Along with that old gray mare, science, well, ain’t what she used to be. Perhaps the latest example is that Scientific American, our country’s oldest continuously published science magazine (founded in 1845), recently made an interesting claim.
“Before the late 18th century,” the periodical tweeted a while back, “Western science recognized only one sex — the male.”
Perhaps Scientific American (SA) may want to explain how the book Western civilization held in highest esteem at that time tells us, in a divine message dating to antiquity, “Male and female He created them.”
Oh, SA is the magazine, do note, that states in its “About” section that it “is committed to sharing trustworthy knowledge.”
The periodical’s tweet, the sixth in a group of seven publicizing its A Question of Sex documentary series, was sent August 24 and reads, “Before the late 18th century, Western science recognized only one sex — the male — and considered the female body an inferior version of it. The shift historians call the ‘two-sex model’ served mainly to reinforce gender and racial divisions by tying social status to the body.”
Sex is “not just complex in the context of intersex,” read another tweet, this one from “medical anthropologist” Katrina Karkazis, one of our time’s Trofim Lysenkos. “Our bodies are far more variable than our categories. Part of what’s happened is people become slotted into this binary framework.”
As to where this scientific surrealism comes from, SA also confesses in its “About” section that it has a very unscientific priority: “advancing social justice.”
But the magazine perhaps only advanced its own reputational decline, as its tweeting and bleating evoke mockery and ridicule.
As The Blaze related, “The propaganda from once-respected outlets like @sciam is truly incredible,” replied Maxim Lott, producer for John Stossel. “People are still free to read book [sic] from the middle ages and earlier, and see how blatantly false all their claims are. Idea that ‘Two-sex model’ served for ‘racial division’ should be stand-up comedy.”
“The hijacking of science to parrot pure and absolute nonsense is just amazing,” commentator Ben Shapiro responded.
Then, on Tuesday, American Thinker weighed in, writing that “Western science always recognized the existence of females…. Ironically, it’s the trans activists — supported by entities like the Scientific American — that no longer recognize women. They can’t or won’t make the distinction and allow females their own sports teams, locker rooms, and bathrooms.”
“Scientists from Aristotle to Einstein recognized the two sexes,” the Thinker later added. “Unfortunately, they wouldn’t recognize what passes for ‘science’ today.”
Of course, it’s easy to laugh at SA’s assertions, and mockery, as Rules for Radicals author Saul Alinsky pointed out, is devastatingly effective in political and social debates. But it’s also important to address the MUSS (Made-up Sexual Status, aka “transgender”) activists’ actual points — with valid ones.
Sexual devolutionaries claim that because certain rare individuals don’t phenotypically (appearance-wise) and genotypically (genetics-wise) conform to their sex’s norm, that norm shouldn’t be viewed as a norm. Ergo, sex is a social construct.
Consequently, MUSS activists will didactically “explain” how there are more than just the two “XX” (female) and “XY” (male) genotypes, with others supposedly being the “intersex” varieties XXX, X0, XXY and XYY. Yet, as even medical site WebMD points out, these are genetic abnormalities that afflict one sex or the other.
In a similar vein, SA published a 2018 article titled “Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic.” Discussing how a 46-year-old pregnant woman had visited a clinic “at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia to hear the results of an amniocentesis test to screen her baby’s chromosomes for abnormalities,” the site related:
The baby was fine—but follow-up tests had revealed something astonishing about the mother. Her body was built of cells from two individuals, probably from twin embryos that had merged in her own mother’s womb. And there was more. One set of cells carried two X chromosomes, the complement that typically makes a person female; the other had an X and a Y. Halfway through her fifth decade and pregnant with her third child, the woman learned for the first time that a large part of her body was chromosomally male.
Convincing? Well, here’s what SA would have us believe: because a woman, while in the womb and due to some abnormal process, absorbed the body of what would’ve been a brother and hence has an unusual genetic profile, we should consider the sexual binary imaginary.
SA’s mistake: One learns in good philosophy that there’s a difference between something being true in principle and it being true in the particular.
For example, an apple in principle is something that doesn’t contain a worm; this definition isn’t negated simply because the occasional apple has a worm, as the worm isn’t integral to the apple. There obviously are deviations among women from the genotypic and phenotypic female norm; these also obviously have no bearing on what a woman is in principle.
SA reflexively spoke of this reality, mind you, when in one of its recent tweets it wrote of “sex traits that fall outside the typical male and female paths of development.” They couldn’t speak of these deviations unless there was a norm — “The exception that proves the rule.”
Put differently, a person’s experiencing of abnormal sexual development doesn’t mean he isn’t a member of one sex or the other, not any more than someone with hypertrichosis (excessive, fur-like hair growth) is part animal and not wholly human. It also doesn’t mean there aren’t just two sexes.
Claiming otherwise, in SA or elsewhere, may amount to “advancing social justice,” but it sure isn’t science.
