Neil deGrasse Tyson Veers Out of Lane, Crashes into Biology with Nonsense About Chromosomes
And in terms of astronomy and physics, an expert on Pluto asserts it is a planet, after Tyson helped to demote its status.
Legal Insurrection readers may recall that famed evolutionary biologist Dr. Richard Dawkins appeared to have had his account deleted by Facebook when he dared to post about the physical realities of human sex chromosomes XX and XY.
His account returned shortly after the move was challenged by Dawkins and widely mocked on the internet.
This week, another scientist offered his hot take on the subject on social media.
Physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson veered out of his lane and decided to share his thoughts about chromosomes and gender.
Hint: They don’t align with Dawkins’ assessment.
Science has become the new public sphere religion, and it’s evolved into a cult where there can be 57 genders and things like chromosomes don’t matter anymore.
Neil deGrasse Tyson thinks things like DNA don’t determine gender. Oh no. Gender is now determined by how you feel on any given day.
Neil deGrasse Tyson takes pride in “communicating science”. Here he explains that XX/XY chromosomes don't determine if you are male or female, and instead, each day you can wake up and decide that “today I feel like I am female or male” 🤯
This is the state of science today 🤡 pic.twitter.com/qui5sBtFPe
— Dr. Eli David (@DrEliDavid) August 15, 2024
The origin of the remarks appears to be when Tyson discussed transgenderism on “TRIGGERnometry,” a free speech YouTube show run by British satirist Konstantin Kisin.
Kisin pressed Tyson on criticism posed by the idea of biological males competing on women’s teams. At one point, Tyson spoke in an elevated tone, appearing to state that the entire sports infrastructure should be reconsidered to ensure inclusion and fairness for all.
“One of your functions over time has been to communicate scientific knowledge to the public,” Kisin said. Kisin then asked Tyson about his belief that gender exists “on a spectrum.”
Kisin was referring to Tyson stating on TikTok, “The XX, XY chromosomes are insufficient because when we wake up in the morning, we exaggerate whatever feature we want to portray the gender of our choice. Suppose no matter my chromosomes today I feel 80% female, 20% male. Now I’m going to I’m going to put on makeup. Tomorrow. I might feel 80% male; I’ll remove the makeup, and I’ll wear a muscle shirt… What business is it of yours to require that I fulfill your inability to think of gender on a spectrum?”
Tyson is certainly free to offer his opinions about subjects. However, his statements are not fact and do not trump the realities noted by serious biological scientists like Dawkins.
I want to note at this point that glamour scientists like Tyson have helped promote the ideological capture of science, undermining important fields of study and harming society as a whole. We have chronicled the issue previously:
- Study Concludes Nature’s 2020 Endorsement of Biden Hurt Trust in Science
- Former Reuters Science Writer Slams Climate Hysteria Promoted by Today’s Media
- Proof that Ideological Capture of Our Scientific Institutions Kills Innovation
- The Ideological Capture of Our Scientific Institutions Accelerates
- UN Official Says Quiet Part Out Loud: ‘We Own the Science and We Think That the World Should Know It’
One example of Tyson’s approach, which still rankles me to this day, relates to his efforts (along with those of a small group of astronomers) to demote Pluto as a planet.
Tyson started noticing that Pluto was different from the other planets in the 1990s. At the time, other ice bodies were discovered in the outer solar system that looked similar to Pluto. Those bodies were also like Pluto in another way: They crossed orbits. Tyson says Pluto was the only planet whose orbit crossed the orbit of another planet.
“It’s kind of misbehaving, if you think of it in those terms,” Tyson says.
When Tyson put together an exhibit showing the relative size of planets at the Hayden Planetarium in 2000, he decided not to include Pluto.
People continue to chide him for this move.
I don’t care what Neil deGrasse Tyson @neiltyson says. #Pluto.is my favorite planet next to ours. So there. 😛 pic.twitter.com/zzX0OP5xRX
— MaryMacElveen (@MaryMacElveen) November 9, 2023
Meanwhile, research on this fascinating planet continues. Researchers have determined that Pluto’s famous “heart” resulted from a…collision with a planetary body.
The feature is called Tombaugh Regio in honor of astronomer Clybe Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930. But the heart is not all one element, scientists say. And for decades, details on Tombaugh Regio’s elevation, geological composition and distinct shape, as well as its highly reflective surface that is a brighter white than the rest of Pluto, have defied explanation.
A deep basin called Sputnik Planitia, which makes up the “left lobe” of the heart, is home to much of Pluto’s nitrogen ice.
The basin covers an area spanning 745 miles by 1,242 miles, equivalent to about one-quarter of the United States, but it’s also 1.9 to 2.5 miles lower in elevation than the majority of the planet’s surface. Meanwhile, the right side of the heart also has a layer of nitrogen ice, but it’s much thinner.
Through new research on Sputnik Planitia, an international team of scientists has determined that a cataclysmic event created the heart. After an analysis involving numerical simulations, the researchers concluded a planetary body about 435 miles in diameter, or roughly twice the size of Switzerland from east to west, likely collided with Pluto early in the dwarf planet’s history.
Dr. Alan Stern, a planetary scientist who led NASA’s New Horizons mission, which explored the Pluto system in 2015 (so is clearly an expert on this matter), asserts that Pluto is a planet.
Stern thinks that definition of a planet is poorly worded. “The IAU’s [International Astronomical Union] definition was created by non-experts—astronomers—who study stars, galaxies and black holes,” he said. “They botched it.”
He thinks the IAU overacted because they were horrified by the idea that there could be hundreds of small planets beyond the orbit of Neptune in the Kuiper Belt. “The purpose of the IAU in creating this definition was to limit the number of planets in our Solar Systems so that school kids wouldn’t have to memorize long lists of planets,” he said. “Astronomers became afraid of astronomically large numbers.”
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Comments
How do you tell if a chromosome is male or female?
Pull down it’s genes
It’s a good thing that Neil deGrasse Tyson wasn’t an influence on Aristotle. If he were, we may now be waking up each morning and deciding whether the Earth is flat or round on that day.
Actually, Neil, it’s pretty simple in terms of genetics. Absent some genetic abnormality such as androgenic/estrogenic insensitivity disorders (which are really quite rare—as in less than 5 births per 100,000 for androgenic insensitivity; even rarer for estrogenic), XX pretty much denotes a female and XY denotes a male. Any extra chromosome, called Trisomy syndromes, are serious disorders which cause severe physical disabilities and shortened lifespans with no known treatment options as cures. Not even gene therapy. So, Neil, don’t screw around in areas which you physicists and mathematicians are NOTORIOUSLY BAD at—biology, medicine and the life sciences. You just make bigger fools of yourselves when you do. Stick to cosmology or whatever field of physics you are in, and we physicians won’t try to explain cold, dark matter or event horizons.
Neil deGrasse Tyson = AA “scientist”
True, and an arrogant tool at that.
Hey Neil, how about I don’t tell you about astrophysics, and you don’t tell me about genes.
Why do blacks in positions of responsibility insist on demeaning accomplished blacks with their antics?
He is not really that bright in physics.
Does NG Tyson do any research at all? I only hear about him being a promoter at best.
if you have XY chromosomes, and a penis, you are a man.
If you then wake up one day and feel like you’re 80% of woman, then you are mentally ill .
It’s not that difficult.
it’s binary, you’re either a man or a woman
“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools” — Romans 1:22.
Further validations appearing daily at a “wise” chromosome-challenged individual near you.
Except you don’t need to have a penis to be male. XY chromosomes are the only requirement.
So you agree that people are sometimes mistakenly “assigned at birth” to the wrong sex, exactly as the linguistic anarchists claim?!
And someone can go through their whole life thinking they’re female, and having everyone else think they’re female, and yet in fact have been male all the time.
What about when the Y chromosome doesn’t express itself at all, so the woman doesn’t even have mannish characteristics, and is completely indistinguishable from any other infertile woman, so that it never even occurs to anyone to test her chromosomes? Do you say she’s still “really” a man?! This is as absurd as the other side’s claims.
No. If someone is anatomically female, she is female, regardless of what her chromosomes might say. For almost all of human history chromosomes were unknown, and there was no way to test for them, and yet anatomically female individuals with XY chromosomes existed and lived their entire lives with nobody doubting that they were women, albeit perhaps somewhat mannish women.
Another point: the words “male” and “female” (and their equivalents in every other language, ancient and modern) long predate any knowledge of chromosomes. Therefore the definition of the word “female” must include such people. The discovery of chromosomes can’t have changed all our languages. We continue to use those words as we always did. We now know what causes babies to be male or female, but our definitions of those words have not changed since the days when we didn’t know why this happened, we only knew that it did.
Further to the above: We know, of course, that alcohol in the bloodstream is what makes people drunk. And we are now able to measure that alcohol content, both directly by testing the blood and indirectly by testing the breath. But the alcohol is not the intoxication, it is merely the cause of the intoxication.
Suppose someone is a seasoned drinker who is well able to hold his drink. Suppose that after a heavy drinking session his blood measures 0.25% alcohol, and yet he is stone cold sober. He passes every sobriety test available. Would you claim, against all that evidence, that he is drunk “by definition”, simply because he has enough drink in him to make a normal person fall down or black out?! No. It is illegal for such a person to drive a car, because the law says so; but he is not in fact intoxicated. He is in fact sober.
Conclusion: Blood alcohol level does not define intoxication.
Also, have you ever read Catch 22? Yossarian has a normal body temperature of 101°F, which under army regs allows him to check into sick bay whenever he likes. But would you argue that he is in fact running a fever?! No. Body temperature is a way to measure fever, but it doesn’t define it.
Likewise chromosomes cause sex, and almost always correlate with it, but they don’t define it.
Flawless logic.
I do not believe that someone whose blood alcohol level is more than three times the legal limit can be “stone cold sober.” This person is imaginary and not real. The argument is far, far from “flawless.” Its initial premise is absurd. “Imagine that everyone went around wearing their underclothes on the outside…” OK, I can do that, but is it ever going to be real?
No.
Surely you know people like that, who have a high tolerance for alcohol and can hold their liquor much better than normal people.
If you don’t believe 0.25%, then make it 0.2%, or any level that would make almost everyone drunk, but not literally everyone.
In any event, it is indisputable that there do exist rare individuals who have XY chromosomes and yet are actually female. To insist that they’re “really” male just because of their chromosomes and nothing else, is stupid.
The same Neil deGrasse Tyson who has been credibly accused of rape and sexual assault by four different women?
Yes, but what’s that got to do with it? A person’s expertise and the truth or falsity of what he says has no connection to his character, or to his behavior. As Aristotle is supposed to have said, upon being discovered indulging a human appetite in a decidedly non-philosophic manner, “Right now I’m not Aristotle”.
All stories about Neil deGrasse Tyson should be headlined:
“Neil deGrasse Tyson is an idiot.”
How do you justify defining Pluto as a planet, but not Ceres, or Charon, or even Luna? Seriously, Pluto and Charon are about the same size, so how can one of them be a planet and not the other?
Ceres was very briefly considered a planet, when it was first discovered. Then more asteroids were discovered and it was decided to demote Ceres because it’s just another asteroid. In exactly the same way, Pluto and Charon are both just two more Kuiper Belt objects.
If we’d known the facts about Pluto in 1930 we’d never have called it a planet in the first place; now that we know, we’ve corrected the error, just as we did with Ceres.
Ummmm, Luna is easy. Because it’s in the orbit of Earth, not the Sun.
But it figures you’d come out on the side of pedantry in that debate.
Pluto and Charon are in orbit around each other, just as are Terra and Luna. The only difference is that Pluto and Charon are of similar size, while Terra and Luna are not Thus one can say that Luna orbits Terra, while one cannot say that Charon orbits Pluto.
Under the currently accepted definition, Luna is a dwarf planet, exactly like Pluto, Charon, and Ceres.
No, Earth and Luna “orbit each other” in the same sense that Earth and a Starlink satellite “orbit each other”, with the system barycenter actually inside the earth itself. In other words, Luna orbits Earth and not the other way around. The barycenter of the Plutonian system is not within either body.
That’s why I wrote “and even Luna”. Because the case for considering Luna a dwarf planet isn’t as obvious as it is for Pluto and Charon.
And that’s also why I wrote “Thus one can say that Luna orbits Terra”. It’s a valid statement, because Terra is so much bigger that the point they’re both orbiting is inside Terra.
In any case, the point here is not Luna but Pluto and Charon. It’s completely impossible to call one of them a planet and not the other, or to classify them differently at all. Whatever you call Pluto, you have to call Charon the same thing.
“Luna”? “Shoot for the Luna” ? “One of these days, Alice, one of these days . . . , straight to the Luna”?
The Luna landah? The space mission from Boston?
Pahk the Luna Landa over there…
In the context of a discussion of planets and their moons, “the moon” is an ambiguous term. Capitalizing it helps, but it still remains more ambiguous than necessary. Calling it by its actual name solves that problem.
In other contexts no such ambiguity exists. There is only one moon that could be meant, so calling it “the moon” is fine and normal.
If XX/XY aren’t biological then, from his thinking, Pluto isn’t a planet. Yes, a long standing debate on whether Pluto fits this or that definition. In between “planetoid” is better for our far flung neighbors.
That’s the only reason for including the segway in the article I guess; to highlight the debate over a definition.
But Leslie Eastman, it does still does not fit. Only if NG Tyson had posited that Pluto is a planet if he wakes up feeling like a planet.
Segway?! Are you leading Segway tours on Pluto?!
Pluto’s chromosomes are yet to be determined.
1. The definition of planet that has been used from the start of modern astronomy to this day does not include Pluto. The fact that Neil DeGrasse Tyson has discovered and converted to a new religion does not change that, and even if you could impeach scientific discoveries by the character of the people who make them Tyson wasn’t even the lead author.
2. This shows why we can’t allow the left to continue to monopolize academia, and why say LAWS and REGULATIONS by our side to restrict their current monopoly are needed. Do you want Neil DeGrasse Tyson teaching that male and female/man and woman are just states of mind you could change at will or do you want the biological definition to be upheld?
Actually, it’s a dwarf planet and that has never changed.
The whole “Pluto is not a planet” thing is just Tyson’s attempt to self-promote, which he does in abundant frequency.
I wrote incompletely. It has never changed *since its reclassification over a decade ago….it would need another vote to reclassify again.
No.
Science is not about voting.
Pluto is a planet.
Ceres is a part of the fifth planet, which is now an asteroid belt.
No it is not. The idea that the asteroids are the remains of some ancient fifth planet is a relic of the early 19th century. There was never any fifth planet, and the asteroids were never part of any planet; they formed in place by the same process of accretion that formed all the planets, but the perturbations caused by Jupiter’s gravity prevented them from forming a single planet.
And no, Pluto is not a planet and never was one. The idea that it was one was simply mistaken, just like the idea that Ceres was a planet. And just as, when the mistake about Ceres was discovered, it was no longer classified as a planet, the same eventually happened to Pluto.
Clearly, you know very little about science as a philosophy. It determines how we should approach the study of nature. We use its method simply because it works better than others we’ve tried. In science, things which people believed to be true for hundreds or even thousands of years are suddenly swept away into the “does not work” pile. Think about gravity and relativity. Newton’s view was discovered to be just a special case of a much broader principle at the start of the 20th century after hundreds of years of holding sway. How did that happen?
Simple. The scientists “voted” with their own research interests. Science is a means of determining “truth” but scientific “truth” is never absolute. All “truth” is open to question. All of it.
Faith and the “truth” it provides is real, but of little use if you want to go to the moon.
Dwarf planets aren’t planets.
A planet clears it’s orbit.
Pluto does not do that.
It isn’t just a Tyson thing.
It also wasn’t the first time something was reclassified in light of new discoveries. Ceres was classified as planet when discovered in 1801 but was reclassified when new discoveries debunked the idea of Ceres as a planet.
If it had been just Tyson Pluto would still be classified as a planet.
I hope he doesn’t mind getting the treatment he gave to crazy man Terrence Howard when he dissected that dude’s wackadoo theories on physics.
No, he is not free to offer his opinions when even stating facts get one purged from social media (as you point out with Dawkins). Tyson is looking out for his career is all.
Meanwhile in the UK, people are being jailed for posting opinions on Facebook that displease the government. We are not too far behind and Tyson can clearly sense things that we refuse to believe can happen here.
No, we’re not “too far behind”; we’re not even on that road. The difference is that we have protection of the freedom of speech firmly embedded in our laws, while the UK never has had that.
The most basic principle of the UK constitution is that Parliament is sovereign, and can do whatever it likes. If it wants to allow slavery it can do so, and it if wants to ban it it can do that too. If it wants to round up the Jews and gas them, it can do that, just as it can fire the king if it wants to. And therefore it can ban speech and that becomes the law.
The most basic principle of our constitution is that Congress has only limited powers, and there are things it can’t do, either because it hasn’t been authorized to do them, or because it is specifically prohibited from doing them, which overrides any general authorization it may have. And one of the things it’s explicitly prohibited from doing is abridging the freedom of speech, even if doing so is “necessary and proper” to carrying out some purpose that it is authorized to pursue, unless there is literally no other way to achieve a legitimate purpose, and the abridgment is strictly tailored to what is necessary to achieve it.
Painful to watch someone beclown himself. If I wake up thinking I’m 80% a kangaroo, should I start hopping? If I wake up thinking I’m Napoleon, what does that make me? A delusional nutcase.
Tyson is more a showman than a physicist— like Carl Sagan who went crazy in later life suing Apple and getting laughed out of court. I can’t forgive Tyson for ruining the Hayden Planetarium. I lived about ten blocks north of the Planetarium, and went there regularly as a kid. In the 1950s the Planetarium was serious. A real astronomer gave lectures in the big dome theater using the Zeiss projector. You also got a pre-lecture in the Copernican Room which a Mosaic floor. On the way upstairs to the dome one passed an amusing sign “To Solar System and Rest Rooms.” Go here to see the way it was: https://playingintheworldgame.com/2014/11/25/memories-of-the-hayden-planetarium/
I went back in the 1990s with my daughter to see the whole place transformed into junk. The Copernican Room had a Star Trek exhibit. No lecture. The big dome had no lecture, just a recording with projected slides onto the dome, and no use of the Zeiss Projector. Today the old building has been demolished and replaced by the Rose Center for Earth and Space— A Disneyland like exhibition. All entertainment, no education or science.
I got my start in a scientific career at age 8 at the Hayden Planetarium. Now Tyson shows what he is, a nutcase entertainer.
obama turned nasa into a mu slim playground
what do you expect from these racist losers!!
Tyson’s great pickup line– Hey baby, want to see my Nobel Prize.
I suspect he would not be able to say such if he were a white guy.
If what Tyson says is valid, then a male heavyweight fighter can wake up in the morning and decide he’s a lightweight and then fight in that division?
The reason why men and women are separated in boxing is the same reason why their are weight categories in the sport – there’s a generally true belief that hitting power is related to weight and sex.
they are coming for your bank accounts
Guy reminds of a male Kamala Harris. Lots of words that mean little, except to himself.
“What business is it of yours to require that I fulfill your inability to think of gender on a spectrum?”
It’s no business at all until you go on the air and pretend you know what you’re talking about and then insist that I believe you. If you, Dr. Tyson, want to wake up and put makeup on, it’s no business of mine, I don’t care what you do. Just because you have a PhD after your name doesn’t make you knowledgeable in everything.
Read Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society.
I don’t think that it was intentional but the argument put forward by Neil deGrasse Tyson that one’s gender can be determined at a whim (F today and M tomorrow) is about as good an argument for the worthlessness of the concept of one’s gender as differentiated from one’s sex. By his characterization, there can be no objective test of one’s gender and therefore it cannot be a useful concept for legal distinctions.
In contrast, one’s sex can be objectively determined. And because of our freedoms, we can recognize that there may be overlaps between the preferred professions and behaviors of the sexes. Not all boxers are males and not all nurses are females.
But let us not require others to subscribe to our delusions.
“What business is it of yours to require that I fulfill your inability to think of gender on a spectrum?”
Ah, but exactly who is it trying to require something of someone else?
Is it normal people requiring “transgendered” to stop playing dress up and act like a man/woman?
No.
It is the “transgendered” that wear a dress and try to require everyone else to pretend that they are actually a woman; or cut off their breasts and require everyone else to call them “sir”.
Pure projection. The only requirement we place on anyone is that they refrain from shoving their fetish/mental illness/insecurity in our face and demand that we pretend that they’re normal.
Oh…and to stop beating up actual women would be good too.
I note one Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, a biologist favored by Stalin. His ideas were wrong, but they became state policy and those who did not publicly support them ended up in the GULAG. As always in a totalitarian regime, if state policy changes then the underlying “science” changes regardless of reality, and if you do not keep up you paid the price.
For the last generation or so, “science” has had to agree with the ideology in power. It is not going to get better, and Tyson is just keeping up with the current temporary reality.
Subotai Bahadur
Tyson is woke joke. He probably does it for the money.
I always assume that Tyson knows his “science authority” career depends on carefully following the fads of the left. And the longer Tyson does this, the more his mind will reflexively work that way until he is unable to realize he has been corrupted.
Letters in front of and behind your name means you have an education, not necessarily you’re smart. A deep voice and pleasing appearance will have some people believe what you spout. Be careful what you believe.
My 1971 Oxford English Dictionary defines “gender” as “sex”–no reference whatsoever to “sexual orientation’.
With “gender”, as with “racism” and other words, the left has corrupted the meanings to suit their agenda.