Amy A: uuuuuh — Subium • Bluesky web client

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Poor Richard so busy doing science that he’s only read up to the year 2000 of History

Dicky has long stopped doing science. He is more like the JK Rowling of science these days.

He's absolutely right in the data that there is a small percentage of people born intersex (about 2%). His comparison on sizes is completely wrong. But also his conclusion is REALLY wrong. The fact that a small percentage are born intersex doesn't negate their existence... that's just bad science.

"Penguins are only a small fraction of birds so penguins do not exist."

The smallest possible fraction of a population is 1 person, so can we safely assume that by his own logic, Richard Dawkins doesn't exist?

Dark matter/Dark energy makes up 95% of the universe. The matter we understand makes up only 5%, so nothing exists, really. It's all a lie.

Literally a gag from the opening of The Hitchhiker’s Guide; that the universe actually contains no life, no money, and no sex because any finite quantity in an infinite universe is so small as to make no odds.

Indeed! Though I daresay Dawkins isn't being Adams' level of clever/cheeky. ;)

Using Dawkins's logic, Finland doesn't exist

His argument immediately below that tweet is that 2% is too large because it counts Kleinfelter and Turners and those shouldn't count because reasons.

"Well sure, if we count ALL these possible intersex conditions as intersex, it might count. But if we DON'T... "

“If we exclude all the unjust wars we can see that the US only engaged in righteous warfare.”

"Assume a spherical cat..."

His argument seems to be that sex can be solely and entirely determined by primary sexual characteristics, and by extension, that this is the only relevant or useful definition of sex. It seems an odd position for the man who wrote The Extended Phenotype to take.

I never knew that turner syndrome was intersex.

Is a molehill 2% the volume of the twin towers

I mean... are we talking regular moles here? Or some sort of gargantuan, giant space mole? 'Cause regular moles? No chance. But maybe Dawkins knows something about moles I don't.

yeh i just dont see a basis for granting dawkins being accurate in any part of this, because hes even got the scale wrong, never mind whatever flawed logic he then extracts from it

Hence my saying that he's right that there's a small percentage (I'd say 2% is small), but that he's wrong about the scale of small and everything else...

And never met the 7 sex/gender categories of the Talmud, eg

Even on a more basic level - apparently the level of biologically intersex people is ~2%. That's around one-in-fifty people. I mean, that's not a statistical rounding error; that's on average at least one for every double-decker bus or train carriage you've ever ridden

Intersex people are about as frequent as redheads are (worldwide).

So if 10% of the population is left handed, we can assume about half of that is women. That means there's an intersex person for every 2-3 left handed women in the world. Obviously, that's a lot of fuckin people. Of course we shouldn't just ignore their existence.

So many spectrums everywhere in the world! Stats on left-handers are skewed a bit because many people were corrected out of it, and some folks are ambidextrous (and some are cross-dominant: I write with my left hand, but determine positions with the info from my right eye)

And therefore intersex people are not – in comparison to the old World Trade Centre towers (about 104 floors each) – a literal 'medium sized molehill', but rather something a bit more than four storeys high. Not a skyscraper, but far from insignificant.

could we just dig the molehill and put Dawkins in it?

...got to be worth a try.

Hah, I like the analogy

Jews are ~2.4% of the US population. Muslims are ~1.3%. Are we also irrelevant? Where is his line? Utter absurdity.

So about a 10m molehill, I'm concerned at the size of the moles that come out of that "medium" mole hill

Nah intersex ppl always been in history bookshop.org/p/books/tran...

Trans Talmud: Androgynes and Eunuchs in Rabbinic Literature a book by Max K. Strassfeldbookshop.org Trans Talmud places eunuchs and androgynes at the center of rabbinic literature and asks what we can learn from them about Judaism and the project of transgender history. Rather than treating these fi...

They're terrified of post modernism and that's basically everything after 1945.

They can and will come for physics too once they recognise the fact that it has also proven that the claims of total objective certainty they rely on are impossible.

He’s vehemently defended eugenics, conceding it’s morally wrong, but claiming it’s effective, using as his proof selective dog breeding. It’s not like that’s known for having all sorts of unintended negative health effects for entire breeds of dog or anything. Certainly not. He’s not doing science

Never Remember Yet

In case anyone is having a hard time picturing it, I drew the graph he proposed:

There's also the fact that he doesn't understand the difference between sex and gender.

Never Forget 🏳️‍⚧️

Statistical correctness, but inhumane. I tend to agree with Dawkins in some regard to this on a factual level, but there's a layer of interpretation he's missing. In the end, it's a straw man. He would build more bridges with this: "Intersex people are human."

When you're talking about a set of every human being, you can't dismiss their existence as mere outliers.

Have you ever seen a molehill more than 5 metres high? Dawkins isn't even factually correct on the proportion of intersex people, let alone his assertion that sex is still binary even though intersex people exist

What is the proportion of intersex people as a proportion of all people?

Most estimates have it between 1% and 2%. 1 World Trade Centre was 417 metres tall (sorry, got the wrong building height on the first attempt)

As an evolutionary biologist, I wish he'd take some time to explain how a human brain (his) evolved into frozen mashed potatoes.

Mostly through melting, I think.

Someone who is smart in one field but is a complete dipshit when he talks about literally anything else outside of that narrow area of inquiry.

Covid?

No, he’s been like this for a long time.

Having a stroke can really fuck up anybody's brain

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