does—then the question is, is Sarah a woman?
Well, then we could get into pedantic stuff about the fact that the story depicts her entire life.
Anyway, I'm not arguing any of this is important, because we all understand exactly how you deal with that ambiguity under normal circumstances if you didn't have enemies trying to cloud the issue.
So, my only point is, we are being dragged into a world of sophistry.
Somebody being dragged into a world of sophistry has the right to simply refuse to participate.
And that right will be abused.
Many people will refuse to answer questions that we pose about important things by claiming that we are engaged in sophistry.
They will be wrong.
We don't engage in sophistry.
But the point is, In a world of landmines, this answer that actually, okay, if we're going to get technical about what a woman is, then maybe we ought to bring in a biologist strikes me as a reasonable answer to the question as much as I would have preferred her to say adult human female, right?
I would prefer it, but I think, you know, For example, I saw Eric tweeted.
Eric, your brother.
Yes, tweeted a response to this, and his point was basically the one we are making.
This is not a difficult question, but he included in his definition an exclusion for intersex people, which is absolutely unnecessary, right?
I understand why you did it, right?
Because there can be ambiguities that blur boundaries.
You and I would point to gametes as the defining characteristic, and nobody as far as we know produces both gametes.
But even if they did, right?
That's not inconceivable.
Even if they did, the point is these Nuances do not change the fundamental definition and I would point as you and I taught repeatedly when we were professors the fact that You cannot you know, you've got a mountain you've got a valley at some point You've gone down the mountain far enough to be in the valley, but there's no way to define what moment that is Does that mean mountains and valleys are a social construct?
No, the river's in the valley.
It's not on the mountaintop, right?
Yeah, you know, this category, though, is a hell of a lot less fuzzy than that.
As I have said many, many times, many places, written many essays on this.
And as we have talked about, as we have written into the book and all, gender is the software to the hardware of sex.
Sex is binary, and yes, there are some mistakes in humans.
Mistakes.
Developmental mistakes or genetic mistakes.
But just like having zeros and ones in your machine code and then occasionally having missing data or a question mark doesn't render it non-binary, sex is still binary.
Gender being the software of sex means, you know, basically the behavioral expression of sex.
And do I have a lot of gender nonconformity?
In part because I grew up with a dad who did a lot of stuff that I thought was really cool and I wanted to do the kinds of things he was doing?
Yeah.
Does that in any way call into question whether or not I'm either a woman or a female?
No.
It makes me perhaps less feminine, which might be the gender description of sex stereotypical.
But you are hearing me say something that I am not saying.
My point is, those rare exceptions exist.
of whether or not I am a female or male, woman or male.
But you are hearing me say something that I am not saying.
My point is those rare exceptions exist.
Even if they were common, it wouldn't matter.
It is not necessary to include an exemption for them because the definition works as is.
And my point would be this is true for many things for which we have definitions and are not falling all over ourselves to make these excursions into sophistries.
So for example, you know the definition of electric versus electronic, right?
This is a well-understood distinction, right?
Electronic involves encoding information into the passage of electricity through a circuit, right?
But it is not hard to come up with examples that, you know, one could argue either way, right?
Well, you've picked an example that I have exactly zero history with.
I mean, I've built some electric circuits and all, but you ask me to define the distinction between electric and electronic, and you have only defined one of them even, so you only did half the job here.
I don't inherently know.
I have a sort of a gist of a feeling for what the difference is, but I really think that in part because that is a human-made system, Reasonable people can disagree more compellingly than, and not only is the system human-made, but the categorizations are human-made, and the fact is that female exists as a category completely outside of whether or not humans exist.
Because what the definition of woman is includes the word human in it, woman doesn't exist outside of human, but it exists outside and long before humans ever had any idea of what it was, and frankly, everyone knew it.
Everyone, people weren't wandering around going like, I don't know, male, female, I can't tell.
Like no one was doing that.
Right.
This is not confusing.
Right.
This is sophistry.
But electric, electronic, you know, I feel like this actually plays into their hands to be talking about systems that are specifically, at least in the case of electronic, anthropogenic.
But I think, again, you're hearing me say exactly the opposite thing that I'm saying.
Electric versus electronic is a fair distinction, even though there are cases in which I can poise something just on the cusp, so it could go either way.
Like a telegraph key, right?
A telegraph key just completes a circuit over some long distance, right?
And it's used to send simple messages, right?
Like, we are under attack.
So, the point is, by its design, it's an electrical circuit, but it's playing the role of an electronic circuit, and you could argue it either way.
But the point is, somebody who would pull out that example and say, well, you are falsely drawing a world of electric versus electronic stuff, right?
That person would be engaged in sophistry.
The point is, there are a tiny number of examples.
Yes, we could, you know, we could agree That a light bulb is electrical and not electronic.
And then we could agree that if I leave a particular light on that it means something, right?
So we can poise things on that cusp without actually challenging the fundamental nature of definitions.
And the point is if you apply the same standard the sophists are using, then we wouldn't be able to talk about anything.
True, absolutely true.
I just think that it is further confusing and further adding fuel to the insane fire that is somehow erupting around all of us now to use by comparison to an ancient truth.
There have been two sexes for something up to, something between, one and two billion years, with a B. Whether or not our lineage has been sexually reproducing that entire time is not totally clear.
We can't go back in time with that amount of clarity.
Probably so, but we can know for sure for at least 500 million years we have been reproducing sexually.
So to say, ah, but okay, here's some examples from a sphere that is, you know, electric exists outside of humans, but electronic doesn't.
You know, we have created electronic systems.
To be using two definitions, one of which does exist outside of humans, one of which doesn't, it just muddies the waters.
I don't feel that this is a useful comparison because it precisely contributes to the idea that, you know, some of these people will call themselves postmodernists, some of them will call, you know, they'll have lots of names for themselves, but, you know, the genderqueer, you know, lots of names, but the idea that you are what you say you are, that female is just a feeling, that humans can be sequential hermaphrodites, no, no, and no.
It's just entirely false.
Of course, which is why I'm saying The definition is adult human female, and saying something like, excluding intersex people, the definition is adult human female, is unnecessary, because adult human female covers it, no matter what.
Even if you had somebody who produced both kinds of gametes, that you and I would agree is a special case, right?
Yeah.
And I guess also, and I actually, a while back, I made a misstep on Twitter, and I've been using the word hermaphrodite Historically, both accurately when applied to other organisms, because there are many other organisms out there which are in plants, we would call it monoecious, having both sexes on one body, so they can potentially self-fertilize.
And, you know, famously, like, banana slugs are herb-maphroditic.
They have both sets of both male and female parts, and they can act as male or act as female in any particular sexual... In fact, in fact, they, well, you've described the case of self-fertilizing.
As far as I know, slugs don't self-fertilize, but they mutually, the male parts of one fertilize the female parts of the other, and vice versa.
I do not know of any examples, and I would like to hear if there are, of simultaneous hermaphrodites that are animals that self-fertilize.
Plants do it, but they do it as a last resort.
Self-fertilization will always be a last resort.
But I don't think that any of the simultaneous hermaphrodites in animals self-fertilize, but they can Be either female or male, they are both the same time, and then they can have basically the gender, what we call in non-humans the sex role, of female or male when they meet the thing that is behaving the opposite way.
So that's simultaneous hermaphrodites.
And sometimes, and of course we have sequential hermaphrodites, things like clownfish famously, right?
Like a lot of reef fish and some other organisms, some other animals, can be one sex, one sex only, and have all the behavioral manifestations of that sex, that is the gender or the sex role, and then they can actually transition, actually turn into the other thing.
And there are lots of amazing behavioral, sexually selected reasons for them to do that based on the mating system and the ecology of where they are.
But humans who are intersex have been called in the literature hermaphrodites somehow, and they're not.
And this is what I got.
I used the term hermaphrodite uncarefully, and I got called to account for it.
And whoever it was who called me to account, this is a while back, was right.
Because hermaphrodite is a description of a functional system.
A hermaphrodite is either, again, simultaneously or sequentially having both sexes in a single individual, either at the same time, simultaneously, or over the course of a lifetime, sequentially.
Whereas there are no human hermaphrodites.
When intersex happens, it's not functional.
Yep.
Even if so, even if there were, there's still only two sexes.
Because hermaphrodite is a both situation.
It's not a third situation.
It's a there's a one, there's a two, and oh there's a both one and two.
But again, even if we had examples of people who created both gametes and they were both viable, it wouldn't change this definition.
It's robust to that.
And so my real point is that language is not built to withstand an attack by sophists.
If we are forced to engage sophists on their territory, we will not be able to govern ourselves, we will not be able to figure out what we think is even taking place.
And we're now seeing this, right?
Because the point is, there are certain rules that obligate you, right?
Social rules, etiquette rules that obligate you to engage things, right?
And the truth must be somewhere in the middle.
But the point is it's not, it doesn't work.
And science also.
So, you know, at the point that Kenji, Kitanji Brown-Jackson says that she's not a biologist.
Kitanji.
Kitanji Brown-Jackson says she's not a biologist.
She is actually deferring to something that itself can't agree, and it's not because it's ambiguous.
It's because the social pressure not to accept a simple definition for woman.
Wait, what do you mean?
She's referring to something?
She's deferring to biologists, saying this is a question for biologists.
We know why she did that.
She knows it's a minefield, right?
Well, but I mean, so I have more to say about what is actually going on with regard to sex and organisms, but I actually I get that when you have been called up by the president to potentially be the next sitting justice on SCOTUS on the Supreme Court, you are gonna hedge and not answer, and that's what they do, right?
Like, that is what happens.
But in this case, the people who are presumably gunning for her...
The people who are arguing that sex is a fiction and in your head and you can just transition whenever you want to, those are the people on her team, on what we used to call our team.
Those aren't the people who are going to overturn the nomination.
No, no, no, no.
I don't think that was the purpose of this question.
I think the purpose of this question- But she doesn't need- As I understand it, one of the amazing truths of the Supreme Court of the United States is that once you are a sitting justice, your team has no sway.
Right.
Your team has no sway, and her team appointed her because your team would appoint you, and her team is the one.
I don't know, former team, I don't even know what.
Team Blue are exactly the people who are at least pretending to be confused on this front.
There's a tiny number of people who are legitimately confused, and I'm sorry for them, and I wish we could unconfuse you, but most of y'all are just pretending to be confused.
And she, with her past, with all of her wisdom and education, and I trust that she has actually been educated, and she actually knows a lot about the world.
He knows damn well what a woman is.
Of course, we all do.
And she is at no risk of being cancelled by Team Blue.
That's not the point.
The point, this is the same flaw that exists in our system of elections for members of the executive and legislative branch, right?
Where you get an opportunity, as somebody is trying to get into the office, to get concessions from them.
Right?
That you then hope will bind them once they reach the office.
It doesn't work at all.
Right.
Okay?
It's bullshit.
But, the point is, we still labor under... An independent judicial branch.
Independent.
Of course that's what it's supposed to be.
Yeah.
But the reason that we are having this conversation is that she was asked a question designed to basically get her to paint herself into one corner or another.
Right?
I don't think.
I guess I would be very pleased to see people paint themselves into the corner of reality when it's so fricking unambiguous.
Of course you would.
And the other side would be very glad to watch anybody who paints themselves into the obvious corner be emulated.
But she won't be.
I'm not saying that.
I'm saying this is the opportunity to create a system of penalties and rewards designed to constrain somebody.
This is the worst possible place to try to constrain somebody because the court is designed not to allow it, but it doesn't mean that that's not the game that's being played.
Or that she is going to be used as an example for others who are not in the same context.
And so... That may be it because I honestly I'm just not buying I'm not buying the argument otherwise, because it feels like usually there's going to be a gotcha moment, a series of gotcha moments, and it's going to be like, if you say the thing we know you're thinking, then we're not going to confirm.
Right.
And it's the opposite, it's the opposite situation here.
Right.
But my point is... Like she'd be, she'd be more, I mean she, I think she will be confirmed, but she'd be more guaranteed to confirm if she could, if she'd just state the obvious.
I don't know what would happen if she stated the obvious.
And, like, we're arguing about the most basic thing that toddlers recognize.
Right, but this is my point.
It's the sophistry, right?
And the right answer to sophistry is, you know, come on, Senator, you know what a woman is.
We all do, right?
That's the right answer to the question.
No, but then the Senator is going to say, well, then define it for me.
No, no, and then the point is, um, There is no legitimate reason to ask for such a definition.
Of course I'm capable of defining it, as are you, as is anyone in this room.
But the entire idea that anything hinges on the ability to define obvious things, right, is evidence that something with this process has gone seriously awry.
And so my point is, look, you and I are now dragged into a conversation where we as biologists are weighing in on what a woman is, right?
That's dumb.
Now, I don't think we have a choice about it, right?
Because especially in light of the fact that she invoked biologists, and I, again, I think this is legitimate.
She, too, will have seen biologists on Twitter or YouTube or wherever claiming that this is ambiguous and sex isn't the simple thing we once thought it was and all of the stuff that we have seen, right?
That's because, like language, Science is not robust to sophistry.
It's not robust to pressure campaigns designed to unmake reality for political reasons, which is why we are having this fight in the first place.
And so the simple answer is, yeah, this is really as simple as you thought it was.
Yes, there are interesting things that happen in other creatures.
Yes, there are interesting errors that happen in human development.
None of it changes the basics here at all.
Anybody who says that it does change the basics is motivated by something else, which may well be fear.
It may be fear of what happens if they say the obvious, and so they may be doing exactly the wrong thing, and they may be, you know, reneging on their agreement with the rest of us, and pretending that something is complicated that isn't.
But the trick is, how do we get back to a place where We aren't compelled to engage sophists, and we do not empower people to claim anything they don't want to answer is sophistry.
In other words, what we need is a good faith environment in which only sophistry is dismissed on this basis, but sophistry is reliably dismissed so that we don't get dragged into taking apart civilization because somebody's got a bunch of gotcha questions that we're going to struggle to answer simply.
You have an answer?
How do we get back to that place?
Well, I think we need to recognize that it's happening.
And then I want to talk about tortoises.
Well, before you get to tortoises, I want to point out a point.
But no, answer my question first.
You said, how do we get back?
You asked the question, how do we get back to a place where I guess we are not obliated To respond to Sophists because they are at risk of burning down civilization.
Obviously it's a big question, but do you have the beginning of an answer?
Yeah, I got the beginning of an answer.
The beginning of an answer is this is a matter of a social contract where those of us who are dependent on civilization have to recognize that above all else this must hold.
That if we empower Sophists... What must hold?
That sophistry does not have to be answered in order to proceed, right?
Okay, but that's gameable.
Ah, that's sophistry, I don't have to address that.
No, my point is, what you need is, let's say, Democrats and Republicans to agree that the Republic will fail if sophists are allowed to steer the conversation, and in fact every conversation which they are now doing, right?
And so the basic point is, we may not be able to agree on anything else, but we should agree on this principle.
Right, that sophistry does not require an answer and that the abuse of the claim that something is sophistry is a problem and there's got to be some no-man's land.
That was in the details in terms of operationalization though.
No, it's not because the point is we all know what a woman is and anybody who can't say that they do at this moment in history has failed on the agreement and anybody who says we all know what a woman is there may be some Okay, but we don't, we can't all provide definitions of electronic versus electric.
No, that's a case where specialists face this issue.
So there's a lot of space in between there, where some people will say you're just engaging in sophistry, and other people saying like, oh I don't really legitimately just am not paying attention to that thing.
Right, so then we need an agreement on that, which is to say that sophistry does not require an answer, and there's some gray area where we can't tell quite whether something is sophistry, and those things probably do require an answer.
We need to err in the direction of answering, but there's a point at which you've gone far enough That you have indicted yourself, and I want to give an example of this, okay?
A Twitter thread showed up.
A friend of ours pointed, I think you probably saw it, but pointed us to it in a shared chat.
Zach, do you want to put up the, what is her name?
It's Sheree Becker.
Sheree Becker.
Somebody I've never heard of before.
She is apparently a PhD.
I think she's a professor in Bath, England.
Can you embiggen it?
And she generated a thread this week that I want to be careful with it, okay?
Because... Oh, I have seen this.
But some people could not see it because they are listening.
They are listening.
All right, I will describe it.
She has a 20 tweet thread in which she lays out the argument that women's sports were not generated to protect women from male competition.
But exactly the opposite.
That in fact, men did not want competition from women and women's sports were invented to protect men.
That women had started encroaching on men's sports and they of course were just kicking ass and taking names because that's what you do when you're a superhero.
And then the men were like, hmm, patriarchy, let's make women's sports so the women can't continue to beat us.
Right.
That's the argument.
That's the argument.
But this is a 20 tweet thread.
Impressive.
Well, I want to be careful and not do that thing because it is quite clear that, sorry, it's Becker, yeah, that Cherie Becker is no dummy.
And this thread is actually really impressive.
Right?
If you set somebody the job, here is a wrong argument.
I want you to lay out the best case you can for this wrong argument.
You would come up with something like she's come up with here, right?
It's not without evidence.
She's got examples of places that where she may even be right, right?
Where, you know, things like skeet shooting, right?
The advantages that males have athletically may not have any implication in skeet shooting, or they may.
I don't really know.
Look, and I've written about it.
In fact, I was interviewed by the BBC a couple years ago about the advantages that women may have in extreme long-distance running, like 50-mile and longer races.
And, you know, it may not be an advantage.
It may be an extremely small sample size with one or two extraordinary female athletes.
But there also could be reasons that extraordinary endurance, extraordinary physical endurance, like women have to endure in childbirth, could allow for greater capacity in some athletics.
Right.
And there's even a way in which we can take the logic that underlies how men and women became different, and we should probably go into that logic.
And it might select for exactly that, right?
Absolutely.
You should expect that there will be places where physically, if not by burst speed or strength, that women will do better at some tasks, of course.
Right.
So, in any case, my point is, the temptation when looking at a thread like this is, Come on.
And that's right, in one way.
But, oh, come on, you're a dummy, and that's dumb isn't right.
The argument is actually really well architected, and that's the problem with sophistry.
So that's your point here, is that that is, whether or not Dr. Becker knows that that's what she's doing, she is engaging in extraordinarily high-level sophistry.
Extraordinarily high-level.
And it's really important that you have a right not to respond to this.
Now, on Twitter, you can just not respond.
But the point is, her argument is one that either, I mean the fact is I looked at this thing and I was expecting it to be nonsense, right?
And I can tell where the bodies are buried in her argument.
She's got three examples of places where women actually were threatening to men in some way.
One of them being skeet shooting.
I've forgotten another one which was like skeet shooting where physical strength was irrelevant.
And then one of them had to do with a threat in football, where women obviously are not capable of competing with men in football, but they were competing for attention.
I think men were at war and women started playing football.
And so, you know, who knows what the truth of this example is, but it's obviously not It's not a case where female athletic prowess was a threat to men.
It's obviously just sort of loosely in the same neighborhood, right?
And then she uses the endurance... And certainly, I mean, like, I did not read through, I don't know the examples you're talking about, except by virtue of you saying them just now.
But, you know, if...
Just, I mean, this sounds like a caricature, but men are at war, so women start their own football league, and they start playing football.
That's a little questionable.
I feel like women would start a different sports league, but okay, fine.
Yeah, the men come back, they're like, okay, ladies, you can have yours, and we're gonna have ours.
Like, of course they would.
Would that sound paternalistic to many people?
Sure, but is it actually better for everyone?
Uh-huh.
Yeah, and even if it's not, the point is none of these are a demonstration for the thing she appears to be advancing as an argument, which is that actually the difference in physical prowess isn't all that it's cracked up to be, and the point is, you know, men were threatened and so they created women's sports to keep them out of their leagues, which is not true, right?
But the overarching point is, look.
Sophists are not inherently dumb.
In fact, years ago, I was prone to look up who the Sophists were, because this is obviously... You mean the actual, like the Greek Sophists?
Yeah, the Greek Sophists, yeah.
And the Sophists were tutors, right?
And in some sense, I don't know the true story, but it's sort of, you know, look, In in debate right and like high school and college debate which you did which I did the whole point is We are going to hand you a position.
It's like being a lawyer, right?
Somebody walks through your door and whether their side of the argument is the one that you would naturally fall to fall to, you're going to advocate it.
So the point is, you don't know, going into a round, you flip a coin to see who's affirmative and who's negative.
And the point is, you deploy all your arguments.
And you may know where the bodies are buried.
You know how you'd argue.
It's about argument and evidence, not about underlying reality.
Right.
So they may have been very good tutors.
I don't know.
Right.
But the point is, A, they were hired guns.
They were hired to teach.
And the sophistry was about nonsense arguments that were high quality.
Right.
And so anyway, civilization cannot be allowed to fall because of sophistry.
And I think the deepest point which you and I have about male and female, which Is really hard without the benefit of you know A classroom and people returning week after week to make is that this has nothing to do with people Right, right.
Well, this is I mean as I mentioned, however, you know 20 minutes ago or so like Some of the people who call themselves postmodernists make this error, and I don't actually know to what degree it's just an obvious bastardization of some of the core interesting principles in postmodernism, of which there are a few.
But you see these arguments that basically, until there was a word for a thing, the thing did not exist.
I've seen that construction a few places, by people who are being serious.
If that isn't a religious position, I don't know what is.
You really think it took human naming of the thing to make the thing exist?
Well then, that's actually the point at which I'm not sure how to proceed in talking to you, because you do not appear to believe in an underlying objective reality.
Do we know what that underlying objective reality is?
In the case of male and female, yes, we do.
But in the case of overall, no.
Is science the best method we have for getting an ever better approximation of the truth of the reality?
Yes, it is.
Do we have missteps?
Yes, we do.
Do we certainly believe some things now which will turn out to not be true?
Yes, we do.
But is there an objective reality which we can aspire to understand, yes or no?
This is maybe the only question that you could ask me, or that I could ask a person if they say no.
Like, I think I'm out then.
I just don't know what to do with you.
If you really don't think there's an objective reality, what is the basis of any of the conversation?
Right, there's nothing to be done.
And the problem is it's an argument that can be deployed.
As sophistry too.
Of course, yes.
And it is.
And it is.
But let's briefly go through the deep question, right, of what it means, what male and female actually means at the level before you get to human beings to interpret it, right?
Because I really think that this is the thing that will cause people's, the light bulb to go on over people's heads.
Yeah.
So, oh, go ahead.
Um, well maybe that can, let me just do a little, little bit, um, of related stuff first.
Sure.
Before, because I think what you're talking about is the, the ultimate, the most interesting layer, but just, um.
You know, what makes you female is having these large, sessile gametes, and what makes you male is having these small, zippy gametes.
But very often, when humans, especially modern humans, talk about it, they talk about being XX or XY, right?
They talk about the chromosomes.
And in humans, as the vast majority of mammals, there being a few very weird exceptions at the base of the mammal tree, the monotremes, the echidnas, and the duck-billed platypus, which have like, god, what is it, like 10 or 12 pairs of sex chromosomes?
It's crazy.
I thought it was 5, but anyway, it's a lot.
Maybe it's 5 and they got 10 in pairs.
I don't actually remember.
And it's variable between the 3 or 5 species depending on how many echidnas you think there are.
Anyway.
The marsupials and the placental mammals, the two other major groups of mammals, which are basically every mammal that you can think of that's not an echidna or a duckbill platypus, not basically, that is everything, have what's called genetic sex determination, which means that we have, all of us, a pair of chromosomes
And if a pair of sex chromosomes, as opposed to all the other autosomes that we have, and it's variable between species, like, you know, humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, and that 23rd one is the sex chromosomes chimps, and I think bonobos, who are together our closest living relatives, have Is it 24?
And their diploid number is 48?
Or is it 22?
I think it's different than ours.
It's definitely one off.
But I don't remember which way it is, yeah.
I think it's one more.
I think so too, but I don't totally remember.
And there's going to be, I'm sure there's other mammals out there whose haploid number, how many pairs of chromosomes do you have is 23, like ours.
And they aren't going to be as closely related to us as the chimps and bonobos.
And so in us, in chimps, in giraffes, in kangaroos, in wombats, in sperm whales, even female sperm whales, there is a pair of sex chromosomes.
And if you have two X's, Then you're female.
And if you have an X and a Y, then you're male.
But it's not that that is what underlyingly makes you female, it's that's what determines your sex.
Okay?
So in mammals, we have XX determines that you will become female, absent other weird developmental things that might happen.
And if you're XY, the position at that last set of chromosomes determines what sex you are.
There are other species, there are other clades that have genetic sex determination, birds famously, but in birds it's the opposite.
And so we use different letters, we use W's and Z's, but whereas in mammals females are the homogamenic sex, meaning we have two X's as opposed to the heterogamenic sex for males, an X and a Y, In birds, females are heterochromatic, and they have a Y and a Z. And males are homochromatic, and they don't... I never remember if it's two W's or two Z's, whatever.
And that actually has some interesting implications for how their ecology plays out.
But they still have genetic sex determination.
Whereas, and we're just sticking to vertebrates here, there's lots of species of vertebrates that don't have genetic sex determination at all, that don't appear to have anything in their chromosomes that says, aha, got it, I'm going to set you down the path to being male or female.
They have some form of environmental sex determination.
So in many oviparous species, for instance, that is egg-laying species as opposed to viviparous species like us who give live birth, You have the temperature of the egg at a critical moment in development that determines what sex you will be, which means at the point that that egg is laid, it is still open.
You still could become male or female, but any individual that kind of doesn't become one or the other isn't viable, isn't evolutionary dead end.
And so, just a few examples.
In tortoises, males develop from eggs that were in that critical period at low temperatures and females at higher temperatures.
In many lizards and alligators, it's the opposite.
Females develop at the lower temperatures and males at the higher temperatures.
And in crocodiles and snapping turtles, both cool and warm temperatures during that critical period during egg development turn into females, whereas it's the intermediate temperatures that produce males.
So there's all sorts of ways to determine whether or not you, some developing embryo, are going to become male or female.
And in species with environmental sex determination, things like if you live in a place that is warming, you might suddenly have a population crash because now you've got all females or all males.
This is going to be a problem.
Whereas for organisms like mammals and birds with genetic sex determination, and several other species as well, The temperature at which we are incubated doesn't seem to matter.
Of course, with mammals, we're endotherms, and we have viviparity, and so we've got this constant internal gestational environment.
But for birds who do lay eggs, yes, mama and, depending on species, papa birds sit on the eggs and keep them warm, but that keeping them warm doesn't change what sex they are, because that's already on board in their genetics.
So all of these things are true, And none of it changes the underlying thing, which is that whether or not you got there because you developed cool, you developed hot, you had an XX, you had a ZW.
If, as an adult, you are capable of producing large, sessile gametes, you are female.
And if, as an adult, you are capable of producing small, zippy gametes, you are male.
And that cannot be changed.
All right.
Now I want to add the thing that I think is most surprising on top of all of that really shocking stuff that you just laid out, okay?
Imagine that you walk into a forest, right?
Imagine that you exist 5,000 years ago before we understood any of this, right?
Or imagine you landed on this planet from somewhere else, okay?
Sounds like fun.
And you walk into a forest and you find animals of some type, what we would call a species.
And some of these animals are behaving in a way that is finicky about who to have sex with.
And some other animals are enthusiastic to have sex with whichever ones will have them, right?
And you said, OK, I know nothing about these creatures or how they work, but I'll bet you those ones that are finicky have big gametes.
And I bet you that the ones that are hot to trot, irrespective of the qualities of the other, have small, motile gametes.
You'll almost always be right, right?
And the reason for this is that, let's walk back a little bit.
So, presumably the initial condition is when gametes, so you have Asexual creatures that don't make gametes at all.
There's an advantage to fusing two half genomes together, right?
We can debate about what that is and it's actually not entirely certain.
It's a little harder to come up with a robust argument for why the genetic variation that comes from sexual reproduction is a good thing.
We'll go into that some other day.
But for the moment, let's just say that there's a reason that natural selection invents sexual reproduction repeatedly.
It's not for all creatures, but for many creatures it appears to be essential.
So, selection invents this thing.
Presumably, when it first does, you get two gametes that are the same size, right?
We would call that isogamous gametes.
Now isogamous gametes is a stable equilibrium.
It's an unstable equilibrium, which means that you can't tell which way it's going to go, but it can't stay where it is.
Because as soon as one type of creature starts cheaping out on how much it invests in these gametes, the other one can't cheap out in response.
It actually has to over invest.
And so what you see The additional problem, well two additional problems, are the reason for one of the sets of gametes to be large is because you can't make a baby just with DNA, right?
You need the cytoplasmic structure, the cellular machinery, and someone's got to bring that.
And if you both bring it, if both male and female bring it, they're going to argue, actually, right?
They're going to argue about whose cellular machinery to use.
Maybe.
And in part because there is mitochondrial DNA, right?
There's actual genetic material in some of the cytoplasm.
And then also if you're both kind of middling size and kind of both have some cytoplasm, then when you get together you might argue about whose mitochondria to use.
You're also both kind of slow and lumpy and you're going to have a harder time finding one another.
There's an unstable equilibrium, and so an unstable equilibrium is kind of a hard concept to grasp because, let's think about it this way.
If you did a computer model of what happens if you put a marble, a perfect marble, on Exactly in the center, balanced on the head of a perfect pin, right?
The computer will tell you that the marble doesn't do anything.
It doesn't fall off.
Why?
Because it doesn't know which way to fall off.
It's equally likely to fall off in all ways, which holds it right there.
Now, in our experience, this never happens, because there are no perfect marbles, there are no perfect pins, and there is no perfectly stable environment where you won't have the tiniest bit of wind or the tiniest shaking of the earth.
That will cause it to be slightly more this way than that way.
And once it's slightly more this way than that way, then it goes that direction.
So the point is, the equilibrium is a technical fact.
Can I have Zach show this while you're talking?
Sure.
So this is a figure from Dalian Wilson's book from the 1980s called The Evolution of Sex and Behavior, I believe.
And this is My computer is playing funny games.
And it's going to be small for you guys, but it describes both the unstable and the stable equilibrium.
The unstable equilibrium of isogamy, in which gametes are the same size and both have arguments about mitochondrial DNA and have a hard time finding one another.
And the anisogamy, the unequal sized and structured gametes that results, that is a stable equilibrium.
All right, so equal size gametes is the initial starting condition.
It immediately breaks apart in favor of a small motile and a large sessile gamete.
But the crazy part is once that happens, and it doesn't matter how many times this process happens where selection favors sexual reproduction, produces equal sized gametes, and then the unstable equilibrium breaks apart and creates one subtype that makes large gametes and one subtype that makes small gametes.
Every time that happens, maleness and femaleness follow, right?
That is to say, the characteristics that cause the, you know, the behaviors of these creatures follow, because once you're stuck with one of these kind of gametes, certain things make sense from the point of view of selection, and other things don't make sense.
And so... Well, I guess I'd like for you to be I think I want you to correct your language there a little bit.
The state of having a small zippy gamete is the state of being male.
The state of having a large sessile gamete is the state of being female.
The software that follows, the behavior for animals, the behavioral manifestation, the choosiness, the displayiness, you know, and all of these things that follow, Let's put it this way.
I agree with your correction, but it's not even software, right?
Because we see it in plants where there is no software, right?
The femaleness and the maleness exist, and they do not change based on how it is that those organisms will later behave.
Let's put it this way.
I agree with your correction, but it's not even software, right?
Because we see it in plants where there is no software, right?
It's the behavior.
And- No, this is- you're the one who wants to call it software.
I'm always the one calling it behavior, and you say software is the more inclusive term that includes plants.
Because I wouldn't say that plants have a gender.
So where we usually get into this is what's the definition of gender, and I say it's the software of sex, right?
In a plant, and you know, the point I love to make is that even in a plant that is a hermaphrodite, that has both male and female, that produces both.
Actually, I don't think there are sequential hermaphrodites in plants, are there?
Kind of.
At least kind of, because there are plants that avoid self-fertilization by the gametes maturing.
Oh, but on a sort of short timescale.
It's very different than the way animals do it, but on a very short timescale, like per flower.
Um, but anyway, the point is even in a flower that has both male and female parts, right?
The female parts are reluctant about sex and they put the male parts through a test, right?
a long Corolla tube that the pollen grains have to grow down in order to reach the eggs.
Whereas the pollen grains are totally hot to trot and they are not discriminating, right?
So in a plant that is wind dispersed, it'll produce lots of pollen.
It lands anywhere, tries to fertilize whatever it lands on.
The male plant parts will hire insects to carry their, you know, to carry the pollen grains out to female plants.
But it's always male insects because they're also the ones who are easily fooled because they're so eager for sex.
Well, actually it's not because it's bees.
Yeah, you're talking about the orchid cases.
Like hawkmoths and such.
Yeah, but anyway, the point is the enthusiasm for sex with strangers
Tracks the gamete size even though presumably this has nothing to do with shared Ancestry between animals and plants because I don't even think the common ancestor of these two things had sexual reproduction No, no, they they probably they did so sex evolves Boy, I'm gonna have to I'd have to go back and it's gonna be some yeast like colonial Something or other right?
Well, I mean, 6 evolves a few times, but in the lineage that when I say definitely back 500 million years, we can track that and maybe up to 2 billion years.
There's a lot that happens in that 1 to 2 billion year space, and I'm not sure how precise we can be about exactly when that was.
In the branching between plants and animals that was.
I'm actually not sure.
Okay.
Yeah, but the overarching point on which I know we agree is that it is the constraints of the mode of reproduction that cause the behavior to become what it is which then in creatures like us becomes a software program that is gender and But the point is the behavior precedes there being any software involved at all.
It's just a set of strategies that makes sense if you are the small gamete producing type versus a set of strategies that makes sense if you are the large gamete producing type, which means that male and female Have a meaning in the universe beyond something beyond the gametes.
It's the strategy that follows from the gametes, right?
This couldn't have less to do with people, right?
And people are in a sense interesting because the software Is partially sexual reversed in us right a both males and females are choosy, right that exists in other creatures But we are asymmetrically choosy we choose for different things, which is pretty interesting And the ornaments display.
Yeah.
Yeah, the ornamented sex is female, right?
typically if you find a displaying bird or spider or something like this, that's the male right and so It's not that these things don't get changed around, but the basic logic of choosiness isn't inverted.
And even as the software changes and the rules change, and even if they didn't, we're just talking about averages and there's plenty of masculine acting women and feminine acting men, it does not change the underlying sex that they are.
It does not.
It does not.
Now, the last point I would make is that...
And then I want to talk about oikos a little bit, just a little bit more on this topic.
All right.
The last point that I wanted to make is that the basic underlying logic of basically males with their small gametes are hot to trot because they're investing less in offspring gets changed, especially in something, it gets changed in any creature where there is teaming up on raising offspring because the point is the logic is unmade.
To the extent that males are cheating on investment by producing small gametes that contain very little, as soon as males are forced to invest, then they view the world in a way that is more symmetrical to the way females naturally view it.
So you would get more symmetry in those species, but you would also have species with sexual reversal.
Where you have something about the ecological conditions has created a system in which males are investing more than females.
So something like polyandrous birds like jacanas or sea heese.
Which is our family term for seahorses, where males are, they do produce the small argamites, hence they're being males, but they engage in the pregnancy.
They, and they really, I mean I actually wrote a piece on my substack about this, and I had not, I had not known to what degree we understood the level of analogy to mammalian pregnancy that male seahorses have.
I mean the The cardiovascular, and I believe neurological, but certainly cardiovascular integration of the fetus with the father's body is extraordinary in seahorses.
Really?
Yeah.
They are actually pregnant, and obviously, you know, the egg didn't come from them, so they brought this in But then it embeds in a way that is extraordinarily like pregnancy.
All right, so the way... You'll understand the point if this makes sense to you.
But they're still males.
There are things about the interaction between the baby seahorses and their father, who is male because of the gametes that he produces, that are beyond what you will understand, that are beyond what we understand, that are likely beyond what we will ever scientifically understand about the system.
However, the underlying logic of the system is relatively easy to understand, which is, if you're gonna invest, you're gonna be choosing, right?
Yes.
That's the driving force and the point is, it takes no complexity to see it, right?
Yeah, and just think that through, just think like, okay, if I'm going to invest, am I going to take everything that comes at me?
In any context at all.
Like, no, if you're going to invest, you're going to be choosy.
Right.
And so to the extent that you have sophists arguing that, you know, it's the patriarchy that caused women to be reluctant about casual sex, just think it through for yourself.
No frickin' way.
Right?
The fact is, if having sex is going to stick you with an offspring that you're going to carry with you for nine months, give birth to, and then have to take care of very intensively for, you know, six, seven, eight years, and then, you know, to some extent until it's 15, 16, 17 years of age, right?
You don't want to produce such a thing willy-nilly, and you don't want to produce it without an agreement To co-parent if such an agreement is a possibility.
So, hence, females will be coy about sex, right?
That has nothing to do with the patriarchy, right?
In fact, the patriarchy protects women because, you know, both men and women have an interest in the women in their group being protected from men who would inseminate them and run off.
There's plenty of places where the patriarchy, which is not a word I tend to use, does not protect women at all or very well.
And one of those places is—another boy I heard from—is with what's happening now with regard to our apparent inability to understand what women are, which is thus allowing men
To claim that they're women and to beat women in sports, which is a much, you know, it's both important and not nearly as important as the fact that once you have that, then you start letting men into women's prisons and, you know, and everywhere else, like all the dominoes fall.
So wait, let's be clear about that.
The problem here, first of all, I'm not a believer in the patriarchy.
I believe that there is a patriarchal force, but the patriarchy is a made-up fiction that cannot exist because it doesn't make sense for male to gang up on female given that the majority, in fact the huge majority of everybody's genome, doesn't know in the next round whether it's going to be male or female.
But I heard!
I heard that the reason, get into it straight away.
Yeah, I know.
I know.
There's this crazy, you know this, but for our audience, there's this insane and apparently taken seriously in some circles, theory over in, I don't even know what, fill in the blank studies, that argues that the reason that humans are sexually dimorphic, sexually sized dimorphic, which is to say men are on average bigger than women.
We all know this.
It's because historically men were constantly stealing food from women, and thus women were starving, which caused them to be smaller, and the smaller women did a better job of surviving because they didn't need as much, but that's only because the men were always stealing food from them.
Right.
I don't say this very often, but I can't even.
Right.
But the point is, this is like somebody starts with the human case and they've never thought about the other cases in nature.
Because there's dimorphism of both directions, right?
You know, in eagles, the female is bigger.
You know, raptors tend to have female, and many herps actually, many amphibians and reptiles.
Females are larger in part because they tend to be oviparous and they're carrying the eggs on their body and they need a bigger structure in general to do that.
And Dick Alexander, my advisor, made a compelling case that animals that compete in three dimensions rather than two, males are selected for agility rather than force.
That's cool.
But let's take the basic underlying logic of dimorphism.
In monogamous species, what you tend to get are individuals of the same size, right?
That's the basic case.
As males have the potential to have more mates, there is a priority put on their being able to displace each other.
Which then causes them to be distorted, to be pushed off the ecologically optimum size for whatever the creature in question is towards larger size.
They accept a cost in order to be able to displace each other for sex, which frankly also has this consequence of making them fragile, right?
So males are bigger in many species, they are stronger, and they are shorter-lived.
And only part of that is because they're asking people to hold their beer and then doing stupid shit that gets them killed.
But the, but the hold my beer while I do this stupid shit that might get me killed is also sexually selected.
Right.
Exactly.
It is sexually selected.
And so you, I thought you were, I would, I would have included a fourth word in there.
You said bigger, stronger, uh, shorter lived.
Bigger, stronger, in general, in non-sexual reverse species, um, the more, this will be more true, the more polygynous the species.
Stronger, bigger, stronger, showier.
Showier.
Showier, and showier can mean the tail, or the dance, or the song, or the car, or, you know, any number of things.
Well, and in humans you have two kinds of showier, right?
You've got show-offs who tend to be male. - Yeah. - And you've got females who are physically augmented in a way that advertises the presence of resources of the kind that are necessary for a woman to be fertile and produce offspring.
And these things are monitored by the two sexes.
But anyway, again, the overarching message is this is the very special human case of something so impossibly long-standing and so central that every time selection produces the two different size gametes, it produces variations on the same pattern.
It's nothing to do with people, right?
And so the idea that a, you know, a generation of people is going to forget Well, you know, so historians like to complain, and I think correctly, that history isn't being taught, that we don't know our history, that lots of people don't know the relevant things from history, and so of course we will end up making the same errors over and over again.
And one of the things that is true of evolution, at least, you know, the branch to which we have referred here, but it's not the branch that we are mostly in, so macroevolution as opposed to microevolution, is that it is an historical science.
And it uses many of the same It has to use the same kind of inference as history does.
And, you know, history, because that is defined as sort of post-literate and therefore, in general, there will be texts, you're still using what people thought about it or claim to think about it at the time.
But in historical science, which is to say macroevolution or geology, also has to use inference, has to use indirect mechanisms, methods by which to assess what actually happens.
Yeah, it's left with no choice because, well, you can't experiment on large-scale patterns.
There's no time machine.
No, but Booth occurred to macroevolution because you don't have a time machine.
We just can't go back and know for sure.
That's what I mean.
You can't run the experiment, right?
You can create speciation events in very rapidly accelerated critters, but you can't figure out how birds evolved that way.
You have to go back to fossils, in which a lot of the evidence has been erased by time.
Yep.
All right.
Maybe we're there?
I wanted to...
Oh, wow, it's two.
So we may just not do any of the other stuff that we were going to do this week, but I did want to...
So I went and looked at dictionaries, and I did want to say that I also looked at a Dictionary of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, which is a book I used to assign to my upper division science students.
I think that the second edition, which is what this is, which was published, the second edition was published in 1998, reprinted in 2003, that's the version I have here, At least while I was still teaching, they had stopped at the second edition and it wasn't being republished much.
But I went and I decided to look up the relevant terms here.
And of course, woman isn't in here because this is a dictionary of ecology, evolution, and systematics.
Systematics basically being macroevolution, the deep history.
And it's a fabulous resource, it really is.
Female though, I looked up female, and to my surprise, not at all, found the egg-producing form of a bisexual or dioecious organism compared to male.
Okay, so that's all exactly as we have already described, but I thought Oh, right, dioecious.
Well, dioecious warrants a definition, and while I assumed that both of us could provide one off the top of our heads, I looked it up in here as well, and it says, used of plants or plant species having male and female reproductive organs on different individuals.
Unisexual.
Dioecious compared to monoecious or trioecious.
Triaceous.
Right, and so that's where I went.
Oh, what?
Well, I looked up triaceous, and let's see, did I tag it?
I did.
Triaceous.
So let's just say that diaceous is what we call hermaphroditism in No.
No.
Monoecious is what we call hermaphroditism in animals.
Because botanists and zoologists, I don't know, don't get along or just generated words separately, we very often have different words for the same things.
What you would call a hermaphroditic species in an animal, you would call a monoecious species.
Monoecious, which means one house.
One house, exactly.
With regard to trioecious, I went, What are they talking about?
This connects perfectly to what you said about sophistry and making an exception for intersex.
Used of a plant species having male, female, and hermaphrodite flowers on different individuals.
So, this is a case in which there are three types of individuals, and we know of no cases, I know of no cases, in which animal species do this.
But a species in which there are male individuals, there are female individuals, and there are simultaneously hermaphroditic individuals.
Tri-Aecius.
Three houses, again, and so I actually want to just do a little diversion into Aecius and Oikos and everything.
But no, there's not some third category.
The third category here, the third type of individual is, you know, you have A, you have B, or you have A and B. It's not C. It's not a third thing.
It's not an 87th gender, right?
Like, it's A and B. It's not a totally new thing.
So that sent me, just because I went here and I thought it was kind of fun, into Oecious, which is the same root as the echo, actually, in ecology and economics.
It comes from the Greek for oikos, the Greek meaning household, which is oikos, and indeed there's an ecological journal called Oikos.
And it has a lot of different meanings, actually, in Greek, and it turns out to be a very important word.
But in looking up what it really means, I found this paper, Leshem 2016, published in 2016, in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.
The paper is called Retrospectives, What Did the Ancient Greeks Mean by Okonomia, which I guess is the root for economics.
And I just wanted to... Wait, wrong?
to share one sentence from this.
This is the Journal of Economic Perspectives published in 2016.
Deep in the article he says, the earliest appearance of the root word for okonomia is found in a poem by Fossilities in the 6th century BCE that reflects the misogynic spirit of texts from this age.
So that was entertaining for me to discover.
And it reflects part of why I think some smart people are legitimately confused, right?
advises his friends to marry a bee-like wife because she is, quote, a good oikonomos who knows how to work.
Oikonomos is usually translated as steward.
So that was entertaining for me to discover.
And it reflects part of why I think some smart people are legitimately confused, right?
That there is, of course, a long history of sexism and misogyny in all of the important intellectual traditions.
100%.
100%.
We know this.
Anyone who claims not is lying to themselves or to you, right?
And so we see that here.
That doesn't mean, just as you have already said, that there is some, you know, patriarchy that is stealing food from women or, you know, whatever it is that they are claiming.
But that there are patriarchal structures in place that have, in part, sort of handed the domain of the domestic to the females and handed the public-facing outward domain to men, and that of course leaves men with power and resources to control, is of course true.
But that doesn't change the underlying truth of what male and female are.
And So let me just follow on from that.
This is one of the reasons people who watch this channel or listen to it regularly will have heard me invoke lineage a million times.
This is one of the reasons that it is so essential that we begin to think evolutionarily in terms of lineage, right?
Because the problem is that the individual is more tractable.
It is easier to comprehend, right?
What is the lineage, right?
Well, the lineage is actually a fractal, right?
You are part of many lineages simultaneously.
So it's a little bit hard to wrap your mind around it and what level is operative in any given interaction.
But until you do, you can start thinking that there is a patriarchy and that that patriarchy is inflicting things on women, right?
And the point is, no, that wouldn't really make any sense in a lineage context, right?
The lineage may divide things very unfairly.
In fact, pregnancy itself is very unfair, right?
Tell me about it.
Yeah, right.
Well, this is a perfect opportunity for me to mansplain stuff.
Yeah, right.
Tell me about how a rotten pregnancy can be.
Well, but that's just the thing.
For you, because you had to live with me!
Oh my!
No, this is exactly it.
The fact is, it is unfairly divided.
But it is unfairly divided by biology, not by men being insensitive to women, right?
It's non-equally divided.
Let's just, you know, there are lots of, I mean, look, warfare, that's dudes.
That's also unfairly divided.
It's unfairly divided.
But the point is, these things have been divided up because it got our lineage into the future, right?
Now, as you and I make the point in our book, we are up For a renegotiation of a lot of these things.
You can't renegotiate pregnancy.
We probably should not renegotiate war for the most part, but maybe think about how, you know, that's a short-term strategy that's going to make it impossible to live on this planet.
But nonetheless, the point is We can work together to reduce war.
Right.
The actual war part.
Biology and getting into the future is not easy.
We got here.
We got here with a lot of stuff unevenly divided in lots of different ways, right?
And more evenly dividing that which can be more evenly divided is a good idea.
But pretending that this is about somebody being mean, right, is preposterous.
That's just not how lineage works.
And anyway, you know, look, at some point, you know, we've seen the sophists now argue that the reason that women's sports were invented was not to protect women from male competition, but exactly the reverse, right?
How far can we really be from an argument that women's prisons were invented to protect male prisoners from being assaulted by women who had committed crimes?
Yeah.
Right?
Female criminals can be rough.
They can!
And so, you know, yes, men invented these women's prisons to protect Male prisoners, right?
That argument's coming at some point, presumably, and we have an obligation to learn how to stop being so damn responsive as if the fact that an argument is difficult to field means that it's valid.
A lot of these arguments just aren't valid, and they're obviously not valid even if you can't put your finger on the reason why in the moment.
And that doesn't make you wrong.
Right.
So I would point out that there's a trick that people will use in arguments sometimes, which is if you say something, they will ask you to define a word in what you've said.
You will find that if you give yourself the assignment of defining the important words in the arguments you make, it's very difficult, right?
We constantly use words that we cannot define, and that is not an indication that we are fakers.
It is an indication of the way the meaning of words is held.
It's not held in the conscious mind in a place that you can immediately bring up the, you know, the meaning of any of the things that you're saying.
You know, the Sophists can use this against you until you realize that your inability to define a word is not an indication that you don't know what it means, right?
And I guess, you know, let's stop being backed into a corner by this stuff.
Excellent.
All right.
We'll get to a bunch of other stuff next week, right?
Yes, we will.
Awesome.
We are going to take a break.
We thank you for having been here with us this however long it's been, and if you are interested in more, consider sticking around for the Q&A.
You can ask questions at www.darkhorseemissions.com, and if you want a forum where we do a Q&A that's live, And we can actually engage with the people in the chat.
That's happening on Sunday, March 27th.
We do it at the last Sunday of every month, 11 a.m.
Pacific, and then we leave it up for those of you who miss it and want to see, which you can get to at my Patreon.
So, if you have logistical questions about anything, you can email DarkHorseModerator at gmail.com.
If you liked this conversation, you know, much more than a lot of the stuff we've ended up talking about up late, but this conversation fits exactly with our book, Honor Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century.
We've got two chapters, one on sex and gender, another on relationship and parenthood, another on childhood, but that are all exactly in the domain of what we've been talking about today.
And no sophistry.
No sophistry at all.
Until we see you next, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
