Michael J. Behe's Blog, page 556

Andrew Sullivan Channels Bob Dylan

Everyone has a religion.  IOW, you gotta serve somebody.  

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Logic and first principles, 5: The mathemat-ICAL ordering of reality

As we continue to explore the significance of logic, the pivotal importance of Mathematics (and of the mathemat-ICAL ordering of reality) has come up. Where, we can best understand mathematics in two frames by using a definition with a bracket: Mathematics is [the study of] the logic of structure and quantity.

The study part is cultural, the logic part speaks to an intelligible rational framework inextricably embedded in the existence of a world with distinct identity and then with structures amenable to quantification. So, let us headline a comment from the thread on no 4:

87: >>Let us take a key observation:

There is order in the universe and we are good at modelling it mathematically. But that doesn’t mean that mathematics exists without humans.

Here we see the concept that mathematics is essentially a human
practice, a study. The contrast, there is order in the cosmos then uses a
shift in terminology that misses a key aspect of that order — it is in
material part inherently quantitative and structural. That is, it is of
the substance that we may appropriately call mathematical.

Not that the labelling creates the reality as an inner phenomenon
locked away from the world of things in themselves by the ugly gulch,
that collective labelling (see the slippery slope to solipsism?) is a
response to discovery.

We must face that, starting with that once any distinct world is, that means that there is inherently a contrast between some A and what is not A, ~A. Existence as a distinct physical entity or even as an idea immediately has as corollary, distinction from what is not the same. We therefore see existence vs non-existence, nullity. We see existence, unity. We see contrast thus duality. The numbers 0, 1, 2 swim into view, not the labels [numerals] we happen to find convenient, the substance.

[Let’s add, how this leads to the construction of the counting numbers:

{} –> 0

{0} –> 1

{0,1} –> 2

{0,1,2} –> 3

. . . 

Where, we may go beyond, to the panoply of numbers great and small, the surreals:]

This surfaces the question, what is truth. Again, not the label but
the substance. To which Aristotle’s response speaks: truth says of what
is that it is; and of what is not, that it is not. Truth accurately
describes reality. It is attainable by us in key cases, e.g. error
exists is undeniably true. And as that is so, knowledge exists as
warranted, reliable truth that we acknowledge [to know, one has to
accept, to actually believe], in this case to utter certainty.

Of course, nowadays, it is a struggle to form a coherent concept of
truth, warrant, knowledge. That is how impoverished our sadly suicidally
bent civilisation has become. And of course, yes these are going to
seem strange and will be hard or even bitter to swallow. That is going
to take time.

Now, back to the mathematical substance of reality. We see from
distinct identity of a world, that the natural numbers are necessarily
substantially present given the force of that identity. But, isn’t all
of this just in our heads, if we aren’t here to do math it vanishes for
want of sufficiently complex brains, poof.

Nope.

|| + ||| –> |||||

obtains whether we are there to perceive and contemplate it or not.
Two is even and the first prime. Three is prime simply as it cannot be
evenly shared in a whole number of slots apart from by ones. And so
forth, property after property. We come along, discover significance,
label, embed in systems of thought. But all of that is in response to
substance that we find it necessary to accurately describe.

We develop symbols:

2 + 3 = 5

Those are cultural, convenient, helpful. But they are not the
substance, they are our way to handle that substance. A substance of
reality that is quantitative (amenable to measure) and structural (bound
up in coherent relationships). We label such, Mathematics. That does
not create a discipline by the poof-magic of words, it is a way for us
to refer to the substantial reality and to our explorations and
development.

But that’s just your view.

Nope, views must be accountable to substantial reality. That
substance starts with there being a distinct world. We are seeing
something that is objectively true, credibly accurately describing
realities that are beyond being figments of imagination such as Mr Spock
or Fr Brown or Tolkein’s world and rings.

Beyond numbers we may see the continuum, the rock falls through
space. But what is space. We see here a quantitative structure tied to
length and dimensionality. There is more or less of length and it can be
in different directions. To get there conceptually, we need integers
(thus negative numbers), we need fractions, we need power series that
can sum to infinite numbers of terms and which converge in some cases,
as we discovered — nope, it was not an invention — the irrationals.
Sqrt-2 deserves to be a famous number once it was seen that the diagonal
of a square was inherently in-commensurable with its sides. Imagine,
this was actually seen as of such significance that it was viewed with
religious awe.

Yes, they saw more truly than we now do in too many cases, this sees into the roots of reality.

Likewise, 0 = 1 + e^i*pi should not only give high confidence in the
coherence of vast domains in maths, but it should give us a view into
the roots of reality. Another day.

Just to get to understand the space in which a stone falls, we have
seen a huge body of quantitative structures embedded inextricably in
reality. The substance is there. Bring on the time for a trajectory and
we see the same continuum again.

Then, to get to the substance of the gravitation that is at root of
the force that triggers the accelerated motion, we find not only further
structures and quantities such as displacement x, velocity dx/dt and
acceleration dv/dt as well as the panoply of infinitesimals, limits etc,
but also the warping of spacetime through the influence of a massive
body, a planet. (A ship or a mountain shows similar effects, on a
smaller scale.)

Then, looking through telescopes, we find that gravitation is central
to the grand structure and function of the overall world we inhabit.

Reality is pervaded with a rationally accessible framework that is quantitative and structural.

Nor does the struggle we may have to acknowledge that pervasive
substance change it. It simply forces us to face the need to pursue
comparative difficulties and recognise what is a superior explanation.
It is simply not good enough to say, oh yes order without acknowledging
the specific type: structural, quantitative — that is, mathematical.

And so, we come to Newton, in his General Scholium to Principia; who
was moved to an exercise in philosophical theology as he pondered his
discoveries:

. . . This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and
comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an
intelligent and powerful Being. And if the fixed stars are the centres
of other like systems, these, being formed by the like wise counsel,
must be all subject to the dominion of One; especially since the light
of the fixed stars is of the same nature with the light of the sun, and
from every system light passes into all the other systems: and lest the
systems of the fixed stars should, by their gravity, fall on each other
mutually, he hath placed those systems at immense distances one from
another.

This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as
Lord over all; and on account of his dominion he is wont to be called
Lord God pantokrator , or Universal Ruler; for God is a relative word,
and has a respect to servants; and Deity is the dominion of God not over
his own body, as those imagine who fancy God to be the soul of the
world, but over servants. The Supreme God is a Being eternal, infinite,
absolutely perfect; but a being, however perfect, without dominion,
cannot be said to be Lord God; for we say, my God, your God, the God of
Israel, the God of Gods, and Lord of Lords; but we do not say, my
Eternal, your Eternal, the Eternal of Israel, the Eternal of Gods; we do
not say, my Infinite, or my Perfect: these are titles which have no
respect to servants. The word God usually signifies Lord; but every lord
is not a God. It is the dominion of a spiritual being which constitutes
a God: a true, supreme, or imaginary dominion makes a true, supreme, or
imaginary God. And from his true dominion it follows that the true God
is a living, intelligent, and powerful Being; and, from his other
perfections, that he is supreme, or most perfect. He is eternal and
infinite, omnipotent and omniscient; that is, his duration reaches from
eternity to eternity; his presence from infinity to infinity; he governs
all things, and knows all things that are or can be done. He is not
eternity or infinity, but eternal and infinite; he is not duration or
space, but he endures and is present. He endures for ever, and is every
where present; and by existing always and every where, he constitutes
duration and space. Since every particle of space is always, and every
indivisible moment of duration is every where, certainly the Maker and
Lord of all things cannot be never and no where. Every soul that has
perception is, though in different times and in different organs of
sense and motion, still the same indivisible person. There are given
successive parts in duration, co-existent puts in space, but neither the
one nor the other in the person of a man, or his thinking principle;
and much less can they be found in the thinking substance of God. Every
man, so far as he is a thing that has perception, is one and the same
man during his whole life, in all and each of his organs of sense. God
is the same God, always and every where. He is omnipresent not virtually
only, but also substantially; for virtue cannot subsist without
substance. In him are all things contained and moved [i.e. cites Ac 17,
where Paul evidently cites Cleanthes]; yet neither affects the other:
God suffers nothing from the motion of bodies; bodies find no resistance
from the omnipresence of God. It is allowed by all that the Supreme God
exists necessarily; and by the same necessity he exists always, and
every where. [i.e accepts the cosmological argument to God.] Whence also
he is all similar, all eye, all ear, all brain, all arm, all power to
perceive, to understand, and to act; but in a manner not at all human,
in a manner not at all corporeal, in a manner utterly unknown to us. As a
blind man has no idea of colours, so have we no idea of the manner by
which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things. He is
utterly void of all body and bodily figure, and can therefore neither be
seen, nor heard, or touched; nor ought he to be worshipped under the
representation of any corporeal thing. [Cites Exod 20.] We have ideas of
his attributes, but what the real substance of any thing is we know
not. In bodies, we see only their figures and colours, we hear only the
sounds, we touch only their outward surfaces, we smell only the smells,
and taste the savours; but their inward substances are not to be known
either by our senses, or by any reflex act of our minds: much less,
then, have we any idea of the substance of God. We know him only by his
most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final cause [i.e
from his designs]: we admire him for his perfections; but we reverence
and adore him on account of his dominion: for we adore him as his
servants; and a god without dominion, providence, and final causes, is
nothing else but Fate and Nature. Blind metaphysical necessity, which is
certainly the same always and every where, could produce no variety of
things. [i.e necessity does not produce contingency] All that diversity
of natural things which we find suited to different times and places
could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being necessarily
existing. [That is, implicitly rejects chance, Plato’s third alternative
and explicitly infers to the Designer of the Cosmos.] But, by way of
allegory, God is said to see, to speak, to laugh, to love, to hate, to
desire, to give, to receive, to rejoice, to be angry, to fight, to
frame, to work, to build; for all our notions of God are taken from. the
ways of mankind by a certain similitude, which, though not perfect, has
some likeness, however. And thus much concerning God; to discourse of
whom from the appearances of things, does certainly belong to Natural
Philosophy.

Yes, the mathematical substance that we find inextricably intertwined
in the fabric of reality may be disturbing and may challenge us to
ponder its worldviews significance. Perhaps, that was intended by the
One who framed it.

But, that is an onward question, the matter before us is the need to acknowledge that rationally accessible framework of structure and quantity.>>

Let us ponder. END

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Responding to Ed George About Mathematics

In another thread, Ed George insists that humans invented mathematics as a way to describe the behavior of phenomena, but that doesn’t mean mathematics is an intrinsic aspect of the universe, a part we discovered, not invented.  Here’s why that position is untenable.

Mr. George is correct that humans invent languages – the language of mathematics included.  Languages are systems of symbols that represent things.  For example, the word “sphere” can be expressed with different symbols in different languages, but the symbols all refer to the same thing – in this case, the form of an object in the real world.  That we invented the symbols and language to describe a real thing doesn’t mean we invented the real thing itself.

As Mr. George agrees, mathematics (in terms of this debate) is an invented system of symbols used to describe behaviors of phenomena (physics). 

However, humans did not invent those behaviors; we are only describing them using symbolic language.  Phenomena in the universe behave in, let’s say, “X” manner. X is a set of discoverable patterns.  We discovered those patterns and applied symbolic language to represent and calculate them. In the same way that “sphere-ness” is an inherent quality of something in the universe which we use the term “sphere” to represent, “mathematics” is a term we use to represent an inherent quality of the universe.

Yet, Mr. George denies that we can know whether or not we “discovered” these behaviors (which we call “mathematics”. Of course we did, and we use symbolic language to describe those qualities and behaviors we have discovered.

This same, simple logic can be applied more broadly.  We invented a symbolic language in order to refer to things we discover about our existence and the universe, as KF is pointing out, in terms of logical first principles.  We did not invent that 1+2=3; those symbols represent observable facts. We did not invent the principle of identity out of whole cloth; it represents an observable fact and, more deeply, a universal structure that human minds cannot escape, no matter how hard we try or imagine. As KF points out, it is responsible for our ability to have cognition at all or to invent and use language.  Logical first principles are a fact of our existence which we discovered – first as “X”, then using a string of symbols to represent.

Beyond observable facts, such symbolic language can represent other discoverable facts; such as, some things are impossible to imagine. Imagine that 1+2=4 in any observable way.  You can say the words or write the equation, but it is not possible to imagine it being a discoverable fact in any scenario.  It’s a nonsensical proposition, much like a 4-sided triangle. The inability to imagine a thing has other implications, but that’s for another conversation.

Language is the invention, but language is itself governed by certain necessary rules.  Those rules were entirely hidden to us in the beginning, but we know they were there because inevitably all languages follow those fundamental rules even if we are unaware of them, the first of which is the principle of identity.  Without that, language is impossible. 

These “X” characteristics of our universe and our existence are things we discovered and then used symbolic systems to represent.

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AI goal: Making computers as smart as fruit flies

It’s not going to be easy:

Recently, researchers discovered that fruit flies use a filter similar to a computer algorithm to assess the odors that help them find fruit, only the flies’ tools are more sophisticated:

When a fly smells an odor, the fly needs to quickly figure out if it has smelled the odor before, to determine if the odor is new and something it should pay attention to,” says Saket Navlakha, an assistant professor in Salk’s Integrative Biology Laboratory. “In computer science, this is an important task called novelty detection.

Computers use a Bloom filter for that, Navlakha, an integrative biologist, explains:

When a search engine such as Google crawls the Web, it needs to know whether a website it comes across has previously been indexed, so that it doesn’t waste time indexing the same site again. The problem is there are trillions of websites on the Web, and storing all of them in memory is computationally expensive. In the 1970s, Howard Bloom at MIT devised a data structure that can store a large database of items compactly. Instead of storing each item in the database in its entirety, a Bloom filter stores a small “fingerprint” of each item using only a few bits of space per item. By checking whether the same fingerprint appears twice in the database, a system can quickly determine whether the item is a duplicate or something novel.

In the fly brain, neurons called “Kenyon cells” broadcast a “novelty alert” when a new odor is encountered. However, the fly introduces a couple of twists: More. , “If computers thought like fruit flies, they could do more” at Mind Matters

Welcome to the world of the non-computable.

See also: Human intelligence as a halting oracle (Eric Holloway)

and

Has neuroscience disproved thinking?  (Eric Holloway)

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Jerry Coyne is learning fast, but fast enough?

One of our scouts has been following the way retired professor of Darwinian biology Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne is trying to confront the SJWs in science, where others are capitulating. The recent question has been whether sex is a real category in biology. (We explain here.)

Anyway, Coyne decided to look more closely into the world of the marching Woke and he discovered that most seem to be cool with anti-Semitism, though some are not:

I’ve published a fair number of pieces (see here) criticizing the leadership of the Women’s March (WM), including Tamika Mallory, Linda Sarsour, and Carmen Perez—three of the four co-chairs—for cozying up to Louis Farrakhan, a bigot, a misogynist, a racist, and a homophobe. There have even been accusations, whose truth isn’t yet known, that the WM used Farrakhan’s security, the “Fruit of Islam” as their own security, which would be an unacceptable financial tie that would in part explain the attraction of Mallory et al. to the loony Farrakhan and his obscene views.

But lately there have been an increasing number of dissenters among women, some of whom were big guns in the original Women’s Marches. Jerry Coyne, “Tablet investigates the Women’s March” at Why Evolution Is True

Many of us knew all this. It’s not an idle matter for Jerry, who happens to be Jewish. But we can’t help wondering, do most people in science really not know very much about the Woke, moving in on them? What time do they think it is?

Jerry has also discovered that the Woke are strangling comedy:

Now, to avoid a comedian offending anyone, a college—the University of London (UL)—has asked a Russian-British (and Jewish) comedian to sign a “behavioral agreement form”, shown below, so he wouldn’t offend anyone.

Well, they didn’t threaten him with criminal charges yet, did they? That could be next.

Imagine the comedians who wouldn’t meet these standards, starting with Lenny Bruce and extending through Red Foxx, Chris Rock, George Carlin (remember how he mocked religion?), and Sarah Silverman, to mention just a few. Good comedy is about more than making us laugh, more than Bob Hope with his bland jokes and onstage golf club: it can break the boundaries of acceptable thought to make us think. Comedians like Lenny Bruce, Chris Rock, and Sarah Silverman are liberals, yet they’d be banned because their acts stimulate the brain. Jerry Coyne, “The death of college comedy: University of London tries to get comedians to sign “behavioural agreement” form stipulating that they won’t mock anything” at Why Evolution Is True

They’d “be banned because their acts stimulate the brain”? Right, but that’s a feature, not a bug, these days. It’s not as if the Woke believe that mind matters or anything. They’ve been told they are animals and what follows, follows.

Note: Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne is the author of Why Evolution Is True.

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See also: About the facts of life, Darwinian Jerry Coyne is still being stubborn … Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry “Why Evolution Is True” Coyne continues to refuse to follow Nature down the primrose path of political correctness and is doubling down on what people used to be allowed to accept as biological fact (Coyne was president of an evolution society which has started to wobble on whether sexes are real divisions.)

And

Is Darwinist Jerry Coyne starting to get it about SJW “science”? Ah, not a moment too soon.; Here is a perfect specimen of sp. SJW, Trollus inyerfaceus. We have certainly dealt with them. Coyne may find some in his own back yard.

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Smithsonian: We really don’t know why humans don’t have fur

Correct explanation: Humans would never look after their fur properly, which is why they don’t have any/Greg Hume (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Some genomics experts and molecular biologists are looking into it. But apart from that, it has remained the province of evolution storytelling:

Evolutionary theorists have put forth numerous hypotheses for why humans became the naked mole rats of the primate world. Did we adapt to semi-aquatic environments? Does bare skin help us sweat to keep cool while hunting during the heat of the day? Did we lose our fur to read each other’s emotional responses such as fuming or blushing? Scientists aren’t exactly sure, but biologists are beginning to understand the physical mechanism that makes humans the naked apes. In particular, a recent study in the journal Cell Reports has begun to depilate the mystery at the molecular and genetic level.

Sarah Millar, co-senior author of the new study and a dermatology professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, explains that scientists are largely at a loss to explain why different hair patterns appear across human bodies. “We have really long hair on our scalps and short hair in other regions, and we’re hairless on our palms and the underside of our wrists and the soles of our feet,” she says. “No one understands really at all how these differences arise.” Jason Daley, “Why Did Humans Lose Their Fur?” at Smithsonian Magazine

The theories you can read about at the link are as creative as you might expect.

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See also: Claim: Sweating made humans the dominant species on Earth

and

Astrobiologist: Are humans freaks of nature?

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Information flow in rocks and brains: Your mug may have a message for you

Researchers at the Santa Fe Institute has come up with a new definition of information that includes meaning but also seems to include non-conscious entities:

Our framework is grounded in the intrinsic dynamics of a system coupled to an environment, and is applicable to any physical system, living or otherwise. It leads to formal definitions of several concepts that have been intuitively understood to be related to semantic information, including ‘value of information’, ‘semantic content’ and ‘agency’.

ENST asks, “can semantics really be “meaningful” in a realm of non-conscious entities”?

With this definition, they want a theory able to encompass every interaction in biology and even physics. They even see information flow in rocks and hurricanes! To them, their definition helps “sort the wheat from the chaff when trying to make sense of the information a physical system has about its environment.” Any system, physical or biological, that sustains its existence has semantic information, according to this view. Notice it need not be symbolic. “Trends in Philosophy of Science: What Does “Semantic Information” Mean?” at Evolution News and Science Today

Of course, if we do equate information flow in rocks with information flow in minds, we are probably looking at a naturalist (materialist) view of consciousness: Nature is all there is and everything is conscious. There is a certain simplicity to it; there is no hard problem of consciousness; it’s an illusion.

As noted at Mind Matters:

To understand why Scientific American would take panpsychism or the “multiple personality disorder” universe seriously, one needs to begin by grasping how very hard the problem of consciousness is for materialists (naturalists). Put simply, it is easier for many today to stomach the idea that an electron is conscious than the idea that consciousness is not a material entity.

That position is not, of course, science. It is simply where materialism ends up. And if the current scene is any guide, we will hear stranger views yet.

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See also: Panpsychism: You are conscious but so is your coffee mug Materialists have a solution to the problem of consciousness, and it may startle you

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Soil microorganisms are twice the estimated volume of oceans, raise questions

Caenorhabditis elegans (nematode)/Zeynep F. Altun(CC BY-SA 2.5)

Not entirely sure what the measurement means but this much is easy to grasp:

The scientific team, which includes hundreds of researchers from all over the world, drilled boreholes kilometers below the continents and seafloor to sample microbes. The information collected by the scientists has allowed them to build models of the deep ecosystem and make the estimates of the deep life biomass.

The researchers found a stunning array of life, mostly microbial, and estimate that approximately 70 percent of the total number of Earth’s bacteria and archaea organisms live in this realm. These microbes live at extremes of pressure, temperature, and nutrient and energy availability. Carolyn Wilke, “Life Deep Underground Is Twice the Volume of the Oceans: Study” at The Scientist

The find is a boost for the search for subsurface life on other planets.

From the Guardian:

One organism found 2.5km below the surface has been buried for millions of years and may not rely at all on energy from the sun. Instead, the methanogen has found a way to create methane in this low energy environment, which it may not use to reproduce or divide, but to replace or repair broken parts.

Lloyd said: “The strangest thing for me is that some organisms can exist for millennia. They are metabolically active but in stasis, with less energy than we thought possible of supporting life.”

Jonathan Watts, “Scientists identify vast underground ecosystem containing billions of micro-organisms” at The Guardian

Presumably, these millennia-old subsurface organisms don’t reproduce much, as it is more economical to just stay alive and do nothing. What then of evolution? If the millennial organism changes a fair bit over the centuries, is that evolution?

Also, what if we examine the organisms without preconceived ideas about natural selection, longevity, or information transfer? Would we favour the same theories? For the same reasons?

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See also: “Fairly sophisticated” bacterial communications pose stark question re evolution

Light-loving cyanobacteria found, improbably, nearly 2,000 feet underground

and

Will a new type of photosynthesis, just discovered, change the hunt for alien life?

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About the facts of life, Darwinian Jerry Coyne is still being stubborn …

Earlier today, in A Man is a Woman, Winston, Barry Arrington asks us to imagine the reprogramming of people who think that words like “male” and “female” represent biological realities, which is somewhat like Winston’s mistake in imagining that 2 and 2 could make 4 even if the party needs them to make 5. In 1984 O’Brien tortured him out of that.

Darwinian evolutionary biologist Jerry “Why Evolution Is True” Coyne is refusing to follow Nature down the primrose path of political correctness and is doubling down on what people used to be allowed to accept as biological fact:

The shameful part of all this is that the scientific journal Nature, as well as three evolutionary biology/ecology societies, who should know better, made statements or editorials that neither sex nor gender are binary. That’s a flat-out abnegation of both their responsibility and of science itself. Evolution itself produces a binary of sex! To be anthropomorphic, evolution wants a binary of sex.

He is defending philosopher Alex Byrne, who wrote on this theme at Medium. criticizing Anne-Fausto Sterling’s op-ed in the New York Times, “Why Sex is not binary.”

Coyne goes on:

As a (former) scientist, it’s distressing to me to see my fellow progressive scientists twist and deform biology out of all recognition so that it buttresses their ideology. We don’t need to do that. Our ideology is a good one—much preferable to discriminating against groups based on (supposed) biological differences—but we should ground it in reason, not biology. And the reason is simple, recognized long before biology became a discipline: we should, in a good and caring society, treat all people as we would wish to be treated were we in their position. (This reciprocity is embodied in the ethical philosophy of John Rawls.)

Of course the Authoritarian Left will demonize people like Byrne (I can already anticipate him being called a “transphobe”), and it’s not pleasant for me to criticize the Society for the Study of Evolution, of which I was once President, for distorting biology in the interest of social justice. I share their goals, but as a biologist I don’t share the “scientific” assertions cooked up to buttress those goals. Jerry Coyne, “Once again: Why sex is binary” at Why Evolution Is True (blog)

Coyne seems to think that the Society still has goals he can share (“I share their goals but…”) but that remains to be seen. There may be plenty more new goals where these came from and old goals could end up being demonized. That happens a lot among the Woke.

As I (O’Leary for News) have tried explaining elsewhere, when the SJWs come for scientists, it can get ugly fast:

Here’s what’s been happening: The social justice mob has gone all non-binary. That would be no more significant than shocking pink hair except for two things:

1. They want to impose on biologists the idea that male and female are just social constructs.

2. The biologists believe that humans are animals.

Now, if you didn’t believe that humans are animals, you could always just say: “Well, among cattle, there are bulls and there are cows – and it sure pays to know the difference when you are working with them. Among gorillas, there are great big silverbacks (males) and then there are she-gorillas. But humans, of course, can be non-binary because we aren’t animals.”

Having decided a long time ago that humans are animals, however, and even that we are related to gorillas and closely related to chimps, the biologists are kind of stuck.

The social justice warriors are closing in, as one evolutionary biologist, Colin Wright, riskily relates:

Recently, this fear has been realized as social justice activists attempt to jump the epistemological shark by claiming that the very notion of biological sex, too, is a social construct.

Yes. And fear is forcing science journals to publish articles implying that the idea has merit.

Even more recently, the most prestigious scientific journal in the world, Nature, published an editorial claiming that classifying people’s sex “on the basis of anatomy or genetics should be abandoned” and “has no basis in science” and that “the research and medical community now sees sex as more complex than male and female.” In the Nature article, the motive is stated clearly enough: acknowledging the reality of biological sex will “undermine efforts to reduce discrimination against transgender people and those who do not fall into the binary categories of male or female.” But while there is evidence for the fluidity of sex in many organisms, this is simply not the case in humans. We can acknowledge the existence of very rare cases in humans where sex is ambiguous, but this does not negate the reality that sex in humans is functionally binary. These editorials are nothing more than a form of politically motivated, scientific sophistry. Colin Wright, “The New Evolution Deniers” at Quillette

Actually, these editorials are warnings for people like Wright to conform to the nonsense or get buried:

What these articles leave out is the fact that the final result of sex development in humans are unambiguously male or female over 99.98 percent of the time. Thus, the claim that “2 sexes is overly simplistic” is misleading, because intersex conditions correspond to less than 0.02 percent of all births, and intersex people are not a third sex. Intersex is simply a catch-all category for sex ambiguity and/or a mismatch between sex genotype and phenotype, regardless of its etiology. Furthermore, the claim that “sex is a spectrum” is also misleading, as a spectrum implies a continuous distribution, and maybe even an amodal one (one in which no specific outcome is more likely than others). Biological sex in humans, however, is clear-cut over 99.98 percent of the time. Colin Wright, “The New Evolution Deniers” at Quillette More.

Reality check. At least Wright knows he is living dangerously. But in a world where there is a war on correct answers in general, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

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See also: Is Darwinist Jerry Coyne starting to get it about SJW “science”? Ah, not a moment too soon.; Here is a perfect specimen of sp. SJW, Trollus inyerfaceus. We have certainly dealt with them. Coyne may find some in his own back yard.

The perfect storm: Darwinists meet the progressive “evolution deniers” — and cringe… Double down cringe…

The Darwinians’ cowardice before SJW mobs explained in detail: They thought the mob was coming for someone else.

Rob Sheldon: Have a little pity for scientists scared of SJWs. I thought the Areo article was the most honest I have met in a long while. It is one thing to boast about courage in the faculty lounge, it is quite another in the provost’s office. I have been cursed with both experiences.

Larry Krauss? Francisco Ayala? And now Neil deGrasse Tyson? (All are pop science bigs, accused of sexual harassment.)

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