As you mentioned bewilderment and irritation, I instinctively found myself looking for something that would trigger that reaction (strange how we can direct other people's attention, uh?). The one element of your article that comes even close is where you (forgive me for the inelegant summary if you may) express a sort of "this generation has conveniently forgotten undesirable facts related to their biology in order to be free to pursue a different agenda, detaching themselves from nature". I heard this sort of "O tempora! O mores!" before, and specifically in the context of telling me how I couldn't reasonably expect a life of independence, knowledge and leadership as those things are not the realm of human beings biologically geared to the production and rearing of the future generation. After all, if you are temporarily incapacitated on a regular basis (by your period, your pregnancy, breastfeeding and the lot), isn't it expecting a tad much of yourself that you'd be able to study and work and lead? Nonsense, surely. Focus on being a good mother and all will be well (pat pat). The other context in which this line of thinking has surfaced in my experience is when people have tried to convince me that I should sneer on the gays. Surely that's not what nature had in mind, the line went. I don't think that deserves much commentary.
Given the above, er, experience, I have a historical antipathy for the above line of thinking. Not that the line of thinking is at fault - it's a bit as if I'd seen spoons used repeatedly to carve people's eyes out. Nothing wrong with the spoon itself, but instinctive recoiling on seeing one wouldn't be unjustified.
Something I've noticed over this time of personal reorientation away from ideology, into a more 'neutral' curiosity, is that the apparent conflicts between biology and our specifically Western brand of moral reasoning seem to invite a zero sum understanding of the world. So that any recognition of, say, the practical reality of sex differences or the material implications of sexual orientation are 'shamed' and shunted into the shadows for their imagined implications. So that things that are interesting and salient have become literally unspeakable among a certain 'educated' class. This is possibly why you are (reflexively) attuned to detect a danger of 'sexism' or 'misogyny' in any reference to biological sex differences. This is how rationalists, like Scott Alexander, get labeled as 'right-wing'. Or libertarians, like Richard Hanania, are tarred as fascist-adjacent. I find this anxiety exhausting.
It's interesting that the more 'morally good' our societies become, the more anxious and less 'happy' they seem to be (as measured by subjective self-reporting and anti-depressant prescription).
I understand very well what you mean by referencing an exhausting anxiety around these topics, and share the view that it is indeed exhausting.
A problem I have with references to "practical reality" is that I have not found one that doesn't fall into one of three categories:
- The excessively complex and therefore irrelevant (Brexit something something immigration something something racism something something, or your example about fish and chips (re-yawn) )
- The j'accuse ("I do the majority of the housework!", "statistics show that most domestic violence crimes are perpetrated by males")
- The trivial/tautological ("a transgender woman isn't biologically a female", "a paraathlete isn't an athlete in the traditional sense" -- welcome to English 101, please take a seat)
Crucially, none of the above statements is untrue in their contexts of reference, and there is in that sense no reason why they should be shunted into the shadows. But the instinctive reaction to the feeling of having one's identity attacked, of being accused of not carrying our weight, of feeling looked at as a potential monster purely because we are a certain category of person, or of having our own experience explained to us by someone else (who's likely nowhere near experiencing the same) invites us to continue to play the game of "where's Waldo" by adding more statements of the same kind in an endless negative loop. It is in this sense that I say, the quest for reality makes us miserable.
Fish and chips isn't English and that discovery pleases you. Great. Find more items of which the same is true and play the game with your friends who also find pleasure in it. Enjoy.
You are doing all the housework and that displeases you. Perhaps... don't.
A transgender woman isn't biologically a female. As that is surely the whole point of their suffering, what can be done to lessen their pain while ensuring we are not generating problems for others as a result?
The common thread of the above alternatives is that each of them implies a level of action as opposed to a nervous exchange of ideas, and having to put in the work if we want things to change, for us or for others - now, *that* is an inconvenient reality if ever there was one.
I'm genuinely lost now. In the same way that I become lost when I read postmodern deconstructivist theory.
But, your observation on how the 'transgender rights' issue seems obviously how it *should* be discussed. The reason it keeps popping up is that it isn't. The statement that 'transwomen *are* women' is the bleeding edge of hyper-liberalism's dive into Gnosticism and a restless urge to make all epistemology relative or context-dependent. I'm resisting that.
On reading this piece, I *think* I have made some headway into understanding the reason why we see things rather differently when it comes to reality and our relationship to it. The way I have always experienced deep meditative states ever since I was a child is what I would describe as a negation of the senses rather than their enhancement. While it's hard to explain, I guess the closest to my experience I've heard people describe is a phenomenon called "sleep paralysis" - except more extensive, I suppose. My father, a man of faith, would tell you that his way of experiencing meditation is a sort of closeness to God.
I do find it interesting that each of us found in meditation something compatible with their overall worldview - the theist feels close to God, the sceptical enjoys the beauty of the universe and the overactive and constantly overstimulated mind basks in silence and temporary oblivion of the self and her circumstances. You'll forgive me for thinking that this is unlikely to be a random occurrence, and feels rather a direct product of our view of the universe. Some sort of personal experience rather than reality, dare I say.
I am, nevertheless, genuinely happy that your experience of meditation is so wholesome and rewarding for you, and wish more people were to have the same experience.
My experience of meditation has 2 layers. One is a reorientation of the relationship we have with our minds, which is mostly about *seeing* and *acceptance*. Really *feeling* something paradoxically robs it of its power to capture your mind. I'm guessing that the absolute mastery of this is what enables someone to sit, unflinching, while their body burns to death (as in that famous photo).
The other layer is loss of self altogether. Or, rather, recognition of the illusion of 'self'. Here's where language and experience part ways (quelle surprise) so that you have to be there to know it.
The best bit is when the boundary between the illusory you and everything dissolves. If I were brave enough I'd do psychedelics to investigate this further, but I probably won't dare.
My contact with this reality is vanishingly fleeting!
A funny anecdote: I came out of one meditative state worrying that I'd become a New Age loon, because Panpsychism seemed so obviously ... obvious. I set about diving into that rabbit hole and was relieved to learn that Real Scientists are now taking Panpsychism seriously. I may be extremely right-brain, but my left brain is only happy if there are men & women in white coats to validate my intuitions - haha! (Right/left brain difference is one of my favourite things - see the work of McGilchrist on this).
So, I had to Google panpsychism - because of reasons of time I'm doing the good ol' Wikipedia copout, from which I quote:
"Plato argues for panpsychism in his Sophist, in which he writes that all things participate in the form of Being and that it must have a psychic aspect of mind and soul (psyche).[8] In the Philebus and Timaeus, Plato argues for the idea of a world soul or anima mundi. According to Plato:
This world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence ... a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related."
[...]
Arthur Schopenhauer argued for a two-sided view of reality as both Will and Representation (Vorstellung). According to Schopenhauer, "All ostensible mind can be attributed to matter, but all matter can likewise be attributed to mind".
With the caveat that skimming through a Wikipedia entry perhaps doesn't give me a full view of what is being argued (and I'm perhaps skipping some critical detail), I'm not sure how this is different from what I was describing :)
Incidentally, you took my explanation to mean that experience/reality is made by *humans*, which I never meant/said at all - for me Youna's consciousness and that of the last ant she stepped on have as much reality/experience to contribute to this universe as mine. A universe of which we all are, and which we all make, from our very unique perspective, without which nothing would exist.
Aren't you saying here that we *make* the universe? Maybe that's why I think that's what you're saying.
My introduction to the modern idea of consciousness as a fundamental property of the universe, like matter & energy, came via Aneka Harris. I've not looked at the classical philosophical stuff on this, because I think it inspired too much woo woo.
Interesting piece. In case you are wondering, no, I'm not bewildered or irritated by it. Let me start with the things I agree with first - I am pleased to report that the main one is core to your article.
"Proving things is so yesterday, for me now. Making connections between ways of seeing the world is where it's at."
Indeed. That's what I mean by comparing experiential notes. I don't think much else matters, and exercises in proving or disproving or arguing about what's real are for me the main cause of personal wars - because as you say, nothing in that realm can really be proven, and it's futile to try. I find much easier and more productive to have conversations about why people feel a certain way about something rather than arguing about whether fish and chips is or isn't truly English (I honestly was not even aware of the debate - yawn).
Hi there. I'd been meaning to comment on this when I first saw it but felt I needed to write something myself first about telling stories in biology. Now I have finally subscribed just in order to leave a comment that disagrees with you. Not sure what that says about me but it's probably not good.
As your substack is about uncertainty, I hope you won't mind my saying that I think you have the wrong end of the stick about a couple of things. I'm speaking from the perspective of someone with a training in science and not continental philosophy. Possibly you'll assume that my biological training has been influenced by continental philosophy - or woke orthodoxy - but I really think it's the other way around.
It really isn't biological reality that there is a special category of 'women'. And, if there were, it certainly wouldn't be defined as 'people with XX chromosomes' which, after all, were only discovered in the 20th Century. DNA isn't a secret book containing our true nature, it's a molecule that reacts with other molecules. Anyway, there's lots of stuff talking about why dichotomous sex categories aren't 'biological reality' that comes from a biological - not post-structuralist - perspective. Certainly it isn't saying 'there is no biological reality' but rather, at the root of all of it is the modern realization that categorizations are not biological realities. From a biological perspective 'trans women are women' is a meaningless statement but so is 'people with XX chromosomes are women' or any other such statement you can come up with. It might be a *useful* statement, for the purposes of a particular study and, as far as I can see, the same applies to each individual political question: who participates in women's sports, who gets to be addressed as she/her, who gets to use women's toilets: these are all political questions. Biology does not solve them.
That doesn't mean there's no reality. If someone does have XX chromosomes, it is still wrong to say that she (or he or they or whatever) do not have them.
Learning biology is an experience of constantly having any categorization undermined. For example a category 'fish' which excludes whales and dolphins can't really be defended under current thinking. This is modern biology, though I might not be believed. And that isn't because whales and dolphins don't produce milk or have 'warm blood' (although so do great white sharks, leatherback turtles and tuna - nor is temperature a dichotomous variable anyway), just that it's because somebody has decided those things are so important they merit a separate category. Someone still had to decide. In this case it was, arguably, Aristotle, influenced by his teacher's religious dogma of the separate world of perfect Forms where, perhaps 'woman' really is a thing - though I guess Plato would probably have thought 'virgin' and 'married woman' were separate forms. Anyway this is definitely a religious idea which biology keeps disproving.
I say this because I just cannot see how it would be possible for my beliefs to have come originally from postmodernism into biology. These ideas came out of looking at the world and finding that the old categorizations, the ideas of perfect forms representing ideas in the mind of God just didn't fit what we were seeing.
I have never publicly said anything related to gender issues before and don't have a dog in the fight. Also I hate censorship and 'cancellation' and public shaming. Nonetheless I think you are missing something important here which, I think, relates to your wider point. Affecting to define reality automatically obscures it, but the way to get around that is not to return to older categorizations that we were more comfortable with. There's just no defending these as anything other than socially constructed - unless you want to claim they are divinely constructed.
Hi Nicholas, this is obviously very interesting and makes me wonder how to answer the question infamously asked by Matt Walsh (What Is A Woman?) if one cannot refer to biological sex characteristics. (I accept that chromosomes may not be sufficient). What seems to have a more 'religious' quality, to me, is the idea that 'womanness' is an innate & immutable *feeling* that someone has about themselves.
I suppose the obvious question to ask you, as a scientist with grasp of technical biological detail, is what is a woman?
I think it is not a scientific question. Definitions serve purposes. Without a specified purpose, there is no right definition.
I mean you *can* refer to biological sex characteristics to define what a woman is. I'm not saying you can't or shouldn't. I'm just saying that that is you there, doing the defining - based on your interpretations of traditions about how the word is used.
I think it's actually less acceptable to a biologist to say that 'a feeling in someone's head' is not admissible grounds for classifying them as a woman whereas 'two X chromosomes (per somatic cell)' is. Because that would imply that the feeling in someone's head isn't a real thing but also that it influences the real world (through the person making certain claims which people then act on). That implies some separate realm of things that exist in some alternative way where the 'feeling' exists. If the feeling is a brain state, on the other hand, then it's just as real as the X chromosomes. You have two variables - and of course there are lots of others you could use - and you can use these variables to define a category for... some purpose. But there has to be a purpose. You can say the feeling is a stupid criterion with which to judge who is a woman. One reason for that might be that we can't measure it and someone might therefore lie about it in order to - say - go into women-only spaces to abuse women. All of which is true - but that's a legal and political question about balancing good and bad consequences, not a biological one about definitions.
This is the Queer Theory lens, isn't it? Doesn't it reduce *everything* to social constructs? Am I just old fashioned in believing that the forms and functions described by scientific endeavour say things about the world beyond any political or social constraints?
I don't know anything about Queer Theory. I think it's very unlikely that my biology lecturers at Oxford in 1998-2002 were influenced by it (Richard Dawkins - who was one of them, briefly, was hugely scathing about any 'theory' of this kind and I think that would have been the general attitude. I suppose it's possible that I have skewed the worldview I learned there in terms of Queer Theory's influence on the wider culture. All I can say is that I doubt it.
In my understanding it's definitely wrong to say that everything is a social construct but it's definitely right to say that every *category* is a social construct. I think that way of seeing the world, for me, comes from being a biologist. And I think that, within biology, it comes from starting out with a worldview in which there were real categories: 'ideas in the mind of God' and finding out that the world just didn't match up with that sort of view if you look closely.
Social scientists are likely to suggest that these views didn't actually come from looking at plants and animals but from political ideas in wider society but, tbqh, I suspect the primary point of such arguments is often to justify the importance of social science. That might be a bit too cynical.
As you mentioned bewilderment and irritation, I instinctively found myself looking for something that would trigger that reaction (strange how we can direct other people's attention, uh?). The one element of your article that comes even close is where you (forgive me for the inelegant summary if you may) express a sort of "this generation has conveniently forgotten undesirable facts related to their biology in order to be free to pursue a different agenda, detaching themselves from nature". I heard this sort of "O tempora! O mores!" before, and specifically in the context of telling me how I couldn't reasonably expect a life of independence, knowledge and leadership as those things are not the realm of human beings biologically geared to the production and rearing of the future generation. After all, if you are temporarily incapacitated on a regular basis (by your period, your pregnancy, breastfeeding and the lot), isn't it expecting a tad much of yourself that you'd be able to study and work and lead? Nonsense, surely. Focus on being a good mother and all will be well (pat pat). The other context in which this line of thinking has surfaced in my experience is when people have tried to convince me that I should sneer on the gays. Surely that's not what nature had in mind, the line went. I don't think that deserves much commentary.
Given the above, er, experience, I have a historical antipathy for the above line of thinking. Not that the line of thinking is at fault - it's a bit as if I'd seen spoons used repeatedly to carve people's eyes out. Nothing wrong with the spoon itself, but instinctive recoiling on seeing one wouldn't be unjustified.
Something I've noticed over this time of personal reorientation away from ideology, into a more 'neutral' curiosity, is that the apparent conflicts between biology and our specifically Western brand of moral reasoning seem to invite a zero sum understanding of the world. So that any recognition of, say, the practical reality of sex differences or the material implications of sexual orientation are 'shamed' and shunted into the shadows for their imagined implications. So that things that are interesting and salient have become literally unspeakable among a certain 'educated' class. This is possibly why you are (reflexively) attuned to detect a danger of 'sexism' or 'misogyny' in any reference to biological sex differences. This is how rationalists, like Scott Alexander, get labeled as 'right-wing'. Or libertarians, like Richard Hanania, are tarred as fascist-adjacent. I find this anxiety exhausting.
It's interesting that the more 'morally good' our societies become, the more anxious and less 'happy' they seem to be (as measured by subjective self-reporting and anti-depressant prescription).
I understand very well what you mean by referencing an exhausting anxiety around these topics, and share the view that it is indeed exhausting.
A problem I have with references to "practical reality" is that I have not found one that doesn't fall into one of three categories:
- The excessively complex and therefore irrelevant (Brexit something something immigration something something racism something something, or your example about fish and chips (re-yawn) )
- The j'accuse ("I do the majority of the housework!", "statistics show that most domestic violence crimes are perpetrated by males")
- The trivial/tautological ("a transgender woman isn't biologically a female", "a paraathlete isn't an athlete in the traditional sense" -- welcome to English 101, please take a seat)
Crucially, none of the above statements is untrue in their contexts of reference, and there is in that sense no reason why they should be shunted into the shadows. But the instinctive reaction to the feeling of having one's identity attacked, of being accused of not carrying our weight, of feeling looked at as a potential monster purely because we are a certain category of person, or of having our own experience explained to us by someone else (who's likely nowhere near experiencing the same) invites us to continue to play the game of "where's Waldo" by adding more statements of the same kind in an endless negative loop. It is in this sense that I say, the quest for reality makes us miserable.
Fish and chips isn't English and that discovery pleases you. Great. Find more items of which the same is true and play the game with your friends who also find pleasure in it. Enjoy.
You are doing all the housework and that displeases you. Perhaps... don't.
A transgender woman isn't biologically a female. As that is surely the whole point of their suffering, what can be done to lessen their pain while ensuring we are not generating problems for others as a result?
The common thread of the above alternatives is that each of them implies a level of action as opposed to a nervous exchange of ideas, and having to put in the work if we want things to change, for us or for others - now, *that* is an inconvenient reality if ever there was one.
I'm genuinely lost now. In the same way that I become lost when I read postmodern deconstructivist theory.
But, your observation on how the 'transgender rights' issue seems obviously how it *should* be discussed. The reason it keeps popping up is that it isn't. The statement that 'transwomen *are* women' is the bleeding edge of hyper-liberalism's dive into Gnosticism and a restless urge to make all epistemology relative or context-dependent. I'm resisting that.
Just realised something, which seems to be a feature of the modern western liberal mind. It’s perfectly illustrated in your comment.
It’s to do with uneasiness about references to material reality because they’re always seen as a gateway to bad things.
There’s a religious quality to this, whereby ‘moral’ valence is never far from the surface.
I’m not saying it’s incorrect. Just that it seems interesting (and that shedding it has felt personally liberating)
On reading this piece, I *think* I have made some headway into understanding the reason why we see things rather differently when it comes to reality and our relationship to it. The way I have always experienced deep meditative states ever since I was a child is what I would describe as a negation of the senses rather than their enhancement. While it's hard to explain, I guess the closest to my experience I've heard people describe is a phenomenon called "sleep paralysis" - except more extensive, I suppose. My father, a man of faith, would tell you that his way of experiencing meditation is a sort of closeness to God.
I do find it interesting that each of us found in meditation something compatible with their overall worldview - the theist feels close to God, the sceptical enjoys the beauty of the universe and the overactive and constantly overstimulated mind basks in silence and temporary oblivion of the self and her circumstances. You'll forgive me for thinking that this is unlikely to be a random occurrence, and feels rather a direct product of our view of the universe. Some sort of personal experience rather than reality, dare I say.
I am, nevertheless, genuinely happy that your experience of meditation is so wholesome and rewarding for you, and wish more people were to have the same experience.
My experience of meditation has 2 layers. One is a reorientation of the relationship we have with our minds, which is mostly about *seeing* and *acceptance*. Really *feeling* something paradoxically robs it of its power to capture your mind. I'm guessing that the absolute mastery of this is what enables someone to sit, unflinching, while their body burns to death (as in that famous photo).
The other layer is loss of self altogether. Or, rather, recognition of the illusion of 'self'. Here's where language and experience part ways (quelle surprise) so that you have to be there to know it.
The best bit is when the boundary between the illusory you and everything dissolves. If I were brave enough I'd do psychedelics to investigate this further, but I probably won't dare.
My contact with this reality is vanishingly fleeting!
A funny anecdote: I came out of one meditative state worrying that I'd become a New Age loon, because Panpsychism seemed so obviously ... obvious. I set about diving into that rabbit hole and was relieved to learn that Real Scientists are now taking Panpsychism seriously. I may be extremely right-brain, but my left brain is only happy if there are men & women in white coats to validate my intuitions - haha! (Right/left brain difference is one of my favourite things - see the work of McGilchrist on this).
So, I had to Google panpsychism - because of reasons of time I'm doing the good ol' Wikipedia copout, from which I quote:
"Plato argues for panpsychism in his Sophist, in which he writes that all things participate in the form of Being and that it must have a psychic aspect of mind and soul (psyche).[8] In the Philebus and Timaeus, Plato argues for the idea of a world soul or anima mundi. According to Plato:
This world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence ... a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related."
[...]
Arthur Schopenhauer argued for a two-sided view of reality as both Will and Representation (Vorstellung). According to Schopenhauer, "All ostensible mind can be attributed to matter, but all matter can likewise be attributed to mind".
With the caveat that skimming through a Wikipedia entry perhaps doesn't give me a full view of what is being argued (and I'm perhaps skipping some critical detail), I'm not sure how this is different from what I was describing :)
Incidentally, you took my explanation to mean that experience/reality is made by *humans*, which I never meant/said at all - for me Youna's consciousness and that of the last ant she stepped on have as much reality/experience to contribute to this universe as mine. A universe of which we all are, and which we all make, from our very unique perspective, without which nothing would exist.
Aren't you saying here that we *make* the universe? Maybe that's why I think that's what you're saying.
My introduction to the modern idea of consciousness as a fundamental property of the universe, like matter & energy, came via Aneka Harris. I've not looked at the classical philosophical stuff on this, because I think it inspired too much woo woo.
Interesting piece. In case you are wondering, no, I'm not bewildered or irritated by it. Let me start with the things I agree with first - I am pleased to report that the main one is core to your article.
"Proving things is so yesterday, for me now. Making connections between ways of seeing the world is where it's at."
Indeed. That's what I mean by comparing experiential notes. I don't think much else matters, and exercises in proving or disproving or arguing about what's real are for me the main cause of personal wars - because as you say, nothing in that realm can really be proven, and it's futile to try. I find much easier and more productive to have conversations about why people feel a certain way about something rather than arguing about whether fish and chips is or isn't truly English (I honestly was not even aware of the debate - yawn).
Hi there. I'd been meaning to comment on this when I first saw it but felt I needed to write something myself first about telling stories in biology. Now I have finally subscribed just in order to leave a comment that disagrees with you. Not sure what that says about me but it's probably not good.
As your substack is about uncertainty, I hope you won't mind my saying that I think you have the wrong end of the stick about a couple of things. I'm speaking from the perspective of someone with a training in science and not continental philosophy. Possibly you'll assume that my biological training has been influenced by continental philosophy - or woke orthodoxy - but I really think it's the other way around.
It really isn't biological reality that there is a special category of 'women'. And, if there were, it certainly wouldn't be defined as 'people with XX chromosomes' which, after all, were only discovered in the 20th Century. DNA isn't a secret book containing our true nature, it's a molecule that reacts with other molecules. Anyway, there's lots of stuff talking about why dichotomous sex categories aren't 'biological reality' that comes from a biological - not post-structuralist - perspective. Certainly it isn't saying 'there is no biological reality' but rather, at the root of all of it is the modern realization that categorizations are not biological realities. From a biological perspective 'trans women are women' is a meaningless statement but so is 'people with XX chromosomes are women' or any other such statement you can come up with. It might be a *useful* statement, for the purposes of a particular study and, as far as I can see, the same applies to each individual political question: who participates in women's sports, who gets to be addressed as she/her, who gets to use women's toilets: these are all political questions. Biology does not solve them.
That doesn't mean there's no reality. If someone does have XX chromosomes, it is still wrong to say that she (or he or they or whatever) do not have them.
Learning biology is an experience of constantly having any categorization undermined. For example a category 'fish' which excludes whales and dolphins can't really be defended under current thinking. This is modern biology, though I might not be believed. And that isn't because whales and dolphins don't produce milk or have 'warm blood' (although so do great white sharks, leatherback turtles and tuna - nor is temperature a dichotomous variable anyway), just that it's because somebody has decided those things are so important they merit a separate category. Someone still had to decide. In this case it was, arguably, Aristotle, influenced by his teacher's religious dogma of the separate world of perfect Forms where, perhaps 'woman' really is a thing - though I guess Plato would probably have thought 'virgin' and 'married woman' were separate forms. Anyway this is definitely a religious idea which biology keeps disproving.
I say this because I just cannot see how it would be possible for my beliefs to have come originally from postmodernism into biology. These ideas came out of looking at the world and finding that the old categorizations, the ideas of perfect forms representing ideas in the mind of God just didn't fit what we were seeing.
I have never publicly said anything related to gender issues before and don't have a dog in the fight. Also I hate censorship and 'cancellation' and public shaming. Nonetheless I think you are missing something important here which, I think, relates to your wider point. Affecting to define reality automatically obscures it, but the way to get around that is not to return to older categorizations that we were more comfortable with. There's just no defending these as anything other than socially constructed - unless you want to claim they are divinely constructed.
Hi Nicholas, this is obviously very interesting and makes me wonder how to answer the question infamously asked by Matt Walsh (What Is A Woman?) if one cannot refer to biological sex characteristics. (I accept that chromosomes may not be sufficient). What seems to have a more 'religious' quality, to me, is the idea that 'womanness' is an innate & immutable *feeling* that someone has about themselves.
I suppose the obvious question to ask you, as a scientist with grasp of technical biological detail, is what is a woman?
I think it is not a scientific question. Definitions serve purposes. Without a specified purpose, there is no right definition.
I mean you *can* refer to biological sex characteristics to define what a woman is. I'm not saying you can't or shouldn't. I'm just saying that that is you there, doing the defining - based on your interpretations of traditions about how the word is used.
I think it's actually less acceptable to a biologist to say that 'a feeling in someone's head' is not admissible grounds for classifying them as a woman whereas 'two X chromosomes (per somatic cell)' is. Because that would imply that the feeling in someone's head isn't a real thing but also that it influences the real world (through the person making certain claims which people then act on). That implies some separate realm of things that exist in some alternative way where the 'feeling' exists. If the feeling is a brain state, on the other hand, then it's just as real as the X chromosomes. You have two variables - and of course there are lots of others you could use - and you can use these variables to define a category for... some purpose. But there has to be a purpose. You can say the feeling is a stupid criterion with which to judge who is a woman. One reason for that might be that we can't measure it and someone might therefore lie about it in order to - say - go into women-only spaces to abuse women. All of which is true - but that's a legal and political question about balancing good and bad consequences, not a biological one about definitions.
This is the Queer Theory lens, isn't it? Doesn't it reduce *everything* to social constructs? Am I just old fashioned in believing that the forms and functions described by scientific endeavour say things about the world beyond any political or social constraints?
I don't know anything about Queer Theory. I think it's very unlikely that my biology lecturers at Oxford in 1998-2002 were influenced by it (Richard Dawkins - who was one of them, briefly, was hugely scathing about any 'theory' of this kind and I think that would have been the general attitude. I suppose it's possible that I have skewed the worldview I learned there in terms of Queer Theory's influence on the wider culture. All I can say is that I doubt it.
In my understanding it's definitely wrong to say that everything is a social construct but it's definitely right to say that every *category* is a social construct. I think that way of seeing the world, for me, comes from being a biologist. And I think that, within biology, it comes from starting out with a worldview in which there were real categories: 'ideas in the mind of God' and finding out that the world just didn't match up with that sort of view if you look closely.
Social scientists are likely to suggest that these views didn't actually come from looking at plants and animals but from political ideas in wider society but, tbqh, I suspect the primary point of such arguments is often to justify the importance of social science. That might be a bit too cynical.