The de evolution of one man. Richard Dawkins used his new podcast to promote more transphobic lies. And this article is by Friendly Atheist dot com by Hemmet Meta on July thirty feet of twenty twenty three, and basically, Richard Dawkins, not any surprise to any of us, has launched a podcast called The Poetry of Reality, which has been an avenue for him to promote more transphobic
ideas. And in fact, his first episode of this podcast was with very famous transphob Helen Joyce talking about what is gender and of course he goes into talks about biological sex and all of that. So before I get into all of my rants, I want to hear about what you all have to say about this topic. So when I was going through my own deconstruction process, and but unlike like a lot of atheists, I wasn't interested in the Four
Horsemen. I didn't read any of Dawkins's work. I had I kind of knew for him in the Proliferary and I knew he was a respected evolutionary biologists and making that education through his work and lecture. Apparently he can't stay in his lane and he's now a gender expert, which is problematic, and he's clearly only following a biggest narrative and is in sitting back and asking himself about
like, m is this true? You know? And I'm sorry, but I have no desire to listen to his podcasts as I really like my Sandy and this article is an example of why. And I would also like to point out that Helen joyce this turf that he had on this first episode and also a bigot. They were just sitting there sniffing their own farts and not realizing this rhetoric and falsehoods are actually being set about actual human beings. And also I'd like to point out that this Geryl person shares my name, and
I would like to point out that hashtag not all Helen. So my kind of respective on this is that I'm a little bit frustrated because he should know the science and he should be inquiring about these things, but he's not, and it's just very, very very frustrating. So, you know, I'd like to get your opinion on this, Scott, because I've obviously have lots of opinions, but I'm kind of I can go more into that a little later, sure, well, when I was reading this article, it became
clear that there was really two subjects being addressed here. One is the actions and the comments and the ideas of Richard Dawkins and how they impact the LGBTQ community. There's other others on this panel that are much more directly affected by those issues, and so I'll defer time to hearing much more important perspective in regards to those issues. But the second issue was what can we do, how should we interact? How should we as atheists respond to this type of
thing? How should we react to Richard Dawkins? And I mean, well, I mean basically, it's bigger tree. We have a moral responsibility of calling this out. And one of the themes on the nonprofits that one of the things we talk about frequently is how religious leaders are afforded unfair and undeserved respect simply due to their position in the community. And so this is a
chance for us to put our money where our mouth is. Richard Dawkins we know as a prominent figure in the atheist community, but that does not mean that we as atheists are expected to go along with whatever he says. That's not what our group does. That's what the other group does. And so if we want to promote ourselves as being reasonable and rational and freethinking humanists,
then we need to step up and say the hard things. We need to say the difficult things, and the morally correct thing to do when you're leaders, and I'll use that term loosely in this case when they're doing bad things, is to say that they're doing bad things and to oppose to doing those bad things. And so if we want to if we want to be taken seriously and when we talk about things, we need to with our actions as well as our words. And so we need to step up and we need
to call things out as we see them. Phoebe, what are your what are your thoughts here? Well? I can't stand Richard Dawkins. I never really have liked the man, and the descent of man is always something that I enjoy to watch from Afar, especially those that we have for some reason be actified. And yet I deliberately choose very religious language to the way that people are hero worshiped and cult worshiped. But I don't know what mister Dawkins
believes. I don't know if he genuinely believes what he's saying, or whether he is just seeing a way of making money about the issues that he think make him money from the same people who he was making money from in the first place. So the group of people that he's main targeting are fairly angry, white middle class individuals commonly referred to in the United Kingdom as a gammon. So they rally against society, they rally against this, they rally against
that. They're typically of his age and so on. And I wonder whether he actually believes what he's actually saying here, And if he doesn't believe what he's saying, it makes it even worse because there's an intenserity to everything that he is doing. He in the article is described as a brilliant long form
individual, but only you really crap short form individual. And this does go some way on a slightly different thing to show that everything is now getting boiled down to the sixty second TikTok and the two hundred and forty platform formerly known as Twitter, that we've got to this thing where if you try to have nuance, you try to have discussion, you try to say things, you try to do things that are more than just those sixty seconds here those sixty
seconds there, and the argumentation and the conflict, you end up with what is effectively a dire tribe of us and them, And it's become this nonsense where my existence has become canon folder and I want to know what Ben thinks about his existence. Yeah, I've been continually frustrated with Richard Dawkins, and
I do think he knows that there's nuance. As a biologist, especially in the field of evolutionary biology, you understand that there are kind of ambiguous lines between a lot of things, like even more talking speciation, like yeah, we've set these lines in place when we study this as a way to categorize things in our brains easier, but we know that that's not the extent of reality in terms of different species. So I think Richard Dawkins understands that there's
nuance here. But instead of going too far into the science here, because we've on other shows and other episodes of this, we've talked about why sex and gender are non binary, But I wanted to today go into his logic and what he specifically does when he communicates this, because this, especially number one, is the big Achilles heel to his argument because logically it doesn't hold up, and or people who might not necessarily be able to argue the scientific
points you can argue against the logic here. So kind of two main things I want to focus on with him are number one being the use of the term biological as being intentionally ambiguous because it allows them to move the goal post. So, if you're imagining a conversation with somebody and you say this person is a biological male or a biological female, what traits come to mind? We all might think of different things. You might think of anatomy, you
might think of hormones, you might think of chromosomes. But everyone has their own idea of like this is what biologically male or female means. So that's already a little bit ambiguous. You're not pinning down what trait you're standardizing that as. But if you think about hormones being a components of biological sex, like your hormones or biological substances, they have biological functions in your body. So if you have a transperson that is on gender affirming hormone therapy, they
have chain their biology. They have changed a component of their biological sex, namely their hormonal sex, which I would argue is a category of sex. So if you break down every one of these components, being chromosomes, anatomy, gammeats, hormones, if you broke those all down and then assigned up person based on each one of these factors, you'd find most people are somewhere in between, especially on the hormonal standpoint. So even if you take CIS
people, you get a variety of combination. So if you take a post stop transwoman, they are probably chromosomally male, hormonally and anatomically female and with no gammets. So we don't have a very clear boundary there at all. But if someone takes the term biological, you need to make sure that you're
forcing them to define their criteria. Do they mean gammeats, do they mean chromosomes, do they mean anatomy, Because as we know, one of those characteristics might not be in place and they would still be viewed in society as a cisman or a sis woman. So then you pinpoint those topics and and you say, okay, well what about people that don't produce gam meats?
And they'll say, well, it's about your potential to produce gam meats, which gets into this weird gendered soul argument like, but then how do you determine what potential somebody has if they've never produced game meats? So you have to pin them down because it ends up being completely incoherent once you get to that point. But if you if they just say, like very vague biological sex, that could mean a multitative thing. So that's something that allows him
to technically be right even if he's not right with whatever he says. But the other point I wanted to bring up with this is the ecological fallacy, which I actually wrote some syllogisms to use for this. I'm not usually the one to do that. I mean, I'm not maybe I'm becoming secularity in J Mike today. But the ecological fallacy is when you take a population statistic
and apply it to an individual. And this is often used for transwomen in sports and for gender firm and care for minors, and so basically it is it assumes that the individual exhibits the same characteristics as the entire group. And this is very problematic when you're creating guidelines, because not every individual is going to meet those set of standards that you would assume are the case for the whole population. So I wrote a little syllogism here relating to the average heights
of women compared to men. So we all of us here know who Cynthia is. She's a lovely frequent guest and host on all of the ACA shows. But I wrote a syllogism saying the average height of a woman is five foot four. Cynthia is a woman. Therefore Cynthia is five foot four, And we all know this isn't true. I know Cynthia, she's a tall person, She's not five. But if we look at this, especially with trans women in sports, you think of the population, people think, oh,
what is the average for women? And that's all that they think of. But you're not considering the fact that each individual does not necessarily meet those criteria. And the average itself isn't even a data point on this spectrum. It's just the central tendency of the values. It might not even be an actual data point. So this is really problematic, and this fallacy is used to perpetuate stigma surrounding like racial issues as well. Like you hear about this
with this neighborhood has a higher crime rate. Bob lives in this neighborhood. Therefore, Bob is more likely to commit a crime. So you see, this logic is extremely problematic. And if we view it in the sense of racial disparities, like we see that this is a problem. But once the same logic is applied to trans people, suddenly people don't recognize it as a problem anymore. So, I know that was a little bit of a rant, but I was really passionate about that. But it was an awesome rant.
Yeah, But to follow on from what you were saying, I am a transfer you're allowed to rant, wow, very much so. But following on from what you were saying, I am a Transferman and I am six foot four, I am above average height for a woman. And there are other women such as say, I know Brittany Griner who is significantly taller than I am. So does that mean Britney Griners should be banned as well? But somebody who has been granting awangon to give him a bit of a break.
So I want to throw to the whole panel. And should we recommend the original evolution text of Dawkins or should we just throw him in the bin? Helen? Oh, I don't know, because this is this is my kind of problem with this thing where that we're discussing is that you can be brilliant in one field, right and understand your particular thing they went into study for. Like, he's an evolutionary biologists. This is the thing that he
educates on. But does he understand the reality of gender and sex and how you know we can define these things and that gender exists on his spectrum? Can't? Does he want to know these things? Does he care? And I'm based on his rhetoric lately, he doesn't seem to, and we all
know that he knows people that probably are experts in this field. And what is kind of bothering me is that if we decide you toss the work he has done into the bin, does that negate the people that actually learn something from him and learned about evolutionary biologists and started to question things about creationism. Do we toss that aside? I don't know, because yeah, he's being
a bigot and terrible right now. But I'm always in this thing about like, well, you could be really good at one thing and be terrible on like social issues. So I'm kind of in this weird place with it. But again, I'm not really a big fan of Dowkins either. So you know, I don't think I'm the person to ask because I don't have a dog in this fight. All I'm sitting over here going is like, you're being a bigot and you're being terrible already to marginalized groups. And I'm also
as a queer person to pissed me off. So I'm sitting over here going and like, I really don't care how smart you are. You are on the wrong side of history when it comes to this issue. So that's kind of my kind of feeling on it. But those people that helped, like their certain groups and people that he influenced them to think about the world more skeptically. So I don't know. And I because I to me, he's just another cranky old man that has some bad takes, and I think that
we can do better going forward. Yeah, I think I agree. I agree, but I think we need to It depends, I mean, right, the question is should we still support dawkins work in other areas? And I mean, on one hand, he clearly has credentials and experience and research in the area. On the other hand, he's turned out to be quite the asshole, and so and so there's going to be a balance going on
there is it is. The question would be will the assholeness affect the affect the scientific uh representation that he's giving, And you know, it's it's hard to say. I mean at this point, I listened to his podcast today
and it was really abhorrent. It was really it was difficult to listen to and and there really wasn't a lot of science in it, especially if we compare it to say, there was an article written by Stephen Novella at Science based Medicine dot com he where he kind of breaks down the differences between gender and sex and the fact that it's not, uh that it's more of a bimodal situation than a than a dichotomy right one or the other, black and
white kind of things. He's talking about how he uses he uses science to show that even uh, with any of those decision factors that doctor Ben was talking about, even within those situations, there's plenty of gray area for for us to take into consideration. And those gray that gray areas people and so
are you know, are we going to respect those people? But if we compare the two approaches that uh, that Dawkins used and that uh Stephen Novelli uses, It's clear to me that the science is slipping out of dawkins representation about the way that he presents he I used to think that he was a very spot on and very fine science advocate, and but now you know,
now I'm starting to question. I was physically ill listening to his podcast today and and and just to give you an idea of what the kind of things he was saying. First of all, he was very flippant throughout the whole thing. And I don't know if that's just because he's British or if he if it does an actual representation of his attitude there. But but he he suggested that some parents would prefer to have a trans kid than a gay kid.
Just the the ignorance just in that one statement is mind boggy. But but but if any of our listeners are going to be uh listening to that podcast, I would recommend that you also either immediately before or immediately after, read that article by Stephen Novellen. I think we can make sure to have the link in the show notes here. But just the difference in their approaches and their presentations is amazing. And so to answer Phoebe's question before, and
I'll pass it to Ben in a second. But to answer your question, Phoebe, I think we're we're definitely getting to a point where we need to or at least in my opinion, he's he's lost in any any amount of slack that that was going to be given to him, And I think it's to the point where, you know, I'm just going to move on,
Ben, what's your what's your take here? I was just going to quickly respond to Phoebe's question and say that I think it is okay to still learn from the good things that he has said in the past, and even if he has some good ideas, it's it's okay to learn from those, but it's important to not let him profit from those. So if people want to use one of his books to learn, get it used from somewhere else.
Don't be giving him the revenue from it. Unfollow him on the social media as we don't need to listen to him there, and there are plenty of other up and coming scientists, send newer people with better character that also have similar credibility in the field of evolutionary biology. So that's my perspective on that to answer my own question. If you're a mathematician, you've probably been taught
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