@GodflyThe@JenelopeJohnson@maxrenke@SadLittleKobold I don’t tend to do remedial evolution on Twitter. But since you say you are an evolutionary geneticist, I’ll make an exception. I’ll go slow, since you seem to have missed a lot already. Consider it a public service. [thread 1/14]
@GodflyThe@JenelopeJohnson@maxrenke@SadLittleKobold This is an evolutionary tree. Some branches display parts of history that we never inhabited. One of those branches on this tree, for instance, terminates in the taxon called “orangutan”. We were never orangutans. But we were—and still are—apes. As are orangutans. 2/
@GodflyThe@JenelopeJohnson@maxrenke@SadLittleKobold (Tree thinking—really grasping what phylogenetic trees are conveying, and what they are not—takes some time, but turns out to be necessary if you are to grok lineage level thinking, and macroevolutionary concepts like synapomorphy, homology, monophyly, etc.) 3/
@GodflyThe@JenelopeJohnson@maxrenke@SadLittleKobold We are also fish. This does not mean that we are clownfish or eels or trout, or that we ever have been any of those things. Here’s another graphic that you may find helpful: 4/
@GodflyThe@JenelopeJohnson@maxrenke@SadLittleKobold Traits that are new and shared at the level of a clade (“synapomorphies”—e.g. vertebrae in vertebrates, mammary glands in mammals) are different from traits found in just a few members of a clade (e.g. sequential hermaphroditism in clownfish). 6/
@GodflyThe@JenelopeJohnson@maxrenke@SadLittleKobold Conflating the individual with the whole is easily revealed as an error. Take facultative parthenogenesis (“virgin birth”) in Komodo dragons. If Komodo dragons can do it, then all reptiles can! And if all reptiles can, all animals can! And if all animals, all life can! 7/
@GodflyThe@JenelopeJohnson@maxrenke@SadLittleKobold Reversals do happen, of course. For instance, snakes have lost their legs. Whales have returned to the sea, from whence they once came. Ostriches have lost flight. 8/
@GodflyThe@JenelopeJohnson@maxrenke@SadLittleKobold Some traits, though, never, or nearly never, reverse. We have no evidence of any vertebrate species that, as an adult, has no vertebrae. Nor of any species of mammal that has females without mammary glands. Nor of any squamate male that lacks paired hemipenes (look it up). 9/
@GodflyThe@JenelopeJohnson@maxrenke@SadLittleKobold Similarly, the *lineage* to which we belong is one long, uninterrupted string of sexual reproduction for at least the last 500 million years. Since we were indeed early fish, we have no evidence of anyone *in our particular lineage* going asexual. 10/
@GodflyThe@JenelopeJohnson@maxrenke@SadLittleKobold The fact that, off on a couple different branches of the vertebrate tree *on which we never traveled,* there is some hermaphroditism, or parthenogenesis, does not mean that we have ever been a hermaphroditic, or parthenogenetic, species. 11/
@GodflyThe@JenelopeJohnson@maxrenke@SadLittleKobold Furthermore, that number—that 500 million years of uninterrupted sexual reproduction? It’s conservative. In fact, our direct ancestors have probably been sexually reproducing, without pause, for somewhere between one and two *billion* years. 12/
@GodflyThe@JenelopeJohnson@maxrenke@SadLittleKobold But evidence is extremely strong for 500 million years of uninterrupted sexual reproduction in our particular lineage, so I’m willing to forego the additional strength of those half a billion to one a half billion years. Just to be on the side of caution. 13/
#FollowTheScience is a perfect encapsulation of an anti-scientific approach to the world, shared by those who think they are modern and hip and sciencey.
“Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?” Syme asks Winston in 1984. “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?” open.substack.com/pub/naturalsel…
As I noted in the last footnote of the linked piece, the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed that I saw after I had finished it, which includes a link to the now forbidden content. Here are a few gems:
Using more words is always more awesomer than using fewer words. What about albino people of African descent though? Where do they fit in to the acronym? Come on, guys, do better. Be better.
Breaking news! Vitamin D protective against Covid!
Some of us have been saying this for a long time, but media & public health orgs have been silent. It's like they prioritize our fear and compliance over our ability to take control of our own health. nature.com/articles/s4159…
Vaccine mandates caused job and income loss, family break-ups, injury, death.
These are mandates for vaccines, remember, that people *now* claim were never supposed to stop transmission.
You advocated for mandates, and now you would have us move on? How dare you.
There are many who are permanently harmed—physically, financially, socially—by what you and yours wrought on society, with your uninvestigated terror and rules.
This is the failure of “data-driven” in stark relief. Next time, try a hypothesis. Do actual science.
Modern activism is often performative, rehearsed, and utterly out of touch with reality. Here, I make the bold claim that men and women are, on average, different heights. That appears to have been a bridge too far.
As absurd a performance as that is by activists, the truth is worse than the fact that they are denying reality. They are not responding to what was said. They are immune to new information. They are engaged in theatre, in what I call read-only activism. open.substack.com/pub/naturalsel…
After @JamesADamore wrote his memo, common sense unraveled at google. Some employees took time off to deal with the trauma of having read that, on average, men and women vary in some ways. How many of those employees do you suppose were men? npr.org/sections/thetw…
Which do we prefer: Allow many children to be irrevocably harmed for what was a passing phase? Or insist on delay for everyone, including those tiny few who persist in their dysphoria until they are legally considered adults?
fail to intervene early, such that a tiny # of actual trans people begin physical transition later & become a less good fit for their perceived sex; or
permanently disrupt normal development for children who were merely exploring their identity.
Which error does society prefer to make?
In the language of statistics, we can frame the decision this way: The null hypothesis is that you are not trans.