Defining identity

In case you had run short of things to be outraged about, today we have a story that the Trump administration is trying to push a legal definition of sex as "a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth."

To a biologist, this is a little like the government passing a law defining pi is being "exactly equal to three."  You might not like the fact that pi is an irrational number, it might be annoying to have to use a decimal approximation to calculate the circumference of a circle, but all of that falls clearly into the "tough shit" department.  The universe is not arranged so as to make you feel comfortable, and if you can't handle that, well, that's too freakin' bad.

Of course, it's no big mystery why they're doing this.  The evangelical Christians, who have had a stranglehold over the Republican Party for years, have a remarkable capacity to look past all sorts of biblical injunctions such as the prohibition against infidelity, divorce, and usury (lending money at interest), not to mention more perplexing ones like the rules against eating shellfish and wearing clothes made of two different kinds of cloth sewn together.  On the other hand, anything remotely approaching sexual relations between two consenting adults other than a traditional, in-marriage male/female relationship, makes these people go into a complete meltdown.  (Other than the aforementioned infidelity, which apparently is okay, especially if it was Donald Trump engaging in it.)

I swear, these people are more concerned about what I do with my dick than I am.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ben Tavener from Curitiba, Brazil, São Paulo LGBT Pride Parade 2014 (14108541924), CC BY 2.0]

Here's the problem.  Even beyond the obvious issue of equal rights for LGBTQ people at the heart of the debate, this viewpoint is completely contrary to what biological science says.  "Gender" is a construct of a lot of different features -- anatomy, brain wiring (the "which gender do you feel like?" part comes from this), chromosomal makeup (XX or XY or, in some cases, other combinations), hormone levels, and sexual orientation.  What the people pressing for this redefinition would like is if those always lined up in exactly the same way.

They don't.

Gender is not simple, and it's clearly non-binary.  Let's just look at two situations that should illustrate that beyond doubt.

First, consider the condition XY androgen insensitivity.  In this condition, the embryo has the ordinary male configuration chromosomally (XY), but has a genetic mutation that prevents the formation of receptors for testosterone.  During development, all embryos looks female until midway during the second trimester.  If the baby has an XY chromosome configuration, at that point -- assuming everything is working the usual way -- testosterone takes effect, the testicles descend into the scrotum and the penis gets larger.  In other words, all of the things parents look for during an ultrasound when they want to find out the sex of their baby.

In XY androgen insensitivity, none of this happens.  The baby looks anatomically female.  A pelvic exam -- seldom done on young children -- would reveal that the child has no uterus, only the lower two-thirds of the vagina, and gonads that are still small and undeveloped, and are still in the abdominal cavity.  These children usually are identified when the age of puberty hits and they don't start to menstruate, but up to then, they are perfectly ordinary girls who have female external anatomy, and more important, feel that they're female.

Santhi Soundarajan, an Indian track star, is one of these.  Because many female elite athletes have very low body fat content, a good many of them don't ovulate, which is why her condition wasn't identified.  But she competed in the Olympics, won a silver medal in the 800 -- and only afterwards did she learn that her chromosomes were XY, not XX.  The Olympic committee stripped her of her medal and banned her from competition.

What would you do if you were told the one thing you loved, were passionate about, excelled at, was no longer an option?  Santhi Soundaraian attempted suicide.

Then there's 5α-reductase deficiency.  The issue with this condition is the hormone dihydroxytestosterone, which is what directly acts to produce the male anatomy.  Males have two copies of the DHT gene, one of which activates prenatally (causing the changes in a male fetus mentioned above), and the other at puberty.  People with a mutation in the first DHT gene are born looking female for the same reason they are in XY androgen insensitivity.  The thing is, the second copy of the gene -- the one that activates at puberty -- works just fine.

When that gene switches on, at age 13 or so, the child goes from being an anatomical female to being an anatomical male, in the space of about nine months.

Add that to recent studies of gender identification in which it was conclusively established that trans individuals' brains are wired like the gender they identify with, not the gender associated with their anatomy.  So all the people who have liked to har-de-har-har about "boys who think they're girls" and how ridiculous that is and how next thing you know, you'll have people identifying as rocks (yes, I actually heard someone say that) -- please do shut up.  All you're doing is establishing how ignorant you are of the biological facts.

The biology of gender is complex, and not fully understood.  We still don't know if sexual orientation is genetic -- it appears to have a genetic component at least.  It, too, is non-binary.  About four percent of people identify as bisexual, for example.  And if you think sexual orientation is a choice, ask yourself when you sat down and gave thoughtful consideration to each gender, and decided which you chose to be attracted to.

Basing gender designation on anatomy alone is not just simpleminded; it's flat-out wrong.  So basing policy on an arbitrary, government-mandated definition of gender is two steps removed from the truth.

Look, I'm sympathetic if there are some parts of reality that make you feel squinky.  There are parts of it I'm not especially fond of myself.  But that doesn't mean the bits you don't like aren't true.  And if you're using your own squinky feelings to make decisions about who other people are, what rights they should have, and what they should be able to do with their own bodies, you are light years away from anything that could be called moral behavior.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a brilliant look at two opposing worldviews; Charles Mann's The Wizard and the Prophet.  Mann sees today's ecologists, environmental scientists, and even your average concerned citizens as falling into two broad classes -- wizards (who think that whatever ecological problems we face, human ingenuity will prevail over them) and prophets (who think that our present course is unsustainable, and if we don't change our ways we're doomed).

Mann looks at a representative member from each of the camps.  He selected Norman Borlaug, Nobel laureate and driving force behind the Green Revolution, to be the front man for the Wizards, and William Vogt, who was a strong voice for population control and conversation, as his prototypical Prophet.  He takes a close and personal look at each of their lives, and along the way outlines the thorny problems that gave rise to this disagreement -- problems we're going to have to solve regardless which worldview is correct.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

The evolution of the anti-evolutionists

Sometimes I see a piece of scientific research that is so brilliant, so elegant, all I can do is sit back in awestruck appreciation.

Such was my reaction to Nicholas J. Matzke's paper in Science this week entitled, "The Evolution of Antievolution Policies after Kitzmiller v. Dover."  And if you're wondering... yes, he did what it sounds like.

He used the techniques of evolutionary biology to show how anti-evolution policy has undergone descent with modification.

I read the paper with a delighted, and somewhat bemused, grin, blown away not only by how well it worked, but how incredibly clever the idea was.  What Matzke did was to analyze the text of all of the dozens of bills proposed since 2004 that try to shoehorn religious belief into the public school science classroom, and generate a phylogenetic tree for them -- in essence, a diagram summarizing how they are related to each other, and how they have changed.

In other words, a cladistic tree of evolutionary descent.

"Creationism is getting stealthier in the wake of legal defeats, but techniques from the study of evolution reveal how creationist legislation is evolving," Matzke said in an interview.  "It is one thing to say that two bills have some resemblances, and another thing to say that bill X was copied from bill Y with greater than 90 percent probability.  I do think this research strengthens the case that all of these bills are of a piece—they are all ‘stealth creationism,’ and they all have either clear fundamentalist motivations, or are close copies of bills with such motivations."

"They are not terribly intelligently designed," Matzke added.  "Some of the bills don’t make sense, they’ve been copied from another state and changed without thought."

He linked the bills to each other by doing statistical analysis of patterns in the text, much as evolutionary biologists use patterns in the DNA of related organisms, and arranged them into a cladistic tree using the "principle of maximum parsimony," which (simply put) is the arrangement that requires you to make the least ad hoc assumptions.

So without further ado, here is Matzke's tree linking 65 different, but related, pieces of legislation:

In particular, he was able to show where the documents incorporated language from a 2006 anti-evolution proposal in Ouachita Parish, Louisiana, and how subsequent generations had pieces of it remaining, often -- dare I say -- mutated, but still recognizable.

"Successful policies have a tendency to spread," Matzke said. "Every year, some states propose these policies, and often they are only barely defeated.  And obviously, sometimes they pass, so hopefully this article will help raise awareness of the dangers of the ongoing situation."

So when there are iterations that are better fit to the environment, in the sense that they went further in the court systems before being defeated or (hard though this is to fathom) were actually approved, the anti-evolutionists passed those versions around to other states, while less-successful models were outcompeted and become extinct.

There's a name for that process, isn't there?  Give me a moment, I'm sure it'll come to me.

Okay, it's not that I think this paper will make much difference amongst the creationists and supporters of intelligent design.  They don't spend much time reading Science, I wouldn't suppose.  But even so, this is a coup -- using the techniques of cladistic analysis to illustrate the relationships between bills designed to force public school students to learn that cladistic analysis doesn't work.

I can't help but think that Darwin would be proud. 

Lamar no like science!

It is a minor mystery why someone would volunteer for a job (s)he is clearly unqualified to do.

For example, I would not volunteer for my school district's Technology Advisory Committee.  My prehistoric understanding of technology is legendary in my school.  My general approach to computers is, "Thag push 'on' button."  If that doesn't work, my reaction is, "Thag no like!  Thag hit computer with rock!"

So any input I might have about advancing our school's technology program would be more or less meaningless, unless it involved making sure each classroom came equipped with a rock.

The whole thing comes up because of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.  Because it seems to me like this committee -- which, by the name, you would think is comprised of people who are well-versed in science -- is largely populated by people who would make the aforementioned Thag look like a Rhodes Scholar.

First, we have Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), a climate change denier who referred to the findings of 97% of the world's climate scientists as "liberal claptrap."  About the issue, he made the following baffling statement:

Once again those with a global agenda have created a straw man by misrepresenting the position of their critics. I do not believe that CO2 is a cause of global warming, nor have I ever advocated the reduction of CO2 through the clearing of rainforests or cutting down older trees to prevent global warming.

In what pretend world would scientists suggest clearing rainforests to combat global warming?  This is either a straw man about straw men, or it's just idiotic.

Then there's Randy Weber (R-TX), whose lack of understanding of basic science led him to say, "I just don’t know how you all prove those theories going back 50 or 100,000 or even millions of years."  Really, Representative Weber?  You could fix that, you know.

By taking a damn science class.

How about Bill Posey (R-FL)?  He's another climate change denier, whose idea of a scientifically-sound argument goes like this:

I remember in the ’70s, that [cooling] was the threat, the fear.  I’ve read that during the period of the dinosaurs, that the Earth’s temperature was 30° warmer.  Does that seem fathomable to you?

The "period of the dinosaurs?"  Oh, you mean that span of time that lasted 200 million years, and during which there were numerous climatic ups and downs, including at least one ice age?  Perhaps you're referring to the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum, in which the average sea surface maximum temperature seems to have been a whopping five degrees warmer than it is today.

Or perhaps you're just a moron.

Then there's Paul Broun (R-GA), who famously referred to evolution as "lies straight from the pit of hell," and that the Earth was created "in six days as we know them."  Of course, Broun is now a lame duck, but he was replaced by Jody Hice (in congress if not necessarily on the Science Committee).  Hice, if anything, may be worse.  He is not only a creationist and a climate change denier, he believes that "homosexuality enslaves people," that women could hold political office "if it's within the authority of her husband," and that "blood moons" -- better known to actual astronomers as lunar eclipses -- could be omens that signal "world-changing events."

And, of course, the whole committee is under the leadership of Lamar Smith (R-TX), who laments the the latest report by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) "says nothing new" in its statement that "severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems will occur if humanity keeps its carbon emissions on a business-as-usual course."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Exactly, Representative Smith.  Exactly.  It says precisely what all of the other scientific reports from the past ten years have said.  And the scientists wouldn't have to say the same fucking thing over and over if people like you would listen.

I'm not nearly well-versed enough in the machinations of politics to get how people like this could end up leading science policy in the United States.  My suspicious side can't shuck the niggling feeling that it's a deliberate disinformation campaign, designed to keep gullible and/or poorly-educated voters in a state of ignorance about how science works.  It's possible, of course, that these lamebrains are simply an example of the Peter Principle -- the idea that in the business world, people keep getting promoted until they finally find themselves in a job they have no idea how to do, and then they stay there forever.

Whatever the cause, one thing is clear, though.

Lamar no like science.  Lamar hit science with rock.