Wokesters in Search of Nonbinary Birds Another dispatch arrives from the exciting frontiers of politicized science.James Freeman
https://www.wsj.com/articles/wokesters-in-search-of-nonbinary-birds-1d65ed47?mod=opinion_lead_pos11
The politicization of formerly respected scientific publications is one of society’s more disturbing recent trends and it seems that yet another periodical is willing to surrender its claim to authority.
Laura Helmuth, Editor in chief of Scientific American, recently tweeted:
White-throated sparrows have four chromosomally distinct sexes that pair up in fascinating ways
P.S. Nature is amazing
P.P.S. Sex is not binary
Other Twitter users were not impressed. Ms. Helmuth’s missive now carries an attachment from Twitter:
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
White-throated sparrows have 2 sexes with 4 unique chromosome combinations.
There are still just 2 sexes that produce either sperm or eggs.
The female types are the white-striped females and the tan-striped females. The male birds are white-striped males and tan striped males.
One can debate whether and how Twitter should address errors in user comments, but it’s clear that the operators of the social media platform are not the only ones raising an objection to the claim of a sparrow with four sexes.
“It’s just incredible how far [Scientific American]– a periodical I admired — has fallen from its mission to provide accurate, clear, and vivid coverage of science,” observes Yale professor of social and natural science Nicholas Christakis, who is also a physician.
Dr. Christakis points to a post on the Why Evolution Is True website maintained by Jerry Coyne, an emeritus professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago:
The tweet Helmuth put up this week… distorts biology—in particular the work of scientists who spent years studying the genetics and mating behavior of white-throated sparrows (Zonotrichia albicollis). This is an interesting bird because both males and females show two forms (this is a “polymorphism”), with one form having a tan crown stripe and the other a white crown stripe.
The forms also differ in their parental behavior and courtship…
The post reviews some of the relevant research and then sums it up:
Just two sexes, and every ornithologist knows this. Even if each morph mated only with its own kind, so that there was total reproductive isolation between the forms and they would, in effect, be two species, there would still be just two species, with each having two sexes.
Now the popular press has mistaken this system for the phenomenon of “four sexes”, which is just flat wrong. The biological definition of sex involves what kind of gamete you make, and here there are only two. Females make and lay eggs, males make sperm.
Seems fairly straightforward, so perhaps a determined band of woke bird-watchers will now set off into the wilderness searching for an animal species that is just as confused about gender as human magazine editors. But this seems unlikely, as such an approach would necessarily require empirical evidence.
In defense of Ms. Helmuth, her tendentious tweet linked to a muddled story from Audubon Society editor Kenn Kaufman, who seems to have added to the confusion by writing that it’s “almost as if the White-throated Sparrow has four sexes” and then just a few sentences later sloppily claiming:
The resulting effect is that the White-throat really does operate as a bird with four sexes.
It really doesn’t.
Perhaps this is not so much a problem in science as a problem among the people who write about science. For those inclined to give Ms. Helmuth the benefit of the doubt and assume her errors are not driven by political bias, she’s tweeting today about a new opinion piece calling for reforms at the Supreme Court that for some reason appears in her magazine called Scientific American.
Sometimes it seems like today’s science media really does operate as a species with just one point of view.
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