Scientific American is Now the Bud Light of Science Journals
Magazine’s editor-In-chief Laura Helmuth slammed for peddling gender pseudoscience on Twitter.
My colleague Mike LaChance recently reported Princeton University professor Agustín Fuentes recently published an article in the Scientific American, arguing that biological sex in humans is not binary.
An interesting thing happened when the Editor-in-Chief of that publication decided to further promote “non-binary sex” concerning a 2017 article in Audubon Notebook.
This led to a very robust response in Twitter’s Community Notes.
White-throated sparrows have four chromosomally distinct sexes that pair up in fascinating ways
P.S. Nature is amazing
P.P.S. Sex is not binary https://t.co/NJhQI6uC0q via @audubonsociety— Laura Helmuth (@laurahelmuth) May 17, 2023
Looking back at the original article, it is clear why Helmuth latched onto the piece to push the non-binary inanity that has flooded the national discourse recently.
We’ve known since the late 1960s that the two color morphs differ in their chromosomes. Tan-striped birds have two identical copies of chromosome 2, but in white-striped birds, one copy of chromosome 2 has a large section inverted, as if it had been put in backwards.
Recent work by biologist Elaina Tuttle and others has established that this section of the chromosome is not just inverted, but scrambled in a variety of ways. And it doesn’t just control the color of head stripes. Many different genes here are tightly linked to form a “supergene,” so that birds of one color morph also inherit a whole range of behaviors. The resulting effect is that the White-throat really does operate as a bird with four sexes.
Evolutionary biologist Colin Wright refuted the entire fiction of non-binary sex in his outstanding Substack column, Debunking Pseudoscience: ‘Multimodal Models of Animal Sex.’ In his article, Wright separates the relationship of individual characteristics and reminds everyone that sexual reproduction is binary: There are egg-producers, and there are sperm producers.
Wright debunks the Audubon Notebook post in this section:
The example they give of a species “with more than two sexes” is the white-throated sparrow (Zonotrichia albicollis). This species has two color morphs, males and females with either white or tan stripes. The more aggressive white stripe morph has a large inversion on chromosome 2, and the species mates disassortatively by color morph, meaning that white stripe morphs tend to mate with tan striped morphs. This chromosome inversion coupled with the disassortative mating by morph has led to a situation where chromosome 2 “behaves like” another sex chromosome.
But having more than two sex chromosomes is not the same as having more than two sexes. While this species may be an interesting case study for how sex chromosomes have evolved, it certainly isn’t an example of a species with “four sexes,” which would require four distinct gamete types.
Wright’s conclusion includes a plea for biologists actually to do biology rather than promote the latest narrative.
As biologists we should not be engaged in erasing, invalidating, or affirming people’s identities or experiences. Our job is simple: describe and explain the natural world as accurately as possible.
Wright warns that the reputations of academic journals, which have been built over decades, will be completely tarnished if it continues to publish pseudoscience as “fact”.
It may be too late for Scientific American. It has now become the Bud Light of science journals.
You really should ask why the religion of gender ideology would require you to destroy your professional credibility like this.
— Bleu Cheque (@VERBAL_CHANCLA) May 17, 2023
Tragic to see @sciam, like so many other once-serious outlets, turning into Buzzfeed. But that’s what you get for hiring “science journalists” instead of scientists, I suppose.
— Cecelia (@Ceceliaism) May 18, 2023
Why are you outright lying about what the paper says? A ‘type’ of reproductive strategy within a sex is not the same as a sex.
Shameful that the editor of @sciam is showing zero scientific integrity.
— Geoffrey Miller (@primalpoly) May 17, 2023
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Comments
I’ve never been able to understand a single article in Scientific American. The illustrators and the author never seem to be doing the same article.
It reminds me of the cartoon of a woman yelling at her cat, and what the cat hears: “blah blah blah blah blah Fluffy! blah blah blah Fluffy!”
With magazines like this newly degerated rag, it’s “blah blah blah blah gay!” or “blah blah blah blah Trans!”
Florida’s got it right: pedophiles should be put to death. The are stealers of lives.
The cartoon was for a dog (ginger). The one with the cat showed it hearing nothing. Larson was 10X the scientist that these clowns are.
Pretty soon SciAm will state that white light is gender fluid since with a prism the rainbow of colors is extracted.
Great Analogy..!
SciAm… don’t we call it Thailand now?
“It’s… a… PUZZLEMENT!”
Yes. But cats from there are still called SciAm-ese.
Hee!
That would make a great submission to a “scientific” journal to see if it can be published.
Scientific American is a misnomer much like the Holy Roman Empire which was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.
I’m pretty sure Rome was an empire and well Rome as in Roman
Just kidding…lol
The Holy Roman Empire and the Roman Empire are two different things.
The “Holy Roman Empire” was mainly German which the Romans never controlled. And it did not control the city of Rome, therefore it was not Roman. It was more of a massive defensive pact than an empire.
Scientific American is neither Scientific nor American.
1. It is no longer scientific: It is now Bud Light Science.
2. It is no longer American owned: It is owned by a privately held German company, Holtzbrinck.
Scientific American jumped the shark decades ago. This is just evidence that it hasn’t come back to anything resembling science.
Agreed. They are desperate to find anything to stay relevant after the advent of the internet crushed their legitimacy and demand even more than it was already down.
The internet broke a lot of things. Technology will save us. Not.
Yes, unfortunately. I started reading SciAm in the early 70s. Through the 80s I had a subscription. It started (obviously) turning left during the Reagan years. When my subscription ran out, I did not renew.
Sci. Am was never a primary journal. It was a journal that tried to explain complex science in terms that an educated layman could understand. I loved it growing up in the 60s.
There once was a time I read SciAm every month. Actually had a subscription to the magazine and looked forward to getting it to see what was new in the areas of science. But not any longer. Gave it up years ago when they started the conversion of their journal into just another PopSci magazine next to all the other PopSci magazine on the magazine rack. Didn’t see the point of reading it any longer. Too bad that. It did cover the scientific world for most of its existence. But no more.
It’s been corrupted, like EVERYTHING else.
Remember who has been our bulwark against this kind of thing: the garbage of the GOP.
Idiot Ronna Romney and her new fake lips should be put out to pasture, alongside China’s favorite GOP senator, McConnell.
“the Bud Light of Science Journals”
Lol! Priceless.
I wonder if President Bud Light reads it.
I’m reminded of the line from the original Starship Troopers book by Heinlein.
‘Uh, men are not potatoes, sir.’
Humans are not sparrows. Nor are they snakes, fish, insects, or trees. They have TWO SEXES. Period. Anything else is a genetic abnormality.
SciAm used to contain mostly articles written by prominent scientists, such as EO Wilson:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/author/edward-o-wilson/
Now, most of their articles are written by “award-winning science journalists,” who generally fill their pages with material biased by leftist politics.
A low point on the SciAm publishing record was the article by a nurse, trashing the reputation of EO Wilson. It implies that the current editors of SciAm feel they need to apologize for the un-woke articles of the past:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-complicated-legacy-of-e-o-wilson/
It seems like the few articles that SciAm publishes by real scientists are mostly those written by women or minorities. And then they include a large photo of the author to make sure you know it’s a minority:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/physicists-make-matter-out-of-light-to-find-quantum-singularities/
Sex is fluid. That’s why I always shower afterwards.
Haha, that reminds me of the “sex” scene in Demolition Man where Huxley tries to get Spartan to have virtual sex using metal gizmos on their heads. When he suggests doing the real thing, she says “Eww! You mean…fluid transfer? Eww!”
This is junk science peddled as science
The bad news is that every channel and institution that provided vetting and curation is now irredeemably corrupt.
The good news is that, finding and calibrating information, sources, and curators has never been easier for individuals.
The interesting news is that these are both effects of the same infotech changes. The more interesting news is that, so far, the folks vexxed at what they don’t control can’t shut down the autonomy without also breaking what makes their machinery work.
Utterly fascinating is that these business model geniuses, just ask them, have yet to figure out that people will pay you to curate information for their benefit as they see it, but not for curating them and what they see for yours.
The Chronicle of Higher Education is just a DIE pushing screed sheet.
For example, “‘INCOMPATIBLE WITH DEMOCRACY’ ‘State-Mandated Censorship’: Florida Faculty Worry About Bill That Would Ban Certain Majors.”
“‘Calls’ and ‘Meetings’: How Ben Sasse Spent His First 7 Weeks as U. of Florida President”
They’re living down to their name.
Medical doctors make the sardonic observation that “Therapeutic Touch is neither”.
Ditto for the Scientific American.
FJB
Joining National Geographic in the Woke arena where propaganda and indoctrination and support of the New World Order is a mainstay.
This drivel by SciAm is like saying people who are blue eyed blondes and brown eyed brunettes marrying green eyed blondes or blue eyed brunettes is evidence of multiple sexes. When I was on the dating scene (a LONG time ago) I dated girls with several variations but I never noticed there were more than two sexes. I just noticed sex. And it was grand!
.
Sci Am has always gone with what is trendy. In 2009-10 and 1993 it carried articles about health funding, with a VERY liberal bent. For 30-some years it has carried articles about climate change, all of them parroting the approved catastrophism line.
Even back around the turn of the 20th Century, when Britain and Germany were in a naval arms race and the US was close behind, SciAm carried frequent articles about naval architecture and the latest in battleships and battlecruisers.
They have sometimes published good stuff, but what we see today is hardly a departure.
God/Nature did provide that humans can be XX, XY, 46,XYY, and 47,XXYY
The appearance of at least one Y chromosome with a properly functioning SRY gene makes a male, else a female.
And those extra genes cause problems for those who posses them.
Two magazines that were respectable once and are now jokes come to min – Scientific American and The Economist.
SciAm lost its way when it went all in with Global Warming propaganda. The Economist I gave up on when I saw that their views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict didn’t vary much from those of the UK Guardian or Palestinian media. To them, the only good Jew was a dead one.