Medicine
Help a Darwinist Tell Boys from Girls
Here’s a glimpse into the ideological corruption of modern biology: P.Z. Myers, author of the atheist blog Pharyngula and a leading (and loud) Darwinist, assures us that he infers nothing about human sexual identity:
When I meet people, I don’t know anything about their sperm count or their chromosome arrangement or even what their genitals look like (you don’t have to show me), so all the sex details are irrelevant to our interactions. Gender matters because we have a huge amount of social capital, some good, some bad, invested in how people present themselves, and also because those gender signifiers are diverse and do a better job of reflecting how people see themselves in society, and how society sees them.
You know, when a population is identified as a discrete binary of two kinds of individuals, male and female, my usual thought is that the next step is to pair up individuals in bottles and do a genetic cross. That’s not how we treat human beings in our communities.
A Matter for Linguists
It’s risible that Myers — a professor of biology — claims to be unaware of rudimentary facts about the biology of people he meets. He is uncertain whether a woman he meets has female organs or a man has male organs. While it’s possible that we are misled, we can be quite sure about the chromosomes or sexual organs of the vast majority of people with whom we interact. We can be more sure about the biological sexual identity of people we encounter each day than we can be sure, for example, of the number of eyes or legs or lungs or kidneys they have — after all, it is not uncommon that people have prosthetic eyes or limbs or lack a lung or a kidney. Yet nearly all of the men and women we meet have chromosomes and organs to match.
Gender is a matter for linguists or sociologists, not for biologists. It is a fundamental fact of human biology that human sex is binary. There are intersex people — born that way — but intersex is a medical disorder, not an event on a normal spectrum, and “intersex” implies the reality of human sexual binary.
What Myers is doing here is imposing his own ideological bias on biological science. Biology is infested with this abuse: atheists and materialists and leftists impose their ideological presuppositions on the science, misrepresenting science in order to advance a metaphysical or political agenda.
Almost Without Exception
It is a scientific fact that human beings are, almost without exception, biologically male or female. It is a scientific fact that human life begins at conception. It is a scientific fact that intelligent design is the most reasonable inference for many aspects of living things.
The infestation of biological science with gender ideology is just the latest iteration of the imposition of metaphysical or political ideology on science.
We should call gender ideology and atheist ideology and materialist ideology just what they are: metaphysical and political biases imposed on science. Real science should be free of such bias, and just follow the evidence where it leads.
Photo: P.Z. Myers, by Mark Schierbecker [CC BY-SA].