Actual science would like a word.

WATCH: Susanne DeWitt, an 89 year-old Holocaust survivor who was arrested and sent to Dachau Concentration Camp at age 4, was repeatedly heckled by demonstrators as she spoke in favor of the City of Berkeley's Holocaust Remembrance Day proclamation.

Jewish man: my family and I do not feel safe as Jews in San Francisco Audience members behind him: making pig noises Are we in Germany 1939 all over again?

Eden Golan, our fellow artist, cannot leave her hotel room in fear for her life because she is Jewish. This is 2024. I call on every artist to join me in condemning publicly this despicable act of hate. This is a time for choosing. Your silence is complicit. @Eurovision @macklemore

I'm thrilled to republish @Evolutionistrue's essay "Biology is Not Bigotry," originally published and then censored by the @FFRF. A scientific defense of sex against pseudoscience, its removal led to resignations by Coyne, @sapinker, and @RichardDawkins. realityslaststand.com/p/biol…

ONLINE LESSON | Art in Auschwitz Art created by prisoners is a unique testimony. Artists documented crimes, saved identities of victims, and tried to save humanity in a world of dehumanization. See the lesson: lekcja.auschwitz.org/en_18_s… All lessons: lesson.auschwitz.org

Thank you Moti. I really would like to see anyone downplays what happened to me go through it themselves and describe it as no big deal. It is hard to explain how painful and disorienting it is to give everything you have to an institution for 20 years, do pretty much everything right, and then have that institution, most of your colleagues, and even friends either join in on the attack, fail stand up for you, or tell you to keep quiet when people who represent the university publicly attack your character. Those attacks are picked up in the international press and overnight you are branded a transphobe. I would like to see my critics go through this and come back to that environment each day carrying on as usual, especially if they did not have tenure, had no lab community of their own. I could go into graphic detail about what happened to my mental health. If I explained all of that to you, Philip, I would hope you might have reconsidered your comment. You don't know what it's like until you go through it. I am obviously not the only one something like this has happened to, and many have had it so much worse. It may look from the outside, because I wasn't fired, there was no investigation, etc., that again, this is just no big deal. But this is often how silencing of views happens. It could not be more clear that these events silence people and research, severely hamper our ability to do the job of the University, and cause a huge amount of suffering.

Oh, dear. It appears that Jerry Coyne is unhappy with @ScienceBasedMed (and me as editor) because we don't echo his "gender critical" pseudoscience and conspiracy theories. Whatever will we do?😉

🧵1/4 A Harvard professor has just published a glowing review of Yale Professor Agustín Fuentes’ new book, Sex is a Spectrum, in The Lancet—one of the highest-ranked, most prestigious medical journals in the world. In it, she asserts that the “gametic definition” of sex—roughly, that there are two sexes, defined by whether the organism produces sperm (male) or eggs (female)—is not only “harmful,” but also “sophistry, not science.” (Lancet piece is below.) I hold the gametic view. To the best of my knowledge, this is the view held by most evolutionary biologists. The author of the review has different ideas, and quotes approvingly from Fuentes’ book on the nature of sex: “sex is a biocultural construct. Gamete size represents but one of multiple components and developmental processes—including gonads, hormones, genitals, fertility, mating, parenting behaviour, secondary sexual characteristics, and gender identity.” People disagree about the nature of male and female, and that’s OK. Respectful disagreement among scholars should be encouraged; it often sharpens thinking and research. But The Lancet review goes well beyond disagreement about the facts, and exemplifies one of the main reasons Harvard is being targeted by the government. Nobody wants to be called hateful or bigoted (especially by faculty with fancy endowed professorships), or even tainted by close proximity to views that could be construed that way. But not only has the Harvard professor disagreed with the gametic view, she apparently feels free to publicly impugn the ostensible motives and character of those who endorse it. Without providing any evidence, she asserts that our view is motivated (at least in part) by political aims, and harmful ones. As she wrote in The Lancet: “Although the gametic definition makes reference to biological systems, it is sophistry, not science. Those who promote this definition favour the assertion that sex inheres in gamete (sperm and egg) production because, in part, it facilitates their political aims by fuelling unhinged panic in some quarters about transgender threats to traditional gender roles.” She praises Fuentes for recognizing scientists’ “responsibility to respond to harmful deployments of inaccurate, overly simplistic, and reductionist science by those attempting to naturalise and depoliticise their hateful views.” And last, there’s the link between those who hold the gametic view and bigots: “Like scientific bigots of yore—such as the anthropologist J McGrigor Allan, who in 1869 pronounced in the Journal of Anthropological Science that, ‘Thousands of years have amply demonstrated the mental supremacy of man, and any attempt to revolutionize the education and status of women on the assumption of an imaginary sexual equality, would be at variance with the normal order of things’—the recent favour bestowed on the gametic definition of sex by anti-trans gender traditionalists appeals selectively to science to naturalise and rationalise inequality and exclusion.” The subtext is that in science, simply following the evidence is ill-advised if you (or others who have power over you) think it will lead to social harms. What kind of person would want to hold, let alone give voice to such harmful views as the gametic one?

Scientists Uncover a Protein That Seems to Fight Aging in Our Skin pst.cr/doHkT

Robert Sapolsky is a great scientist and writer, but I agree w the author here that his arguments against free will are unconvincing. Granted, human choice does not arise from a miracle in the brain, but ... quillette.com/2023/11/06/rob…

Societal norms have frequently reinforced a binary outlook on sex & gender in nature, but there are many examples where this isn't the case. Evolutionary biologist Joan Roughgarden tells us how animals often fail to fall into neat boxes #PrideMonth #LGBT 🌈piped.video/watch?v=KJ3lcCa0…

DO - talk about people “acquiring” or “contracting” #COVID19 DON'T - talk about people “transmitting COVID-19” “infecting others” or “spreading the virus” as it implies intentional transmission & assigns blame bit.ly/32HZe0q #coronavirus

Hard competition, but this may be the worst paragraph of all time in "Scientific American". Here is how I think it happened: The author of this article was predisposed to thinking that there are no biological differences. Then she read this thing about pacesetters, in which it said that using male pacesetters would make women 'artifically faster'. She took this to mean that there is a sort of conspiracy to make women not run as fast as they can. She could have considered that pacesetters only run the first part of the race, and that if the pace is set too high here, the runners will run out of energy later on. But she didn't consider that, because she was excited to see evidence for what she wanted to believe. Probably she used this argument a number of times on her colleagues, with the punchline "as though women were not actually doing the running themselves", to great success. What a silly assumption, haha.

Stag beetle vs giant robot stag beetle - GO!

So let’s walk through it. We now have video of the scene showing the explosion is from the parking lot and the buildings are in tact. There is no crater, no building demolished. This is inconsistent with the type of bomb many were suggesting yesterday. nitter.app/Osinttechnical/status/…

Judith Butler describing the October 7 massacre as armed resistance: “We can have different views about Hamas as a political party, we can have different views about armed resistance. But [...] the uprising of October 7th was an act of armed resistance.[...] This was an uprising”

Speciation theory is badly broken. But as with the rest of evolutionary theory, the solution is higher quality Darwinism. Only when that mess is fixed will we know what remains to be explained. My bet would be the remainder (what can not be explained in principle by Darwinian processes) is zero. But we won’t know if we never get our act together.

It’s easy to dunk on @TuckerCarlson here. He is just simply wrong about Darwinism. But Tucker is a very smart, educated guy who ended up confused about evolution because our truth-seeking institutions have taken up lying full time—including the biologists, I’m ashamed to say. We all believe nonsense, across multiple topics. The Darwinian paradigm IS broken, having nothing to do with any error of Darwin’s. But the real story is the Cartesian crisis we are clearly in across the board, and the dawning of this needless dark age. The alarm is going off, but instead of leaping out of bed, we’re going to take the battery out of the smoke detector and go back to sleep. Shame on us.

Ladies and gentlemen, the editor-in-chief of Scientific American

This debate is taking place in the 21st century at @MIT. I warned you for many years but you did not listen... Upcoming debates in this series include the following topics: 1) Does the sun exist? 2) Is gravity a real thing? 3) Can men get pregnant? 4) Will the evolutionary of consciousness be cracked via the use of Queer Theory?

These are the last 6 slides from a BIOL 104: Principles of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology lecture at Yale, a required course for all pre-med students. The slides attempt to obfuscate what males and females are by asserting that the binary concept of sex is "essentialist" and insisting that "Evolution is fundamentally anti-essentialist." Therefore, the binary notion of sex is unscientific and wrong. They claim that "sex" is: ▫️ "a fact about history, not individuals" ▫️ "a cluster of iterative, coevolved, differentiated reproductive homologies" ▫️ "a becoming or enactment—a performance of the self" They also claim that an organism's phenotype is "the performance of the individual self" and that "biology needs queer theory to get the phenotype right." This is pure biological pseudoscience masquerading as science. This is a lecture I can envision Deepak Chopra giving. There are many deep flaws with this portrayal of sex, but one of the most significant errors is the portrayal of binary sex as "essentialist." And while it is correct that biology is "anti-essentialist," it is not "essentialist" to point out an actual defining property of certain categories. "Essentialism" in biology implies something immaterial and unfalsifiable. But having the function to produce either small or large gametes is a material reality, and therefore not "essentialist." Do not conflate "essentialist" and "reductionist." Many natural phenomena or categories don't have a single defining trait. Species are reproductively isolated, lineage-based taxonomic classifications. Things like "races" are nonrandom statistical clusters of genetic relatedness. But some biological phenomena, like the sex categories male and female, really do have single defining properties, which is rooted in the type of gamete—sperm or ova—an individual has the function to produce. This isn’t “essentialism,” it’s just observing and describing biological reality. Different types of biological phenomena are described differently, because the world is what it is and it's the job of biologists to describe and explain it. It is very worrying that Yale requires their medical students to take courses promoting biological pseudoscience.

Bill Maher calls out Scientific American for an unscientific claim that men could only beat women in sports because of 'societal differences'. Neil Degrasse Tyson defends the concept to Bill's dismay: Bill Maher: "I'm going to tell you. Scientific in American. 'I could read it to you. It's. It's really ugly. You know, I apologize to younger voters that my Gen X is so full of fucking fascists.' This is in Scientific American. Less than a year ago, the inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes, but of biases in how they are treated in sports. That's nuts. And it sure ain't scientific. And it's in Scientific American. And that's why the Democrats lost the election. Neil Degrasse Tyson: "Women might actually have the advantage. You could look into that. Yeah, maybe long distance swimming." Bill finally found someone more smug than himself. NDT masquerades as an intellectual but cannot acknowledge basic biology.

We evolutionary biologists (@SwipeWright , @Evolutionistrue , @FondOfBeetles and others) are fascinated by the immense diversity in body and behavior of male and female organisms. We also understand that mammals come in two sexes, male and female, and that these are reproductive categories that are defined by the body plan for the production of either large or small gametes. @Anthrofuentes knows what we think about all this, so I am confused about why he says in @sciam that scientists like us “maintain that whether our bodies make ova or sperm are all we need to know about sex.” Relatedly, he says that “producing ova or sperm does not tell us everything…about an individual’s childcare capacity, homemaking tendencies, sexual attractions, interest in literature…” Um…who is saying that gametes dictate any of this? That sex is binary is obviously compatible with traits like interest in literature varying widely between the two sexes. It is also compatible with the existence of significant differences between the sexes. Unfortunately, Fuentes has tarred all the members of a diverse group with the same brush, denigrating the motives of those who assert that sex is real, biological, binary and meaningful for social policy. “They are arguing for a specific political, and discriminatory, definition of what is ‘natural’ and ‘right’ for humans based on a false representation of biology…[and] dishonest ascriptions of what biology is are being deployed to restrict women’s bodily autonomy…and to attack the rights of transexual and transgender people.” Sex matters because even though bodies and behavior vary, being male or female does predict a lot. Women in particular understand this, because we are more physically vulnerable than men. We care about gender-diverse people and their basic human rights, and we are *also* concerned about safety and fairness in places like prison cells and women’s sports. These issues can be debated sensibly without relying on “a false representation of biology.” scientificamerican.com/artic…

I'm constantly amazed & confused by the use of ad-hominems—on public platforms—by academics. Especially when it's a philosopher, I try to understand the motivation and provide a bit of feedback via email. It generally fails, as it did here, spectacularly. Today's example is from a UVM philosopher, who completely shut me down, writing only "Please do not contact me again." Below is: 1. His initial Bluesky post 2. My email response 3. His reply 4. His follow-up Bluesky post threatening to share my email if I contacted him again. The only email I sent him is the one below. So I'm heading him off and just revealing my nastiness right here to all on X. Links at the end. 1. Weiner's initial post (Nov 1): "Matt Weiner @mattweiner19.bsky.social this is not to deny that there are also biologists who prominently support transphobia. it seems to me that many of the prominent names have left the field for the full-time grift (Colin Wright, Weinstein & Heying who were always cranks, Carole Hooven, Dawkins too). could be selection bias though" 2. My email to Weiner in response: On Nov 4, 2025, at 12:01 PM, Hooven, Carole Kennedy <hooven@fas.harvard.edu> wrote: Dear Professor Weiner, I am writing in regard to your Bluesky post of November 1, in which you included me among “biologists who prominently support transphobia.” You also speculated that I (and others) “have left the field for the full-time grift,” and call us “cranks." I was hoping you could, at a minimum, clarify these rather uncharitable comments. First, could you please explain why you believe I “support transphobia”? Perhaps you mean that I have supported individuals you regard as transphobic, rather than that I am myself transphobic—but I’d appreciate your elaboration. Second, what leads you to conclude that I’ve left academia for “full-time grift”? If that were the case, it would have been a stupid move, given that leaving a career I loved resulted in the loss of most of my previous income. Finally, do you ever worry about what this kind of public rhetoric models for your philosophy students? Essentially calling people like me,  Richard Dawkins [@RichardDawkins] or Colin Wright [@SwipeWright] “transphobic cranks and grifters,” as a response to disagreement about substantive and controversial issues? Thank you for your time. Best, Carole Hooven 3. Weiner's response to my email: From: Matt Weiner <Matt.Weiner@uvm.edu> Date: Tuesday, November 4, 2025 at 12:13 PM To: Hooven, Carole Kennedy <hooven@fas.harvard.edu> Subject: Re: Your recent Bluesky post Dear Dr. Hooven, Please do not contact me again. Matt Weiner 4. His original post and then the followup bsky.app/profile/mattweiner1…

It is not helpful to use the term "terrorism" in a war when the White House only ever applies it to one side. Better to remind both Hamas and the Israeli government that humanitarian law makes it a war crime to target or indiscriminately fire on civilians. whitehouse.gov/briefing-room…