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.
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:
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.
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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