Mick Hartley

After that previous post on the Scientific American article and the new Lysenkoism, I've just seen this at UnHerd, from Ellen Pasternak:

Scientific American has a proud history as one of the world’s most distinguished magazines, predating Darwin’s On The Origin of Species and inspiring countless science enthusiasts over the centuries. What a shame, then, to see it recently fall down the rabbit hole of a pseudoscientific ideology claiming that there are more than two biological sexes, both in general and in humans specifically.

Let’s be clear: sex is binary. There are only two routes for a sexually reproducing individual’s genes to flow from one generation to the next: via either small gametes or large. There is no spectrum from sperm to egg. Individuals of any species who are shaped by evolution to reproduce via sperm are called males; those equipped to reproduce via the egg route are females….

Many people currently wish to believe, to put it crudely, that a man is a woman if he says he is; this belief is socially sanctioned, is endorsed by our institutions, and will often lead to peers seeing us as good, kind, right-thinking people. The fact that sex is observably a fixed, binary trait in humans is an impediment that would-be adherents must explain away, one way or another.

Fuentes and Scientific American are therefore filling a niche in the market that is created by trans ideology. I don’t believe Fuentes really thinks “human sex is not binary”, as his article states. He will be aware that he presumably, like the rest of us, has two biological parents, one of each sex; he will know that if he wants to reproduce, he will need to do so with an individual of the opposite sex to himself. But his ability to construct clever-sounding arguments obscuring this fact, backed up by his position of academic authority, is worth good money in the marketplace of rationalisations.