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Heather E Heying Profile picture
Heather E Heying
@HeatherEHeying
Evolutionary biologist. Seeker & communicator of truths (DarkHorse podcast, Natural Selections on Substack). Spends time in the Amazon. Rhymes w flying.
32 subscribers
Jun 3 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Being assigned male or female at birth does not make you that thing.

Sex exists outside of human understanding of it. And sometimes, rarely, we are wrong. 🧵

telegraph.co.uk/boxing/2025/05… You are already, from the moment of conception, male or female. Normal development produces a baby that is easily recognizable as one sex or the other.
Nov 5, 2024 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
Smart women are voting for Trump.

Many have explained why: 🧵 x.com/joomikim1/stat… x.com/joomikim1/stat…
Feb 9, 2023 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
.@thedarkhorsepod declared a spreader of misinformation.

Nope. We engage topics scientifically, are skeptical in the face of certainty, & speak truth even when it’s inconvenient for those in power.

The @nytimes of old would have applauded such behavior.
nytimes.com/2023/02/09/tec… @thedarkhorsepod @nytimes A reminder: fact-checkers aren’t scientists, and many of the “facts” claimed to be false by these petty tyrants have long since checked out as true.
open.substack.com/pub/naturalsel…
Dec 20, 2022 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
“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:
Nov 21, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
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… Here’s my Substack, from October 26, 2021
Oct 31, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
“The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat.”

Being recognized for having gotten it right is not gloating, @ProfEmilyOster.

And those who got it so terribly wrong? You need to apologize, and work hard to right what you and yours inflicted on people. 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.
Oct 21, 2022 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
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…
Oct 2, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
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?

Vox gets it very, very wrong.
vox.com/policy-and-pol… Compare the risks side by side:

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.
Mar 12, 2022 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
When medical interventions result in long-term harm to the individuals who are on the receiving end, those harmed deserve help, compassion, and a voice. [thread 1/12] March 12 is #DetransAwarenessDay: a day to recognize those harmed by the increasingly common hormonal and surgical “treatments” that facilitate a person passing as the opposite sex that they are. 2/
zoom.us/webinar/regist…
Sep 13, 2021 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Coming tomorrow: A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century.

“We must seek the next frontier: the event horizon, beyond which we cannot see, from which we cannot return, but through which may be our salvation.”
huntergatherersguide.com This book is big and broad and no conversation will tackle all of it. Here are just two that @BretWeinstein and I have had so far, which are now available:

The Joe Rogan Experience
open.spotify.com/episode/2PFQRs…
Aug 2, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Join me in my new endeavor, Natural Selections, a weekly newsletter about things evolutionary. All the writing is free. Join now to get the next post (Hospitals Should Let the Outside In) direct to your inbox tomorrow morning. Link to follow. About Natural Selections:
naturalselections.substack.com/about
Jul 29, 2021 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
Announcing Natural Selections – my brand new newsletter, hosted by Substack.

If it evolved, it’s fair game.
[thread – 1/11] Join me here for my very first post: Fact Checkers Aren’t Scientists – Too Often, They’re Censors. 2/
naturalselections.substack.com
Jun 13, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Respectfully, Secretary Reich, you have drunk the Kool-Aid.

Not that it should matter, but I’m a liberal. And, for 15 years, I was a college professor, an educator. I saw first-hand the damage that Critical Race Theory wrought. At its founding, CRT was indeed interested in “the role that race has played in American politics, policy, and law.” Now, though? It’s a weaponized bludgeon used to move power from one place to another, without doing anything to change the underlying dynamics that got us here.
Apr 24, 2021 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
Dude, please. “GOP supporters believe that rampaging mobs burned and looted major cities”?

I’ve never voted GOP (not that it should matter), and I know—not believe, *know*—that a tiny but rampaging mob continues to do damage in Portland on the regular. [thread 1/11] Saturday, April 17, downtown PDX. The night before, yahoos set a dumpster & the bathrooms on fire outside the Apple store. Awning is gone, tree is charred.

Burned to the ground? No.
Insane to accommodate this kind of behavior? Yes.
Insane to deny it is happening? Also yes. 2/
Apr 13, 2021 • 26 tweets • 6 min read
Ignorance, arrogance, and the wielding of credentials to shut down discourse: a triple threat.

When these three characteristics show up in one place, I feel a responsibility to at least slow the spread of misinformation. Here we go. [thread 1/26] We are all ignorant of some things. Ignorance should be forgiven. 2/
Apr 2, 2021 • 14 tweets • 14 min read
@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/
Mar 18, 2021 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
The mainstream narrative on the search for SARS-Cov2 origins reads like the dystopian endgame of a postmodern world. It’s anti-scientific, anti-reason, and anti-human. Humanity can do better, and we must. [thread 1/12]
wsj.com/articles/who-c… The WHO’s verdict on SARS-CoV2 origins was arrived at by a show of hands, an informal vote in which how individuals voted was visible to all.

Guess what, though. Reality doesn’t care about democratic norms. Reality is what it is, regardless of what people think about it. 2/
Feb 21, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I had a conversation with Meghan Murphy on science, and SARS-CoV2, and feminism, and sex and gender, and more. Meghan Murphy was booted from twitter for the 21st century crime of stating the obvious. She’s still on YouTube, which is good for all of us.
I made two errors of (biological) fact in this conversation. I’m not going to say here what they are. If you watch and you think you spot them, let me know!
Feb 16, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
On top of the global pandemic, Portland, Oregon had months of protests & riots; 10 days of wildfires that gave us the planet’s worst air quality; and now this: snow and ice storms that wiped out power *and* cell service for a huge number of us. (Portland is under all the red.) Earlier, I was out walking the dog in the deep icy slush as an explosive melt kicked in: The sun broke through, and days of accumulated ice loosened, breaking off trees, shattering on the ground like porcelain , crystalline ice casting shard-shadows.
Feb 4, 2021 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
Attacks on women in sports are showing up at the federal level.

These erasures are discriminatory, harmful, and unscientific. Here’s why ⬇️ FACT ONE: Trans girls are natal boys.

MYTH: Sex is not binary.
Gametes reveal our sex. Going through development as a male permanently changes your body, and provides advantages in strength, speed, and power.
Variation within categories does not render the categories invalid.
Jan 31, 2021 • 30 tweets • 8 min read
You all ready? Here we go.

Science doesn’t work by fiat, or by forced, fabricated consensus.

That consensus that you see before you? It’s a mirage. It’s a farce.

Science embraces all hypotheses, and says: let me at ‘em. [thread 1/30]
Science does not require a lab coat, or fancy tech, or a big grant. Having a credential and using an authoritarian tone are *useful* for tamping down dissent, but “useful” and “truth-seeking” aren’t always the same, are they now? 2/