Scientific truth stands above human feelings and politics

If intelligent extraterrestrial beings ever visit us, what common ground shall we find for conversation?

Science, of course. Overwhelmingly science, very probably nothing but science and mathematics.

Our other preoccupations will be too alien to them, or too parochial, to arouse their interest. And vice versa. The aliens will revere their equivalents of Newton and Einstein, of Planck and Heisenberg. They’ll have the Pythagorean theorem. Parochial ephemera such as “systemic racism,” “decolonizing the curriculum,” or “cultural appropriation” will be trivial and beneath their notice.

All this is just to say that science is, or incrementally approaches, universal truth for all time and all space. Unlike gender studies, media studies, women’s studies, black studies, white studies, Mickey Mouse studies, science is not parochial or ephemeral, not limited to one dot in the universe, one species, or one meager span of history.

Moreover, science advances as the centuries (decades, years, weeks) go by in ways that cannot be said of any other academic discipline. Even the glories of Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Michelangelo, profound though they may be, are like a fine wine that doesn’t travel and doesn’t age well, at least on the cosmic scale of time and space. 

The facts of science were facts long before there were humans to discover them. And they will continue to be facts long after our species has gone extinct, long after any brains exist to remember us.

Alas, of late, there is one particularly egregious example of human hubris in the face of the eternal and universal verities of science — specifically, the ridiculous claim that we can override science and choose our own sex from a spectrum. The human conceit here is the idea that personal feelings can change reality.

There are not just males and females, so the claim goes. They are but the extremes of a spectrum. Where you place yourself in the spectrum is a matter of personal choice. If you feel you are a woman, you are a woman. Never mind if you have a Y-chromosome, testes, and a penis, no matter if you have breasts and ovaries, your male or female identity is something you get to decide for yourself, as easily as you might choose your political party or favorite football team. 

It is to be hoped that, in America, this will soon go the way of McCarthyism. I could imagine future lawsuits against surgeons who, in violation of the first clause of the Hippocratic oath, have cut off the breasts of girls below the age of consent for no better reason than a subsequently regretted claim to have been “assigned” the wrong sex.

How can I be so sure that there are only two sexes? Isn’t it just a matter of opinion? I advocate for what I shall call the universal biological definition (UBD) based on gamete size. Biologists use the UBD because it’s the only definition that applies all the way across the animal and plant kingdoms and all the way through evolutionary history.

Gametes come in two radically different sizes, the phenomenon of anisogamy. Female gametes are very much larger than male gametes, and that is how biologists define female and male.

A human egg contains at least ten thousand times as much matter as a human sperm. In ostriches, the discrepancy is obviously even greater, by a very large amount.

The UBD is universal in the sense that it applies to all animals, vertebrate and invertebrate. All plants, too, unless you count algae as plants. Admittedly, not all individuals produce gametes at all, or throughout their life. A human male baby or fetus has the potential to produce microgametes. An older woman remains female, though she has ceased to produce ova.

The way the sexes are defined (the UBD, universal and without exception) is separate from the way an individual’s sex is determined during development (variable and far from universal). How we, in practice, recognize the sex of an individual is yet a third question, distinct from the other two. In humans, one look at a newborn baby is nearly always enough to clinch it. Even if it occasionally isn’t, the UBD remains unshaken.

A feeling of being in a body of the wrong sex seems to be a real psychological condition. Such “dysphorics” can feel genuine distress. When anorexics look in the mirror, they see an emaciated body that they think is too fat. “Gender” dysphorics look in the mirror and see the wrong genitals. Both deserve sympathy and understanding. Nobody is phobic about anorexics. Why should anyone be phobic about gender dysphorics? “Transphobia” is a pernicious fiction.

If your science is so weak that the best you can do is yell that your opponent is a “transphobic bigot,” a “TERF,” or a “full-on MAGA alt-right Trump-supporter,” you’ve already lost the argument.

A position should be supported, or refuted, by rational discussion informed by evidence. People who terminate an argument by resorting to threats or name-calling are ignominiously signaling that they’ve lost the argument. Let us hope we, in our century, don’t take long to come to our senses.

Richard Dawkins is the Emeritus Professor of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. His latest book is “The Genetic Book of the Dead.” This article is an excerpt of his contribution in “The War on Science: Thirty-Nine Renowned Scientists and Scholars Speak Out About Current Threats to Free Speech, Open Inquiry, and the Scientific Process,” edited by Lawrence M. Krauss.