In in the film Lawrence of Arabia, there's a point at which Sharif Ali confronts Lawrence with his having said, earlier in the film, that "you can be anything you want". Set out above is Lawrence's cinematic answer.
And its correct.
When I was young, I had to study genetics.
The reason for that was that I was a geology student, and while those who aren't familiar with the discipline may imagine that you study rocks all day, in actuality its an incredibly diverse field of study. Biology was a big element of geology, but paleobiology. That involved genetics in a major, major way. As a geology student, you learned that genetics is destiny and a controlling, immutable, factor in reality.
In fact, quite frankly, I think you end up learning that more deeply, in some areas, than biologist do. You become deeply aware of evolutionary biology, which is its own field really, and which is something that has an overarching impact on everything else, and I mean everything else, more than anything else in the physical world.
You are what you are, to a major degree, due to evolutionary biology.
You also became aware that this wasn't accepted by everyone in society. At that time, it wasn't accepted by Protestant fundamentalists, and it still isn't. I recall being in a paleontology lab when a person came into it as he wanted to debate our professor, Don Boyd, about evolution. Evolution is applied genetic paleobiology. The person who came in, however, armed with a misconstruction of the Old Testament, had further armed himself with pseudo science to support his position that evolution wasn't. It is.[1].
That sort of experience left a person with not only a solid grounding in biology and paleobiology, and a really solid grounding in science itself, but also with an expectation that there were people out there who didn't accept scientific reality.
None the less, I'd never have guessed the extent to which this has become true in the 35 years that have passed since the event noted above. And not just with "conservatives" or the right wing of politics, as is so often claimed, but with the left as well. Indeed, it can be maintained pretty clearly that both sides of the political spectrum have their own major problems with different areas of the scientific fields, with the right really having one right now with medical science and certain of the physical sciences, and the left having one with the topic of human evolutionary biology.[2]. Each side would prefer to just make things up in these areas, or certain portions of these areas.
This is what really determines the basic nature of what you are. It controls far, far more than what you might imagine or care to imagine. It makes you essentially identical, in so far as any remote observer might care to note, with any member of homo sapiens sapiens back to the dawn of our species, whether that be 100,000 years ago or 200,000 years ago. Indeed, you share so much of this with closely related subspecies, like Neanderthals, or preceding species, like Denisovans, that it isn't even funny. That's why, in fact, in terms of paleontology these "species" can only be regarded as a "species" if you are a "splitter". If you are a "lumper", and thereby a member of that scientific group that holds that the classic definition of a species is the prioper one, that being if a male and female individual can breed and produce a viable offspring (capable of breeding itself), they're one species. Frankly, this is the correct view in my opinion, and the opposite view is only held, in my opinion, as developed species that we've genetically altered over times, such as canines, are viewed instinctively by us as more than one species because of what we've developed. In other words, we think dogs and wolves are different species only because we can't imagine wolves and labradoodles being in the same species. Genetically, however, the better argument is that they are.[3].
Okay, so what is this about?
Well, to kick it off, Demi Lavato just a week ago or so announced that she's "non binary". She even wants to be called "they", rather than she.
No, she's not non binary, she's a woman, and that makes her a she.
Let's note here that sexual inclination, or no inclination at all, doesn't define your biology. Your biology defines your biology. If you have a female biology, and she does, you are a women. If you have male biology, you are a man.
That, we'd note again, has nothing to do with your individual desires, irrespective of what they are and regardless of their origin. Almost every living human being alive has some desire to be something other than what they are, at some level. Not all of that is biological by any means, but some of it is. People struggle with desires to be thinner, stronger, taller, or free of physical impairments of all sorts all the time. Wishing doesn't make it so, and you can't insist that other recognize these features as non existent. Indeed, doing so is a lie, and if you are doing it regarding yourself, you are lying to yourself, which is a very bad think to do.
An organization that's in this end of the social spectrum, and this is a societal and cultural deal, not a biological or physical one, argues on its site that while most human beings are male or female, some are not, and they're non binary, and moreover that this has always been true.
It hasn't always been true, and in additional that confuses society and culture with science, which are not the same thing.
What's always true with 100% of mammals, absent extremely rare conditions which are generally regarded as a species of biological defect (which doesn't make a person so afflicted bad), is that humans are born with either male reproductive organs, or females ones. Moreover, this difference in our species is not only significant, its massively significant.
We'll have another thread that will no doubt anger some that we were going to quote from, in advance, here, but instead we'll just take it on directly, and maybe quote there, what we'll type here.
We're primates, which is pretty obvious, and as primates we are members of the animal group that has the highest sexual dimorphism than another mammal. Great apes, of which we're a member, are very pronounced in that regard, and our genus, Homo, is through the roof on it. Like it or not, and there's plenty of evidence that lots of people don't like it, and that it's a problem in various ways (more on that in other upcoming posts as well) that's a fact. Evolutionary biology teaches us that early on in earlier Homo progenitors there came a time when our brains got big, the off spring needed long nurturing, and things really got rolling in all sorts of ways. The males ended up stronger, much stronger, and aggressive for a reason. The females were weaker and frankly much more maternal than the males. Because of being tied for years to their children, they depended upon the foodstuff support from the males, and the result was that humans evolved disparate, but constant, sexual drives, that tying the males to the females on an individual basis. Indeed, psychologist are now well aware of what St. Paul was early on, that sex fused a man to a woman in an irrevocable psychological way that made promiscuity particularly perverse.
This isn't really on that topic, but again it is. There are men, women, and that's biologically it. Generally that's psychologically it as well. "Non binary" or "transgenderism" doesn't really exist but rather reflect present sociology, which is more cultural than physical.
What does exist, however, is a wide ranging human mind that's now set outside, very much outside, of its eco niche. And as we've become richer and richer, over time, we've naturally, because of our original evolution, come to focus on our genitals, as odd as that may seem.
But another way, of you are Oot Gronk, Cro Magnon, and a man, your daily focus is probably on finding things to hunt and kill, or pick up and eat, and avoiding bears. Sure, the babes have your attention and you're likely in a natural marriage with one. And for her, the focus will be on the kiddos and also on finding something to eat and hoping that Oot doesn't get killed by a bear.
In that environmental regime, think resources are going to keep everyone focused on the thin resources and overcoming them. Indeed, if you ever have the experience of being in thin resources, which most people in the Western world don't anymore, in this real existential sense, you'll find that the level of pondering of sex is pretty low. Contrary to what people tend to imagine, for example, about old fashioned basic training, which was pretty much all male, is that this topic isn't on anyone's mind and if there's focus on anything inappropriate, it's probably on beer at the 1-2-3 Club.
Indeed, studies on men who are left in really isolated environments where they need to be focused shows that by and large, they don't think about women at all. I haven't read anything on women, but logic would hold that they probably don't much either. Those studies tend to show that men who are busy don't tend to start thinking about women until there's women around, and at that point they still don't think about them that much if they're really tied up in something on a continual basis.
You really have to have an element of leisure, or at least down time, until these things start to come up much. And while that time comes up in our original aboriginal state, it does in a pretty concentrated fashion and in one in which people are really still pretty focused. As an example, its' been noted that Native American societies had really low birth rates, far below European Americans at the same period, and one of the early features of European/Native American contact was that women were attracted to European men (or European American men) as they were comparatively wealthy and much less restrained in regard to abstention (we're trying to be delicate here).
Leaping forward, we'd first note, as we have before, that the current set of definitions in regard to sexual orientation categories is really recently, dating back only a little over 100 years ago. This doesn't mean that acts based on the non typical orientation didn't occur, but the identification categories now made are social categories, not scientific ones. And its also not really until societies have enough wealth to have leisure does an expansion of culture, and cultural specialization, arise. That's also about when we really start to notice this phenomenon.
That suggests that the phenomenon itself is a cultural and psychological one, which I'd note doesn't mean right off the bat, as some will assume we're leaping to, that I'm asserting this is a mental illness. But it is worth noting that as a phenomenon its much more recognized among people of European extraction. General Asian cultures regard its as solely a "white" matter and wholly cultural in origin, although certain the same things happen in every Asian culture.
Okay, what's all this suggest?
Well for starters it suggest that people are leaping to conclusions that these things are real in a scientific, i.e., biological, sense, which isn't very well supported at all. Indeed, the opposite its true although it does seem that some people may be more genetically predisposed to them than others. But its still the case that all humans are male, and female, that's flat out it.
It also suggest that the modern definitions perhaps should be reconsidered as the least. Indeed, it tracks back to a really long, probably overlong, thread we did awhile back which brings up the point that maybe these definitions are actually completely in error and, ironically, those backing them may actually be backing a set of concepts that originated with definitions that served to categorize these things as mental illnesses.
If that's the case, and there's pretty good evidence that there is, those who are awash in the new definitions should both rejoice and recoil, as it gets back to the science, which doesn't endorse the new views, but doesn't endorse the old categories either.
Basically, what that leaves us with is humans, and as a species we have a wide range of traits, and one of our characteristics sit hat there are those among us who always depart from the median, and those departures are benign or harmful in very degrees, and oddly enough, in varying times in varying degrees. A person has to accept that. But that doesn't change you from what you basically are, which means you're either a man, or a woman not both or neither, and you really can't choose to be the other.
And you really shouldn't, for that part.
Oh, why not, you may ask? Isn't crafting your own reality nifty and guaranteed to have a better chance of making you happy?
Nope, it isn't, on lots of scores.
All of this is presenting an interesting set of unanticipated modern problems, again only of that type that a really rich society can have. And they're problems that could be avoided.
To start with, denying concrete scientific realities is simply dangerous in its own right, and we know that. Indeed, we see that all the time with people who have ignored scientific realities in regard to diet and substances, with any number of tragic results occurring nearly daily.
Here, although we often fail to realize it, we constantly see it in regard to attempting to take on our psychological desires medically or pharmaceutically, which tends to produce widespread suffering. Indeed, I'll note one that people often don't think about in this context, which is directly related, that being pharmaceutical birth control.
Pharmaceutical birth control was first introduced in the early 1960s. For the most part, so far, designed to hormonally alter a woman's natural cycle, it should be pretty obvious that ingesting hormones to defeat a natural system is going to have some pretty risky results, and yet we've been happy to accept them, we think, for over 50 years now.
And yet in that time these substances have been shown to cause an increase in cancer and stroke, two risks that, I'm pretty sure, would cause them to be banned by the FDA as a class if they were just being introduced. They're also demonstrated to have an impact on female psychology in a way that isn't really understood, with it being shown that women taking them judge long term male mates significantly differently if they're on them, than if they are not.[4].
Societally it can be argued that they've been a disaster as they've broken down the social order to an enormous degree. This is a point often raised by social conservatives and particularly by religious conservatives from those branches of Christianity that oppose pharmaceutical birth control, which are principally the Apostolic faiths. Irrespective of how a person identifies with these groups, however, the argument is solid as the change in overall behavior has decoupled the original link between men, women, sex and longevity or relationships by severing its natural procreative purpose from the picture, all while leaving the basic instinctive pattern, including the imprinting it causes, in place.
Given that example, and numerous others, a good case can be made for the position that medical and pharmaceutical treatments that go to address natural biological makeup are a really bad idea. Indeed, in some other areas we've already concluded that. Nobody, for example, would now advocate the psychosurgery that Rosemary Kennedy was subjected to, for example. And yet that was an accepted treatment at the time, much like gender reassignment procedures have suddenly become in the last few years.
Added to that, as that's occurred, there have been developments that have led to concern and pushback. Indeed, just while in the US procedures are expanding down to the child level, in Europe they're being banned on the basis that childhood expressions of identity in this area tend to be subject to being false where as the procedures themselves can be devastating for the recipients.
Indeed Reddit, where seemingly everything is located, has a subreddit simply made up of people trying to reverse their gender reversal. This is yet another thing I discovered by accident (like the completely disgusting subreddit that is made up of Hentai representations of World War Two naval ships) but it has a surprising level of participation, which given the generally low levels of the overall population who undertakes a reassignment in the first place, should at least give a person pause.[5].
And all that points out that if a person is uncomfortable in their own skin, there's likely a greater reason for it than the one they perceive. A person can medicate themselves out of a greater reality, and can have a surgeon cut out a greater reality either. The risks of trying that are vast.
And in someway they're dishonest to oneself and to society at large.
An example of that is provided by cosmetic surgery, which is concentrated in the female portion of the population and which is more over fixated on breasts. All kinds of women go through surgery they don't' need to have unnatural large breasts when there's no point to such a surgery, in a healthy woman, at all. Inserting foreign bodies in a healthy body is a bad idea in and of itself. Moreover, given yourself a visual reproductive advantage, which is what is the underlying goal, is destructive to society overall, given the really odd idea to everyone that everyone needs to look like one of Hugh Hefner's visual prostitutes, and further promoting an idea that visual attractiveness is so important over everything else that surgery is warranted to achieve it.
Indeed, on that last point, all of this gets back to the idea that we ought to be sex focused, and sex focused on a way that has nothing to do with reproduction. This isn't healthy societal focus. Indeed, it tends toward trivializing the entire topic.
People who advocate for those in this area commonly tend to point out historical figures, often with some wide liberties taken, who had these tendencies. Its often noted that they had really productive lives and that their tendencies were never acknowledged, even by those who had them. This isn't always the case, of course, but there's something significant in that. They may not have acknowledged them in part because our modern understandings of these things are wrong, i.e., people can't be put in a box like that, and also because these people were busy, i.e., a lot of the time they had something else that really was taking up their time.
Indeed, that was even the case in the entertainment industry more than it is now, where plenty of experimentation with all sorts of things seems to go on constantly. Entertainers seem to have more time to engage in themselves than other people do in general, so it shouldn't be too surprising that these things surface more there, but as noted, plenty of people who were supposedly "closeted" may very well not have been, or if they were the same thing would apply; they were just really busy.
Beyond that, however, a lot of the time on any social movement, we're just flat out wrong. People with strong roots in the evolutionary biology sense of things, or with very strong roots in history or the history of philosophy, tend to be very aware of that, but regular people and even extraordinary people just living their lives often are not. Cutting edge developments seem like they must be true as they're happening now. Over time, this leads to a lot of things that seemed to be new and true turning out to have been new and false. As noted above, the entire current conceptualization of sexuality outside of biology and evolutionary biology basically goes back to Freud, who is now regarded as wrong on darned near everything. Everything we're currently obsessed with in this area now, on a societal basis, may very well turn out to be as well.
Indeed, the fact that it may very well turn out to be is in part demonstrated by the lengths that people have to go to ignore the problems this creates.
The other day I read an editorial by a top preforming female athlete noting that she couldn't compete against "transgender females". Why? Well, if you grow up male most of your body remains male, no matter what you do with your reproductive organs later on. In other words, they're stronger as that's the way nature made them. This is accordingly creating an unfair problem for "born females" if you will, who shouldn't have to accommodate themselves to this.
Likewise, the back and forth in the military is surreal. We'll have a future post coming up on the topic of women in combat, but for the time being we'd note that there are those in the service who have transitioned from male to female, in the current vernacular. As the essence of military service is serving in war, how does the United States government plan on accommodating this ongoing medical treatment requiring status in time of war, and should it have to? And if those who have done this are captured from our service, which doesn't recognize male/female divides (although as we'll show it should), what then. Are the Chinese or North Koreans going to accommodate it?
Finally, ignoring nature is done at your absolute hazard, and we've gotten away with about as much of this as we can. This lesson should be obvious, but we live in such surreal times that "progressives" can fixate on nature while arguing that humans can create their own reality. We're part of nature, however, and we can't get away with that indefinitely.
At some point in the future, and probably more quickly than we care to even think of, all of this current experimentation is going to come back to haunt us. It's already haunting some now. But believing that sociology is ever accurate is a pretty foolish assumption in the first place, and ignoring nature is an even more foolish one. We ought to step back, and maybe step out.
Footnotes:
1. Okay, I want to note right here that I won't entertain an argument that discussing evolution is contrary to the Christian faith. It isn't.
Right now, on the edge of town, there's a large billboard by some obviously conservative Protestant organization that states we're created, not evolved, with the classic crossed out traffic symbol in use.
People who take this point of view also tend to take the view that the Bible establishes that the world is around 7,000 or so years old, which is wrong. The Bible doesn't state that and the world is way, way older than that. Additionally, people who take this view are highly literal in their reading of the Bible in some things, and tend to ignore it completely in others. For instance, almost everyone who is going to take the strict reading of the word "created" is also going to hold a solo scriptura view of the New Testament, even though the New Testament never defines the canon of scripture anywhere whatsoever, and therefore if you are at an intellectual dead end immediately.
Anyhow, nowhere in the Bible does it say how God went about creating things, only that He did. It borders on arrogance to assume God couldn't create the current biological world through evolution. For those who would pose the question why would he do that, why wouldn't he. Presuming to know the mind of God for such things assumes more than can be assumed.
As a member of one of the Apostolic faiths, I'd note I'm part of the majority wing of Christianity that doesn't have doctrine in this are and doesn't feel it has to, as it doesn't have to. The view of the Catholic Church is that science illuminates the Divine Creation, so following science is not antithetical to the Faith, properly understood in both venues. I'd argue that insisting that the world is only a few thousand years old, and that evolution is made up, is a problem however as it makes Christians look ignorant and creates the dummy argument that Faith, Reason and Science can't be reconciled, when in fact they aren't at odds to start with.
2. For absolutely baffling reasons, its impossible to discuss vaccinations in certain right wing circles now as the science on this, which is now ancient, isn't accepted. It's not clear why it isn't accepted, but its concentrated just in that demographic.
Conservatives for some time have been hugely skeptical on climate science, which is a bit different as the climate is hard to figure. I'm noting it here, however, as it goes from scholarly skepticism at higher levels to sort of a rational that if my livelihood depends on it, the science must be wrong, at another level, which may be how a lot of skepticism works on everything, I suppose.
As will be seen here, however, progressives are outright rejecting biology in favor of an extraordinarily recent social set of concepts. Never mind that it just doesn't fit the science.
3. Indeed dogs make a really interesting examples as they must be the species that's more genetically engineered by human than any others, leading to examples that bear so little resemblance to the wolf, or even to other dogs, that its not funny. At the end of the day, however, all dogs are "mutts".
