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Hey everybody, this is Razib with the Unsupervised Learning podcast, and I don't do this very often. I'm gonna do it again. I did it recently. Well, you know, a month ago, I am asking everyone who is listening to this podcast enjoys it, especially if you are not a paid subscriber to Unsupervised Learning, my substack please review and rate well, this podcast because it gets more visibility that way. And it can be recommended and other people's feeds and you know, other similar podcasts and whatnot. And so yeah, I just I know, it might take you a minute. But I think that that's, you know, a good payback for the content here, especially if you are a listener to one of the free options of which there are many. And you know, if you're subscribed to Spotify, or Apple podcasts, you can also find it on YouTube, and then various other platforms. So it's just not one place. And you can find on Lipson as well, which is where the free version is hosted. So with that logistical issue out of the way, I want to introduce our guest today, my friend, Dr. Colin Wright. Colin is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. And he is also the author of Realities Last Stand, which is a substack on this platform, you know, substack, this is where the podcast is first posted, if you are on the fee free feed. And I also like to take some credit for Colin being on substack. Because I did prod him. And now he is one of the top science substacks. Like me, Colin, you know, I mean, it's like, we're up there were up there. So I don't know. I'm proud to have him on the platform. And we're friends. We've known each other for about six years now. And I think I will start out really quickly. By introducing how I introduce myself to Colin, which call it knows the story. He wrote a piece I think it was fall of 2018 Was that right? Fall 2018 for Quillette on sex and gender, and how sex is real. And I dropped into his DMs on Twitter, and he didn't have very many followers back then. I dropped into his DMs and I said, your life is changing. And he's like, I don't know what you're talking about. And I was like, you will. And I was right. Wasn't I, Colin?
You were you were right on. I still had this this hope that. I'll find just, if I just calmly explain to people like why I disagree with them, then everything will just be fine. That's what scientists do. Nope.
Yeah. So you know, Colin is trained as an evolutionary ecologist? Is that what I can I say that behavioral ecologist? That's accurate? You have your PhD from Santa Barbara.
Colin: Yup UC Santa Barbara.
And you are from California, I have been to your beautiful childhood home, I hope your parents are doing well.
Colin: They're doing good.
Breaking the fourth wall or whatever Colin and I are friends. But if anyone has any cursory knowledge of my social media or anything like that, I think you will know that. So I don't want to pretend like you know, you're just another, another person on this podcast part of the the content machine that is Unsupervised Learning. So, you know, you started out as an academic, basically, at least within the last decade. And in fact, like we overlapped at UC Davis for I think a year. You were an undergrad and I was a grad student, but I don't think I mean, we didn't know each other, you know. So it was my first year I think in grad school and your last years as an undergrad there. So, you know, you have this academic path all lined out. And then obviously things changed, and we're going to talk about that. But the first thing I want to ask you about is your former PhD advisor the last time we talked. You could talk that much about it, it was still really fresh in in the news, although, you know, it's not a super interesting tale of academic - Well, I think I can say fraud. I don't think it's alleged anymore. I think he's been, you know, basically found to have engaged in academic fraud, manufacturing data and fabrication, he still claims that there are errors and mistakes, I actually read his apology recently, because he's, he's taken a turn into a new line of work. And I just think this is a very, very amusing fact or datum to enter into the record as we go into, you know, the Gender Wars and all these other things you're involved in. So what's what's what's Dr. Pruitt doing now.
It's not completely clear. You know, he was doing some teaching, I think at a high school somewhere in Florida. He's since I've been writing a series. I think it's like a multi volume series of fantasy novels. I don't know the exact story, but there's a lot of sort of politics involved. It's set in like, sort of, I think, a medieval time. But there's like a lot of magic going along. There's giant magical cats in this world. There's backstabbing. The reviewing the reviews actually look pretty decent. But that's because he has a career of writing good fiction in science, and now in science fiction, which was his genre all along.
Well, so I'm gonna say, you know, he has been alleged, and now it seems to be like, you know, whatever, the authorities have come down, and concluded that he did engage in data fabrication, but he was still your PhD advisor. Right?
Yeah, he was my PhD advisor. You know, we had no inkling this was going on while we were there. One of the papers that this occurred on was, you know, on data that - he had this policy where if you're a new graduate student in his lab, he had all this backlog of data that he collected, or he said that he collected, while he was a postdoc, you know, just data, he was in the field just doing stuff. And then he would give this data to new incoming graduate students. So they could write sorta a first paper get their feet wet, you know, writing a real paper, you know, right when they had joined the lab, and we analyze it, write it up, and we get first author on the paper, you know, just good practice, because that's what scientists do you analyze data, you write papers. And so this paper, this data that he handed me, like two weeks, you know, after I'd freshed into his graduate program, this was probably in 2013. You know, turns out, this data was completely fabricated. You know, we looked back on the data after other patterns came out, and it was just okay, yeah, this is clearly done. There's a lot of cut and pasted things. There's no biological explanation or methodological explanation for these things. And unfortunately, that was a paper that was my first paper ever, and that was in PNAS, it was a huge paper. That is currently, you know, we tried to retract it, as soon as all this stuff came out. But he kind of lawyered up and threw the wrenches into all the gears of the process of things getting retracted. So now that the investigation finally came out and concluded that yes, indeed, that there was fraud committed, we're now moving forward with this retraction. But you know, this is used by my enemies online is, you know, they'll just throw these out, like, Oh, look at all these retractions, like, what Swipe Wright doing? And this is just stuff that my advisor did and no data that I've ever collected, or any of the colleagues that have collected had been shown to have the similar anomalies. So yeah, we're glad that he's finally sort of been brought to justice on this whole thing.
Yeah. I was asking you about that. Because you know, and I did was what was his first name again?
Colin: Jonathan
Yeah, I have met Jonathan. I mean, I remember meeting him once at UC Davis. I think he was there as a postdoc. Maybe while we were there.
I think, yeah. I overlapped with him too at least a year.
Yeah that was that was that year he was postdoc. And I think I think he might have been the pop bio postdoc that year. The group itself has a joint postdoc. I think he might have been that year. And I was at some dinner anyway, or lunch, and he interrupted the conversation and said, Hi, real quick, and he's very energetic, very fast talking guy. Do you think despite all of his data fabrication, I mean, do you did you learn some science from him? I mean, did you get skills? I mean, was this kind of a situation where he wasn't a total fraud, but he added some fraud into the sausage so to speak?
Yeah. Yeah, that's a good question because honestly not every adviser is perfect and everything like that, and there are things he could have definitely improved upon. But overall, I think he's a legitimate genius and a creative person like, that was the most baffling part about this entire fraud investigation, and conclusion was that he was brilliant enough where he could have been just a very successful scientist, had a good reputation, could have still published a lot of papers, we wouldn't have maybe been in Nature and all that stuff, but it would have been solid papers, he could have been a very successful scientist, just if he hadn't done the fraud because he was incredibly knowledgeable of literature. He was an incredible actual work ethic, you know, he just sort of had this ability to just spend hours upon hours on end just writing papers. He did work hard in the field when we were out there with him. And, you know, his he was incredibly creative when coming up with ideas on how to, you know, design experiments and test for things. It's unfortunately, at the end, sort of, he just sort of put his his foot on the on the scale. And it was baffling. You know, it was more just like this, trying to climb the ladder faster than you know, he would have normally but he would eventually eventually probably got up that ladder, he just, you know, would have taken him a decade longer. But that's how science is supposed to work.
Yeah, well, I'm gonna I want to read, actually his website at the Black Chateau enterprises. So Its his PR agency for The Amber Menhir, his first book in his series. I want to read - It's kind of funny. It's kind of not funny. It's like, I don't know if it would be so funny if you didn't know the context of who this guy is. But I'm gonna read with the PR blurb, which I think he probably wrote a lot of it. “Avoiding the usual expectations of fantasy by way of satire, humor, and the race of nefarious evil cats. The first of first and Jonathan Pruitt's The Shadowof the Monolith series. The Amber Menhir arrives this October from Spinner Loom press” and I think that's his own self publishing imprint. “Having earned the title of the world's most infamous spider biologist, Pruitt has penned the grim dark fantasy looming the academic and scientific communities, while also offering an immersive, diverse and fast paced story” quote “I can be far more honest to fiction than I ever could have ever contemplated in nonfiction” Pruitt says, “What exactly is Menhir? Found across the globe Menhirs are mysterious ancient imposing monoliths to prove evidence of civilizations existence, they're often the subject of superstition, just like magical institutions that make up this world. Whether they stand as pinnacles of grandeur and discovery or blemishes a political pestilence will be up to the reader explains Pruitt, readers visit a modern day Grimm Dark Fairy Tale where reality bends and twists with plenty of humor and profound insights. In writing The Amber Menhir, Pruitt drew upon his many life experiences from traversing the rugged landscapes of South Africa and Numidia, to savoring the enchantment of Australia and Canada. Jonathan Pruitt's metamorphosis from a prodigious scientific mind into a fantasy author is a testament to reinvention, as he proves in The Amber Menhir the shadows of the monolith book one.” Okay, so it's available for a reading copy on Net Galley and for preorder on Amazon as of the press release. So that was a you know, it's the whole thing, it's gonna look a little weird. I honestly, I do not condone, obviously what he did as a scientist, but you know, there's, this was not a bitter guy seems like he's trying to figure something else out. And this is more honest to maybe his spirit of like, you know, seeking glory and fame in the spotlight than as a scientist where that shouldn't be secondary. But really, it was important to him. And so we cut a lot of corners. That's the way I’m going to say it, mildly. So, you know, that's that, I do wonder if maybe there is going to be a cat character based on you in there Colin.
You know, I've kind of wanted to read the series to see if I can, like, identify people in his life that he talks about and maybe myself or something in one of these characters, you know, it's honestly like, it's probably a good book, because he used to be our Dungeons and Dragons. You know, dungeon master we used to play that because we were super nerds in graduate school. And he would just create these amazing fantasy worlds, you know, from scratch to lead us through these these what do they call the roleplay worlds
RPGs
Yeah, RPG I won't remember the name but what's the what is it called the world's you create in Dungeons and Dragons. I should. I should know this.
Okay I didn't know it. I'm not that much of a nerd.
He create the adventures That's what I was looking for. Yeah. So it's probably a good book. But uh, you know, I don't know if I can give it a full endorsement
You condemn his science, but you're kind of curious about his fantastical fiction prowess, right?
Yeah. Maybe I'll check it out.
Well, let's, let's pivot away from fantasy. So in 2018 you write this piece in Quillette? I think I read it, but it was kind of boring, because like, why is someone writing this? Talk about where that's coming from? Because some of the listeners would be like, why would Razib say something that rude, but you know what I'm saying?
Yeah, I saw a lot of comments. Sometimes I go back and look at what people said. And everyone's just like, I was basically just nodding along the for every sentence, because every part of the essay was nothing controversial. It was just the most basic biology you can imagine, basically, that biological sex is real. There's only two sexes, you know, people who identify as a one sex, as a sex that they're not aren't really that sex, you know, just, you know, stable reality type stuff, things we've long discovered, that have just suddenly become or became taboo. Too taboo to say, that a lot of people didn't want to say, or they would just couch it in sort of this cryptic nonsense. So yeah, it was just a piece that you know, sex is real. And it matters that we acknowledge that it's real, and sex isn’t a spectrum. intersex people are not a third sex, just basic stuff like that, but like, oh, still be compassionate to people who are having, you know, distress about their, you know, so called gender identity or have gender dysphoria, you know, it was just a compassionate piece, but scientifically accurate piece and argued that we don't need to throw out reality in order to, you know, have compassion for people who are going through certain types of mental distress.
Yeah, I mean, you're being very careful mental distress. I know, You've been attacked, as you know, you know, I don't know, like calling for the genocide of trans people. I've just seen weird things. I think they wanted to like, Well, I mean, they've canceled you multiple times, quote, unquote, they, as you know, people like Kevin Byrd, who, a little bit more low profile. Now, there's new people, but you know, there's always someone like that. Basically, I think they said, you said you said something about social contagion. And they said that this was like genocidal, or something. Turns out that I think a lot of people now uncontroversially accepted social contagion is happening, right.
Yes. I mean, it was, it was pretty uncontroversial. At the time, there's plenty of things that are we call social contagion. It's not, you know, they tried to spin it as me saying that trans people were a virus or something like that, or, you know, just ridiculous but, you know, we have we've known of social contagions, in the social sciences, with certain things like anorexia and, you know, just all types of things like that, where it's, you know, it's a, something that's detrimental to you, but it still spreads even though it's can be harmful through like mimetic reasons.
Yeah let's get into the normative aspects of the law. But let me um, let's back up. And I want to do some definitions for the boomers out there. Because there's a lot of you guys and like, Thank you for your subscriptions. I'm not gonna lie, like, you guys definitely are supporting this podcast supporting this substack at a higher level, probably because you've made money and whatever. So I'm not using it as a pejorative, like literally, I know that there's a lot of boomers that don't know like, what Colin is talking about in the detail. So call it what is, I'm just gonna give you a term and you need to like explain it to like, in Boomer language, what is a cis-het-trans woman?
Well, there's a lot of contradictory terms in there in the gender ideal ideology, but basically they view people not just as just like normal people that we all have this prefix of either of being cis or trans. If you're trans, it's maybe a word that we're more familiar with in their world this means that you have a gender identity that is something other than as they would say the sex you were assigned at birth but we would just say as your biological sex and if your cis see is in front of your your name, this is someone who identifies with the sex they were assigned at birth or their sex so you're a male and you identify as such
So what I said is by definition not possible, you cannot be a sis trans Can you be a cis trans person?
No, you cannot. Those are -
Mutually exclusive categories.
If your gender fluid maybe some days you can be cis and some days you can be trans but to my knowledge you can’tbe both
Okay, so your gender fluid you can be cis or trans depending on how you feel. And then also the trans woman. The woman is what you are the trans is implying the transition, because I know a lot of people get trans man and trans woman confused and like, which one is it? So the man or the woman is not what you are born, it is what you are or identify as. and trans is just referring to the fact that you went through a transition.
Yes, well, I mean, that's what I say. Being trans implies a transition in the world of gender, whoo, you don't need to actually transition, it's just an identity, you are trans. As long as you just happen to identify as the opposite sex. No transition needed. So yeah, that's just part of the upside down
Yeah like it starts to get a lot of this has like been a moving target. I think it's even changed over the six years you've been on the scene. And okay, so we have like, all these kind of convoluted definitions, and you're saying sex is not a continuum. And intersex is not a sex. I know that there's, I'm not gonna lie here again. You know, I'll just give you an anecdote. I have a friend. He's liberal, pretty normal guy. But He's not, I wouldn't say he's woke. He's definitely like skeptical of some of the trans and all these things. On the other hand, he's not like me or you, he's tries to be more open, he's still in academia, you know, whatever. And one time, he told me that he disagrees with some of the things you're saying, and he wishes he had time to write it up. And this was like, literally five years ago, he still hasn't had time to write it up. I don't really understand, like, how you're wrong about things on the science. But there's apparently like some details, talk about what your ideas about sex and gender are just so we know.
Yeah, so I there's, so I criticize what I call and what people now sort of called gender ideology. Because basically, it what this ideology says is that whether you're a boy or a girl, or a man or a woman has nothing to do with your biology, and everything to do with how you identify according to these stereotypes of masculinity and femininity. So you know, you can be if you're a, if you're a really effeminate male, than you're actually a woman, if you're a really masculine woman, you're actually a man. I just think that's a regressive way to look at things. And you know, this is this idea that a butch lesbian is no longer a woman, because of being Butch and attracted to women, that they're now a man, this is this is completely ridiculous. And then, so a lot of activists are trying to blur this boundary between males and females, in order to assert that, you know, everyone should just be able to identify with whatever sex they want to, and have all the, you know, benefits that come with that, you know, being able to compete in the sports category of the opposite sex and access the spaces that are for the opposite sex. And there's a whole gender medicine thing, which says that, like, you know, because sex is the social construct, it's related to just various body parts, we can just change those body parts, and we can change your sex to match your gender identities, all this weird stuff. So I just have basically made a career out of reminding people, what males and females actually are, it has nothing to do with whether you have breasts or whether you have facial hair, or how deep your voice is, and all this stuff. But it just really has everything to do with the the type of gametes that your primary sex organs have the function to produce males and females is are defined by the relative size of gametes, sperm versus ova. And that's just sort of the way it is. That's how that's the universal definition of males and females, across all of life, or at least any species that produces sexually with sperm and ova. So that's all I'm really trying to say is maintain this biological reality. And that because there's only two gametes, there's only sperm and ova, there's no intermediate. Therefore, there are only two sexes that an individual can be. And someone who presents with a rare, complex intersex condition, to the extent that they might be sexually ambiguous. You know, that's fine, but sexual ambiguity isn't a third sex. And so sex is still binary in that sense, because there's still only two. That's really what I've been saying, for the last five years again, and again. And again.
Yeah, so I think one of the one of the things, one of the issues that crops up here is, it seems like implicitly, what you're saying is, I'm not like, I'm not trying to restate what you're saying in a different way. But, you know, I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but the whole idea of the definition of the categorization of intersex implies the two other sexes.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, so, intersex people,
Like, you couldn't have intersex would not make sense without the two other sexes, the two other sexes will make sense without the idea of intersex. Does that make sense?
Yes, that's accurate. And just the idea that you know, an intersex person, just because someone might be truly sexually ambiguous. And I think that could be theoretically possible that someone could have such a complex ambiguous primary sex organs are something that you couldn't really say whether they're male or female. That doesn't mean they're a third sex because there's not like a third type of sex cell gamete that they're producing. They're not some third viable gamete producer out there. So, regardless of how many people can be sexually ambiguous, I mean, it could be, even if half of all humans were fell into this category of being just bizarrely sexually ambiguous, it would still be the case that there's only two sexes, because there's only two gametes. So there's, I think that's an important point.
All right. So you're talking about sex. So you know, at the end of by the end of graduate school, like 2016, it was starting to become common place to talk about and this was not something that was discussed, like, really that much at the beginning of graduate school, I think it came out of, you know, Judith Butler, and gender ideology and stuff. So there's a distinction between sex and gender. Sex is a biological reality. A gender is about presentation and all sorts of other things. Honestly, I didn't care too much about gender. Because, like Colin, if you want to run around in a skirt, I'm just gonna call it a kilt. You know, you know what I'm saying? Like, I don't, I'm not gonna lie. Like, I don't give a shit. Like, you know, I was never a goth, I don't care what you look like, you know, like, tell me what you think what's between your ears? Not like, what's you're wearing. But hey, that's just me. I understand that matters a lot for other people, you know, their earrings, or piercings or clothes, their hairstyle, I get it. Okay. That's what I understood. But it seems like over the last decade, let's say over the last decade, there has been a progressive conflation of sex and gender to the point where, I mean, a lot of these arguments and discussions are very confusing, because I think people are just, they're acting like sex itself is malleable. And I'm hearing things about, I'll give you an example that I find interesting, like many years ago, Jordan Peterson, something about lobsters and monogamy or something I don't remember. And it was all like the rage. I wasn't paying too close attention to it, because it was whatever it was, you know, arguably, naturalistic fallacy like why are you talking about lobsters. But now I'm hearing all about like fish that change their sexes, which, you know, I read about when I was a kid, this is like a new thing. This is not a new thing. But again, like what? What hath Pisces to do with you, man? I don't know, you know, so it's like naturalistic fallacy cropping up like this sort of thing. We're not fish. You don't go to Alaska and change your sex, you know? But can you talk about the fish and the sex change and other organisms? And how that applies or doesn't apply to humans and mammals, mammals in particular, mammals in particular exhibit like strong dimorphism when it comes to sex. And I'm not talking about like size or something. I'm like, talking about like, you know, gamete production, gamete organs, you know, our genitals are very different. You know?
Yeah. So there's, there's a lot of arguments that people will try to use to somehow suggest that humans can change their sex or that we should let people just identified into any sex category they want to and I really common when you see this happen all the time, especially during pride month, you'll get organizations posting things about the amazing sex changing abilities of a certain fish. They'll talk about clownfish, or the Māori wrasse and these are fish that are what are called sequential hermaphrodites, which means that they are one sex at one stage in life, and they turn into the other sex at a later stage in life. Humans were called gonochoric species, that's a fancy word to say that our sex exists in separate individuals, we are not hermaphrodites. So in our individuals are either male or female, and they stay male or female throughout their entire life. You know, our sex organs develop once, they're present throughout our entire life. And so we can describe individuals as just sort of being male and female. It's a static thing that just says what you are, but some fish, you know, they might start out male, and then eventually, either through environmental cues or sometimes through cues from how big their bodies become, will trigger sort of them to change their sex, and they'll they'll produce, you know, the other type of gaming. The idea that somehow, sequential hermaphrodites, debunk the idea that sex is binary, is completely nonsense, because if you think about it, well, how do you know when a fish has changed their sex? It's because they've gone from producing one type of gamete to producing another type of gamete. There's only two gametes, they're either male or female. So the existence of hermaphrodites Even a simultaneous hermaphrodites individual who's producing both sperm or ova at the same time, this really just reinforces the fact that there's two sexes, these are just two different reproductive strategies. And yeah, sometimes one individual can be exhibiting in performing both of these reproductive strategies at once, or they can, you know, exhibit these strategies at different times in their life. But there's still only two fundamental reproductive strategies. And that's why there's only two sexes, and why you can say that sex is binary. So again, all these examples they try to use to dismiss the binary nature of sex actually just reinforce it even more. And then they try to have these ideas feed back and saying, well, because fish can change sex, or here's some slugs who are producing both gametes at the same time, somehow this needs to imply or this is a liberatory for the LGBTQ plus movement, seeming to suggest that fish can do it and so can humans. It's just a non sequitur. I don't even know how to respond to that except by saying it's nonsense.
Yeah. Well, so you know, just for the, for the listener and the viewer who doesn't follow this closely, which is most, you know, I think some of our arguments and discussions it's weird. So a lot of these ideas and concepts have bled over from gender ideology, gender theory. A lot of this began with the book “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity” by Judith Butler. Butler is a she's a literary theorist. He's a queer theorist, a philosopher, and she's also won awards for the worst academic writing. That was actually how I originally found out I remember, when I, when I started reading your stuff, or other people, you know, you know, Gender Trouble would come up periodically, or Butler would come up. Butler is also by the way, a they/them now? So just, if I get confused on pronoun, I don't know, I'm not trying to be offensive, just like it was she for a long time. But any case, anyway, so they’re a big queer theorist, probably one of the bigger was of the late 20th century. And, you know, obviously, first fourth now the 21st century. And, you know, she has this idea that gender is performativity, like you perform, which again, like, presupposes certain gender stereotypes, where do those come from, right. I mean, wearing a skirt is female performative in the United States, but not in Scotland, you know, actually not for the ancient Greeks for the ancient Greeks like wearing. Like, I know, some of the listeners or viewers or whatever know, I think tunic should make a comeback. We don't ride on horses anymore. So we don't really need trousers all the time, especially in warmer climates. So just putting it out there. Yeah, trousers were invented by the Scythians okay. Because they rode on horses, because they're more convenient to ride on horses. That's why trousers got popular. Okay. In Any case - Sorry, I don't want to like, go on like an anti trousers rant. I like trousers. But like, you know, it's just like, you know,
If you just want to wear a dress Razib, you can you can do it. I'm not gonna judge you.
Yeah you say that. Are you trying to say I have like, ulterior motives here anyway. It's a tunic, okay. It's a tunic. It's not a dress, but everyone. Yeah. But anyway, so the idea that it's performativity. So it's obviously applied to humans, but then like, all this stuff with other animals gets smuggled in, and we're just like, What the hell? And it's very confusing to follow all the different arguments. I mean, that's why I rely on people like you to be candid, because you can track it. And a lot of the people, you know, there's people like Leo Sapir, I think at the Manhattan Institute, who argue about these things. But it's great that you're an evolutionary biologist, which the one of the reasons they bring up the Pruitt affair is to undermine your credibility there. But it's weird that now you need to be a PhD, really, zoologist, to understand what sex is? Right? It's weird.
It is weird. Well, you don't need to be one to understand what it is. But you need to be one to to be taken seriously or something. It's ridiculous. Because I mean, it's very simple concept of what sex is. And everyone's intuition is more correct then you get from the queer theorists out there about what sex is, you know, it's, again, you're right, it all started with sort of Judith Butler and talking about gender as a performance type thing. I think she had like a throwaway line in there that like, oh, maybe we'll find out that sex is just as performative as as gender or its there's just as much of a social construct and like that single line, just sort of people ran with it, and then the likes of Anne Fausto-Sterling went with it even more.
So you brought up Anne Fausto-Sterling. And I'm really glad because I've seen this name before. It's a very, very distinctive name. And that's actually why I remember it. I don't remember who she is. It's a she? You have to like ask these things now, but it's an act I don't want to miss. Yeah, okay. So I don't want to because I don't We'll know anything about this person. But I see this person cited all the time about, you know, sexism and gender and stuff like that, telling me about this person, what they wrote why it's significant and why you have to rebut this person's work.
Yeah so Anne Fausto-Sterling, I believe she's at Brown University, and has been really responsible for sort of taking the musings of Judith Butler about sex being a social construct, and has really sort of tried to give this scientific backing mainly by just promoting the existence of people who have intersex conditions or differences of sexual development. She's responsible for claiming that you know, up to 1.7%, or even over 2% of people aren't definitively male or female. This comes from a study that she participated in where they literally defined the males and females as like individuals who adhere to a platonic ideal of being male or female. And so they had very, you know, when the baby is born, how long is its penis, if it's, you know, we're not within this one range, we're going to consider this a deviation from the platonic ideal and this these people were considered to have DSDs or be partially intersex if they have -
Wait. So let's just say you got a micro peen, okay
Yeah , these are considered intersex in her definition,
Micro peens are intersex. What if, you know a woman has a extremely substantial labia,
They had a size or length cutoff for how big the clitoris could be for you to be considered no longer female. And they would even consider like, you could even have a very be a male with a very large penis. But if you had a condition called a hypospadias, which is where the urethra sort of doesn't come out of the very tip, but it may be on slightly under an underside. This would be considered an intersex condition and her widely broad, overly broad definition. Wherevin reality, like a more clinically relevant definition of being intersex is like the appearance of actual sexual ambiguity or some mismatch between your sort of internal organs and the way you look on the outside.
Let me jump in. Yeah, so androgen insensitivity syndrome, which there are a variety of them, so from what little I know, it's basically a situation where there might be a mutation breakage on SRY, the sex determining region on the Y. And so you don't exhibit masculinization starting in the second trimester or late first trimester I think that is normal. And so some of these individuals, I mean, they're born, they have internal testes. A lot of them are flat chested, but they're taller, but they are more female presenting is what I would say. So would you count that as intersex?
I think it's okay to call it an intersex condition in like a strict clinical sense, but I would consider these individuals from a purely biological perspective, as being male, I think CIAS a is a male disorder of sexual development. And, you know, that's not I don't think anything's wrong with their SRY gene, they just they, they, they don't respond to androgens. Their androgen receptor, and all their cells, it just is non functioning. And so they have like, you know, high levels of testosterone in the male range, their bodies just don't, you know, respond to it. And so they develop, you know, their genitals look 100% female, they look 100% female, you wouldn't be able to tell just by looking at them, I think, yeah, they are, as you mentioned, like, slightly taller, but uh, you know, that's really about it. And a lot of them don't even know, or at least, they used to not know until they were about the time of going through puberty and they wouldn't get a period then, you know, they get an ultrasound or something and it's just like, Oh, you have you have testes instead. So yeah, so these are examples of you know, people who sort of have complex conditions and where biological reality might not need to match on you know, legal reality they're usually legally considered female and I think that's probably an accurate good thing to do. And Fausto-Sterling just uses this overly broad definition of what's intersex to say that oh, look how non binary sex is where you know, the binary of sex has nothing to do with the degree to which people could be sexually ambiguous and everything to do with the fact there's only two sexes you can be there's only sperm and ova. And then Anne Fausto-Sterling also wrote some article in The New York Times and also like in an academic one about there being five sexes. You know, males, females, Herms, merms, and ferms, which is like female pseudo hermaphrodites, male pseudo hermaphrodites and hermaphrodites or something like that. Again, just trying to draw lines around various intersex conditions and trying to say that these are independent sexes even though they're not producing a third or fourth or fifth type of gamete so it's just a lot of hand waving. It's a lot of obfuscation. She then has since sort of said like, Oh, I was just being tongue in cheek with that, and I called her out on. It was Twitter at the time, now X, and she just like scolded me like, for calling this out and saying that, like, well, all her, you know, followers adherence, apparently didn't get the memo that it was just a tongue in cheek thing. And this is still in the you're gonna retract this paper? Apparently not. So yeah, I mean, these ideas are very powerful. They've had a lot of consequences. And we're still dealing with them right now. And now it's gone beyond Anne Fausto-Sterling. And it's, you know, you get these ideas in Nature about the sex spectrum, you get, you know, Hormones and Behavior has a whole series on, you know, the non binary nature of sex, integrative and comparative biology has writing articles about this, like real, I don't think they're real scientific papers, but they're in real scientific journals that are publishing these things. And it's just a completely incorrect ideas about what sex is in nature. So it's really like a full court press, I'd say of just sort of the sex pseudoscience just spreading like wildfire. And there's like, almost no pushback in the academic literature, except for, you know, a peer reviewed book chapter I have with Emma Hilton. And there's some more in the works right now. But you know, we just need to get why there was no pushback. Well, I've known people that have submitted things, and they just get desk rejected from these journals. Or people don't want to talk about these things, because they see what happens to all the people who have talked about this, you know, they see the arrows I've taken from speaking out against this and, you know, caused me to leave academia. They've seen Heather Heying, who talks about this, you know, she can only get by on her podcast with Brett, I have a substack. So I can't be cancelled anymore. Emma Hilton, you know, she's fortunate enough to have a really robust department that has defended her, but they've tried to come after her and get her fired. It's just not worth a lot of people's time to just try to combat this because they have to make make it the rest of their career. And they're ever forever going to be labeled as some transphobic bigot, and it's just not worth it, in their opinion to do this stuff.
Do you think? Yeah, I mean, do you think do you think it's getting a little bit easier though? Like, do you think it's peaked?
Yeah, definitely. It's easier now than it's ever been. We have people like Jerry Coyne, who's always been supportive of my work, you know, big name and evolutionary biology. Just recently, Richard Dawkins promoted one of my talks I gave on the sixth binary, he said, it was superbly clear and totally correct. So I'm just going to flip off all my former colleagues who tried to say I was a bigot, promoting pseudoscience, because I know their big dog and spans too. Yeah, it's much easier than they
I mean they were. I think Dawkins is, you know, his status has changed a little now that he's like off the reservation on some of the new progressive stuff, you know?
Yeah. I mean, just because he's considered to be off the reservation, just because he's pushed back against precisely the same things I've been pushing back on. But, you know, there's no, no world. Can you paint Dawkins is some, you know, far right, you know, extremist or anything like that. And I just know, a lot of people respected him when I was in academia.
Yeah, I mean, things change very fast. I think we'll see. So I do have to say, though Dawkins, is 82. And Jerry Coyne is 74.
It also shows that like, the only reason they can talk about it, too, is because they're retired. And they've already had their career. And Jerry Coyne is, you know, just receiving retirement money from University of Chicago and Dawkins is wealthy from both academia and all his books. So it's only people have like, who have the ability to not be canceled, who can really speak candidly on this topic?
Well, I'm, you know, a lot of people still in academia, I'm sure, like, in terms of people in touch with you, do you think that I mean, my personal experiences, a lot of young academics, young as in like under 30 are very, very socially radical. On You know, all the Identitarian identity, race, gender, etc, sex, or whatever, I don't know, all the different identity categories they have, you know, I don't know all the all of them right now. But, but the main ones are sex and sex, gender and race, right. So I mean, I do think that like it seems to have peaked, but there's a massive cohort. And all of the older Gen X professors are going to retire at some point soon. Not soon, but you know, within the next generation. Dawkins is not gonna live forever, you know, bless his heart as they said, he's not gonna live forever. These older guys are not gonna live forever. And then they're gonna be replaced by who I mean. Yeah. What do you hear?
I worry there's a big pipeline problem like big time. You know, a lot of these people really, as you've mentioned, they retired, you know, after the whole summer of 2020, George Floyd stuff, a lot of people retired or were fired for having any views that weren't super progressive. So yeah, I mean, that's it's in the pipeline is really bad. Because as you mentioned, like the the more based ones are going to be retiring. And the people who are, you know, beginning their careers down this pathway are tend to be pretty radical I've known. I've had well, I've had people that I've worked with in labs, undergrads who had been field assistants for me, who were brilliant, and they would have made amazing scientists have, you know, told me that they're, they're no longer pursuing a career in science because of how, you know, woke everything is how they can't, they don't just don't think there'll be treated the same, and they can't, you know, say accurate things about biology. They don't want to fill out dei statements, all that type of stuff. So it's, yeah, they really rigged it. So the,
For the listeners. I mean, I have a lot of non academic listeners what DEI is.
So DEI stands for diversity, equity and inclusion. And it's one of the reasons I left academia because you're suppose you're, you're forced to fill out or make make a statement, you know, you have like your CV, you have your research statement, sometimes a teaching statement, and then oftentimes, they want you to fill out, you know, a one or two page DEI statement that says basically, they need you to express fielty to these orthodoxies of progressive leftism about, you know, critical race theory type stuff. And you know, what, how minorities are held back. And he needs to express a detailed knowledge of the various ways the different types of identities of race and sex intersect and produce these oppressor oppressed classes and all this stuff. So if you reject sort of this worldview, which I did, you're, you're basically forced to lie about it, because this is what's used as a litmus test for applicants to say, oh, this person didn't write a very good DEI statement, or they wrote something good, but it's not in line with sort of the progressive orthodoxy on it. And, you know, those are just a good way to do a first filter of people who are applying, and I mean, universities, like Berkeley, specifically, do a filter, first and foremost on DEI policies, before they even hand the applicants on to the department to even make judgments based on their academic merits. So yeah, it's a big problem.
So I want to ask you about, I guess, like the, so everyone knows this, because I always tweet about this, because, you know, I'm a fame whore. But, you know, you, you did a chart about a political spectrum. And it's the it's the chart where basically, there's one guy who's standing on the left side, and then the left runs away. And, you know, the guy on the right is like laughing at the guy on the left, and like, Elon Musk retweeted it. So you know, it's become like a big meme. I think Ben Shapiro also retweeted or mentioned that. And I just want I always tell people, like, I'm the guy on the right, because I have been telling you, since we got to know each other, that you will be voting Republican at some point. You would really, like just just for context, you are, you know, you're I don't know if there's a new atheist, whatever, that's an old school term, but your standard issue atheist, you're kind of a lib, you're kind of liberal actually. Maybe not like, maybe not like, Bernie Sanders, liberal, but you know, you're not -
I voted for Bernie in the primaries in 2016.
Yeah, so you are Bernie Sanders, you were a Bernie Sanders, liberal. And so, but on some of these social issues, you've diverged and you know, some of this stuff is like, you know, group affiliation is not the right word, but it's, you know, you became heterodox on sex. And now you're talking to me, which, like, you know, far right wing provocateur, as you know, you know, you've you've engaged with Bo Weingard who well, is that like one I don't want to get into it, but you don't have to say it like he's gotten into like one particular track right now. So like all of these, you know, kind of like, heterodox thought criminal like kind of these you know, taboo people you're rubbing shoulders with now, you know, just because you said there was a sex binary. Okay, so that's where you started. And now you know, You're an independent now you and your your partner, you know, Christina Buttons, I think I can say that she's your partner, because you got to make it pretty obvious on social media. But you guys are both basically lefties. Christina was even woke presenting like when I first when she first followed me on Insta and Twitter and X. I thought it was a woke person because the way she looked in the picture,
Me too, I thought I was being catfished it took me a while to actually respond. And with anything with anything with like, you know, hitting on her or anything like that, because I thought I was being catfished-
You guys are basically, I don't know, like, I don't think you guys can be like classified because I know Christina worked with Matt Walsh for a while and then she left the Daily Wire like their whole enterprise because she is not a down the line social conservative in that way. You know, she has very specific foci or focus on the gender ideology issue. You too, although you have engaged I think more in broader cultural war stuff with other people, even though you don't talk about it too much. Obviously, you know, I think I know where you stand on DEI, you know, you probably don't disagree with a lot of the things Chris Ruffo says now about, you know, higher ed, you know, so, what's happened to you? How do you feel right now? Are you politically homeless? All of that just like talk about this journey from being an atheist, Bernie Sanders supporting person in 2016 To eight years later, where you find yourself?
Yeah, yeah, it's been kind of wild. And it's funny, because I've described it as sort of like a political journey standing still, it's like, I didn't really move anywhere, as my cartoon depicts, it's just like, my position has been static, or at least for the most part, and it's just been the political ground shifting sort of beneath my feet, where I've had the same, you know, sort of principles about, you know, adhering to biological reality, I used to debate with the creationist intelligent design people, because they're wacko views on on evolution. You know, I've always been, like a supporter of equal rights, and, you know, a lot of feminist causes, you know, for the fact if they're, you know, their right to vote and suffrage and all that stuff really great. You know, the left view on on race that used to be sort of the Martin Luther King, judged people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin type of stuff. And then just being a very pro free speech activist. Since I'm an atheist, I think it's a good thing. History shows that, you know, it's good to have free speech, so you can kind of speak truth to power. I think free speech, academic freedom is definitely needed in in the universities. And this is why I wanted to be an academic, because I thought it was great, probably the best environment if you wanted to have honest, frank discussions about reality and things like that. And then it just turned out all those things have completely shifted. And so I haven't shifted my I just see those views and my values are now probably better expressed on the center liberal right than, you know, the sort of more center liberal left now. And so that's kind of where I see myself. Politically, I tend to align more with, with Republicans on average, who still have that liberal sort of value thing like the Chris Rufus, of the world.
Razib: You mean like a classical liberal
Yeah, like a classic liberal in the US, we say liberal and a lot of people just think Democrat, but now there's like, actual liberalism, as sort of a political ideology or sort of moral value, a way you can see the world and the individual, you know, sort of free markets and that type of thing, individual liberty, property rights, that type of stuff. So yeah, so that's where I am now I'm pretty politically homeless. I don't consider myself like a Republican. Well, I've never really considered myself a Democrat. It's just I voted for the party that best expresses my morals and views. Right now, that is more the Republican Party, although I'm very, not a Trump fan. And I don't know if I could bring myself to vote for Donald Trump. So I don't know, I might sit this one out. Let's see how things run. It's definitely pretty wild. And politically, homeless is a good descriptor for how I feel right now.
Well, I mean, what's it like? You know, unfortunately, you did not move to Austin. You moved to Nashville, so I don't get to see you. But so I don't know. What was it like politically around there. I know, Nashville is a little bit liberal, but it's in a sea of red.
It's been great so far, you know, I still have sort of this, this leftover hesitancy to talk about these topics that people who I just meet. When they ask it, what do you do is just like, Oh, God, how do I how do I tell them what I do and what I write about? Because if you did that in California, like odds are that the person is going to start screaming at you or something, and hear that it hasn't been the case. But I still feel like that fear of like, Oh, God, how do I describe my job to this person, even though they're much more likely to be like, oh, yeah, like, that sounds? - That makes a lot of sense. I even felt that when I was at this like Nashville hunters and anglers meetup thing and it was a bunch of people and like wearing camo vests and stuff like that and talking about guns. At first, I still found myself like, Oh, should I talk about what I talked about? Like they were all clearly on board with everything I was talking about. So, yeah, it's been great in Nashville. I do also love Austin and I need to make it out there. But yeah, Nashville is a great town.
Yeah. So you know, you've had a, I guess, like, just inadvertent journey. And I know that you're big on Twitter / X. That's where I see you. You rocketed up to fame and infamy. And a lot of it is through beefs and conflicts and getting involved in these inter ne sign. Sometimes internecine conflicts, I guess. You can see you're at, wow, you're like 200k followers, bro. Like, you're way ahead of me now. But controversy sells beefs sell, you know, so I not surprised you guys.
I try not to get involved in mudslinging. I'm pretty least of the way I think I'm pretty just dry on Twitter. I'm just like, males and females are real. I just call out like, here's a weird paper about non binary.
So you're offensive because of your substance, not your style. You know, I think I'm both like, uptight, I like coming. I'm pretty aggressive with people, as you've probably seen, you know, you're very, very mild mannered compared to me, but you say, shocking things. Like, there's two sexes in humans. So, but that you get, like, caught up in some sort of storms. And, you know, you got like, all the academics frothing at their mouth. So you're not really an evolutionary biologist, or he actually studies Behavioral Ecology, that's totally different. You know, I mean, obviously, their just stupid you know, but any case, so maybe that's what you're getting involved in. And then, you know, there's this whole IDW faction that, obviously you were orbiting around there, like you were not profiled, but that kind of like collapsed. Can you talk about what's going on with that? Because like, I'm not, you're not friends with a lot of those guys. But I'm not like part of it. Like what's happening there? Like, what, what is the state in 2024 Colin?
Oh, I mean, the whole IDW thing. I never saw it as like a cohesive group, it was just sort of a bunch of heterodox thinkers. And the only thing they had in common was that they would be like, willing to speak to people who they disagree with, and air these disagreements and agree to disagree. That type of thing is like, hey, let's talk about it. Let's not cancel people for having views we disagree with even vehemently disagree with that has since sort of fractured more, I know that there's some people who don't want to talk to each other. Like Sam Harris doesn't want to talk to Brett Weinstein about some of his views. And there's probably other weird dynamics of people not talking to each other. So that's completely broken down. I mean, I still follow a lot of them independently. There's some maybe not so much anymore, but they're all interesting people. I think it's still good to follow and at least hear what they have to say. But yeah, it's not like all these people were had any coherence or had any affinity based on like, shared views, except for sort of the anti cancel culture type stuff.
Yeah, I mean, I mean, I follow some of these people, I don't know them all. I mean, I've DM’d with Brett a little but basically, Sam Harris is basically a normie liberal, he's a system guy. He supports the system. You know, again, I respect his courage. And, you know, he's, expressed some taboo viewpoints, we don’t need to get into the details there. But I'm not saying that he's some sort of, you know, just Normie generic person, like he does put himself out there. But, but he is a, you know, kind of like, I don't know, he's not a partisan Democrat, necessarily, but he's a conventional liberal, very, very anti Trump, like you expressed a strong ambivalence. Let's put it mildly to Trump. But I mean, Sam Harris is way more, you know, extreme about that. So aside from some of his, he has some heterodoxys. He's still more aggressive about Islam than a liberal would be, you know, he's engaged with Charles Murray and said some things positive about that. But you know, in general, he's down the line. A Biden, bro, right. Then you have Brett, who as of this recording, was just on Infowars with Alex Jones.
Colin: I saw that, yeah
So that is, that is a migration. So to speak. You know, from again, a Bernie bro in 2016. Professor at Evergreen State, and some of the stuff Brett says like, I'm gonna lie, it's kind of weird. You know, the Chinese invasion thing. You hear that?
I did. Yeah. Can't say I agree.
Yeah. Can you tell them what it was? This is funny. I'm sorry. Like, Brett like, I’m not hating here. But it's like, it's just like, I'm sorry. I just laugh when I heard that cuz like Brett I don't buy this. And I think it's funny. So just tell them what that is.
Yeah I'll try. I'll try to restate it as clearly as I can. But I think he went to the southern border. where he saw that there are a lot of Chinese people that were coming over, he would look at this then in the context of China's like one child policy, which tended to favor males, they would sometimes, you know, abort females who were there. So they could think what to push on the family name type of thing or to have they wanted someone to work around the farm, or whatever it was. And so rather than seeing this as just sort of like a bad policy thing, that is they're reaping the sort of consequences for, he's suggesting maybe that this is a higher level, like above the species level, like at the lineage level adaptation, to produce a disproportionate number of males in preparation for war. That is a I mean, it's a fun idea. It's one of those like group selection type things that it's, I think it's a fun thing to think about. And, you know, but there's almost certainly no evidence to suggest that this is going on. Again, it's just because it's like a possible thing. I don't think it's plausible. And, you know, Brett expressed that he would this, like, kept him up at night that he's very fearful about this. I think it's so fantastical, even if it's in the realm of possibility. It's not in the realm of plausibility. And so I couldn't see myself being kept up at night by pondering such things. It's, I think you can explain it with much more proximate causes.
Here's the thing, Colin, you're laughing now. Or you're like expressing some serious skepticism. But what if one month from now you wake up? And you and Christina are frogmarched to a vast hall where you're forced to eat dim sum?
Well, then, I will I will apologize to Brett. Yeah.
Yeah, I don't know. I started laughing when I heard it.
I like Brett too this isn't a personal thing at all. And I just, I wouldn't have expressed that that view myself was such, you know, giving it as much credit
IDW we got a comedian in the house. I don't know, man. Take it for what it is, Brett. I mean, we're not trying to be dicks. But like, I you know, I’m just keep it real. I'm gonna be honest, I thought it was kind of funny. Okay, so, you know, there's these internecine conflicts, you're still tight with Lindsey, can you? I have asked you this, because like, I don't know what the hell's going on. I will tell a David Lindsey story, which I have told people. I think it was like, you know, we were in a group chat. I'm not gonna say which one. But you might know a bit about this. But I told Lindsay at the end of 2019, I think it was over Christmas, and like, you're gonna be hanging out with Christian evangelicals soon, you know, and he laughed. Because Lindsey is a hardcore new atheist, you know, he comes out of that movement, like explicitly. And that's what he was doing a couple years later. He was doing a couple of years later.
I mean, I've been given talks in churches, and I get invited out to these these groups and stuff, because they want to hear about sort of sex and gender thing. So it's, like,
Well God created, man and woman, right? It’s the Bible
I mean, it's just yeah that's, that's the other half. I get like, they support me because they're just like, you know, God created man or woman. That's the sex binary. That's all they need to know. I just tried to tell them that like, Well, okay. You can believe that and at least we're at the same endpoint. But you don't need to believe in sort of the biblical reasons, in order to to understand that there's two sexes, like there's actually good evidential grounds for this as well. So I tried to give them least arming them with that. So they're, they're not out there, just talking to the libs. And then just saying that, you know, God made it this way, because that's not going to work. So I'm trying to arm them with the actual facts and evidence.
Well, I mean, So James, I don't know, I swear to God, like he is. Alright, so I'm gonna do the King James Version, because I liked that translation. Because I'm a boomer, I guess. Okay. This is like a quote about Ishmael. “And he will be a wild man, his hand will be against every man and every man's hand against him, and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren” So I just think of that when I see what's happening with James Lindsay because, you know, one day he's like going off against like the critical race theorists and Marxists and stuff like that. Then the next day I see the far right is attacking him. Then the next day I see him like, facing off against the center right. I don't even know man, like how many different beefs like he has a beef machine, you know, and I'm not talking about the beefy thighs which he has also talked about, you know,
He's a savant and he just like is jujitsu-ing every everyone coming at him from all different directions. I don't know how he does it. I'm I love James. He's such a good dude. He's you know, spicy on Twitter and I can't say I like every single thing he tweets but in person we're good buds. He's great, great guy. He gets a lot of hate. But he's Yeah, he's such a good dude. And brilliant. Like he's super smart.
Yeah, just so was it like, just so you guys know, listeners out there who don't follow all these ins and outs. Lindsay was a co author was a co author on the conceptual penis paper. So, you know, that's that's how kind of his turn. I mean, earlier I did he write a book about atheism or
did he in the past, you know, he wrote a book about sort of God and all that stuff. He was sort of a new atheist writer, I didn't read his books back then it didn't know too much. But I had like, heard his name.
Yeah, so he comes out of it. He's got he's got a bunch of like books now. Or he, he's a contributor to a bunch of books about, you know, whatever, like critical theory, social justice, all these other things. But he also is like, God doesn't, We do. You know, these, everything is wrong about God.
He gives most of his talks churches now. Which is really funny.
Yeah, so “Everything Is Wrong About God” was was published. The paperback was 2015. Right. So it must have been like, a couple years, a year earlier for hardcover. So like 10 years later, now he is he is like part of so I saw him I saw James Lindsay being mentioned in some internecine side conflict between Christian nationalist evangelicals and anti Christian nationalist evangelicals. And the anti Christian nationalist evangelicalism are like using Lindsey in some way or collaborating with him. I thought, this is what happened. I saw something an explanation of what happened. We see this is like very, very deep in the weeds, but I think it's just like, interesting. Cuz I know some of these people because I'm pretty far right, in a lot of ways. Or I have like, I go, I go to, you know, I know people that are on the far right, that's what I'll say. Right? I myself, I'm probably center right in most of my views, but, you know, whatever, socially moderate, and it's hard to average things out. There's some things where I'm like, right wing some things where I'm left wing, probably. But anyway, let's just like set me aside. So he went to some Claremont conference. And I have gone to Claremont conferences, and I'm friends with a lot of people, the Claremont Institute. It's diverse, but right now, it does have kind of an air of like, Christian nationalism about it, even though they have a lot of Catholics who are not Christian nationalists, because Christian nationalism tends to be a Calvinist reform project in the United States. There's a, you know, group New Founding in Dallas, and apparently, like someone got up and said, like, he should be forcibly converted to Christianity in the Christian nationalist Republic, and James got offended by that I get why he's offended. I mean, I'm not gonna lie. I'm gonna like straight up saying those guys are LARPers like they aren’t converting no one, okay? Because I go to these conferences, and they talk about how, you know, non Christians should be second class citizens what they mean by non Christians, but people who are not Calvinists Christians, Calvinists Christians are like 10% of America's population or something, you know, so it's like, this is just a LARP. Honestly, I'm gonna be honest, I tell them to their face. Like I don't really care. I mean, I agree with you on like, a lot of cultural issues, all this extra stuff, like, whatever this is like, this is like Harvard communists fantasizing about the Marxist utopia. Not gonna happen. I'm not worried. So I wouldn't have gotten offended. I just want a laughed, but apparently, James said he got offended. So that started to beef, because he's still an atheist. And, you know, you have like all these like, weird, strange bedfellows. And then it turns out, oh, actually, like, you guys totally disagree on everything. Well, I mean, duh, I mean, he hasn't like, you know, I don't know. And also, I don't understand, like, you know, James is not he's new to these like circles. So I think I'm gonna be do a little psychoanalyzing, I think part of his beefing with people on the right is because he's a newcomer, and he's shocked at some of the stupid things from his perspective that they say, I would not be shocked because I've always been there. You know, it's like, yeah, like, they're gonna say, like, weird things like this, or they're just like, okay, like, that's insane. You know, I mean, it's, it's like, whatever. If you go to some left wing conferences, people will say weird things to like, they're gonna confiscate all the guns, you know, or something like that, you know, or like, and ban fossil fuel cars that run on fossil fuel. Like just people to say that, you know, and you laughing them off
Yeah, I still have these moments too where like, I'm somewhat shocked when I hear what people believe on the right like, that's crazy. I don't want to associate myself with that. But then I think again, like Well, I'm here because I was responding to like some even more insane crap coming from, from the left about, you know, the reality distorting stuff about sex and gender and all that stuff. So there's never going to be a group that's going to be perfectly aligned with everything you believe in and it's really Just a cost benefit thing. I mean, I was at a recent summit, I won't say who it was by because it’s kind of private thing, but I went there, there were a lot of Christian conservatives there. And some of them, you know, I was on there to talk about the biology of sex and what males and females are, and all that stuff. And I, you know, talked about them in terms of them being evolved reproductive strategies. And then some people out for the talk, were very offended that I even like, brought up evolution in the first place. This is like, Okay, well, I'm an evolutionary biologist, I don't know what to tell you. I'm just gonna say like it is, I'm not going to change. And I do try to make sure that I don't sort of not say, evolution or something. When I'm in a church and things like that. I'm just gonna say what I actually think about it, and people can talk to me after and if they want to talk about evolution, or why they don't like it, then I'm happy to have that conversation, too. So yeah, I just tried to be as authentic as I can, in these situations and not know, I am done with the whole, like, hiding what I think about reality from certain groups, because that's what I was doing on the left for a while, and I'm not about to start doing that on the right now or any other group. So yeah, you just have to get used to being around people who disagree with you. And, yeah, people are going to try to, you know, use you for their own ends, but I'm using them for my own ends too. I'm going on their platforms, so I can try to convince other people. It's, there's nothing you can do about it either. There shouldn't you know, if you're gonna require like, some ideological purity test, and you're never gonna, never gonna go anywhere, you're just gonna sit at home and stare at your wall and not have any influence whatsoever.
Amen, brother. Amen. I got it. Okay. So, you know, obviously, we've been talking for a while, and I want to be respectful of your time, as they say, in the business. So I want to wind down. But I want to talk about your book, which, you know, someday maybe I too, will be a book writer, you know, but people asked me about that. But you, you are, you're coming. Home stretch. You are writing a book. It's titled, let's talk about sex. No, I'm just joking. I don’t know what it’s titled. I think that'd be a great topic, I think would be a great title. Or like, maybe talk about sex? Yeah, it'd be I don't know. So yeah, talking about your book, where you're going, but let’s talk about your book, what's going on.
So, it's going to be no surprise that this is a book that's on the topic of what biological sexes and how people are distorting it, and why it matters that we understand what males and females are in society, I'm hoping it's just going to be sort of a one stop shop, where you can go to it, if you want to see why all the arguments out there are for the for non binary sex, I will basically summarize and debunk every single one of them. And there's quite a lot because they take a lot of different forms. So the beginning just talks about sort of the evolution of the two sexes, and sexual dimorphism. And how this influences the behavior and physiology and everything of animals and how I can create so enormous diversity of body types and all these things. But they're still like, the two fundamental sexes. And then the second part of the book really goes into the weeds and the details of like, what the sex binary means, why sex isn’t a spectrum, why it's not a social construct. It debunks Fausto-Sterling's sexes, the idea that sexes is rooted in chromosomes, and there's maybe seven sexes, because there's seven different types of viable sex chromosome combinations. Debunks the bird with four sexes and the four sex ant species and why they're just sort of misinterpreting what the word sex means, you know, everything in the weeds, but hopefully written in an engaging way where the people will keep reading and learning stuff. It's not going to be to sort of lofty and academic sounding. But hopefully it's academic and precise enough where people understand what's not - you're gonna have a pretty full understanding of what sex is. And then the consequences for this, why this is happening? What is what is gender ideology trying to subvert all this stuff and why it's important to push back on this, I stay out of politics completely, you should be able to read it from anywhere on the political spectrum. And learn from it. And, yeah, that's the that's the idea.
Okay, so I want to like, talk a little bit about the science just, you know, I do think it's interesting. Again, I don't have like a strong like, I don't care. I mean, I've read about the evolution of sex, you know, for decades, super interesting. Everyone should check Narrow Roads of G Land Volume Two, and volume three, especially Volume Two, WD Hamilton's series of collected papers on the evolution of sex. This is not a complicated topic. There's not like a first massive chapter or prologue about what sex is in these books that are published from like 20 years ago, and that are following a tradition that's been going on for decades. Like people just know, you know, it wasn't like complicated in the past. Okay. So setting that aside you talked about gametes. So gamete are obviously sperm and eggs. These are the singular copies in diploid organisms, because not everything is diploid. But in diploid, So two copies of a gene by Mendel's Law of Segregation. You know, you have like one copy that's sampled out of the parents, they come together, right, and so sperm is haploid, it has one copy. And then eggs are also haploid, they have one copy. And so the copies come together and create a diploid human. And so this is interesting, because it de-emphasizes chromosomes, which I think is actually useful, because a lot of people don't know this. But you know, there's different chromosomal arrangements for creating the two sexes in different parts of the animal kingdom, across the tree of life. So in birds, females are the heterochromatic sex. So they're the ones I think it's like zw, and zz, okay. So females are ZW, and males are ZZ. So it means that sex linked diseases and birds are through the female, females are the are the sex that has like, you know, the breakdown because of the recessive sexual diseases. And that causes some differences in various… I don't want to get into evolutionary genetics of it. The point is, sex chromosomes themselves evolve. They tend to usually the non recombining one which humans is the why the one that's kind of the deviation and has very few genes, most of them involved in sex. That tends to eventually decay and disappear. Because of Muller’s Ratchet, like look it up, Muller’s Ratchet. And then you have to have a new sex chromosome. So our sex chromosome has been degrading, it's a really the Y is a really crap piece of genetic information. It has has very few genes. It's filled with repetitive elements, et cetera, et cetera. So eventually, something it will disappear, something new will evolve. But the maintenance of the production of the gametes is by necessity maintained because otherwise you wouldn't have a lineage, right? So you'll figure out new ways to do the same thing. The key is you have large gametes and small gametes. And that just seems to be pretty common across the tree of life I've ever thought about in detail, actually. But this is true in plants too you know plants also have the same dynamic.
Yeah it’s the universal defining characteristic of male or female is the relative size of your gametes. You pointed out that in humans and birds we have chromosomal sex determination. Other species do differently. Turtles and alligators, they don't have sex chromosomes at all, like whether they develop into males or females is determined by the temperature that their eggs are incubated at. So I really try to distinguish between what how sex is determined, you know, mechanistically, developmentally, versus how sex is defined, which is by your the type of gamete that you have the function to produce, a lot of people will read - Oh, sex is determined by chromosomes. And they'll think in their mind, you know, colloquial, meaning have determined the mean, that's like, sex is defined by chromosomes. But then no. We have no problem determining the sex of a, of a turtle or an alligator, because, you know, their sex is basically what type of gamete they're producing not the temperature that they were incubated that, like those help, you know, cause a embryo to develop down a pathway that will result in males and females, but, you know, they aren't the defining feature of being a male and female. So, yeah, that's a point that I tried to make as clear as possible in my book, you know, the upstream mechanisms that lead to sex, and then there's sex itself. And then there's all the downstream consequences of sex and sexual dimorphism. And behavioral differences. And animals can do this other way. And sex role reversals in certain species, depending on ecological factors, you know, there's all crazy diversity. The mechanisms and the downstream consequences aren't binary, but the sex definitely is because there's only those two gametes.
So here's the final question, Dr. Wright. Is there life after sex?
Absolutely. 100%
What's your life after sex going to be like? What I mean, you know, I know that your whiskey or gin like you'd like to make alcohol. I mean, I know that your column Dr. Colin Wright is a fully featured person, he is not simply a second of all. Other things you're interested in, you know, when people people ask me they're like, you know, Colin seems fine. But like, you know, some day like, we're not going to want to talk about Yeah, so I think Oh, yeah. Now you're full fledged public intellectual. So where are you going now? Or maybe you need to go into the alcohol business. I don't know.
I mean, could Be I would, I would love to start a distillery sometime in the future. But I think we'll be talking about the next thing for at least another five years to a decade in terms of like, getting this out of law. I mean, a lot of what I do right now working for the Manhattan Institute is involved in, you know, getting policy changed. I'm doing a lot of expert testimony for court cases, I just testified actually in, in Texas for SB 14, where I was cross examined by a bunch of ACLU lawyers in my face about why sex isn't defined by, you know, gamete production, that type of thing that was entertaining, I wrote about it on my substack it put the whole transcript on there, if anyone wants to read that. But you know, the the Heritage Foundation has recently put out something called the Defining Sex Act, which is model legislation that only a couple states have taken up right now. But it's, I think, of round 20 or more are set to be taking this up this year. And I'm basically their go to boy for defending this type of stuff. So I'll be doing a lot of expert testimony, both written and in court. So I'll be super busy on this stuff. And there's going to be tons of challenges. And so I think it'd be busy for the next several years doing this. Hopefully, the book does well, and I can not have to do this my entire life. But I think, you know, we'll be grappling with it to at least some degree for a while. And then, you know, I've always kept my ear to the culture war stuff. And I think I have, you know, ideas to lend to other topics as well, even though I'll try to stick to biological issues. As much as possible, we're probably going to see a resurgence of, you know, intelligent design creationism and stuff at some point as the right gains more political power. And so maybe I'll have to pivot to that again, and I'll get exiled from the right doesn't go back to the left. And who knows, I think we'll see. I'll be doing something for sure.
Yeah, you definitely will be doing for sure. So, yeah, everybody, you know, someday, you know, soon, there will be a book. You know, you can order online at various work. I gotta say, I ordered a book off Barnes and Noble, cause something was back was back. This is like, totally random, but I'm gonna keep it in the podcast because I know, this is what, what, what really exercises me, okay. I got to order a book at Barnes and Noble for my kid, because it's like, it takes don't take too long from Amazon. Barnes and Nobles website sucks. I'm just saying like, if you're competing with Amazon, at least, like employ some devs that because it just it was a pain in the butt to order the book. I mean, come on man. Who's working on? Yeah, I'm just like, oh my god, like, why are you making it difficult for me to order the damn book? And this was an expensive book. You we're gonna get money out of it, you know. Anyway. So that's like editorializing. So yeah. It's been great talking to you excited about everything you're doing. Obviously, the substack realities last stand was linked to it. You know, you're working with the Manhattan Institute, various races, you know, people can support you. We didn't talk too much about your quillette years. But you know, you were an editor there. You know, you've been now through the trenches and kind of gone upward and onward. I'm proud to call you a friend. Also, you know, I am. I don't wanna say proud but like, you know, I respect your courage. Although, like, again, it's courage in the face of absurdity a lot of times so it's like, kind of like a kind of a backhanded compliment, you know?
Yeah, yeah. I mean, the people I'm against are like very very clownish it's it's not like anyone had a gun to my head but they did you know, try to go after my career so
They went after you career you have a new career now because you know, they went after your career and that's you know, you will be known for that actually, let me just check really quickly before we check out let's just see what - what exile what's exile lifestyle?
Exile lifestyle? Is that? Is there an article about me in exile lifestyle?
It's by Colin Wright. There's another Colin Wright on Google
Colin: There's a couple but
Yeah, but you're but you're Dr. Colin Wright. I mean, that's that's your website you got the Manhattan Institute page. Author speaker West Bend Wisconsin yeah that's a different - yeah, yours is a common name you're mostly it's you but there's random other people I'm just curious like you don't have like - who is this guy?
I’ve been trying to get like a Google thing but it's for some reason it hasn't been working like I created it
Yeah so there's Colin.substack this guy is is a whole is a whole like thing so anyway, there's other Colin Wrights but you know you don't have like too much like nasty stuff written about you. That's what I'm checking. So good for you Colin I think you're doing you're doing good work. And you know, you're making a life out of it. Maybe it's like a role model for other scientists who want to speak up I don't know I know communication, Science communication, whatever you want to call it is a big thing now, you are gonna get incoming but you know, that's, that's life and you're making a good life out of it in Tennessee and central Tennessee. And you know, having fun, enjoying yourself and maintaining your integrity. That's what it's all about man. So, I've kept you here for a while. Everyone check out check out the sub stack and, you know, it was my pleasure talking to you. My pleasure knowing you. And, you know, I'll see you online man.
Thanks Razib. Always a pleasure coming on.
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