The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - The Origins Podcast: The War on Science Interviews: Day 1, Richard Dawkins

Episode Date: July 23, 2025

To celebrate the release on July 29th of The War on Science, we have recorded 20 podcast interviews with authors from the book. Starting on July 22nd, with Richard Dawkins, we will be releasing one interview per day. Interviewees in order, will be:Richard Dawkins July 23rdNiall Ferguson July 24thNicholas Christakis July 25thMaarten Boudry July 26thAbigail Thompson July 27thJohn Armstrong July 28thSally Satel July 29thElizabeth Weiss July 30thSolveig Gold and Joshua Katz July 31stFrances Widdowson August 1stCarole Hooven August 2ndJanice Fiamengo August 3rdGeoff Horsman August 4thAlessandro Strumia August 5thRoger Cohen and Amy Wax August 6thPeter Boghossian August 7thLauren Schwartz and Arthur Rousseau August 8thAlex Byrne and Moti Gorin August 9thJudith Suissa and Alice Sullivan August 10thKarleen Gribble August 11thDorian Abbot August 12thThe topics these authors discuss range over ideas including the ideological corruption of science, historical examples of the demise of academia, free speech in academia, social justice activism replacing scholarship in many disciplines, disruptions of science from mathematics to medicine, cancel culture, the harm caused by DEI bureaucracies at universities, distortions of biology, disingenous and dangerous distortions of the distinctions between gender and sex in medicine, and false premises impacting on gender affirming care for minors, to, finally, a set of principles universities should adopt to recover from the current internal culture war. The dialogues are blunt, and provocative, and point out the negative effects that the current war on science going on within universities is having on the progress of science and scholarship in the west. We are hoping that the essays penned by this remarkable group of scholars will help provoke discussion both within universities and the public at large about how to restore trust, excellence, merit, and most important sound science, free speech and free inquiry on university campuses. Many academics have buried their heads in the sand hoping this nonsense will go away. It hasn’t and we now need to become more vocal, and unified in combatting this modern attack on science and scholarship. The book was completed before the new external war on science being waged by the Trump administration began. Fighting this new effort to dismantle the scientific infrastructure of the country is important, and we don’t want to minimized that threat. But even if the new attacks can be successfully combatted in Congress, the Courts, and the ballot box, the longstanding internal issues we describe in the new book, and in the interviews we are releasing, will still need to be addressed to restore the rightful place of science and scholarship in the west. I am hoping that you will find the interviews enlightening and encourage you to look at the new book when it is released, and help become part of the effort to restore sound science and scholarship in academia. With no further ado, The War on Science interviews…As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krause. As many of you know, my new book, The War on Science, is appearing July 29th of this year in the United States and Canada. And to celebrate that, we've interviewed many of the authors of the 39 authors who have contributed to this volume, and we have 20 separate podcast interviews

that will be airing over the next 20 days, starting July 22nd, before and after the book first appears, with many of the authors in the book on a host of different subjects. The authors we will have interviews with in order of appearance over the next 20 days are Richard Dawkins, Neil Ferguson, Nicholas Christakis, Martin Boudre, Abigail Thompson, John Armstrong, Sally Sattel, Solveig Gold, and Joshua Katz, Francis Wooderson, Carol Hoven, Janice Fiamengo, Jeff Horsman, Alessendro,

Sturumia, Roger Cohen and Amy Wax, Peter Bogosian, Lauren Schwartz and Arthur Rousseau, Alex Byrne and Modi Goren, Judith Sisa, and Alice Sullivan, Carleen Grible, and finally, Dorian Abbott. The topics that will be discussed will range over the need for free speech and open inquiry and science and the need to preserve scientific integrity, stressed by our first podcast interviewer, Richard Dawkins, and we'll once again go over historical examples of how academia has been hijacked by ideology in the past and the negative consequences that have come from that

to issues of how specific disciplines, including mathematics, have been distorted, and how certain departments at universities now specific, claim that they are social activists and a degree in their field is a degree in either critical social justice or social activism, not a degree in a specific area of scholarship, how ideology is permeated universities. We'll proceed also to discuss issues in medicine. Sally Settel will talk about how social justice is hijacked medicine. And also, when it comes to issues of gender affirming care, we have a variety of authors who are going to speak about the

issues there and how too often gender-affirming care claims are made that are not based on empirical evidence. In fact, falsely discuss the literature in ways that are harmful to young people. We will talk to several people who, for one reason another, have been cancelled for saying things. Francis Woodison at Mount Royal University in Canada and Carol Hoeven from Harvard, who eventually had to leave Harvard after saying on television that sex is binary in biology. We'll be talking to people who've looking at the impact of diversity, equity, and inclusion in academia and how it's restricting free inquiry, and also restricting in many ways scientific merit at those universities.

And finally, Dorian Abbott, the last contributor to our series, will be talking about three principles he believes are essential to separate science and politics. and keep academia free from ideology and more for open questioning and progress and to make sure that science is based on empirical evidence and where we go where the evidence is, whether it's convenient or not, whether it's politically correct or not, and we're willing to debate all ideas that nothing is sacred, a central feature of what science should be about and what in some sense this podcast is about.

So I hope you really enjoy the next 20 days and we've enjoyed bringing it to you. So with no further ado, the war on science, the interviews. Well, Richard Dawkins, it's always great to see you. It's always great to be with you. Thanks for being here. Thank you. You look very divine, and you're up there in the sky, which is appropriate.

I just discovered this stupid background, and I can't switch it off now. Oh, no, it's great. I love it. I love it. It really, it's appropriate, in my opinion. and I'm so happy not only that you're here to discuss your chapter in your book, but that you wrote the chapter in the book. It's the first chapter in the book. And it captures so much of what the book is about. And as I would have expected, and it is the case, it's beautifully written,

lyrical. And I want to go through it with you. And the title also, I think, is incredibly important. The title of the piece is, scientific truth, stand above human feelings and politics. which I think is the key point. And it sets the tone of really the book is about the encouragement of ideology into science and academia and society more generally, but particularly science.

And it talks about, in this case, two specific examples of ideology impacting on science, one historical and one more modern. But you started out before we get there talking about the nature. of science, and again, in a lovely lyrical way, you point out that science isn't just, we say science is universal, but we often, when we think of that, we mean it doesn't depend upon where you are or here you are, but as you point out, it doesn't even matter what planet you live on. And it's universal in a true sense, not a terrestrial sense. And you say, if intelligent, your first sentences of intelligent extraterrestrial beings ever visit

us, what common ground shall we find for conversation? And of course, you say science. And I think that is particularly important as opposed to the more ideological ideas such as systemic racism, decolonizing the curriculum, cultural appropriation. Those are not scientific terms. And I think that's a key differentiation. And when you talk about science, of course, what you, you know, one can extol the scientific method, but, and you do. But you give a great example of scientific method that really takes it away from, from sort of human biases and in an important way. And that's the double-blind control trial.

So why do you talk about that a little bit? Okay. The double-blind control trial is big in medicine. I don't know. I'm not sure who invented it. It's pretty obvious, really. You have to try to get rid of your own biases. Any scientist with the best will in the world will want a certain result to come out of the experiment, perhaps.

And in a medical experiment where you're testing, say, a new drug against a control, the placebo effect is so important that if the patient or the doctor or the nurse or anyone has a slightest inkling as to which pill is the experimental and which is the control, it can bias the results. And even if it doesn't, when you publish the results, the readers can only know for sure that they can trust it if it's been double-blinded. It's not always possible. I mean, in the case of surgical procedures, nobody's going to volunteer on the off chance of being the control in a surgical procedure. So you can't always do it. But in the cases where you can do it, it is the gold standard for objective scientific truth, which is guaranteed to be not biased by,

subjective feelings. Yeah, as you beautifully right, it stands for the exclusion of feelings, subjective impressions, lived experience, and the pernicious notion that, quote, your truth is different from my truth

and everyone's truth is equally valid. The only fully reliable truth is the truth supported by objective publicly inescapable evidence. And the double-blind experiment is a beautiful example of that. And you go further to point out, you know, the different kinds of truth, which is becoming so prevalent nowadays in popular parlance, lived experience truth or indigenous truth. But as you say, there's two quotes of

years that I particularly like here, where facts are concerned, there's only one way to determine their truth or falsehood, and that's to examine the evidence. The best way to know how to evaluate the evidence is a scientific method. And most importantly, when you think of sort of cultural or socially derived a truth, you say the facts of science were facts long before there were humans to discover them. I don't be facts long after our species is gone. I think that's a really important factor. They don't require our interpretation for stars to exist. Yes, they're kind of arrogance to assume that humans have to be involved in everything.

I met this in New Zealand recently where there's a move to import Maori, quote, ways of of knowing into science curricula. As he was saying earlier, science is universal. If there are Maori ways of knowing which are valuable, then they should be all over the world, not just in New Zealand. You know, exactly. You know, I don't know if he's a friend of hers, but he certainly know Tim mentioned probably,

but I love the fact when he says this, he talks about, there's a great line in one of his pieces where he says, you know what they call alternative medicine that works? Medicine. Yes, quite, yes. And I had that. Actually, I was at a, I was an event that was sponsored. It may have been, I don't know if it was related to Richard documentation, but it was in China a long time. I know it was in, it was for, it was for CFI long ago. And there was a big meeting and they kept talking about Chinese medicine. Another, another name I kind of hate because, you know, they have the same DNA, the same ATP. If it's not Chinese medicine, it's not Western medicine. It's medicine, if it works. Yes. Yeah. And, and I think that. That's the important thing about science. Now, in this case, of course, the first example you give of this vain hubris, which of humans assuming somehow that they're, that in the face of eternal and universal verities of science, somehow our human politics are more important. The first example you give is a tragic one, which is Lysenko. And we talk about that in detail. I learned a lot, actually, from reading your piece about Lysenko. And he, as is well known. He basically was responsible for the starvation of literally millions of people in Russia and

later on in China. And why do you talk a little bit about him? He was a Charlottom. He knew very little science. He had fixed ideas and he caught the ear of Stalin. And that was the whole point. Stalin loved it because it chimed in with his Marxist prejudices. And so Lysenko became in charge of Soviet agriculture eventually.

He had huge power and he abused his power. He even had his rivals imprisoned or even executed. And as you say, he was the cause of mass starvation, not just in Russia but in China as well. The main source of the quotations that I give is a book that Lisenko edited, I think, about a 1948 conference in Moscow, where one after another the delicate stood up and denounced what they called Mendelist, Morganist, vicemanist, a heresy. It's just like a religious meeting, and all the speeches ended with rousing cheers for Comrade Stalin.

It's a chilling, horrible document. It's got a very innocuous title, The Situation in Myles, biological science. Exactly. It's a really sinister document. Yeah, it sounds an obtrous. The situation, biological science, sounds like a science document. And I want to parse some of this more carefully.

The summary you've given is beautiful. I want to parse it because to understand exactly what he got wrong and how it related to Marxism. And you just mentioned this Mendelism, Morganism, Wisemanism, as opposed to maturinism, which is what Lysenko promoted. and it was very Lamarckin. So why don't you briefly describe what this maturinism is?

Well, Mitterin was just a horticulturist. He was a gardener, really. And he believed in Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics. Or he probably did. Anyway, the Senko assumed that he did and grafted the doctrine onto his name.

And so he became a kind of hero in Soviet agronomy at the time. He was dead by then. and everybody had to bow the knee to his so-called doctrine. He was just a gardener, really. And he and Asenko both believed in inheritance of acquired characteristics, which is anti-genetic. It's not true.

It's a doctrine which persistently rears its head. Lots of people want it to be true. They have a sort of human, probably political desire for it to be true. If it were true, then they believe it could be used to sort of in the perfection of humanity, that kind of thing. The Weissman alternative, which is that you get the genes you're doled and nothing can do about it, they're yours, and then you pass on half of them to each of your children, and you don't influence them on the way through. They just flow through you like a river. That's very different.

That was anathema to Lysenko and to Stalin and to essentially all of Soviet agronomy at the time, except for the heretics who were imprisoned, banished, or executed. And that idea, and you say that basically he rediscovered a very landmark notion, and it's a simple notion, anyone who I suppose who gardens knows, that plants can change and respond to environmental stress. Cold can induce them the flower,

and that's called vernilization. But what, and you say, where it went wrong and very big wrong. Well, it's not inherish it. I mean, it's, it's, yes, you know. Yeah, exactly. It was the belief that it was inherited, that some kind of memory could go on.

Yes, quite. And that's quite a market. And I think the point you make here, and people may wonder, why did it, why did it catch on? And you say, his nonsense would have died in natural death. Had it not conformed to Soviet ideology

and the quasi-religious Marxist's in the indefinite improbability and malleability of man, which goes with a general suspicion of genetics. So the idea that people can, you know, that future generations can improve because of what, genetically, literally, because of what past generations have done. Yes. Well, at least what past generations have said.

Of course they can approve by what past generations have done. I mean, in the sense that if past generations, if you're in a society, for example, that, you know, where people don't believe the rustling of the trees or lions, your future generations will suffer for that. But the idea that the genes are changed by what you're doing life is. Yes. But it captured onto that.

That's where I hadn't ever heard that before. I was wondering, always wondered why Lysenko caught on. And it's that notion that, the Marxist notion that man can improve and be malleable. And I think that's a real. I think so, yes. And you know, there were Western scientists like, Bernal and even JBS Holden who were, because of their Marxist belief,

they briefly, in Holden's case, not so briefly in Bernal's case, latched onto it and championed him and in some cases tried to do experiments to verify what he said was true. And it's funny because Haldenin you think of as a great biologist, but they eventually let go of that or no? Well, I think he was a Marxist to the end, but he would have given up on the Sankos,

certainly, yes. And you do point out that. I hadn't realized. I knew that it caused great starvation in Russia, but actually later on between 1959 and 61, you say as many as 45 million Chinese people died as a result of starvation because that Lysenko's crack body is that caught on with Mao's greatly forward. I didn't know that. for the same ideological reason.

Yeah, yeah, that's amazing. Now, there are quotes from this conference that I think I have to read because they really capture how political ideology supersedes science here. Thus, comrades, as regards to the theoretical line of biology, Soviet biologists sold that the maturin principles are the only scientific principles. The wisemenists and their followers who deny the heritability of acquired characters are not worth dwelling on at too great length. The future belongs to Mitterin.

And that V.I. Lennon and J.V. Stelon discovered Ivy Mitterin and made his teachings of possession of the Soviet people. And it goes on. And what is interesting, and again, I think it's important to view in the modern context of how this has happened in different modern attacks on science, ideology, is to see how other people, how other academics pile on. And you quote another, you know, speeches by other than Lysenko saying, the only correct theory, the one capable of illuminating the path of practical agronomy,

is the Mitterin Lysenko theory. I cannot refrain from telling you a curious incident, you know, when a professor, you protested and how awful that was. and where people are beginning to condemn those who think otherwise. And I think that's a really important characteristic of this. Yes, and at the end, at the end of the conference, there are these pathetic individuals who stood up and confessed, confess their sins. That's well worth having a look at.

Yeah, no, exactly. I mean, you know, that is, and again, you see that kind of, I tend to think of malice confession, But before we get there, there was the attack on Vavlov, on the grounds that it works, that centers on the origins of plants and Drosvilia and things like that. Was Vavlov the person who Lysenko had eventually punished?

Is he the person? Yes. Vavlov was a genuinely distinguished plant geneticist. He was hugely distinguished. He made enormous collections of plant seeds. and he was a very distinguished scientist. He was eventually arrested on trumped-up charges of espionage, and he died in prison under horrible circumstances.

He's been rehabilitated in Russia since that time. Well, that's good to know, of course. But now let's get to these retractions, which are interesting because I see so similarities between people. what I see here and what's happening now in a variety of scientists. One person wrote, when I leave this session, the first thing I must do is to review not only my own attitude towards the new, maturion science, but my entire early activity. And then let the past which divided me from T.D. Lysenko, although not always, it's true,

be forgotten. Believe me, that I take this step today as a party member and as a sear a member of our party, that is honestly. And that kind of retraction is interesting to see because there are many papers now in a variety of areas, not just gender, which we'll talk about, where people retract their papers after the fact from journals because they might cause offense, for example. Or people, to take a biological example, and someone you and I both know, Francis Collins, who was head of the National Institutes to Health. After the George Floyd's instance, when it became to rigor to say that science was

systemically racist, he confessed that the National Institutes to Health had been systemically racist basically all the time he was director. But that kind of virtue signaling obviously means nothing. Because if you really believed that, he would have resigned. You see that there. In a case, and in the Sincos case, people's lives were really at risk, as you point out with Vavlov. And it's that disturbing aspect of people being, lives being at risk. And nowadays, the modern version of that is not so much people's lives, but people's careers being at risk, people's professional careers and the reputations.

And then you turn to a more modern example and a very current example of ideology, including on science, which is in your section, is sex. the social construct. And there's a kind of interesting things here that, as always, I learned from reading you. You quote Alan Sokol, who has a piece in the book. This is based on this postmodernist attitude to science. And he defines it as so-called scientific knowledge does not, in fact, constitute objective knowledge of a reality external to ourselves, but is a mere social construction on par with myths and religions, which therefore have an equal claim to validity. And And these two quotes from social scientists that you have here blew me away and I have to read them. One psychologist, Harry Collins, the natural world has a small or non-existent hole in the construction of scientific knowledge.

I mean, I just, how can he would say that? It's just shocking. And then this other person, another social scientist, Kenneth Gergen, the validity of theoretical propositions in the sciences is in no way affected by fact. actual evidence. Yes. Yes. People could make this up. But you point out what a social construct is. Two examples that I think are great. One is money and one is the calendar. Why do you just elaborate on that? Yeah, well, money has no intrinsic value. It only has value because other people value it. And so that is a social construct. As I point out, a bit of green paper with $1 written on it and a bit of green paper with $100 on it.

The second one is 100 times more value than the first, but they're just bits of green paper. It is a social construct that makes the difference. The calendar, well, the length of a year in terms of days is an objective fact. That's governed by the rotation of the Earth and the orbit of the Earth around the sum. But the calendar, the division into 12 months, the division into weeks of seven days, that's a social construct. And I quote the rather humorous example of the lost 11 days when the Julian calendar was superseded by the Gregorian calendar and they jumped 11 days in sometime in September. And people allegedly rioted because they thought 11 days had been stolen from their lives.

I mean, that's the elevation of a social construct where it has no business. Exactly. Yeah. The calendar is social construct. The Earth's orbit isn't. No matter what you think, the Earth order takes a certain amount of time. And I think it's a great example for people who may want to see that. Then the other aspect of postmodernism is this notion of power. And you quote, another quotation from SoCal, is from Stanley Arnowitz, who says, science legitimizes itself by linking its discoveries with power, a connection which determines and not merely influences what constitutes as reliable.

knowledge, the notion that somehow everything can be defined in terms of power and knowledge is only defined by people who have power rather than something external to people. And you say this attitude exemplifies the eubristic aggrandizement of human power, arrogating to mere humans, a quasi-divine dominion over nature itself. And as with Lysenko's determination to overrule science, if science conflicted with Marxist Leninist theories, if reality is a mere social construct, society is the power to change. reality. And now you come in, you would say that you would argue legally declaring a man to be a woman, just because he wants to be a woman, has much in common with the perpetual motion joke and the

calendar rides joke. But unfortunately, the perpetual motion joke I should mention was repeal the laws of thermodynamics so we can have perpetual motion. Exactly. That's right. It's a great idea. And I get letters all the time for people who think they have. Unfortunately, that's the course of being a physicist. But the the depth of improved the main point is that there is a well-defined

definition of sex which we'll get to. But the inclusion of it, the intrusion of it is real. And you point out that the American Medical Association of 2023 and I should say we have a number of articles in the book by doctors talking about this intrusion in gender affirming care as well as the definition of sex.

But the AMA in 2023 laid down some best practices for sex and gender diversity. Medical students would be taught that both sex and gender are socially, both sex and gender are socially constructed. And quote, it is appropriate to affirm each individual's self-determination regarding both sex and gender labels. And you asked the question, are we seriously training a generation of young doctors to think that the sex of a patient is a matter of individual choice, not merely in anatomical and physiological reality? And what's crazy about this is if you ask almost all patients, they would know the answer to that right away. And it's scary to think that their doctors don't. Well, I think doctors do, but the American Medical Association is trying to

cowtow to fashionable doctrine. But in practice, I mean, any doctor who treats a biological male as though he was female when actually treat him as a patient is not a very good doctor. Yeah, that's what one would expect. And you make another important point, which is really important. You can imagine, and I think they're already present lawsuits, not future ones. I think in the States there are lawsuits from people who have transitioned when they were transitioned when they were minors who feel like that they didn't have that choice. But you can say I could imagine future lawsuits against surgeons who in violation of the first clause of the bureaucratic oath, which is to do no harm, 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.

What, after all, does below the age of consent mean, if not too young, to make permanent life-changing decisions? And that's a huge issue. The age of consent is a legal demarcation when a girl in this case is capable of consenting to have sex. And obviously, it's an arbitrary demarcation, but nevertheless, it's there. And you think that the decision to have your breasts cut off would be at least as radical as a decision to have sex.

And so any surgeon who cuts the breasts off a girl below the age of consent, just because she thinks she's a boy, deserves to be struck off. And I hope in future they will be. Well, I think we're seeing, as a number of people, and I've already had interviews with a number of people,

I've known to the scientists or doctors who write about this in the book. That's happening. What's unfortunate is, at this moment, And is this happening much more effectively in the UK and Europe than it is in the United States? The United States is behind the curve. You mean the opposition to that is? Yeah, the opposition.

Yes. Yeah, is, you know, with the cast report and other reports in the UK and others pointing out that basically gender affirming care, that children should not be, life-changing decisions should not be made to children on children. Yes. And Europe is along with that too, but it hasn't happened yet in the United States. But, okay. So yet we then turn to biology, which is great because that's your field. And you point out the definition of sex and why it's the definition of sex is really important

because so often I hear the definition of sex to be, oh, X, Y, chromosomes versus X, X, X, and instead you advocate what you shall call a universal biological definition, which is based on gamete size. And you say that because it's the only definition that applies. all the way across animal and plant kingdoms and all the way through evolutionary history. So why don't you describe that? Yeah. Well, chromosomes work for mammals.

I mean, in mammals, males the X, Y and female of the X, X, X, X, in birds and butterflies, is the other way around. Birds are the equivalent of the X, Y. In many reptiles, it's done by temperature. In some reptiles, it's done by the X, X, X, Y system. There are all sorts of ways in which sex is determined. So there's nothing universal about that. The gamete size criterion for defining male and female is universal.

It's universal in all animals and plants, not in algae, not in fungi, but otherwise it's universal. There are no intermediate gametes between sperms and eggs. Your gametes are either microgammates or they're macrogrammits. You can be hermaphrodite and have both, which simply means you have both men. male gonads and female gonads, and sometimes at the same time, sometimes at different times of your life, and that's reasonably common in fish and other creatures and earthworms and snails. But the divide in gamete size between micro gametes and macro gametes is universal, and it comes about for a very good reason.

Mathematical models have shown that isogamy, which is equal gamete size, is unstable, expected conditions and you get a runaway natural selection effect towards some gametes becoming smaller and smaller and more and more numerous. Other gametes becoming larger and larger and less numerous and the small gametes becoming motile and adapted to seek out the large ones. So that's the sperm egg divide. It is universal and it is totally understood and is widespread and runs right through evolution. And just to make it clear, and you call this, you don't call it, it's called anti-sodgamy, which is a new word for me, but the point is that female gametes are

large and male gametes are small, and that defines female and male. That defines it, and there are no intermediates. And there are no intermediates. Sex is a binary. Sex is absolutely binary. It's absolutely binary. And you point out, as you just said, there are mathematical models of why that happened. And it's basically economics. Do you want to go through any of those arguments, you know, a part of Parker? I could. Isogamy is a system that you see get in some algae where the gametes are of equal size. And so the costs of making a zygote, making a new,

individual are born equally by both parents. So it's an economic fairness about that. They both contribute an equal amount. The unstable runaway towards anisogamy leads to one sex being the economic provider, namely the female sex, the egg sex, the ovum sex. The other sex just contributes DNA. And from that, a whole lot of things follow, a whole lot of differences between males and females throughout the animal kingdom. And it all hangs together as a coherent story of differences between the sex is fundamentally stemming from this basic economic imbalance. Yes. I mean, if you have larger ones, then they're more like to survive, smaller ones.

You can do things, but then there's this economics. If you have larger ones and more energy devoted to them. And you say, and like, and what's really important, and I'm really happy you describe this, definitions in science are. are just definitions. But what matters is if they explain things, that's what really matters, the explanatory aspect of science. And, you know, Feynman used to say, I know you like birds, but Feynman used to say it didn't matter what a bird's name was. It was, you know, it was what it does and what, you know, and, and this is really important. You say the fundamental economic

inequality of its antisogamy illustrates a large number of biological phenomena, therefore or justifying your claim that the UBD, universal binary, universal biological definition of sex, does a lot of explanatory work. If you define females as macro-gammy producers and males as micro-gammy producers, you can immediately account with the following facts. And they're 14 of them.

And they go everything in mammals. It's the females that just ate, in bird species when only one sex incubates. It's nearly always the, and one feeds the young, it's nearly always the females. in the fish that bear live young, it's nearly always the females. When one sex guards the other against compilation with the others, it's nearly always the males. Polygony is far more common than polyandry.

When one sex tends to die younger than the others, it's usually the males. When one sex is long as usually males. In all cases, the key is economics. Large gametes cost more than small ones in various ways the inequality plays out. And I think that's what's really important. This definition actually explains what goes on. and that's why it's important. And I think it and you have a beautiful paragraph and that maybe you can describe it where

anisogamy is domine reproduction, but lots of other versions of sex have come and gone. And I can read it if you want or maybe you can remember that where you. Well, yes. I mean, excuse me, I'm going to have to clear my throat. Okay, sure. There are various anomalies like in hyenas. Females are very much like males. They look like males.

They have bogus. They have fake male genitalia. They tend to be socially dominant. And this has given rise to legends of males giving birth. It's actually females giving birth. But they've even got fake balls and a fake penis. there are, well, sea horses which are fish. The male gets pregnant.

He actually has a brood pouch in his belly. And you might ask, well, how do you know it's the male? Why not define the male as the one who, define the female as the one who gets pregnant? But then you would lose all the other explanatory, those 14 things that you mentioned. I don't know. I wanted to go back to that. But you also tried out that. things change in time. Let me read your paragraph because it was very

liberating for me. Anisogamy as dominated reproduction, mating systems, and social systems for probably two billion years. All other ways to define the sexist run, fall afoul of numerous exceptions. Sex chromosomes come and go through an evolutionary time. Profficit gametes spewing into the sea gives off to paired off copulation and vice versa. Sex organs grow and shrink and grow again as the ions go by. So, I mean, a lot of these other, and you say, herom systems change placed with faithful monogamy, psychological concomitants of sexuality change like the wind. And so lots of other

definitions change biologically with time. And that's, and what's really important. And you say, that is all you need know of sex differences and all you need to know. One sex produce gametes and are much smaller and more numerous than the other. And you says Keats might have only slightly exaggerated if he'd been an evolutionary biologist. So the other definitions all, you know, are time dependent in some sense and often species dependent, but, but this gamete, this description is not. And, and, you know, you mentioned the seahorse. But the other one you often, you talk about because a lot of enthusiasts love to talk about anemone, the clownfish. The ceremony fish.

Fish is most common fish. They'd love to be around. They're serial hermaphrodites. I mentioned demaphrodites only. Snails and earthworms are simultaneous hermaphrodites. These fish are serial hermaphrodites. But I know they're great favorites of the sexes, non-binary lobby. But they're just hemaphrodites.

I mean, they're serial hermaphrodites. And you point out that when, it's true that when one dies, the dominant males becomes female. But what does that mean? Well, that means that dominant male, if it becomes female, suddenly starts to produce eggs instead of follows the definition of what is a female, not because it wants to be a female. It starts to produce eggs. And before that, it had produced sperm.

And therefore, that defines. So in the case of clownfish, yes, they can change their sex, but it's still binary. Yes, exactly. And that's a really important point. And you actually talk about actually someone who I once had in one of our origins events, and Fausto Sterling, who's argued that there's a sexual continuum. But you point out that it really isn't. It's binary.

Yes. And of course there are genetic, one could say mutants, if you want to call it that, at a very, very small level. But if you look at, but if you look at, human population, it's not a spectrum. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's completely binary. I, I have the analogy of that trying to draw a bar chart, a histogram. Yes. The number of unambiguous male babies and unambiguous female babies.

If you, if you represent those on your histogram as the two, the twin towers of the World Trade Center, then the intermediates, if any, the intermediates would, would be the height of us of a medium-sized mole hill in between them. And that is not binary. That's not binary. But then as you point, sorry, that is binary. Yeah. Yeah.

As you point out, even that's an overestimate. The true figure is zero, not even a moral. Yes, that's right. Nobody produces, nobody produces middle-sized gametes. Intermediate the geneagin sperm. And so in that, it's clear that in that case, it really remains binary. And very importantly. And again, just to beat this dead horse one more time,

there are situations where environment can change, can determine sex, such as in snakes, right? In snakes and some lizards, where if gestation takes place at different temperature, the male, you'll produce either females or males.

But there'll be either females or males. That's the point, right? Yes, not intermediate. Yeah. Okay, now you talk. Then you get in a little hairier concept, which you point out the word gender enters the discourse trailing clouds of confusion. And it does.

And of course, you point out linguistically, grammatically, there are genders in different languages. And you prefer to restrict your discussion of gender to those languages rather than people. Because gender and sex get confused. Absolutely. Yes. Yes. Let me at least, you know, so at least point out a potential, play the devil's advocate here a little bit, or maybe a potential different way of thinking about it.

I tend to think of, you see, and I don't use women and man. I use male and female for facts, and I use woman and man for gender, because I tend to think of gender as the expression of one's sexual identity. so that if what you know and and so almost like genes are expressed but but it's the expression of gender identity so a male may may act like a gendered female because in every way that's their expression of their individual sexual individual sexual identity doesn't make them a female but gender wise they're a woman now I guess you would you have would you have problems with that Well, they're free to call themselves what they like. But if they go into a boxing ring masquerading as a woman when they're actually a man,

it's not their gender that knocks the other person out. It's their sex. Yes. It's important to realize there is, I think the really important thing, and this is where the confusion come from, is people conflate gender and sex. and they're not the same thing. And after that it becomes a little bit more semantics. Sex as well.

Gender, it's more, has many different definitions, I guess. I don't feel any need to use the word gender in this context. As I said, I use it in the grammatical context. If you're learning French, you have to know the gender of a noun. You have to respect the pronouns of a noun. Yeah. You have to respect the fact that the table is feminine. because otherwise you're not speaking proper French.

That's gender. And it's a kind of accident that in some languages have 15 genders. And they perform the same role in language as what we think of as gender. Yeah, you said you work at from Stephen Pinker. I didn't realize there were 15 languages. Yes. That language. That's amazing, 15 genders.

But it's worth pointing out here. You say the current fashion for transsexualism belongs in a cluster of interrelated bodes, sometimes called woke, partly stemming from a sincere concern for social justice, largely well-meaning, which couldn't be said for Lysenko, but misguided in scientifically ill-informed, which could be said of Lysenko. So, I mean, I think the point is that a lot of what's happened is people, you know, look, there are people who, as you point out, have gender dysphoria,

who, who, or transsexuals, and, and, um, and one can understand and sympathize with their, with their gender dysphoria. and one shouldn't discriminate against them as much as discriminate against anyone else. And so the social justice origin of this is one shouldn't discriminate against people who have gender dysphoria. But then that's true to the extreme and unscientific version, which is to say that they're not having gender dysphoria. They literally are in other sex.

Exactly. And that's a perversion of language. That comes from postmodernism. and that is inadmissible, in my opinion. And the problem here, you're pointing out, and this wasn't a problem before. I mean, it wasn't as pervasive a problem before, is you say, well, look, people can be wished to be born the opposite sex

and feel like they're trapped in the wrong body. But you say today's surrounding culture, doctors, psychiatrists, teachers, political leaders, lawyers, and perhaps above all, school friends, give more than little push. When you say, say, go for it. For it, yes. Yeah, when you gave sex assigned at birth is arbitrary. It suggests that, in fact, sex is assigned and it's not real.

And so it's the cultural aspect that's pushing people to make this confusion between gender and sex. I think it would be like saying to an anorexic person who's skeletally thin, it's okay. You're not thin. You're not. It's kind of like that. It's pushing them into it. Yeah, and just so both you know I can get into more troubles, there's this thing of where fat shaming,

where people who are extremely obese don't, there are health problems with being extremely obese, like or not, but the current fat is to not suggest there's a problem there. I mean, to be proud of being in that. And I understand it because you don't want to, the difference is you don't want to discriminate against people who are obese, but you don't have to say that it's healthy.

Yes, quite. And I'm sure I'll get hate mail for that one. But anyway, and you point out that there are two other problems with this. One is simply reporting language and reporting things such as crimes that are wrong. For example, in the Bournemouth Daily Echo, she is accused of four counts of engaging in sexual activity in the presence of a child and two counts of exposure where she, quote, intentionally exposed her penis. Her penis, note.

Her penis, that's why. Sorry, it's intentionally exposed her penis intending someone would see it and cause alarm or distress. And another one, a transgender woman is denied raping two women with her penis as she went on trial at the high court. And that was in the times. And you point out that that has consequences if people were. report crimes by people who are actually males and call them females. And in terms of the statistics of crime reporting, which have influence on public policy, you get the wrong public policy if you use the wrong science. That was a point that I hadn't really occurred

to me until I met it a few months ago. And it's a very important point because the vast majority of crimes of violence are in fact committed by males. And if a male masquerading as a female, if his crime is recorded as a female crime, that has a dramatic effect upon the statistics, which is quite unjust towards real women. Yeah, you point out, I think, they do the statistics. It gives a 15 times wrong estimate. But you also, there's another problem. When one starts to do this, there's the question of thought police, which is we're seeing a lot of them in the United Kingdom, in particular, but also in Canada. And you say, you know, you point out if a journalist had said with his penis instead of her penis,

the Times could have been in trouble with the police for misgendering. And this example, in 2020, the Humbersy Police descended on the workplace of Harry Miller to warn that one of his tweets was being recorded as a hate incident. And what was the tweet? I was assigned mammal at birth, but my orientation is fish. Don't misbeas me. It's a good joke. It's a joke. And it's really a scary joke when that gets called hate speech.

Yes. And it's also a scary point when you just begin to ask the question about this. And I think I skipped over it here. And you gently skip over it. You know, in asking this question, oh, no, actually it's later on. In fact, it's coming up, which is a. the comfort, which is sex and race. You make a really interesting point, which I had occurred to me, which is that race is polygenetic, right? It's polygenetic, polygenetically inherited, and namely

that when a white person and a black parent mate and produce children, the color of those children's skin can be lighter or darker. And therefore defy this notion of white and black. black. Yes. So race really is a spectrum in a sense, or it can be a problem. Yes, it really is. It really is a spectrum. And it's a question that never occurred to me. You say, why did the craze for non-biological self-identification, it's sex and not race? Why the double standard?

And I don't know if anyone has an answer to that. Well, Rebecca Tuval wrote an article about this in a philosophical journal, and she got terribly attracted for it, regarded it as insane and prejudiced and transphobic and everything. She simply pointed out the truth, which is that race is a continuum. So why not encourage people who want to identify the different race? if you're going to do that with sex, why not with race? It's a really interesting point. Her case, by the way, just to clear this up for people,

that's in the article, in her article, she compared the case of Rachel Dolazal, who identified as a member of a different race with Kate Jenner, who's the famous American athlete who was former Bruce Jenner, who identified as a member of different sex. The response for our article was, again, Lysenko, and this is what I wanted to stress.

It's hysterical. A majority of the journal's associate editors issued an apology and the editor resigned. And of course, she was accused to being crazy, racist, transphobic, everything, even though there's no everything, racist, transphobic, and stupid. And there's someone else who was attacked,

and namely it was you. Thanks for that, you produced the following tweet. And I remembered vividly. In 2021, you produced the tweet. In 2015, Rachel Dolazala, a white chapter president of AAACP, was vilified for identifying his black. Some men choose, some men choose to identify as women and some women choose to identify as men.

You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss, which is just like the perfect kind of question you might expect on an exam by a teacher who wants people to think. And you are, after all, a teacher and a professor. For that tweet in which you ask people to discuss, you point out you're vilified and, and, and, and you are, and, And I think we have to point out that an organization that should know better, the American Humanists Association, retroactively took away your Humanist's Year Award for asking people to think, which is, you know, the opposite of what humanism it should be all about. It's really remarkable that it's that extreme.

The next thing you talk about, which is intriguing to me, because, again, I'd never thought in these terms. And, of course, you're well, not probably the world's most famous atheists. and I have been associated with you in that regard as well, is the theology. Can you point out that there are two characteristics of the modern sort of obsession with victimization and also with the willing ability to change sex? And one comes from original sin and the other with transubstantiation. So why don't I open it to you to just explain that?

Well, original sin is one of Christian. humanity's most unpleasant doctrines, it states that all people are born with sin, born with original sin. They have inherited the sin of Adam, believe it or not. And the sin of Adam comes down in the form of the seaman, which is why, and Jesus was not conceived with seamen. So he was free of original sin. And his mother, Mary, also, for theological reasons, had to be free of sin, it had to be fear of, so it was necessary that she should be immaculately conceived. So that was invented by some Pope, I forget when. And original sin is fundamental key to Christianity. And original sin has been grafted onto white people. Because such hideous things were done by

white, are white ancestors to black people in form of slavery. It really was hideous. I mean, quite utterly appalling to see in the original version of my article with the pictures were cut out of the published version, but I had a picture of a slave ship in which there were slaves like sardines in the ships hold. I mean, just disgusting, just horrible, horrible, horrible cruelty. So those white people who did that deserve to be condemned in every possible way. But we who are white are not responsible what our white ancestor did just because we are white. We can as humans say that

humanity is capable of horrible things but we don't deserve to inherit the guilt of our ancestors simply because we're white. That is a very, very Christian kind of doctrine and it is original sin. Nor should be, as you point out, that there are none of those who are to blame

for such cruelty dead and unavailable, so are the Africa chiefs who sold the Africans in slavery and the Arab slaves. Indeed, yes. I mean, you know, one could one could argue that everyone is, is, as suffers this atavistic guilt. But it's a really interesting point. And it's very similar to original sin that, that, and I, I first heard it from Hitchens, but it's, I understand now the Quokos much further back that we're, we're born ill, but commanded to be well. One of the problems of Christianity. The other one, though, is transubstantiation, which is really amazing. It is true. I mean, again, I learned it, I think, from me, that the Protestants see it as analogy, but the Roman Catholics see it as literal, right?

Yes. They use the Aristotelian distinction between substance and true essence. And so Aristotle, of course, long predates Christianity, but Aristotle was enormously influential on Christianity throughout its history. Yes. And so when Roman Catholics say that the blessing by a priest of the bread and wine turns it into body and blood of Christ, they obviously don't really think that it is body and blood, but except in the Aristotelian sense, that the true substance is the technical term. The true substance is body and blood.

and when the priest blesses it, it's transubstantiation, transubstantiated, into, into, so that the actual bread and wine becomes the mere aristotelian accidental, as is the technical, aristotelian technical term. So that's what the transsexual people are effectively saying, that the very act of standing up and announcing, I am a woman, turns you into a woman. So even if you still have a penis, that's merely an Aristotelian accidental. In true substance, you are a woman. The other thing one could add is that you're being a dualist because you're saying,

if you're saying that you are trapped, as they do, trapped in the wrong body, you are maybe biological male, but you're a female trapped in the wrong body, That's a kind of dualism. It's like, say, you have an immortal soul, which is a truly female soul, which is struggling to get out of this entrapment of a male body. And the soul is the aristotelian substance and the male body is an erythalian accident.

Okay, well, it's interesting. I hadn't thought of those potential origins or support for a lot of what, we're seeing in the case of in the case of both this victimhood mentality and power and oppression and sex versus gender.

You conclude, an interesting statement that I'm not sure, well, I'm going to read the statement, I'm not sure I agree with that 100%. You say if your science is so weak that the best you can do is yell that your opponent is a Mendelist Morganist or a wisemanist, a transphobic bigot, a turf,

or a full-on maga, alt-right Trump supporter, you've already lost the argument. Well, of course, you've lost the logical argument. What worries me is in the modern world, you don't lose the argument. Well, that's true enough, yes, yes. And that, and that I think is the real problem here. And one of the reasons we've written this book is that we, at least in academia and in science, and we should be, the logical argument should take precedence and not the noise.

And you point out that a large part of this is in this weird notion that, that language somehow is violent, that violence can be done by language. Oh, God, yes, yeah. As opposed to physical violence. And I want to give you the last word by reading your last words. There's an addendum that I won't read, but the last words, 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. Like Lysenko, it took decades, and the death of Stalin, for Russia to see through Lysenko, let us hope we in our century don't take quite so long to come to our census. And that's a great hope, and that's one of the reasons we wrote this book, and one of the reasons you kindly wrote this beautiful article

that begins the book. And we hope that the book will, by being written by people from inside rather than outside, who are criticizing what's going on and from a diverse group of scientific disciplines and scholarly disciplines and political ideologies, all arguing that basically a person should be supported or refuted by rational discussion informed by evidence, which is really the heart of science and the heart of

academia. And you always describe it beautifully. Thank you for describing it to the book, and thank you for being here to elaborate on it in this discussion. Thanks again, Richard. Thank you very much. Hi, it's Lawrence again. As the Origins podcast continues to reach millions of people around the world, I just wanted to say thank you. It's because of your support, whether you listen or watch, that we're able to help enrich the perspective of listeners by providing access to the people and ideas

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