Anthropology Associations Double Down on Their Cancellation of Science-Based Panel
It turns out that one “long covid” effect is the use of the term “settled science” when dismissing the reasonable counter-arguments of those who disagree with politicized pseudoscience.
This week, in my defense of real science, I took up the story of anthropologists who were slated to give a talk about the importance of biological sex at an anthropology conference. They were canceled when conference organizers asserted their presentation could allegedly cause harm to the Trans and LGB community.
The move flies in the face of decades of science, which uses forensic techniques on skeletal remains of an individual to identify whether it is male or female. The analysis is based on a number of genetically determined characteristics.
The presentation was going to focus on sex, which is strictly binary and genetic:
Two of the chromosomes (the X and the Y chromosome) determine your sex as male or female when you are born. They are called sex chromosomes:
Females have 2 X chromosomes.
Males have 1 X and 1 Y chromosome.The mother gives an X chromosome to the child. The father may contribute an X or a Y. The chromosome from the father determines if the baby is born as male or female.
In the wake of the controversy, which has blasted much deserved heat on the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA), the groups doubled-down on the decision to silence professional scientists whose work didn’t align with the narrative du jour.
…The session was rejected because it relied on assumptions that run contrary to the settled science in our discipline, framed in ways that do harm to vulnerable members of our community.
It commits one of the cardinal sins of scholarship—it assumes the truth of the proposition that it sets out to prove, namely, that sex and gender are simplistically binary, and that this is a fact with meaningful implications for the discipline. [emphasis mine]
Apparently, one of the “long covid” effects is the use of the term “settled science” when dismissing the reasonable counter-arguments of those who disagree with politicized pseudoscience.
The panelists already affirmed the focus of their work on the immutable sex characteristics driven by genetics. The organizations are conflating sex with gender roles as a way to deflect from their disgraceful position.
… Around the world and throughout human history, there have always been people whose gender roles do not align neatly with their reproductive anatomy.
There is no single biological standard by which all humans can be reliably sorted into a binary male/female sex classification. On the contrary, anthropologists and others have long shown sex and gender to be historically and geographically contextual, deeply entangled, and dynamically mutable categories.
The social media response to the American Anthropological Association has been brutal.
If an organization such as yours cannot make a basic distinction on biology, a framework by which the organization itself was founded, then this is just a pseudo scientific field.
— Gemel Walters (@shinakira00) September 29, 2023
— Adam Kissel (@kissel_adam) September 29, 2023
Pseudo-scientific nonsense. May as well call yourself the Flat Earth Society.
— Lee Duncan (@OnTheMysteries) September 29, 2023
CASCA was also slammed hard.
You people have lost the plot and can't be trusted with facts.
— DWatters 🟣⚪️🟢. 🦖 (@dwatters60) September 28, 2023
Evolutionary biologist Colin Wright has refuted the entire fiction of non-binary sex in his outstanding Substack column, Debunking Pseudoscience: ‘Multimodal Models of Animal Sex.’ He offered the following analysis of the anthropology organizations’ explanation.
The statement accuses the panel of “transphobia,” and asserts that it “relied on assumptions that run contrary to the settled science in our discipline” and would harm “vulnerable members of our community.”
They further accuse the panel of committing “one of the cardinal sins of scholarship,” such as assuming that “sex and gender are simplistically binary, and that this is a fact with meaningful implications for the discipline.” The panel, however, was only about sex, not gender.
The statement goes on to make irrelevant claims about “people whose gender roles do not align neatly with their reproductive anatomy,” and then falsely asserts that “There is no single biological standard by which all humans can be reliably sorted into a binary male/female sex classification” (yes there is, and it’s based on the gamete a person can or would produce). They also make the absurd claim that sex a “dynamically mutable” category in humans.
As if these moves weren’t contemptible enough, in July, the AAA membership voted to endorse a resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions.
An all-member referendum took place by electronic ballot between June 15 and July 14. Thirty-seven percent of AAA’s eligible members voted, with 2,016 members (71% of the votes) supporting the resolution, and 835 members (29% of the votes) voting to oppose it.
“This was indeed a contentious issue, and our differences may have sparked fierce debate, but we have made a collective decision and it is now our duty to forge ahead, united in our commitment to advancing scholarly knowledge, finding solutions to human and social problems, and serving as a guardian of human rights,” said AAA President Ramona Pérez. “AAA’s referendum policies and procedures have been followed closely and without exception, and the outcome will carry the full weight of authorization by AAA’s membership.”
If there are groups more anti-science and intolerant than AAA or CASCA, I would be hard pressed to name them.
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Comments
I heard the best quote from a researcher who was confronted with the term “Settled Science”; which was “If it is settled then it isn’t science.”
Nearly all “Scientific ideas, theories, and even laws have at least had to be modified if not outright rejected.” I would venture to say, (without any research), that very few ideas that were thought of as Settled have withstood the test of time.
What they really mean is that it is “settled” political philosophy masquerading as science.
Flat-Earth used to be settled science too.
You are mostly but not entirely correct.
For example, Newtonian physics is correct in the sense that nothing we can observe on Earth is moving at relativistic speeds. It turns out that at speeds approaching the speed of light Newtonian physics breaks down,
Similarly with quantum mechanics; energy levels are continuous at any normal humanly observable levels outside of the modern laboratory, but it breaks down at atomic levels.
My comment is pedantic and I agree with your basic assertion.
Erronius
Still, it’s possible that Newtonian physics needs correction. What if the conserved quantity is not momentum, but momentum minus the momentum in some parallel universe that exists through the wormhole? As soon as we can find and measure the relevant things, we’ll discover the flaw and the physicists will get all excited and start working on the correction, within the domain in which that effective theory was formerly believed to hold.
So even the things that work the best, that we all rely on constantly, might be more interesting than we understand. To working technical people I’ve known, and I am one myself, a theory is never settled. Why promise such a thing? Others can assume what they want; we provide no guarantees.
To us it’s just a working hypothesis, and we move forward without hesitation because we need lots of working hypotheses to be able to think much at all, so we’re used to using them. And we’ve seen tons of dishonest or incompetent efforts to dismiss them, and we like them because they work amazingly well, so we’re quite jaded.
Allow me–
For example, Newtonian physics is incorrect when we can use technology to observe that things on Earth are actually moving at relativistic speeds. This is because at speeds approaching the speed of light Newtonian physics breaks down,
Similarly with quantum mechanics; at any normal humanly observable levels outside of the modern laboratory energy levels are continuous , but it breaks down at atomic levels.
This suggests that our entire understanding of physics in it’s entirety, is in a state of flux that may be perpetual.
Like that.
Newtonian physics only APPEARS to work.
Been a doctor for 50 years. The science-based stuff came in a few decades ago and just about destroyed patient care. Witness the COVID disaster.
Almost 50 years ago as a college freshman, I showed my odd intellectual taste by attending a lecture on cholesterol. Maybe someone assured me it would be interesting. Actually I think it was in a building I hadn’t been in yet and I wanted a reason to go there.
And I learned that cholesterol levels are set by a feedback process in the body, and that cholesterol is put there on purpose because you need it. Then as I learned engineering, I discovered that one doesn’t necessarily directly manipulate the “output” in order to change it in a feedback system. One usually diddles something else instead.
And so when the medical profession soon got all excited about limiting cholesterol and didn’t seem to be aware of any of this, which I as someone who had just earned the right to drink (it was 18 at the time) could understand, I started suspecting the medical profession was filled a good proportion of morons. (But it was so hard to get into med school — did the training destroy these people in the process of licensing them?)
This assumption has served me in good stead, moreso as I’ve gotten older.
I should make it clear, I am not objecting to the use of science. Wasn’t some science always used in understanding what was done in medicine? But the misapplication of science in incomplete and stupid ways is worse than nothing. Just an excuse to support a narrative.
Suppose you want to get people taking dangerous statin drugs. Tell them that it’s needed to control cholesterol. Now maybe the cholesterol doesn’t need to be controlled, and also maybe the right way to control it is by changing something else, and finally maybe there are better ways to remove it (ahem, serrapeptase) that you don’t bother to tell people about. I can say these things because I don’t have a medical license to lose.
They come up with one remedy, run some inappropriate tests, interpret them with grade school level statistical inference (medical statistics are the worst) i.e. lying with statistics, and voila you have the foundation required by “evidence based medicine” for putting the entire older population on statins.
This happened again with Covid.
I find it amusing that several have made comments on cholesterol. Cholesterol is one of the biggest scam ever put over on the global population. Cholesterol does not cause any disease. Yet I know of only one trial (Jupiter) that has been allowed publication as medical peer review is broken and paid for. I took the governments own white paper 20 years ago and using their information on cholesterol proved in Federal court that the substance is a major building block and not a disease element. Read Cholesterol Myth.
Ha! Caught you using science after all. But real science not scientism or cherrypicked malarkey.
Categorize skeletons by referencing them to a male racing bicycle seat. Do the two sitz bones fit on the seat or not.
Lysenko lives, he just moved from the USSR to the USA.
But but but if we start concluding things from bone structures, we’ll have to listen to the phrenologists!
It was once “settled science” that we could rank the intelligence of the different races by the cranial capacities of their skulls, and that American Indians were “averse to cultivation, slow in acquiring knowledge, restless, revengeful, and fond of war.” The tone of certainty is no different today when listening to Fauci (“I am the science”) or the climate cult, where one starts with the conclusion and manipulates or selects only the favorable data. Pseudoscience in the service of the will to power.
“It was once “settled science” that we could rank the intelligence of the different races by the cranial capacities of their skulls, and that American Indians were “averse to cultivation, slow in acquiring knowledge, restless, revengeful, and fond of war.” ”
And the people who can’t tell a man from a woman are the ones who decided that you can’t make a good estimation of intelligence from brain size (only in humans, of course, it works just fine in every other animal(
And I will not comment about the intelligence of a conquered people who have not yet realized that their vaunted ‘reservation sovereignty’ is a trap.
How can you tell it’s ‘pseudoscience’? If it works for every other living animal on the planet, but humans are exempt because reasons, it’s probably pseudoscience.
And, yes, Virginia, that DOES mean that humans can be bred just like dogs.
While I appreciate your comment, you have not connected your assertion of the cranial capacity or lack thereof of Amerindians with
“averse to cultivation, slow in acquiring knowledge, restless, revengeful, and fond of war.”
I know nothing about the cranial capacity of American Indians.
The ‘slow in acquiring knowledge’ assertion has been borne out by time. Amerindians are amongst the populations with the lowest of college graduation rates.
There is absolutely no doubt that American Indians were ‘fond of war’. Prior to their pacification, American Indians were amongst the most savage of human populations to walk the earth, They would torture captive white elderly ladies and infants in the most horrific fashion.
While medieval Europeans invented dastardly methods of torture, the Marquis de Sade had nothing on the Amerindians. Thumbscrews would suck, but getting tied down on the desert floor over a red ant colony is far worse.
The modern ‘ret-con’ of the behavior of American Indians as illustrated in movies such as ‘Dances with Wolves’ portraying pre-Columbian native Americans as peaceful people living in harmony with nature is a huge load of BS.
It didn’t help that Europeans brought hard alcohol to the new world before the Amerindians had even developed fermented alcohol which precluded their ability to develop some tolerance for drunkenness, but that misses the point.
The native Americans were extremely brutal and cruel. Andrew Jackson was righteous.
Erronius
This right here is PURE bunk. Literally, a hypothesis is a statement of assumed truth that is either falsified or not by the evidence. It is not a fallacy to provide evidence for or against a hypothesis. However, this particular hypothesis is more settled than the antithesis that sex is not binary.
“It commits one of the cardinal sins of scholarship—it assumes the truth of the proposition that it sets out to prove, namely, that sex and gender are simplistically binary, and that this is a fact with meaningful implications for the discipline. [emphasis mine]
Thank you for this correction. It’s real and important work to beat back the expert dishonest wordsmithing employed by those anthropologist and highlight the inherent logical flaw.