Scientific American Article Claims There’s No Difference Between Male, Female Athletes
An article’s assertion there is biological equity in female and male athletes shows what happens when a trans-activist agenda supersedes rational scientific analysis.
The annals of pseudoscience have some astonishing entries.
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Phrenology was the 19th-century belief that the shape of your skull could predict your personality.
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Flat Earth Theory was popular for a considerable time, despite the fact some ancients already recognized our planet was a sphere?
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N-rays, which were a fantasy of early 20th-century scientists, who thought they discovered a new type of radiation.
The once-respected publication Scientific American has published a paragraph that is so woke and filled with real disinformation regarding biology that it must be considered for addition to this list.
The November issue featured “The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong,” by Cara Ocobock and Sarah Lacy.
In this piece, the authors examine the example of Sophie Power, who, in 2018, ran the 105-mile Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc while breastfeeding her baby at rest stations. They attribute her endurance to estrogen.
Then Ocobock and Lacy make this claim, which is perhaps the most woke paragraph in the history of pseudoscience…yet:
“The inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.”
As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best.
Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters at women’s events because of the belief they will make women “artificially faster”, as though the women were not doing the actual running themselves.
"There are no biological differences between men and women that account for the universal trend of male athletes outperforming female athletes in just about every single athletic sport/event that exists. Its actually because men aren't allowed to be pacesetters in women's… pic.twitter.com/BlGTru9wkC
— The Heretical Liberal 🇨🇦🏳️🌈 (@Rob_ThaBuilder) October 5, 2024
I will simply note that the use of the word “inequity” here ties this rubbish to the equity agenda infiltrating scientific fields. But I digress.
In reality, serious scientists agree that men have many physical differences in height, muscle mass, upper-body strength, and other factors that boost their performance over women. Men have 25-40% more muscle mass than women, thanks to testosterone.
A piece published in “Endocrine Review” in 2018 has a detailed scientific review of biology.
Elite athletic competitions have separate male and female events due to men’s physical advantages in strength, speed, and endurance so that a protected female category with objective entry criteria is required.
Prior to puberty, there is no sex difference in circulating testosterone concentrations or athletic performance, but from puberty onward a clear sex difference in athletic performance emerges as circulating testosterone concentrations rise in men because testes produce 30 times more testosterone than before puberty with circulating testosterone exceeding 15-fold that of women at any age.
There is a wide sex difference in circulating testosterone concentrations and a reproducible dose-response relationship between circulating testosterone and muscle mass and strength as well as circulating hemoglobin in both men and women.
Physicality may be one advantage testosterone gives, but it isn’t the only one. My sport, archery, usually separates men and women for tournaments. This is because men’s longer arms and more upper body strength allow them to shoot higher arrow speeds. Higher speed leads to higher scores because higher arrow speed means less wind interference and more forgiveness for form mistakes.
But there is another fascinating difference, the details of which come courtesy of two researchers from the School of Physical Education and Health at Wenzhou University, who looked at how men and women score in recurve archery.
Our study enables us to conclude that gender differences are more pronounced in reaction to a negative result. In a situation where losing can only be avoided by winning or facing poor previous performance, female athletes have 2.4 and 3.6% lower performance than their male counterparts.
The above results indicate a gender difference in the ability to handle pressure between men and women in elite recurve archery. Similar findings on choking under pressure in archery have been discussed by Diotaiuti et al. (2021), who explored the psychological factors contributing to performance declines in high-stakes situations.
Consequently, our findings complement those of Banko et al. (2016), who found that women perform considerably worse when trailing by a substantial margin. This finding is consistent with that of De Paola and Scoppa (2017), who indicate that women can handle pressure just as well as men, as long as they are not lagging.
This research shows that men handle competition-related stress better, too.
Jonatan Pallesen, who holds a doctorate in statistical genetics, has some thoughts about how this inanity came to be.
The author of this article was predisposed to thinking that there are no biological differences.
Then she read this thing about pacesetters, in which it said that using male pacesetters would make women ‘artifically faster’. She took this to mean that there is a sort of conspiracy to make women not run as fast as they can.
She could have considered that pacesetters only run the first part of the race, and that if the pace is set too high here, the runners will run out of energy later on. But she didn’t consider that, because she was excited to see evidence for what she wanted to believe.
Probably she used this argument a number of times on her colleagues, with the punchline “as though women were not actually doing the running themselves”, to great success.
Hard competition, but this may be the worst paragraph of all time in "Scientific American".
Here is how I think it happened:
The author of this article was predisposed to thinking that there are no biological differences.
Then she read this thing about pacesetters, in which… pic.twitter.com/C9xWw9NFQ3
— Jonatan Pallesen (@jonatanpallesen) October 6, 2024
Snark and clever quips in support of a narrative do not equate to facts.
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Comments
Insane. But predictable.
Now to be known as Unscientific American, what a shame how easy it is to destroy a brand and reputation.
Everything has a finite life, including magazines. National geographic died decades ago.
SciAm went bad a LOOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGG time ago.
DEI abominates everything it touches.
It is the new Black Plague, occurring in a pandemic far worse than the so called Covid pandemic.
At least the vaccine is free: it is called common sense and reason.
Simple TEST! Get a 190 pound woman and a 190 pound man! Get the “Scientific” American “researchers” to stand ten yards away. Have the 190 pound woman run full speed and tackle the “researchers”. Then have the 190 pound man run full speed and tackle the “researchers”. Use slow motion cameras to record the impacts and resulting effects of the “researchers'” hits! Oh, why did we allow the 190 pound woman to go first? Well, if the 190 pound man went first there would be no “researchers” able to stand for the 190 pound woman hit! Do people REALLY get paid to be as stupid as those “researchers”??
Where to start…First off, there is “confirmation bias” in most of life, and then there is “Woke DEI Bias” at Scientific Insanity. The authors, no doubt recent graduates of Brown or Harvard, could not see any inconsistencies in their methods. When everything is through the lens of DEI, we end up with this drivel and FEMA driven by “emergency LGBT++equity responses. Just look at Western NC.
Based on this “logic” all male and female divisions in all sports should be dissolved.
Do ANY of these silly hustlers have a brain in their heads?
`~Rhetorical of course!~
Just because a nitwit wants something to be the way he/she dreams it, doesn’t mean this is attainable.
Have they ever heard of male muscles (you can count on a male to have considerably more than a female) or testosterone?
These twits have made a mockery of girls’ sports and stolen money and valour in their quest for the impossible but still insist their way is the only way.
They can place the pronouns they insist on where the sun DON”T shine!
It’s easy to say there is no difference between men and women when you have beclowned yourself by calling men “women,” and women “men.”
Then there is no difference!!
Scientific American also conluded there is no difference in intelligence between Kamala Harris and Albert Einstein.
That may be true – Every woke progressive is smarter than real scientists!
sarc
Well, Einstein’s been dead for almost 70 years, so…
I’d still give him the edge.
Add Eugenics to your list of pseudoscience fails at the beginning.of this article.
And add Freudian psychoanalysis.
“Aether,” also known as the fifth element or quintessence, is the material that fills the region of the universe beyond the terrestrial sphere”
The Bruce Willis documentary about the fifth element is fantastic.
Eugenics isn’t pseudoscience.
It’s just distasteful.
But if you can breed an ape for traits, you can breed a human for traits.
Add the Climate Change scam. Conscience, just computer models that idiots treat as evidence rather than theory. Plus the absurdity that the advocates claim 97% consensus but the number of models actually proliferate instead of reduce.
I feel it’s necessary to point out once again that Scientific American is neither scientific nor American. It was purchased by a German multinational publisher way back in the 1980s. Today, it’s more accurately described as a a purveyor of globalist agitprop.
And it’s called “Scientific American” only because the name “Hustler” was already taken.
Woke end in self-immolation of critique.
Alabama must have dressed the cheerleaders as football players last Saturday.
Use RICO to permanently abolish the democrat crime cabal
When seizing assets, include the propaganda assets, AKA mainstream or drive-by-media
Crime in the Dem party is so widespread that housing them will be a major problem.
Another part of the “False Religion”.
Trust the Science!!!! (or else comrade citizen).
When I was a 2nd Lt in the USMC, one of the things I liked to do on rainy days was to go to the base library and read the periodicals that I couldn’t subscribe to and two of them were “Scientific American” and “Aviation Week”. Both of these magazines have gone WOKE and are no longer credible. The articles are all slanted and support their woke agenda. It was with great sadness that I dropped my “Aviation Week” subscription after more than twenty years.
Throughout HS and after, I spent all my spare time in the biggest library in the city. Much of that time was in the business and industry section, reading both paid and controlled circulation trade magazine’s.. While the latter had a lot of company sponsored propaganda, reading all the articles did provide balance.
I saw that National Geographic had articles on the Vikings, but I didn’t want to read about all the African and Chinese Jarls that led them on raids with carefully balanced 49%-49%-2% male-female-confused crews.
Going through the OLD NatGeos from the ’20s to the 50’s was fun. I used to pour through Aviation “Leak” and Space Technology in the 60’s because they were great. These are now irrelevant. Aviation Week came out with a new mag called “Commercial Space”. I got in on the first and I think only printing…as it debuted just as Challenger went “poof”.
Hmm…
Ya’ know, I see no difference between Scientific American and Romper Room.
Romper Room is more scientifically accurate.
Women masquerading as men play real men in a lower level Spanish soccer league and proceed to lose 19-0. But, yeah, no real biological differences. It’s gonna be a long season for the bearded ladies.
https://notthebee.com/article/group-of-11-trans-men-join-spanish-soccer-league-and-get-absolutely-destroyed
US women’s national team played a Dallas U15 club team and lost 5 or 6 to 0. That got smoked by teen boys, most of whom weren’t probably even shaving yet.
Most of the women probably weren’t either!
Sorry, I got hijacked by the teaser for $100M Navy Ship With Lesbian Captain Runs Aground, Catches Fire, Sinks
This gender-crazy article is hysterical. But it’s par for the course for Scientific America, today. They are morons.
As to pacesetters, they are not allowed in certain competitions (because they are a sort of cheating). The pro track circuit allows pacesetters but the olympics does not. The pro track circuit also has, sometimes, I believe, an led track light that illuminates the world record pace (though I’m not sure if this is real or a graphic effect, as is done with swimming broadcasts).
There is no point to having a male pacesetter in a female competition since the pacesetter cannot run too fast for the competitors but has to keep a specific pace to start the race. The pacesetter only goes a couple of laps so a woman can set the correct pace for a women’s race as well as a man. Too fast a pacesetter brings a result as if there had been no pacesetter since the competitors can’t keep up and have to just lose the pacesetter, nullifying any benefit.
Pacesetters are a form of cheating – no matter who is doing the pacesetting. But for these idiots to think that this argument about guys not pacesetting for women’s track events is holding the girls back … LOL. Girls can just run in men’s events if they think they are that good. Men’s competitions have ALWAYS been the “open” competitions. Women have tried to play in the PGA. They can’t compete. Nancy Lieberman was touted as being the greatest female basketball player in history – so great that the New York Knicks gave her a try-out. It was such a joke that no one ever talked about a woman in the NBA, again. In athletic events – track and field – women cannot even come close to the men’s times to even qualify for state high school finals, let alone world class competitions.
And now, these chicks are showing the same sort of deficit in science writing 🙂
It is amazing that we have people in this world who are actually saying incredibly inane and stupid stuff like this OUT LOUD. This current population of humans – particularly in the West – consists of some of the sickest, most deranged morons that evolution has ever puked onto this planet. It is insane!! And we are going to serve as a cautionary tale (and the butt of jokes) for millenia into the future. Millenia.
You are correct. Men aren’t pacesetters in women’s events because the women typically can’t keep pace with a man’s pace in their races. You could use a man I suppose but then there would be an article condemning the male pacesetter as taunting the women.
During the Pike’s Peak Ascent race I wound up teamed with a gal. Her stride was slightly longer than mine but my cadence kept our pace in sync. I would move forward for passing as some the male runners would make it tough on women and I enforced the pass. About three miles from the finish she couldn’t keep up with the pace and we had to separate. I should have looked at her number but forgot. For the race, I set my HR in the high 160’s. When I would make a pass, it would climb above 170 and oxygen debt hit. After passing I’d set up behind the next runner using the slowed pace to drop below 168.
You might ask why there are no female players in the NFL?
Now, maybe the league has a rule, I have no idea.
But if you’ve ever met an offensive lineman it’s perfectly obvious why women should never play in that league.
They’d get killed.
I was talking to a BC football player in a bar, and I noted that his arms were bigger than most peoples thighs! He was huge!
On the other hand, Doug Flutie was shorter than me and fairly slight. Still got the job done though!
The best part of the article:
“The only reason females are slower than males is that males have male pace makers, which is unfair because male pacemakers are faster than female pace makers.”
It’s not science and a national insult to call this American.
Now, I don’t have a PhD, so maybe I’m just a dumb schlub, but…
If there’s no difference in athletic performance between men and women, why would it hold women back not to have male pace-setters? Aren’t the female pace-setters just as good?
Well I got a half dozen letters after my name and you are exactly correct. This is selection bias and would be throw out by any credible scientific journal. This is emotion based science not evidence based science, and thus it is not science
Men’s and women’s gymnastics are exactly the same, too.
I had not realized my blindness to this long-standing reality, until the editors at that august publication saw fit to bring it to my attention — something I will always feel grateful for.
Thank you to Scientific American.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Now do Power Lifting.
And putting the “men” on the balance beam will certainly separate the real ladies from the men.
Some differences are obvious and matter.
And they wonder why “Trust the Science!” doesn’t work anymore.
I trust science, but what they’re doing isn’t science, it’s politics.
I will trust a lot more when they run an experiment and publish the evidence.
“She took this to mean that there is a sort of conspiracy to make women not run as fast as they can.”
*****
For pro-level distance racing, I think male pacers should be allowed for women. It might help the very few who can challenge world records.
““The inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.”
If this were so, then there should be no discussion about male pacers and “conspiracy”, there should be plenty of women available to pace races. I think the issue with pacing is that in the women’s distance category, the number of “top” elites is quite small and those capable of pacing an elite field are in the race to win. The number of men who can run near top elite times is much larger and they are happy to be paid to pace races.
Well it seems that biology and genetics are no longer considered science
Groucho was right: That’s the silliest thing I ever hoid.
Unconfirmed reporting from PBS: Judy Woodruff is rumored to soon report that the DOJ and NIH will open a civil and criminal investigation against American men for having larger penises than American women.
My anonymous sources are quoting honest forthright Atty General Merrick Garland: “Until today, all my life, I had not realized that American men — aside from me — almost all have larger penises than American women, and I will not rest until those responsible for this inequality are brought to Justice. Without fear or favor. No expense will be spared. It’s just not acceptable in the 21st century in the United States of America.”
Tim Walz’s wife and Doug Emhoff’s wife are rumored to be unaware that any husbands were supposed to even possess a penis. Or balls. Of their own.
(Legal disclaimer: All of the above is fiction. It is actually possible that Judy Woodruff is not reporting any of that atall. And that Tim Wakz might have a penis that his wife is aware of)
This publication is junk science.
I disagree. Its no kind of science at all.
It is alphabet propaganda and nothing more, a group of mentally ill losers screaming the sky is puce, when the briefest observation conclusively proves their assertions wrong..
They why is there women’s chess? The brains are wired differently with respect to what seems rewarding to obsess on. Women go multi-tasking complexity, men go more focused abstraction. Either can do either but they differ in how rewarding it seems, and so the wrong sex drops out at the highest levels, preferring not to give up other stuff.
lol lol lol
I’m not ready to give up on phrenology.
You may be on to something. There is a self-proclaimed knucklehead among us who believes he would make a good vice president, a not unreasonable notion given the current situation.
Nah, never mind.
I want to hear the story behind this photo. Google Lens was no help because it just kept coming back to this page as the origin.
It is my own working, using Grok. I am glad you like it. I gave it a command for an image with clowns and a banner that says “Scientific American”. This is what it came back with. Thank you Elon Musk.
Very impressive effort. If I knew what I was talking about, I’d encourage you to copyright it.
It is an excellent fake. I should have looked harder at the fingers, especially the background dude on the left. That’s usually the giveaway,
It was a convention of Tim Walz impersonators celebrating his claim to have discovered a cure for cancer … but he forgot it before he could write it down. Still, a great scientific achievement for an American, if fleeting.
if you want an example of men/women competing together, look at the Bix Beiderbecke run in Davenport IA, I think it is a 7k run, not sure of the distance but they run as a group and award prizes to the first man, woman to cross the finish line. I don’t think a woman has been first first.
Sounds like they’re suggesting rape victims through the ages could have just fought off attackers with their equal muscle power if they didn’t want to be assaulted.
Archaeologists can tell male from female based on where the muscle attachments are on bones. Men have attachments that give their muscles more leverage. The idea that extra leverage doesn’t translate into real-world advantages is ludicrous.
Not to mention differences in shoulders and pelvises (pelves?). The skeleton can’t lie.
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Scientific American is decades past being taken seriously by those interested in science. It now caters to those who hold out “the Science” as authority meriting automatic credence. It is just another form of mental self-stimulation for the self-styled “woke” crowd. This article is par for the course that organization took as I cancelled my subscription.
The boys’ HIGH SCHOOL pole vault record is 19 feet 10 inches.
The women’s WORLD pole vault record is 16 feet 7 inches.
I’m waiting for a good high-school kid who lives in a woke state to “identify” as a girl and start breaking the women’s records by a couple of feet.
How about we take the authors into a bare knuckles no holds bared event that only ends by knockout/choke out? Pair them against similarly trained and similarly sized men and see how they do. Bet you they adamantly refuse to participate to put their theory to a real world practical test.
This is just another hit piece by the girl boss BS cult that women can do anything a man can do. The truth is they can’t and they don’t b/c women and men have different but complementary strength/weakness which are only fully realized when used together for the benefit of both. These sorts of feminist fanatics despise evolutionary biology precisely b/c it refutes their argument that differences between men and women are fully explained by culture/sociology imposed by the ‘patriarchy’. It’s nothing more than girl boss feminist fan fiction.
Scientific American is *NOT* a scientific journal in any sense of the word. It is, at most, a science-focused magazine on par with Popular Mechanics. People who read Scientific American like to say it’s a journal because they like to sound intelligent. Unfortunately, they sound like morons when they talk to actual scientists. Occasionally, the magazine does produce some great illustrations (or used to), but other than that, it’s far too much a vehicle for Eurosocialist polemics and propaganda than it is for conveying even a scintilla of even a reasonable, layperson level of scientific knowledge.
Scientific American is today what Omni was in the ’80s.
Omni had better science then today’s Scientific American and clearly labeled their SF as SF. And that was a lot better.
I will admit that I don’t remember Omni because it was a bit before my time. Wasn’t there another magazine called Discover that was like it too? I remember going to Scientific American for graphics for school projects because that’s the one thing they could do—good illustrations. Other than the cool graphics here and there, the articles were a bit overwrought and panicky for my taste—especially the ones focusing on overpopulation and climate.
Based on the Scientific American article it should be proposed to begin forming ground combat brigades staffed exclusively by women and the draft if sufficient women do not volunteer, overlaid by affirmative action to correct the past when men were preferred for combat over women. Watch what SA says then.
It is psychotic to think that women would run as fast as men, if they had the same rules. If you start with the fastest man, running against the fastest woman, then the second,,,all the way to the 100 millionth fastest man against the 100 millionth fastest woman–this would include people who have never trained at running or even voluntarily run 1500 meters in a row (with the only rule that the consequences of winning will be deemed to be better than the consequences of losing, there is not a chance that 100,000 women would win their race. I’d doubt that 1000 would.
A better question would be whether the 1000th best male runner is faster than any woman.
Scientific American claims the Earth is really flat.
Your headline picture should be the permanent cover photo on the now totally misnamed “Scientific” American.