The annals of pseudoscience have some astonishing entries.
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.
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.
Snark and clever quips in support of a narrative do not equate to facts.
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