Biologist CANCELED For Telling Truth About Gender - Colin Wright (4K) | heretics. 59

initially I just pushed back very politely as you know scientists trying to act ask them what do you mean there's five Sexes what do you mean sex is a spectrum or it's a social construct and instead of getting back the scientific arguments the debates the evidence it was just immediately you're a horrible person you're a trans phobe did it really piss you off well it stems from a misunderstanding of what they have about what the fundamental property of being male or female actually is um and if you don't understand this single nugget of truth then you're just you have no anchor you're just sort of floating freely without any any tether to reality why do men have nipples yeah so it it has to do with give me a brief rundown of your scientific background so I'm an evolutionary biologist I uh did my undergrad at UC Davis for my Bachelor's of Science and evolution ecology and biodiversity I went to UC Santa Barbara and I got my degree in evolution ecology and Marine Biology although I didn't study marine biology that was just sort of tacked on on the on the degree um I studied animal personalities like Collective personalities of social insects and arachnid societies which was pretty cool um and then I started so I I did a post do at Penn State for a couple years and that's when I started seeing a lot of I guess the the what we would call like the sex and gender debates start popping up on on friend social media on the social media accounts of professors and students I was in making weird claims about the biology of sex things things like you know didn't you know that there's five Sexes or that sex is a spectrum or that it's like a social construct uh and I did some initial push back on there because part of what I did as an animal behavior scientist is we need to know what biological sex is the the fundamental uh aspect of sex that's rooted in in gametes it's a type of reproductive strategy and we need to know how to identify males not just in humans but in in wasps that I studied and ants that I studied and spiders that I studied because the sex of an individual predicts lots of different Downstream effects on it like its body Its Behavior Uh that type of thing and so knowing the universal fundamental defining property of sex uh it was clear that people had a really unclear uh idea of what sex was and so initially I just pushed back very politely as you know scientist trying to act ask them what do you mean there's five Sexes what do you mean sex is a spectrum or it's a social construct and instead of getting back the scientific arguments the debates the evidence it was just immediately you're a horrible person you're a trans vobe all this type of stuff um and and so I just sort of leaned into it since then because part of the reason I became a scientist in the first place is so I could talk about true facts of biology uh at least I thought that's what we were all all there um and then I I I was getting more and more push back and I I just decided to keep leaning into it and write some popular articles for for quette early on that went super viral and then I just kind of became a go-to person to talk about the biology of sex because nobody else was talking about it and so five six years later I'm still talking about it and uh yeah and here we are I think for for most people um even listening to people who are not experts in their field like everybody listening to this now watching this now they they do their job whatever it is and they're an expert in it because that's why they do their job and there's nothing more frustrating than hearing from people who don't do their job and aren't experts in their field whatever it might be that they know better than you and they're just coming did I mean did it just did it really piss you off yeah I mean you could see what the activists are saying on it and there's there's a pure sort of ideological underpinning to what they're saying uh when I initially got into it it was just some people are wrong about the biology of sex and I'm going to just correct them in a very Academic Way and then when I looked under the hood a bit more it's clear that well what's what's buttressing their arguments if you can call them that isn't evidence and reason it's all this ideological baggage that's underneath it that's um they view it as sort of the Civil Rights cause rather than just a statement to fact about what the biology of sex are what makes an individual an organism male or female um and so hearing a lot of people you know you get anthropologists that talk about it like these cultural anthropologists uh who just are the worst on this topic completely you get medical doctors who talk about the biology of sex but they they have sort of a pragmatic way that they approach the biology of sex where they try to to put it in these different layers these different levels where they'll talk about chromosomal sex or your hormonal sex or your the the gametes that you produce and there's like a pragmatic reason they do this because they're doctors they need to diagnose illnesses and problems and so they sort of look at sex and sex related traits on like on a hierarchy of of causation because if you're a biological male you have testes you produce sperm but for some reason your testosterone is really low uh that could be because you have testicular cancer or something like that so doctors will will sort of look at sex in this sort of layered system even though sex itself is not layered it's it's there's the causes of sex there's what sex is and then there's sort of Downstream consequences of sex which you know there's a lot of variation between males and females not just in humans but uh in every animal uh and plant that there is so it it's it's disheartening seeing sort of an activist takeover of a lot of the sciences and the people who should be pushing back the ones who are experts in this area are just kind of kind of uh been then cowed into silence because they don't want to push back they see what happens when people speak up about this stuff and it just they much rather just continue on getting their grants and doing their their lab work I suppose I mean we're going to talk in the second half of this about Evolution as well so the problem of magical thinking I suppose on the right when people uh we had we'll talk about taker Carlson and then what he said um but I suppose is it no surprise that this would also happen on the left just a different version of it because humans are humans whatever side that you are on politically and we're always going to do some magical thinking I think that's right so I I started so back when I was before I became an evolutionary biologist when I was still a student I ran a Blog it was called warm Little Pond it was from Darwin's talking about the origin of Life he's sort of hypothesized uh that it could have started in a warm Little Pond somewhere uh and I was mainly interested in debunking a lot of the creationist and intelligent design arguments about Evolution um mainly because I just think it's it's harmful you know at an individual and a societal level if we're denying fundamental truths about biology you know things that are absolutely true we can't know a l about medicine um about our Behavior if we're not taking Evolution into account so that was I dedicated so much time to just debunking these arguments is actually why I became an evolutionary biologist in the first place I found myself just reading papers and textbooks about evolutionary biology and and I just got obsessed with the topic and then I just became an evolutionary biologist um and while I was doing that you know my colleagues were very happy to see me pushing back against uh the creationists the intelligent design people um and I would also try to debunk things like uh uh so alternative medicines the on that that aren't based in in science and stuff like that all all sort of like quackery I guess if you want to crawl it yes exactly and then when I saw this whole sex Spectrum sex as a social construct stuff to me I was just criticizing another new type of sex pseudo science or biology pseudo science it was out there um but instead of be getting the support of my colleagues since this was an idea that's mainly coming out of leftwing circles uh this was it was just the sacran belief they they wouldn't allow it to be criticized um where I'm just trying to not play tribes I'm just trying to criticize pseudoscience wherever I see it and using my same approach just trying to be very calm and measured and explain to people why I think they're wrong and be being willing to to receive push back and have a back and forth on these topics as well what's I think what's really sad is that if we we know that if we all stood up and just said what most people think about biological reality there wouldn't be a problem anymore I've been cancelled now I've been disinvited I've not been able to speak about it properly yet but from several book festivals and book shops and for for doing you know to sell my book it's got nothing to do with the culture wars my book a psychology of Secrets uh but because of things I've said about gender and trans so that's still happening in 2024 even though it does seem to have calmed down a little bit the whole you know I think more more more and more rational people are coming out of the woodwork but we know from history the banality of evil we know like a lot of it comes from people just not speaking up and I just I I just want to encourage anyone listening and watching like I I don't want anyone to get fired because of what I say but at the same time if we all do it at once you know if if the festivals the festivals don't find me really because they care about gender they care about getting bad press well if they got worse press from canceling people and if they continue to get bad press from canceling people for expressing views about biolog biological reality then they would have they wouldn't be incentivized to to to cancel us anymore what is a what is a steel Manning of a man can be a woman I mean I suppose there are if you think about it you take estrogen and you sort of I know you can't make your will into a vagina of you know but what's the Steelman here so the the Steelman is that well it stems from a misunder understanding of what they have about what the fundamental property of being male or female actually is and if you don't understand this single nugget of truth then you're just you have no anchor you're just sort of floating freely without any any tether to reality so what a male and female are fundamentally uh they're different reproductive strategies or evolved reproductive strategies males are the evolved strategy of producing many small gametes called sperm and females are denoted as the sex and this again this is universal across all plants and animals not just humans uh they're this the individuals that produce fewer larger gametes or OVA or eggs um a hermaphrodite isn't a third sex they're just individuals who are both male and female and there yeah they're they're they're utilizing both of those reproductive strategies uh this isn't something that's found in humans but garden snails um certain frogs that type of things that they they are either simultaneous hermaphrodites they're producing both the gametes at the same time or they're sequential so they're doing sperm at one time and OA at another time sometimes it's like a life cycle thing why is that why does that happen and also just anyone watching I do apologize for saying that's weird I don't mean don't mean to offend any hites watching statistically there probably are some so I don't mean weird and horrible way just fascinating scientifically but why does that happen um well there's like the the mechanisms that can spur this on to happen so when clownfish they have just an interesting evolved hierarchy where they you know they're trying to get access to the anony um the individual that's in the anemone it's a very valuable limited resource uh and they're the females that are in in the cemone if the female dies the next male will come up and there'll be a change in their their hormonal profile it'll actually facilitate a a change in their their gonadal tissue and they'll change from male irreversibly to female uh it just it just benefits them more as as as a female uh having access to those resources than it does being a male in that situation um and there's this whole dominance hierarchy of males beneath beneath that system uh you see it a lot in fish it's one one reason it's cuz it's easier as a fish to change your the type of gamut you're producing you know fish don't need um an intermission organ like a penis or anything like that or a vagina they just need to change some of their their tissue and then they just sort of emit their their gamits into the ocean um it doesn't require a lot of secondary sex characteristics in order to achieve fertilization so it's it's much more simple but once you get like the change going on to land um you know you have females at least if you're a mammal you have you you're carrying Offspring inside of you so your your bodies are sort of cemented into the role of either male or female because you can't just change all of that uh that Anatomy um you know it's it's there and it it can't just go away just by you know turning on some hormones um so the main uh issue the main problem that a lot of the activists are doing here is they're ignoring gamits as the fundamental defining characteristic and they're looking at what are called secondary sex characteristics so the characteristics that human males and females uh uh exhibit and and that come about because of puberty so males get taller we get facial hair our voices get deeper we get hairier uh women you know they grow breasts fat distribution over the bodies all the things that sort of socially you know when we're looking at somebody we're not looking at people's gametes we're looking at your secondary sex characteristics the way your face looks uh and we're using that as a proxy for for what someone's sex is and everyone knows that some women have very masculine features and some males have very feminine features and it could be sometimes you'll get it wrong you know very rarely you'll get it wrong but sometimes you do uh and and so what activists they're they're seizing on this fact that there is a lot of variation and overlap in secondary sex characteristics and they're saying well that is means that there's variation of sex itself when that's not the case you know we all know that males in general are taller than females um but we wouldn't say that a small female or a short male is is somehow like has a height sex of being female or something it's just no they're still male they're just a short male uh you know a female with masculine hands is just a female with masculine hands a female with a deep voice is just a female with a deep voice whatever uh but they would like to say that all of these traits are sort of combine statistically to make someone male or female and because all of these traits exist on you know somewhat of a spectrum well this can all be changed if you take hormones this changes your secondary sex characteristics you have surgeries this changes your secondary sex characteristics and we can make someone statistically more male or female whereas you know if if your view of sex is purely based on secondary traits sure you can change your sex but that's not what sex is they just it's a fundamental Mis misunderstanding of what sex is so that's the best way I can steal man them is that they just have they're just misund a misunderstanding at a fundamental level of what sex is um because it it doesn't apply to other species if you think about it so they might say well you know we have uh testosterone is the male sex hormone um and that high testosterone levels are associated with being male well that's only in humans though like other species that have males and females don't have testosterone linked to to the bio biological sex and the only way that they can say that XY chromosomes are associated with males and humans or testosterone is associated with males or beards are associated with males is because there is something else apart from beards and testosterone and chromosomes that all those things correlate with and that thing is the type of gamet an individual has the function to produce so all those arguments they actually rely on the gtic definition of sex even if they don't quite realize it what has happened to a human who is a hemaphrodite so there's in the medical literature you'll hear the word hermaphrodite being used to describe humans they'll say like a true hermaphrodite and as a biologist I I want to push back against that because when I think of a true hermaphrodite I'm thinking of like a garden snail that is literally both male and female they're producing sperm or OVA um there are no examples in the medical literature of an individual human that is a true hermaphrodite in the sense that they're like a snail um sometimes they might have bits of ovarian tissue and testicular tissue like ovotestes for instance there are some rare cases where a person could have one ovary and one one testicle um but they're only ever fertile for one of those things and and also even if we were to say find a perfect example of a human that's producing both eggs and sperm um you know that would be medically very interesting but it also wouldn't be an example of someone who's a third sex it wouldn't be a negation of the binary nature of sex because that would just be an individual that is both male and female into one not like a third sex category CU that would require uh a third gam that they're able to produce which which there is not interesting there's a great book called um middle sex have you ever read that you know I haven't but I've been told I I need to read that it's it's really good and it I don't think it gets political really at all really it doesn't it doesn't take a side in anything it's just a person who is into sex and grows up that way and it's a fascinating read uh something really difficult to do I think weird to imagine snail sperm I just started thinking about like what does that look like is it all gunky well it will be won't it gunky anyway yeah you know I've actually never looked at it but I would imagine it it probably looks very similar to just humans white um I don't know about the actual secretion itself because in humans the the white is is mainly the uh prostate fluid that sort of you used to carry the sperm but the sperm itself um you wouldn't be able to see it doesn't really have its own own color and snails probably don't have proes do they no they don't just think that's a mammal thing um is there any evidence at all for like I put like before because I I know how uh specious this is but a a male brain woman brain female brain that stuff this is like a big topic um because you see a lot of the the activists try to well they play both sides of it and one hand there's no male or female brain that sex us to think that males and females have different brains on the other hand you have uh them trying to stand up for you know writes by saying that well you know a transom has a female brain they're born that way and so the these are actually two contradictory views um it's either born that way or it's socialized in into it so how I try to approach this is looking at the human brain like you would look at any other organ that males and females have um so when we look at brain scans uh you know many thousands of them for males and females um to the you know normal Observer it's just meat you know you can't really tell differences but there are actually sex related differences they're not absolute differences it's not like you're going to find you know people always say like well what is a male brain or a female brain you're not gonna it's not going to be like one trait that's going to set it apart it's not like one's made of wood the other's made of metal there's something like fundamentally different about these two brains um there're usually St statistical differences and I usually like to talk about human faces to to to sort of convey this so you can look at the face of a of a male or a female and you can look at thousands of male faces and thousands of female faces and sort of get like the average male and female face but if someone were to ask you like what what makes the face male or female it's it's not any one thing it's when when we when we go through puberty uh testosterone sort of changes our facial features all in a very systematic directional way where our eyes get more you know set back or we have a thicker brow Ridge or Jaws get more this way um the shape of the nose the texture of the skin all of these things sort of contribute to what we would call like a masculinizing of of someone's face um if you were to look at at faces you can predict with high certainty what the sex of an individual is um but it's not going to be you're not going to get it right all the time so there's variation there's definitely this clustering of characteristics that we would say is a typical male face and a typical female face but this sort of statistical argument for sex differences applies also to brains uh brains can vary in slightly different ways they can be masculinized or feminized it doesn't mean that there's blue and pink brains but there are average male typical brains and male female typical brains just like there's male typical height just like you can look at someone's hands um you can look at digit ratios and how much hair is on the hand and you can look at masculinization and feminized hands um so are there male and female brains not if we're trying to talk about binary this is a male brain this is blue and pink boxes with no variation in between um but are brains masculinized and feminized in a sex specific way uh yes but there can also be males that have you know put them in a brain scan and and they have a a brain that looks more feminine than most females and you can have some females who have brains that appear more masculine than most males are they born in the wrong body do they have I mean no if someone does a woman with very masculine hands does she have is she born with wrong hands you know this is just natural variation yeah I always I've got really small hands look look at these would you guess they were women's hands um it would be probably leaning more towards the feminine side of things yeah it's hard to imagine because I got my big bearded face in the middle yeah but they're small hands so this is a really interesting thing though because you think of okay the contradiction that you mentioned earlier and I think Judith Butler's fallen into this as much as anybody who for anyone who doesn't know that's someone who writes about writes terribly about stuff she's won awards for her terrible writing um an academic called Judith Butler she was the one in the ' 80s or whenever it was pushing this idea of like everything's just a social construct so basically we've got the same brains and everything's just social and the contradiction being now it's like oh no but you've got a female brain and a male brain they would say to you I suppose if we Steel Man Steel Man again their argument oh you're saying you're you're on the other side of I mean we're basic sorry just to get that right again we're saying that she's actually wrong about both I think that uh it's just a social you know because the idea that we got the same brains isn't true we've got slightly different brains on average um and also the idea that you you have to be one or the other is also wrong uh and I suppose what you're putting forward is more nuanced you're saying no what you know and that's what they're missing is that is that right they're missing the Nuance in the brains are different there are sort of male and female brains but not firstly they're secondary characteristics and third and secondly oh my gosh I've lost myself in this in the M do you know what I'm saying yeah no yeah it's yes the Judith Butler it's hard to know exactly what she got wrong because you're tempted to say just about everything and it's uh it's fractally wrong where it's wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution um so yeah because she goes back and forth between using sex and gender um interchangeably when it suits her um in order to get sort of her her ideas out there um but yeah I would just say from a biological perspective a male brain is any brain that is in a male body and a female brain is any brain no matter how masculinized or feminized it's in a female body um a lot of the activists are trying to portray um the varying degrees of masculinization or feminization of brains as a brain sex um and then because they like to to filet out sex in in multiple levels they will say that well your body might be uh male you might have you know normal looking penis in testes you could have you know have a beard and a deep voice uh but oh your brain has been is very feminized so you have uh you have a female brain sex and that disparity between the body and the brain is what they would say is this uh that that mind uh body or the gender identity body disconnect and then the idea behind the gender affirming care is that we can actually use you know if if you feel dysphoria if you're if you're feminine in your expression and your behavior but you have a very masculine body they see that as a mismatch between your brain sex or gender identity and your your physical sex but the gender affirming care model is that well all of your physical features those can be changed and we can bring you your physical sex into alignment with your brain sex uh in order to to achieve gender Euphoria or at least you you'll no longer be your body will no longer be out of out of whack with your brain uh you can't try to change someone's mind or anything like that because that's categorized as conversion therapy yeah um but somehow you know making gay people straight or whatever by modifying your body that's not that's that's completely that's it's gender affirming care um so this is this is the thing though because I suppose Freedom loving or libert Liberty loving individuals you might say Hey you know you go do that um you can go and live you feel like you're a woman I mean the issue I've I've got is the idea that you you then you know the the policies isn't it I mean you go and live in a woman but it doesn't mean you can you can now that everybody else has to see you as a woman is that that's the I mean otherwise for intents and purpose that indiv that individual can say I feel like I'm a woman whatever you think a woman is in your head and I'm running around acting like I'm a woman okay it might be offensive to some women but you're an individual you're free to do what you want but it doesn't mean you can go into female prisons sport exactly and people are free to to view themselves however they wish I don't even know how you could prevent someone from viewing someone how they want to view themselves um but yeah it's it's whether we should all go along with with their self-perception um and I know I'm coming from this classical liberal side where and I thought we were achieving a lot of success in this idea that we were correctly identifying that there was a lot of uh variation in the degree to which people conform to sex stereotypes there's masculine and feminine girls masculine and feminine boys um and we were at least going in the direction of the Society of saying that's completely normal if you don't like that deal with it like these people exist and we should accept them uh and now we've we've kind of just gone the complete opposite we're saying well the boy who's very feminine you're no longer a boy you're actually a girl you're you're stuck on the wrong body and we need to change you I I'm just for the hands-off principle like these are just normal people these are just this is just natural variation and we need to let them be who they are uh but then they would interpret be who you are as like well they're they're born in the wrong body so being who they are is modifying it's sort of I feel like it's authoritarianism coming from a benevolent dictator rather than not nice it it was on the right path and then it just somehow just totally got derailed uh and that's when I jumped off the train before it went off over the cliff humans in big groups they just always going to do that they're always going to start telling people they're in the wrong body they're in the wrong thing there's something wrong with who they are both the right and the left have a really big problem with gender non-conforming individuals you had the people on the far Christian right who don't like their feminine Sons potentially being homosexual and so they tried to change their brains to match your body you know try to change your behaviors and then on the far left we have just the opposite where they're you know they they claimed to be accepting of it but now they're saying well we need to change your body to match your brain it's just two ways to achieve the same end result basically um is it is it mostly sort of young girls who want to become boys and then older men who want to be women yeah that's that's the the current um pathway so it used to be more boys uh would want to become girls and later in life and higher proportion of them would uh choose to transition later in life and that is flipped now it's mostly mostly girls um but there's two Pathways for for males one is sort of the the hyper the homosexual pathway like very feminite young boys um who who grow up and you know they feel this uh you know it's not merely just gender non-conformity but it's kind of very centered at hating their genitals and wanting to change them and really this internal feeling of being born in the wrong body that's has nothing to do with just their Conformity to stereotypes um and then you have the other pathway that's the sort of autogynephilic Route which is straight males who later in life it's autog gyop just means sort of uh being turned on en visioning yourself as as a woman and this sometimes I think they probably tricks people into misinterpreting these feelings of arousal with feelings of of you know that being the natural fit for your body and what you are and and I'm I'm fine with either of these people you know as adults choosing to transition if that's something they want to do um it it's mainly just the the kids side of thing where we need to make sure that they're appropriate age before they're making these like life altering often sterilizing decisions the the funny thing about AGP or autophilia is it's an extremely male thing I would imagine the sort of sexuality getting into that fetishistic mind you know I and I saw recently there was an interview you won't know because there a UK guy called Grayson Perry who's long been sort of heralded as a I suppose a crossdresser or a transvesti more than I'm not sure that they've had anything done or he's had anything done downstairs but he goes on all sorts of shows doesn't try and really it's more drag than anything else it's it's a low voice he's got he was asked recently um on a radio show you know do you think that the problem people have is that you're doing something that you're getting some sort of SE sexual gratification out of and that people around you who are witnessing you and around you haven't consented to being part of that and he actually said yes and you know just was honest about it but he's turned up there's a picture of him he turned up at a children's hospital charity thing wearing a giant dildo and because he's an artist he sort of got away with it and I feel like that's tantamount of the Jimmy savil Stu you know about Jimmy savil in the UK that was the I call them PDF files on the show you can't call them by the real name because YouTube gets cancel people who go after children at the BBC uh and they hid it for decades basically and he was getting up to all sorts and that's for me this the kind of thing that in 20 years they look back and it's like this guy turns up with a dildo like at a children's charity and everyone's like oh How brave and wonderful yeah no it's there used to be that distinction I guess with crossdressing I hav't seen some trans organizations like try to claim crossdressers as as part of the trans umbrella um you know whenever I think I mean the the stereotypical crossdresser at least when I was growing up was like Eddie isard yeah but EDD yeah decided that uh he identifies as a woman now um and is is using women's spaces uh I feel like I feel like isard was applauded early on as sort of like this gender bending you know and it was sort of a fun you know playful type thing until it got really serious and he started going into women's places and that's that's when a lot of people said okay you've gone a little too far because he was very adamant early on about you know I'm I'm just a I'm a trans Vesti I just I'm I'm I'm not I'm not a woman I'm I'm I just you know I think he called himself an executive transvestite cuz he dressed very uh stunning for when he when he when he crossdressed it's just the power of social contagion I think isn't it he was seemed to be perfectly happy doing what he was doing we don't know obviously what he was really thinking but uh now the society's created something that maybe he would have felt like he was being a coward to not come out fully and say yes I am this thing embraced me I get virtue points for it yeah you I think it's also a stepping stone for a lot of uh the autog gynophile type people like they might start out crossdressing and there's an arousal component to it and then you know when when the culture moves a certain direction where you know a lot of these people are identifying as women that just was the natural next step for for Edie yeah and it's such a shame for a lot of these people I suppose because many of us didn't care we were like yeah do your thing and now because we're so involved in the politics of it and the ideology of it and we've looked into it and we've started to understand God you're getting arousal out of this I didn't really think of it that way I I don't want to be part of that I don't want to go for lunch with you if you're getting a kick out of how everybody's perceiving you I just want to go with I want to have an asexual lunch and an asexual dinner and and not have to think about what's in your pants all the time yeah it it's it's a tough one because I I I think that we should still you know accept people who are crossdressing and you know even if some of them are getting aroused from the whole thing like what are we going to do we're going to have dress codes for you know men and women going I mean there was the dust up at the gens bet conference because um out a very out autog philic male Nam Phil Ellie decided to wear sort of a gown there and you know JPC I think did the right thing saying well we're not going to have dress codes we're not going to look at the door and be like you're dressing too feminine for a for a male so we kind of have to get over people crossdressing it doesn't bother me whatsoever it's just I can understand why some people might not like it and if you don't like it then you can excuse yourself but we can I think we need to be at least accepting of of that yeah I suppose it's it's gets to the the line is maybe children schools uh if people are turning up at high schools you know wearing those kinds of things you don't really want your children being part of that well especially like the you know the the Canadian shop teacher what's her boobs with the the grotesquely large uh prosthetic boobs and yeah I thought that was trolling dinner plate sized areolas yeah it was completely ridiculous I think it might have been trolling I can't remember but either way like Canada came out in full support of this person's right to wear this what is like literally just fetish gear to a the extent to which it faces women I mean I I've showed a friend of mine a woman who's who's a lawyer uh there was a there's a quite famous lawyer now in the US I think who basically you know TR crossdresses but looks like a clown or or looks like a prostitute I mean it's it's not crossdressing to look like a a lawyer who's a a woman and is very you know uh um eloquent and elegant and everything it was a it was done you know sexual yeah and everybody was just bowing down to him as like oh yes what a brave suning person you are and it's like you must be trolling this is just absolutely extraordinary um tell me um briefly I guess what XX and XY actually means just for those those of us who don't like what does it look what's happening in our bodies what is this so we're mammals and so we have what's called sex chromosomal sex determination um a lot of people get confused of what it means for sex to be determined versus how sex is defined so in nature there's many ways that sex is determined and all we mean by determined it's a specific term within developmental biology that is basically referring to the the mechanisms and environmental and genetic triggers that cause an embryo to develop down a pathway that will result in either a male or a female um so as I said mammals it's it's per by chromosomes but other species like crocodiles for instance and turtles uh the temperature at which the eggs are incubated will determine whether the embryo develops into a male or female so they have temperature dependent sex determination um so when we talk about what xx and XY are in humans those are just the chromosomal combinations that are associated with males and females because for males there's a gene called sry it's on the Y chromosome and the presence of that Gene is what triggers males to develop or what triggers an embryo to develop into a male uh down that that developmental pathway instruction yeah it's it's the it's the instructions that say you know this is the instructions that will make a male um there's some people that like to say that the embryo itself is male but you know I I I'd push back against that type of portrayal because the sex of an individual it's a it's an it's a phenotype it's it's what it's a it's an end point of development that you get to um at some point along the development of an embryo it it turns into a male um but it's not a male before that it might have the the instructions to become one but like a zygote itself isn't male or female even if it has the instructions for it just like you know what's the sex of a of a an alligator egg before you know intermediate temperature before it develops you know these are sexless embryos um and sex is something that bodies develop into so that's the relationship with with chromosomes you can have instances where that sry y Gene that's typically on a y chromosome gets transposed onto an X chromosome and so you can have XX males uh or you can have situations where the sry Y Gene get shut off and if you have XX chromosomes condition I think it's Turner syndrome if you're xxy oh no that would be sorry that would be Klein felter syndrome but if so if you would have Klein felter syndrome and be XX y but the SR y Gene is turned off on your y you can actually be an XX y female so you can be a female with a Y chromosome so chromosomes it's it's just the instructions sometimes the instructions can be weird but that's that's relationship between chromosomes and sex why do men have nipples yeah so it it has to do with the types of uh how we develop in utero and the sex differentiating pathway doesn't really start until after the nipples are already developed and that's just sort of this ground plan that's put in there that's ancestral and mammals because um you know if you look at the evolution of sex it's the Sexes weren't always weren't always there some you know initially there was just females producing eggs before okay um and males are kind of an offshoot of the normal typical female developmental pathway and so we just have sort of non-functional uh nipples it's there's other things that females have you know that people debate about uh you know what is the evolved function of sort of like the female orgasm into because it's not necessary for reproduction and there's some people who think that it's sort of a similar a similar situation where it's it's a byproduct of of selection for orgasms in in men this it's a highly debated field uh so I won't go into the choose as side on there but there there appears to be maybe be sort of these these traits that are maybe evolved for one sex but they they can't quite contain it just in one and so there's remnants of it in the other sex that have have their own uh possible function or sometimes they're just there and in a non-functional state wait there's a female orgasm so I've heard so I've heard why don't men's testicles have rib cages around them that's a that's a good qu so some animals have them they're internal to their body oh yeah yeah um like well fish for instance have internal uh I think there's some mammals that have them internalized as well Birds they're all internal um the the main idea is is sort of kind of a temperature regulation they need to be at a certain temperature and um you know when it gets colder outside and many males have noticed that they kind of go up and attract into the body to get more get more warm and on very hot days they uh they tend to hang a little bit lower so it's it's this idea of temperature regulation that there's an ideal temperature oh they do that to sort of stay warm in cold conditions that's that's really interesting yeah okay and but I mean they should You' think that they would be more robust and and and hard or something because yeah they're they're quite vulnerable in a very vulnerable spot I first yeah I heard about that point about the ribcage of Ricky jasis podcast Carle pilson I think said it um why don't they have a rib cage around because you'd think natural selection would would allow for you know some people over the years would get kicked there and it would ruin their chance of sorry it would ruin their chance of procreating uh so there should be a rib cage there but we're getting on to Evolution and natural selection so that's my segue rib cage testing what did tuer Carlson the ex Fox News presenter say recently on Joe Rogan yeah so he was on Rogan um and the topic of evolution came up I I didn't actually watch the whole episode I I watched the clip so if if there was more context to it that I'm not getting to I apologize um but essentially he said that Evolution the people don't believe in evolution anymore uh is this really a thing that the Sciences has abandoned the the topic of evolution or natural select um and Rogan gave gave some push back against this but it wasn't very robust push back and as I mentioned I kind of have a history of of engaging with the creationism intelligent design Evolution debate um and so this started a big Whirlwind on Twitter because you get someone with a high-profile like Tucker Carlson on the biggest podcast in the world saying scientists don't buy evolution by natural selection anymore and then all the people who are you know already maybe believed some version of that felt emboldened to come out and so there was at least a week where uh all of the evolution Skeptics and deniers and all species of that came out um to proclaim the death of of uh of evolution and Darwinism uh so that's been an entertaining last couple weeks as as an evolutionary biologist and I've I've sort of been I knew this day was coming where I'd alienate myself from some of my more right-wing Christian audience because at the end of the day like I'm an evolutionary biologist and I'm I'm going to talk about Evolution and I've given talks about the evolution of sex and had people come after the talk and say like I liked you you know you talked about there's only two Sexes and you know you can't change sex but they're like don't don't talk about Evolution because you're going to lose everyone I'm just like well I'm not here to you know the reason I'm talking about this now and I'm not in the university is because I've refused to not talk about true things about biology so I'm not going to bite my tongue In This Crowd either I'm going to talk about Evolution and sex you can just deal with that if you want to there must be enough middle grounded people but this is a there are most people totally agree with what I'm saying but they're they're not the most the loudest ones this is the thing and you want the loud people to push your stuff more this is a genuine problem that people like you and me creators not creators like a Divine creator of course but uh creators in the YouTube sense and the substack sense uh it's a genuine problem that we face because you end up growing a large profile and a large following we rely on that for our living and we know that beliefs are formed not necessarily around accuracy or a pursuit of accuracy but actually around what our peers will think so it's very hard to stay in in line um and we know that we are monetarily incentivized not to put out stuff that might piss off some of the people who joined us because of the gender stuff and but also are maybe right-wing religious people yeah I think we want religious people to follow us I think Evolution doesn't necessarily I mean I'm an atheist myself but I think you are as well as that but it doesn't necessarily disprove God I think you can have your God and your chrisan Christianity and stuff and still understand Evolution but it is it is a problem for for not just us but everybody this is this is a real problem I I go through and Purge some number of followers every couple months just because some people follow me and don't sort of know what my views are on other things they just see someone who's talking about their's two Sexes and they don't they don't know the bigger context so I have to remind people that I'm actually an atheist and I'm an evolutionary biologist I'm going to talk about both those things uh if I if I please so I think just bringing out that honesty and that transparency is as frequently as I can um makes it so my audience doesn't become so shocked yeah when they see me say something that they might disagree with so I try to do because the last thing I want to do is is sort of either be captured by my audience or feel like I want to censor something because I don't want to lose subscribers or something like that so I I I try to to Foster that middle ground of people who follow me because they they know speak honesty on things and because of things like substack um I can I can I I don't I'm I'm not beholding to to any one view really yeah for now until they all leave you and then you got to start talking about gay frogs or something which I always say that apparently was true in the end the gay frogs thing was Alex Jones the feminized frogs Yeah yeah that was like the one thing it was the maddest thing he ever said and apparently that's actually true doesn't make a good sound sound bite but they're turning the frogs gay it wasn't wasn't a good impression um apparently a lot of the issue was with the the word theory um it might have even been you that tweeted I saw people tweeting about this the issue was that the scientific way of you know what a theory is cuz he said it's just that's why they call it a theory it's not even science what does a theory mean in that in evolutionary theory it's yeah it's it's almost nostalgic like talking about these debates again because I just you know college student me is just like this is what I did online is talk about these these issues um yeah the whole just a theory idea Mis again it's a misunderstanding of of what a theory means in science um people tend to think oh it's like an educated guess maybe or it's just it's just a wild guess it's just a theory that's how we use it sort of colloquially in our everyday conversation but when scientists talk about a theory it is not just a wild guest it's it's not even just an educated guess it's a a thoroughly tested uh framework that interprets many different lines of evidence and facts so um and it's important to distinguish between what facts are in theories too so facts are just sort of the world's data you know how distance from Earth to the sun uh here's you know the the gene frequencies in this species changed from this to that and over couple Generations those are just facts anyone can verify on their own um and then there's the theoretical framework that explains how uh you know how the why we see this the pattern in the fossil record why we see a certain pattern with the species that emerge on Continental islands versus volcanic islands that are it has to do with how uh how old they are and what the fauna that's coming from the nearby continent versus uh you know a neighboring island or something um the evidence from the the genomes and how uh this this shows the the relatedness and how Evolution occurs by mutations and selection um you know any one of these lines of evidence is like tremendous Evol evidence for the the fact of evolution that Evolution takes place but then all of these combined in this theoretical framework um it's it's just such an insurmountable amount of of evidence that all points in the same direction uh for the fact that evolution is is uh a legitimate thing and there's the fact of evolution that life has changed over time that's an undeniable fact that's just an observed thing and then there's the theory of evolution that's the mechanisms that we used to explain how this process occurred so some people will say well how does evolution explain this one thing we don't know how the The Joint of the weasel frog evolved that's a weird looking thing you can't explain that therefore you know Evolution's wrong or something well just because we don't know like aspects of it or maybe even aspects of the theory um maybe we we can't explain certain things or at least maybe some people don't think it's sufficient to explain certain things that still doesn't mean that the fact of evolution is incorrect that animals didn't evolve so it's important to keep the fact and the theory as separate do do we have any competing theories that are that are scientific that go oh you know what it might be this other thing no there's there's nothing else so I mean there's other ideas that have been incorporated into evolutionary theory I mean Darwin did some of this very early on so he had his idea of natural selection um but then there was this seemingly glaring contradiction that he would see something like a male peacock that is just handicapped by this tremendous amount of plumage to the point where they can barely even fly they're just advertising to Predators saying like kill me I have no defenses I'm this huge Target and this was a major big problem for Darwin's theory because it's like well if it's all about Survival how can like this thing this is a huge handicap we would not expect this to evolve and then he did what a good scientist does and just thinks about it really hard and collects evidence and he showed that well he he developed the concept of sexual selection saying well the peacock might be at a disadvantage for long-term survival because of this handicap but this comes uh with the great benefits because the individuals that have the most attractive plumage have an overwhelmingly higher number of Offspring and at the end of the day Evolution cares about differential reproduction um how many copies of your genes are you putting in the Next Generation and so you could say that well sexual selection is this other Theory but it was incorporated into darwi Evolution that's all part of uh of Darwin um there's ideas of neutral selection of you know not all traits are adaptations they can just sort of be they can hitchhike with adaptations they can just be the result of neutral genetic drift um yeah there's been all these interesting discoveries along the way um but they all fit really snugly within the pre-existing framework which also gives good evidence that the framework is super robust uh because none of these new discoveries have conflicted with it they've all just settled so perfectly within it and actually enhan the entire you know it gives more insights to other aspects of the theory might not have had before you'd think the ones the animals that have survived through sort of sexual selection I would think over time they would die out because okay they're reproducing a lot within so it's good within your tribe to have this big peacock feather and stuff uh but you're not actually adapting for your environment you're going to get killed easily how have they survived this long well I mean I as it could I mean you might be able to have you know if you introduce a new Predator that's that has a you know a specialist for for peacocks or something they could wipe them out at such a high rate where you know the the handicap isn't overcome by reproduction and things like that um I mean it's going to depend on the environment if the environment changes suddenly then yeah that it could be it could be a dead end potentially um but if it's more gradual change which is sort of How It's been more in the past you know we're we're seeing a lot more mixing now because we're introducing producing species like crazy across uh across borders that would naturally be like barriers to these types of things happening um and it's that's what invasive species are they're just you know they came from somewhere else and they're free from the the pressures that have kept them in check in their previous habitat and now they're just running them mu and and current habitats because they have no Predators or uh the environments are just a certain way for them so yeah I mean anything anything could definitely happen but there there's situations where it could be could become a a real handicap rather than just sort of handicap in the the sexual selection sense one of the issues I've got with um talking to lots of different kinds of people with different theories and different knowledge and whatever it might be uh is that I've realized I've come to realized that I have to take everything on faith um I I realized this while I was debating a flat earther that I don't know how to prove the Earth is not flat so I've taken it on faith from scientists and textbooks and things that it's not I've never seen it be spherical I believe 99.9% that it is because I don't know why these people would all be lying and I don't know how that might happen um and I've not seen the fossils and things like that so I suppose you scientists are asking us just as religious people might to take everything on faith and I'm not not not a criticism I don't know what other way it can be yeah I mean you can't expect everyone to go out on a on a dig and then if you're out there how can we know that these bones weren't just put in there for us to dig up later on and not everyone's going to go be able to do you know genetic testing on their own and how do we know the outputs of the computers it's not behind the scenes so I mean there there is a lot of things you just sort of have to I don't like using the word faith here but maybe you have to to trust trust the process uh there's a lot of aspects of of biology that aren't politicized where there's no reason where we should suspect that the population geneticist studying fruit flies or or Guppies or something have an agenda for what they're doing but they're using the same genetics that we're using to study humans that type of thing and so um there's a lot of students that are out there who join genetics Labs who aren't doing anything with humans they're just doing their stuff with whatever species that has no political ramications whatsoever there's no reason for them to be biased and skew the data except maybe climb the ladder and publish papers or whatever that's that's another story um but yeah you just you need to do the work and try to understand the history of these ideas um the history of fields like genetic like genetics how we got to the current methods that we have right now from from mendal up until now and there's a rich history it takes time I mean you have to you have to you have to do your own research on these things and not just watch Clips on Tik Tok or you know even coming from the right or the or the left or wherever it is um and you know if you want want to be agnostic about these things then that's that's a perfectly reasonable thing uh to do as well um otherwise you know refrain from having strong opinions until you've done a sufficient amount of research search we talked about the problems with uh the gender ideology you know prisons uh Sports women's spaces that's part of the issue if we you know policies what is for you the biggest danger with people believing that Evolution didn't isn't isn't is only a theory is not real I think Evolution Roots Us in reality I mean I got into Evolution because I thought it helped answer a lot of big I guess some of the fundamental questions of existence really just like who we are what are we doing here how long have we been here um why do we behave these certain ways you know why do our brains work like this why do we deceive ourselves the social dynamics that we have why are we so uh afraid of being ostracized from our groups that types of stuff um dating men and women's interactions like all of this can be explained you know may not know all the details but like large sads of it be explained with evolutionary theory and if you don't have this framework of it it's just a this complete chaotic mess um but you talk to The evolutionary psychologists they can talk about you know why why are males more sexually violent like this explains incarceration rates explains uh you know sexual assaults um you know differences between males and females in the types of uh uh Hobbies we get interested in you know people versus things um this is this is all fits within an evolutionary framework and it it makes sense of the world in a way that we would have absolutely no way to explain if we didn't have this so and it seeps into everything we're evolved our behaviors have evolved our bodies have evolved for medicine we need you need to know about Evolution for uh you know if you're going to get a a transplant you know we know because of evolution that if you have an identical twin hey you should maybe get a kidney from them or if you have a brother that's the next best thing um You probably don't want to go too much further out uh you know from that you if if you're going to get you know AC cross species transplant I think they've done with chimpanzees before you know they're closer to humans you know might not want to go for a pig because that's even more distantly related this is all explained by by evolutionary biology yeah my worst nightmare that a close family member needs a kidney I suppose the worst is that I need a kidney well it depends what the frame I'm looking at um and and speaking of that speaking we're in New York course um speaking of that sort of yeah ostracism as as you mentioned from the tribe you know why why why it feels so bad to be ostracized I don't want to use this moment as a plea for people to speak up centrists speak UPS moderates people who who are not so far one way or the other and who are tired of magical thinking because we need more people to do it and where can those people go and find your work so I'm on substack um my substack is is realities last stand.com uh chose that name because I talked mainly about the biology of sex on there but not not just I'm trying to expand uh the the range of topics that we talk about um but you know the biology of sex is something like everyone knows that males and females exist and if we can be convinced that sex is a social construct that males and females aren't real that your eyes are being deceived um then there's there's no other thing that you can't be convinced of uh or out of so that's the name of the the substack um again reality last stand.com I write on there I also it's sort of like a magazine where I publish other people's work too on various topics and it's it's really the existence of that it helps me be able to talk about these topics and be a biologist outside of Academia uh that is able to say the things that a lot of people don't want to say about this topic who's a heretic you admire so there's a lot of Heretics that I admire um as an evolutionary biologist I think I have to go back to the OG Charles Darwin though um because he he's dealing with a lot of things that a lot of people deal with today about the fear of social ostracism of questioning uh you know these sacran beliefs either coming from a a Christian right or the woke left or whatever it was there was wokeism back then um but he had this amazing idea that was based on a lot of intense fieldwork uh looking through Museum specimens this guy had just so much time to devote his life to this topic and when he stumbled across this idea that evolution by natural selection he knew it was huge he knew it was going to be groundbreaking and he knew that he was going to be uh attacked for it brutally and so he did what a lot of scientists sadly don't don't do as much today is he didn't publish right away he just wanted to build the strongest case possible he did this by by setting out all the the aspects or the things that Evolution that he couldn't quite explain now and said if we can't explain this if I can't explain this under my theory then the whole thing is wrong and then he went and did his best to falsify it as much as he possibly could and then he realized that he like he was unable to falsify this idea and then he built up this massive case using um you know uh what we call artificial selection you know with with dog breeds uh he did you know comparative Anatomy he just he was going to write this enormous T of a book that he probably just released before he died just you know to put out there or at least when he's very old but he was forced to write like a a shorter version which is the Origin of Species which is still hundreds of pages long uh because his his friend Alfred Russell Wallace was GNA kind of stumbled independently on this idea so he ended up publishing it uh his his own book The the I guess The Abridged version of his his giant book um but he he's he's I think this the ultimate scientist the way he approached the topic the way he knew it was going to be socially unacceptable but he did it anyway because to him it was it was the true it was the truth and that's what ultimately he cared about as a scientist so I think we all should try to emulate Darwin when we're out there especially scientists uh yeah I think he's just a model human and and scientist great heretic yeah fantastic heretic yeah people please do go and go to reality's Last Stand that's not going to be here that's going to be down there in the description reality last hand that's Colin substack go and sign up please support my guest he's been absolutely wonderful and keep watching this show there will be something similar there going to put it there and hit the like button because it helps to spread this out and start speaking up about centrism and being moderate and magical thinking come on we we can do it

Channel: andrew gold | heretics.

Views: 263,032

Keywords: andrew gold, podcast, heretics, on the edge, colin wright, evolutionary biology, trans, ideology, woke, antiwoke, evolution theory, gender

Id: bFPlJSkuf-o

Length: 60min 49sec (3649 seconds)

Published: Thu May 30 2024