Why?
People’s bodies are still organized around the production of either sperm or ova, even if they’re unable to reproduce due to a developmental issue. You can call that a third category if it’s useful to you, but that doesn’t form a third sex as understood by biologists.
Intersex is a confusing term, and doesn’t dispute the binary. People are still male or female, with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disorders_of_sex_development
From the author of that paper:
https://xcancel.com/ClaireAinsworth/status/888365994577735680
In your piece ‘Sex Redefined’ are you making the claim there are more than 2 sexes?
No, not at all. Two sexes, with a continuum of variation in anatomy/physiology.
Do you have a particular edge case in mind? One that’s commonly brought up is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovotesticular_syndrome, but that doesn’t fall outside the sex binary. Having a bit of nonfunctional tissue doesn’t affect one’s sex.
Colors aren’t a great analogy either, because in anisogamous species, gametes are strictly binary. There’s sperm and ova, with 0 overlap and 0 other options. “Purple gametes” just don’t exist.
This also isn’t my opinion, this is the accepted definition in the field of biology.
This is often a point of confusion, but human sex is binary. There’s edge cases that require clarification as to how they fit into the binary, but don’t disprove it.
Human sexuality overall is complex and that’s why we differentiate gender from sex. The sex binary and gender spectrum complement each other though, and don’t clash.
If you’re interested in learning more, here’s some background reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonochorism
We fall into that category, where we have two body plans, each organized around producing either sperm or ova. Other species have more body plans, such as recognizably distinct males, females, and hermaphrodites:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trioecy
Those species are a good contrast. Humans don’t have that variation, and so sex is binary in humans.
There’s literature that explains this specifically in detail, though most of it doesn’t really explicitly talk about it, much like math papers don’t generally explain that integers can be added together.
I think we agree. Maybe I was misreading the above comment, but I was just clarifying that “transform” in that sense for chickens is not actually changing sex, and so is a different situation than clownfish.
I’m not aware of that being an actual change in sex. The hen can develop male characteristics, but won’t produce functional sperm.
Male seahorse get pregnant, but that doesn’t make them trans, they’re unambiguously male. This is a great example of why sex is defined by gamete size. If it weren’t, we couldn’t talk about males and females in any useful way across the animal kingdom.
Clownfish would be a better example as they’re sequential hermaphrodites, but that doesn’t have any bearing on the human sex binary.
She’s not wrong, but it’s not something to aspire to. Same as “You can be a pedophile if you’re a corrupt fascist dictator”
That can’t be. I’ve been reliably informed by lemmy.ml that China is only interested in peaceful activities and can’t possibly have any military ambitions 🙃
No worries, I can also be slow to respond. There’s a few things at play here:
Neutral mutations can become beneficial later on. It’s not just about the genes, it’s also about the environment. Even deleterious mutations can become beneficial, like sickle cell disease likely being selected for due to its protection against malaria.
Following from that, deleterious/neutral/beneficial are pretty loose categories, and it’s not even really correct to think of them as categories. It’s more about how beneficial it is. Sickle cell disease is bad, but better than dying of malaria.
Beneficial mutations can be really beneficial. Once somebody has them, they can spread like wildfire through the population. One example is the ability to digest lactose as an adult. It’s “worth” lots of “failures” to get that mutation (using those terms loosely and without value judgement). An analogy might help here, think about it kind of like this slime mold searching for food. The tips have a lot of churn and waste, but the food it finds is worth doing all that work. You can think of the beneficial mutations as the branches that are kept.
(Note that evolution isn’t directed by “something”, even as simple as a slime mold, it’s a description of a physical process, like gravity, so the analogy is loose)
We’ve seen beneficial mutations happen in person, and shows another example of how useful beneficial mutations can be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment. The E. coli evolved the ability to digest a new substance they couldn’t before. The experiment also touches on neutral mutations sticking around.
The distinction you’re drawing between micro evolution and macro evolution relies on an assumption that either there are different kinds that are inherently distinct, or some sort of “system” that prevents micro evolution from progressing into macro evolution. For the prior, I’ve never seen a defense of that that doesn’t rely on the supernatural, and for the latter, what happens when the system itself changes due to evolution?
In my personal experience, the strongest argument against any radical move away from the current general scientific worldview consensus is that everything generally fits together. Sure, the estimated age of the universe might be adjusted slightly from 13.7B to 13.8B years, or the Jurassic might actually be estimated slightly wrong. But across all evidence we have, the current scientific understanding across a diverse range of disciplines is approximately correct. Nobody is counting tree rings and saying “Wait a minute, these show the Earth is 6,000 years old!”. Nobody is dating rocks and saying “Hold on, this dates as twice as old as the universe!”. Note that you’ll find claims of things like fossilized tracks of humans walking next to dinosaurs, but those don’t pan out
That treatment has been done. From the same page:
https://talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB101.html
Most mutations are neutral. Nachman and Crowell estimate around 3 deleterious mutations out of 175 per generation in humans (2000). Of those that have significant effect, most are harmful, but the fraction which are beneficial is higher than usually though. An experiment with E. coli found that about 1 in 150 newly arising mutations and 1 in 10 functional mutations are beneficial (Perfeito et al. 2007).
The harmful mutations do not survive long, and the beneficial mutations survive much longer, so when you consider only surviving mutations, most are beneficial.
The analogy to a messy room fails. I recommend you read this (and the rest of the archive, it’s great stuff):
https://talkorigins.org/indexcc/CF/CF001.html
Of note is “The Earth is not a closed system”
Realizing that the root cause is just because you want it to be true is fine, commendable even. Just don’t try to justify it post hoc with sciency-sounding arguments.
I disagree with everything you’ve said, but upvoted because you answered the question.
When military action is more beneficial and profitable to China, they will not hesitate to use it.
If China tried to invade a country, that would give the US an excuse to come to that country’s defense, and China does not have the resources to deal with that. Since they can’t use hard power, they’re using soft power.
Expecting altruism in geopolitics is hopelessly naïve.
They don’t have capacity to deal with the US intervening. If not for that, they would 100% be steamrolling everything they could. They’ve done it many times before and they’ll do it again, just like everybody else in history.
The “proof” consisted solely of checking that the passport said “F”, which is what Khelif’s says due to being incorrectly assigned female at birth. That’s why new verification requirements are being added, because the old ones were laughably bad.
Khelif is biologically male, as verified by several independent sex tests (i.e. has testes, produces sperm, went through male puberty). Nobody that has seen the results will go on record saying that Khelif is female, but several different people have publicly stated that they’ve seen the tests and Khelif is male. The IOC itself admitted that it’s a DSD issue (read: biologically male), and Khelif keeps chickening out when it comes to sex verification tests for some strange reason, even trying to fight new policies that require them going forward.
Why bother trying to push a false narrative? We went through the same process with Caster Semenya (“oh just a woman with high testosterone”) who turned out to be biologically male as well and even fathered two children. What do you get out of deluding yourself?
Apart from ad hominems, your entire argument is based on being incorrect about how Islam views intersex people? Islam has policies that are pragmatic for the time period they were invented in, but are based on logic like “if they have to pee sitting down then they’re women”.
Completely inadequate for ensuring fairness in sports, and Algeria would have 0 issues with a biological male representing them in women’s sports if approved by a fatwa relying on such primitive logic.
A better analogy for the author’s clarification would be “Red and blue, each with a continuum of variation in hue”. There’s still no purple, just different shades of red and different shades of blue. I don’t really have more to add beyond pointing out that this is the author of the paper directly clarifying that point.
You’re free to invent whatever categories you find useful of course. But biologists will continue to recognize human sex as binary, because that is a useful description of the reality they encounter.