Peak friendliness
The “friendly” atheist again, at Religion News Service:
Richard Dawkins has abandoned science to justify his transphobia
Even the title is ridiculous. It’s not “abandoning science” to know that men are not women. Trans ideology is not scientific, it’s all about the fee-fees.
Subhead:
It’s jarring to see the world’s most famous atheist use his massive platform to downplay or deny trans identities.
Wait. Are we talking about science here, or idenninies? They’re not the same, to put it mildly.
And how is it “jarring” to see an atheist deny that claims about idenninies can trump physical realities?
For decades, the renowned evolutionary biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins urged his readers to use science and reason to counter religious misinformation. Now Dawkins is abandoning both to spread anti-transgender rhetoric embraced by religious conservatives.
Other way around, bro. Trans ideology has nothing to do with either science or reason. It’s about fantasy, and bullying everyone into endorsing other people’s (frankly tedious) fantasies. Neither science nor reason tells us we must or should do that.
The podcast episode dropped days after Dawkins wrote an essay for the British magazine The New Statesman answering the question, “What is a woman?” Dawkins’ reductive response boiled down to “A woman is an adult human female, free of Y chromosomes,” as if the absence of a single chromosome answers the question.
Reductive shmeductive. The absurd baroque explanations of trans ideology are too complicated by half.
And author J.K. Rowling, whom Dawkins called “very brave” in his podcast, has couched her inflammatory rhetoric in biological terms.
How very dare she! We’re not biological, we’re divine airy souls self-created by our own sacred minds. How could a famous atheist like Dawkins not understand that???
I can no longer recommend Dawkins’ books to people who want to educate themselves about evolution.
It would damage his soul if he did.
It’s also maddening because Dawkins remains the go-to atheist for reporters and media outlets. There are more atheists who are LGBTQ, women and people of color than ever before, yet it’s Dawkins who often takes center stage whenever there are public conversations about atheism. That’s not his fault, of course: He literally wrote the most popular book on the subject. But it’s irresponsible to use his platforms to spread ignorance on a topic that critics have repeatedly said he doesn’t understand and often gets flat-out wrong.
Which critics are these though? The ones who adhere to the gender ideology. Critics of gender ideology on the other hand take a different view. I for instance think Hemant Mehta is flat-out wrong about nearly everything he says in this sloppy piece.
Funnily enough, all the people whose opinions I respect have also been criticising and/or laughing at this same piece of idiocy.
The twit is literally having a go at possibly the most successful living biologist for stating a fact about biology which is so basic that plants have no problem working it out.
Hemant Mehta is literally less knowledgeable than a cabbage.
The confidence and self-assurance with which he babbles like a complete idiot is probably helpful to him.
Of course there are also critics who say he doesn’t understand the origin of life’s diversity and often (or always) gets it flat-out wrong. Many of them are women and POC. Perhaps reporters should stop talking to him about evolution and start talking to creationists.
Where, where are all the other criticisms? I wanna read them.
The latest premium episode of “Blocked and Reported” is about the kerfuffle at The New Statesman regarding Dawkins’ article and the demand that there needed to be a rebuttal piece. The hosts get into the oft-cited “up to 1.7% of newborns are intersex”. They discuss Dawkins’ pointing out how extraordinarily inflated that number is, and the correction of another scientist who shows that Dawkins is right about the inflation, but that the inflation comes from another source. Anyway, I’m not a “primo” as the hosts put it, so I only heard the preview, about 15 minutes. Even that, though, is worth a listen.
I was just referring to all the creationists who pop up whenever evolution is discussed online.
‘It’s also maddening because Dawkins remains the go-to atheist for reporters and media outlets.’ I’ve mentioned elsewhere that this sentence might actually be revealing the salient issue for Mehta.
“A woman is an adult human female, free of Y chromosomes,”
What about 46,XX/46,XY?
guest @ 7 – Yes well it’s a pity Mehta didn’t think of writing The God Delusion but there it is.
Amazing how Dawkins’ science books became retroactively worse after his recent comments. I didn’t know causation worked that way.
WaM @ 6, sorry, I didn’t mean you, I was asking tigger – replying without refreshing the page to see there were new comments in between. My bad!
Indeed there are critics of Dawkins who pointed out that he has a tendency to emphasizer adaptationist explanations of evolution and does not spend enough time on other drivers of evolution, such as drift, catastrophism, etc. This is apparent in his earlier books, but I think he has in more recent books such as “Greatest Show on Earth” given some credit as due to other aspects of evolution.
Larry Moran, Emeritus Professor of biochemistry at the University of Toronto, has criticized Dawkins on the Sandwalk blog. Here’s an example. It’s a criticism of the way that Dawkins has used terminology.
Moran is someone I learned a great deal from at talk.origins. He’s insistent that people use terminology correctly, and I certainly can see why that’s so important for a biochemist. And Dawkins receieved a great deal of criticism from Gould. They traded essays in many cases to discuss their differences.
But that’s not what Hemant is doing here, by any means.
Who or what I choose to identify as, or as one of, could come out of my genome, or maybe from all that whisky I had for breakfast. But science has a rational, empirical and not a religious basis. Otherwise, no need for a doctorate or whatever in this or that: just look it up in the Bible.
Wishing does not make it so, although many a cat probably wishes that it had been born a dog.
Mike @ 12 – I have rather fond memories of reading dueling essays between Dawkins and Gould back in the day.
I like Larry Moran. He invited me to dinner with him & PZ & a few others at the CFI Ottawa conference all that time ago. Was v. welcoming and nice.
He’s got a new book out on Junk DNA. I may invite him as a guest on Ikonokast.
So typical. Dawkins says something trans advocates don’t like; he has many books on a subject that has fuck all to do with the issue, and which trans advocate has recommended in the past. But if he doesn’t agree with trans advocates in every single way, then every single thing that has ever come out of his mind or his mouth turns into vomit. No one should read him on anything.
Frankly, I enjoy Dawkins’ writing, even when I don’t agree with him. He can be maddening…but I remember a really fun review he did for a book of Gould’s, taking aim at how Gould used baseball to explain everything. Dawkins used cricket to demonstrate the fallacy of using baseball in a book that might be read by non-Americans. It was a great read. And I also enjoyed the Dawkins vs. Gould essays, and I wasn’t surprised when one or the other of them referred to the other as a “friend”. They could snipe at each other, disagree with each other, but not think the other one needed to be censored, or attacked with a baseball bat, or threatened with a guillotine. But I suppose that attitude is so last week that it can’t be bothered with.
Ophelia @11,
Ah, no worries. I should’ve realized it.
In what freaking way has Dawkins “abandoned science”? Biology (science) has discovered only two gametes that comprise human sexual reproduction. Human males produce the small, mobile gametes (sperm), and human females produce the large, non-mobile gametes (eggs). There’s no science or reason or logic that establishes that human beings can change their sex. The people who deny the reality of sex are the ones who have “abandoned science.” TAs and their allies/adherents are the ones who “hate” — openly hate women, and hate LG — and who use unscientific and illogical ideological rhetoric to “justify” their hatefulness, nastiness, and cruelty.
Hemant talked to Jey McCreight, (deadname Jen, but now she’s enby) who works in science, and she told Hemant that biology is more complicated than white colonialists claim. So, maddog1129, since Dawkins hasn’t been paying attention to Jey since Boobquake and Atheism+ he’s effectively abandoned science.
McCreight is enby?? I thought she was transmasc. I cannot keep up with the changes.
Amanda Jettayyy Knox has sparked hilarity by coming out as something for the fourth time.
I think it’s time for me to come out. Hetero-lesbian non-binarytrans aro. I’m sure that will make perfect sense.
Well, yeah, because it does, under normal conditions. Duh.
Ok, he wants precision, so to be precise: A women is an adult human whose phenotype developed largely as expected in the absence of a functional SRY gene. A man is an adult human whose phenotype developed largely as expected in the presence of a functional SRY gene.
Admittedly not particularly pithy, that.
I may have mis-remembered. I promise to #dobetter