The de evolution of one man. Richard Dawkins used his new podcast to promote
more transphobic lies. And this article is by Friendly Atheist dot com by Hemmet
Meta on July thirty feet of twenty twenty three, and basically, Richard Dawkins,
not any surprise to any of us, has launched a podcast called The
Poetry of Reality, which has been an avenue for him to promote more transphobic
ideas. And in fact, his first episode of this podcast was with very
famous transphob Helen Joyce talking about what is gender and of course he goes into
talks about biological sex and all of that. So before I get into all
of my rants, I want to hear about what you all have to say
about this topic. So when I was going through my own deconstruction process,
and but unlike like a lot of atheists, I wasn't interested in the Four
Horsemen. I didn't read any of Dawkins's work. I had I kind of
knew for him in the Proliferary and I knew he was a respected evolutionary biologists
and making that education through his work and lecture. Apparently he can't stay in
his lane and he's now a gender expert, which is problematic, and he's
clearly only following a biggest narrative and is in sitting back and asking himself about
like, m is this true? You know? And I'm sorry, but
I have no desire to listen to his podcasts as I really like my Sandy
and this article is an example of why. And I would also like to
point out that Helen joyce this turf that he had on this first episode and
also a bigot. They were just sitting there sniffing their own farts and not
realizing this rhetoric and falsehoods are actually being set about actual human beings. And
also I'd like to point out that this Geryl person shares my name, and
I would like to point out that hashtag not all Helen. So my kind
of respective on this is that I'm a little bit frustrated because he should know
the science and he should be inquiring about these things, but he's not,
and it's just very, very very frustrating. So, you know, I'd
like to get your opinion on this, Scott, because I've obviously have lots
of opinions, but I'm kind of I can go more into that a little
later, sure, well, when I was reading this article, it became
clear that there was really two subjects being addressed here. One is the actions
and the comments and the ideas of Richard Dawkins and how they impact the LGBTQ
community. There's other others on this panel that are much more directly affected by
those issues, and so I'll defer time to hearing much more important perspective in
regards to those issues. But the second issue was what can we do,
how should we interact? How should we as atheists respond to this type of
thing? How should we react to Richard Dawkins? And I mean, well,
I mean basically, it's bigger tree. We have a moral responsibility of
calling this out. And one of the themes on the nonprofits that one of
the things we talk about frequently is how religious leaders are afforded unfair and undeserved
respect simply due to their position in the community. And so this is a
chance for us to put our money where our mouth is. Richard Dawkins we
know as a prominent figure in the atheist community, but that does not mean
that we as atheists are expected to go along with whatever he says. That's
not what our group does. That's what the other group does. And so
if we want to promote ourselves as being reasonable and rational and freethinking humanists,
then we need to step up and say the hard things. We need to
say the difficult things, and the morally correct thing to do when you're leaders,
and I'll use that term loosely in this case when they're doing bad things,
is to say that they're doing bad things and to oppose to doing those
bad things. And so if we want to if we want to be taken
seriously and when we talk about things, we need to with our actions as
well as our words. And so we need to step up and we need
to call things out as we see them. Phoebe, what are your what
are your thoughts here? Well? I can't stand Richard Dawkins. I never
really have liked the man, and the descent of man is always something that
I enjoy to watch from Afar, especially those that we have for some reason
be actified. And yet I deliberately choose very religious language to the way that
people are hero worshiped and cult worshiped. But I don't know what mister Dawkins
believes. I don't know if he genuinely believes what he's saying, or whether
he is just seeing a way of making money about the issues that he think
make him money from the same people who he was making money from in the
first place. So the group of people that he's main targeting are fairly angry,
white middle class individuals commonly referred to in the United Kingdom as a gammon.
So they rally against society, they rally against this, they rally against
that. They're typically of his age and so on. And I wonder whether
he actually believes what he's actually saying here, And if he doesn't believe what
he's saying, it makes it even worse because there's an intenserity to everything that
he is doing. He in the article is described as a brilliant long form
individual, but only you really crap short form individual. And this does go
some way on a slightly different thing to show that everything is now getting boiled
down to the sixty second TikTok and the two hundred and forty platform formerly known
as Twitter, that we've got to this thing where if you try to have
nuance, you try to have discussion, you try to say things, you
try to do things that are more than just those sixty seconds here those sixty
seconds there, and the argumentation and the conflict, you end up with what
is effectively a dire tribe of us and them, And it's become this nonsense
where my existence has become canon folder and I want to know what Ben thinks
about his existence. Yeah, I've been continually frustrated with Richard Dawkins, and
I do think he knows that there's nuance. As a biologist, especially in
the field of evolutionary biology, you understand that there are kind of ambiguous lines
between a lot of things, like even more talking speciation, like yeah,
we've set these lines in place when we study this as a way to categorize
things in our brains easier, but we know that that's not the extent of
reality in terms of different species. So I think Richard Dawkins understands that there's
nuance here. But instead of going too far into the science here, because
we've on other shows and other episodes of this, we've talked about why sex
and gender are non binary, But I wanted to today go into his logic
and what he specifically does when he communicates this, because this, especially number
one, is the big Achilles heel to his argument because logically it doesn't hold
up, and or people who might not necessarily be able to argue the scientific
points you can argue against the logic here. So kind of two main things
I want to focus on with him are number one being the use of the
term biological as being intentionally ambiguous because it allows them to move the goal post.
So, if you're imagining a conversation with somebody and you say this person
is a biological male or a biological female, what traits come to mind?
We all might think of different things. You might think of anatomy, you
might think of hormones, you might think of chromosomes. But everyone has their
own idea of like this is what biologically male or female means. So that's
already a little bit ambiguous. You're not pinning down what trait you're standardizing that
as. But if you think about hormones being a components of biological sex,
like your hormones or biological substances, they have biological functions in your body.
So if you have a transperson that is on gender affirming hormone therapy, they
have chain their biology. They have changed a component of their biological sex,
namely their hormonal sex, which I would argue is a category of sex.
So if you break down every one of these components, being chromosomes, anatomy,
gammeats, hormones, if you broke those all down and then assigned up
person based on each one of these factors, you'd find most people are somewhere
in between, especially on the hormonal standpoint. So even if you take CIS
people, you get a variety of combination. So if you take a post
stop transwoman, they are probably chromosomally male, hormonally and anatomically female and with
no gammets. So we don't have a very clear boundary there at all.
But if someone takes the term biological, you need to make sure that you're
forcing them to define their criteria. Do they mean gammeats, do they mean
chromosomes, do they mean anatomy, Because as we know, one of those
characteristics might not be in place and they would still be viewed in society as
a cisman or a sis woman. So then you pinpoint those topics and and
you say, okay, well what about people that don't produce gam meats?
And they'll say, well, it's about your potential to produce gam meats,
which gets into this weird gendered soul argument like, but then how do you
determine what potential somebody has if they've never produced game meats? So you have
to pin them down because it ends up being completely incoherent once you get to
that point. But if you if they just say, like very vague biological
sex, that could mean a multitative thing. So that's something that allows him
to technically be right even if he's not right with whatever he says. But
the other point I wanted to bring up with this is the ecological fallacy,
which I actually wrote some syllogisms to use for this. I'm not usually the
one to do that. I mean, I'm not maybe I'm becoming secularity in
J Mike today. But the ecological fallacy is when you take a population statistic
and apply it to an individual. And this is often used for transwomen in
sports and for gender firm and care for minors, and so basically it is
it assumes that the individual exhibits the same characteristics as the entire group. And
this is very problematic when you're creating guidelines, because not every individual is going
to meet those set of standards that you would assume are the case for the
whole population. So I wrote a little syllogism here relating to the average heights
of women compared to men. So we all of us here know who Cynthia
is. She's a lovely frequent guest and host on all of the ACA shows.
But I wrote a syllogism saying the average height of a woman is five
foot four. Cynthia is a woman. Therefore Cynthia is five foot four,
And we all know this isn't true. I know Cynthia, she's a tall
person, She's not five. But if we look at this, especially with
trans women in sports, you think of the population, people think, oh,
what is the average for women? And that's all that they think of.
But you're not considering the fact that each individual does not necessarily meet those
criteria. And the average itself isn't even a data point on this spectrum.
It's just the central tendency of the values. It might not even be an
actual data point. So this is really problematic, and this fallacy is used
to perpetuate stigma surrounding like racial issues as well. Like you hear about this
with this neighborhood has a higher crime rate. Bob lives in this neighborhood.
Therefore, Bob is more likely to commit a crime. So you see,
this logic is extremely problematic. And if we view it in the sense of
racial disparities, like we see that this is a problem. But once the
same logic is applied to trans people, suddenly people don't recognize it as a
problem anymore. So, I know that was a little bit of a rant,
but I was really passionate about that. But it was an awesome rant.
Yeah, But to follow on from what you were saying, I am
a transfer you're allowed to rant, wow, very much so. But following
on from what you were saying, I am a Transferman and I am six
foot four, I am above average height for a woman. And there are
other women such as say, I know Brittany Griner who is significantly taller than
I am. So does that mean Britney Griners should be banned as well?
But somebody who has been granting awangon to give him a bit of a break.
So I want to throw to the whole panel. And should we recommend
the original evolution text of Dawkins or should we just throw him in the bin?
Helen? Oh, I don't know, because this is this is my
kind of problem with this thing where that we're discussing is that you can be
brilliant in one field, right and understand your particular thing they went into study
for. Like, he's an evolutionary biologists. This is the thing that he
educates on. But does he understand the reality of gender and sex and how
you know we can define these things and that gender exists on his spectrum?
Can't? Does he want to know these things? Does he care? And
I'm based on his rhetoric lately, he doesn't seem to, and we all
know that he knows people that probably are experts in this field. And what
is kind of bothering me is that if we decide you toss the work he
has done into the bin, does that negate the people that actually learn something
from him and learned about evolutionary biologists and started to question things about creationism.
Do we toss that aside? I don't know, because yeah, he's being
a bigot and terrible right now. But I'm always in this thing about like,
well, you could be really good at one thing and be terrible on
like social issues. So I'm kind of in this weird place with it.
But again, I'm not really a big fan of Dowkins either. So you
know, I don't think I'm the person to ask because I don't have a
dog in this fight. All I'm sitting over here going is like, you're
being a bigot and you're being terrible already to marginalized groups. And I'm also
as a queer person to pissed me off. So I'm sitting over here going
and like, I really don't care how smart you are. You are on
the wrong side of history when it comes to this issue. So that's kind
of my kind of feeling on it. But those people that helped, like
their certain groups and people that he influenced them to think about the world more
skeptically. So I don't know. And I because I to me, he's
just another cranky old man that has some bad takes, and I think that
we can do better going forward. Yeah, I think I agree. I
agree, but I think we need to It depends, I mean, right,
the question is should we still support dawkins work in other areas? And
I mean, on one hand, he clearly has credentials and experience and research
in the area. On the other hand, he's turned out to be quite
the asshole, and so and so there's going to be a balance going on
there is it is. The question would be will the assholeness affect the affect
the scientific uh representation that he's giving, And you know, it's it's hard
to say. I mean at this point, I listened to his podcast today
and it was really abhorrent. It was really it was difficult to listen to
and and there really wasn't a lot of science in it, especially if we
compare it to say, there was an article written by Stephen Novella at Science
based Medicine dot com he where he kind of breaks down the differences between gender
and sex and the fact that it's not, uh that it's more of a
bimodal situation than a than a dichotomy right one or the other, black and
white kind of things. He's talking about how he uses he uses science to
show that even uh, with any of those decision factors that doctor Ben was
talking about, even within those situations, there's plenty of gray area for for
us to take into consideration. And those gray that gray areas people and so
are you know, are we going to respect those people? But if we
compare the two approaches that uh, that Dawkins used and that uh Stephen Novelli
uses, It's clear to me that the science is slipping out of dawkins representation
about the way that he presents he I used to think that he was a
very spot on and very fine science advocate, and but now you know,
now I'm starting to question. I was physically ill listening to his podcast today
and and and just to give you an idea of what the kind of things
he was saying. First of all, he was very flippant throughout the whole
thing. And I don't know if that's just because he's British or if he
if it does an actual representation of his attitude there. But but he he
suggested that some parents would prefer to have a trans kid than a gay kid.
Just the the ignorance just in that one statement is mind boggy. But
but but if any of our listeners are going to be uh listening to that
podcast, I would recommend that you also either immediately before or immediately after,
read that article by Stephen Novellen. I think we can make sure to have
the link in the show notes here. But just the difference in their approaches
and their presentations is amazing. And so to answer Phoebe's question before, and
I'll pass it to Ben in a second. But to answer your question,
Phoebe, I think we're we're definitely getting to a point where we need to
or at least in my opinion, he's he's lost in any any amount of
slack that that was going to be given to him, And I think it's
to the point where, you know, I'm just going to move on,
Ben, what's your what's your take here? I was just going to quickly
respond to Phoebe's question and say that I think it is okay to still learn
from the good things that he has said in the past, and even if
he has some good ideas, it's it's okay to learn from those, but
it's important to not let him profit from those. So if people want to
use one of his books to learn, get it used from somewhere else.
Don't be giving him the revenue from it. Unfollow him on the social media
as we don't need to listen to him there, and there are plenty of
other up and coming scientists, send newer people with better character that also have
similar credibility in the field of evolutionary biology. So that's my perspective on that
to answer my own question. If you're a mathematician, you've probably been taught
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