I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere if you’re going to respond with an “Oho!”

Don’t bother say “Oho! Here’s where the analogy fails!”. I already know that, thanks.

I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere

Don’t bother say “Oho! Here’s where the analogy fails!”. I already know that, thanks.

1. It’s a common misunderstanding, but humans and chimps didn’t evolve from each other. We each evolved from a common ancestor. Regardless, it seems like you wouldn’t accept anything other than something from the now, so here’s a study that agrees with the general mutation rate done by comparing parents and children in Iceland: Parental influence on human germline de novo mutations in 1,548 trios from Iceland Here’s also a paper on calculating the distribution of those mutations across deleterious/neutral/beneficial: Assessing the Evolutionary Impact of Amino Acid Mutations in the Human Genome
2. If a mutation doesn’t decrease the reproductive capacity of the carrier, then it’s not harmful. If it’s harmful, then it will affect the reproductive capacity. That’s just how it’s defined in this context.
3. I think it’s slightly sloppily phrased, but is a counter to a specific claim found in this book: https://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Creationism-Henry-M-Morris/dp/1982697091. I don’t have a copy so can’t comment further.

Some amount of that is literal psyops. Every major country is intentionally trying to cause at least some division in their geopolitical rivals. There’s also internal psyops where governments will try to fracture any movements that might cause political change. At a smaller level, there’s echo chambers built by people that are already sucked into an ideology, hoping to propagate that ideology. This recent thread that had simple biological truth downvoted to hell is an example:

https://sh.itjust.works/post/50387688/22307005

All in all it’s not new though, it’s just gotten more efficient. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism is one example of how it’s always been this way. Isaac Asimov also had a pithy quote:

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

When you have your basic needs met and aren’t starving to death, you can afford to be irrational and embrace comforting lies. It’s just the human condition.

Sorry, I can’t help you when you’re being willfully obtuse. I’ll try one last analogy, which I’ve been resisting since it can often confuse, but I really don’t know how else to get through to you. Don’t bother say “Oho! Here’s where the analogy fails!”. I already know that, thanks.

Consider a computer program in which its “sex” is determined by the first bit it outputs, either 1 or 0. You run it and the program doesn’t output anything. Oh no! What sex is it? You examine the program and find a “output_zero_bit” function that was never called. The program has no other way of writing a bit. There is no code that will output a 1, and it is impossible for the program to do so. That program would be “sexed” as a “0” because although it didn’t output a 0, it has the code to output a zero and doesn’t have the code to output a 1. If, at some point, we found programs that had no code to output anything at all, and had no concept of outputting either a zero or a one, we’d called those programs sexless. Those programs would be organized around producing nothing. But nothing like that has been found, and it’s extremely unlikely that we ever would.

Again, don’t bother responding if you’re going to say “humans aren’t 1’s and 0’s!”. Already aware, thanks. I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere if you’re going to respond with an “Oho!”, but if anyone else reading this is actually curious, that analogy may help clarify the situation.

Posted another link elsewhere that explains the ambiguous terminology a bit:

https://projectnettie.wordpress.com/

Although rare, some individuals have disorders of sex development (also referred to as intersex conditions). Most of these disorders are male or female specific and do not cause ambiguous biological sex. Some individuals have reproductive anatomies with both male and female features; here, biological sex classification is a complex process with input from medical professionals and parents. Not one of these individuals represents an additional sex class.

I think the answer you’re looking for is that ambiguous is being used in the sense of “not immediately obvious, requires further investigation”, not “impossible to know in principle”

Either way, thanks for the conversation (and pedantry!)

That treatment has been done. From the same page:

https://talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB101.html

Most mutations are neutral. Nachman and Crowell estimate around 3 deleterious mutations out of 175 per generation in humans (2000). Of those that have significant effect, most are harmful, but the fraction which are beneficial is higher than usually though. An experiment with E. coli found that about 1 in 150 newly arising mutations and 1 in 10 functional mutations are beneficial (Perfeito et al. 2007).

The harmful mutations do not survive long, and the beneficial mutations survive much longer, so when you consider only surviving mutations, most are beneficial.

Take your pick of people with relevant credentials, such as PhD Developmental Biology or PhD Developmental Genetics, that signed a statement that is exactly what I’m saying:

https://projectnettie.wordpress.com/

[…] Biological sex does not meet the defining criteria for a spectrum.

Or someone else:

https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/33/2/in-humans-sex-is-binary-and-immutable

the objective truth is that sex in humans is strictly binary and immutable, for fundamental reasons that are common knowledge to all biologists taking the findings of their discipline seriously.

Even in your best case, when you look at one of the few extremists pushing for a nonsensical redefinition of sex, they still directly admit that gamete size is binary, directly contradicting the strange claim above about a third gamete size:

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-science-of-biological-sex/

When it comes to gametes, these are strictly binary – egg or sperm

I mean c’mon, this is just silly. Crack open your textbook and read it.

No.

The medical professionals examine nearby structures to reveal what sex the body has.

You’ve illustrated my point exactly. Why are those conditions called ovarian agenesis and anorchia? Think hard about that and what that implies about the fact that, even though the gonads are missing, we can tell what they would be if present. The names literally support my point. MRKH likewise leads to missing ovaries, not testes. Why is that?

I’m sorry, what? You’ve fundamentally misread that meta analysis if you think it posits a third gamete type. Just what?

Did you misread this bit? “Whereas some of these traits do typically have a bimodal distribution (some chromosomes, gametes)”. That’s not positing a third gamete type or saying that gametes aren’t binary. A binary distribution is a subset of the set of bimodal distributions. They use the term bimodal in reference to chromosomes, and it’s technically correct when applied to gametes, but does not imply that gametes aren’t binary. The paper even acknowledges binary gametes elsewhere.

If you’re this wrong about a paper that you think supports your point, I don’t think it’s worth examining your take on other papers. Suffice it to say, for anyone else reading this, don’t take the other commenter’s word for it. The paper I linked is a good read.

Well, can you find any such example in any literature of such a completely sexless body? It doesn’t exist, but I’m interested in why you think it does

You’re trying to find a gotcha where there is none. I’m telling you that your question is incoherent.

The sex of an organism is defined as the size of the gametes it is organized around producing. That’s it. The secondary structures just tell you what that’s likely to be, because they’re correlated with it.

You’re trying to posit a “spherical cow”, a theoretical construct that doesn’t exist. A body won’t just “not have gonads”. You’re talking about magically poofing someone’s gonads out of existence. It’s the same as asking “Oh yeah, well if I was a rectangle, what sex would I be?”

I’m explaining the more reasonable and coherent case of “Assume you can’t examine the gonads of a body. How can you fairly reliably determine their sex by looking at secondary structures”? Note that it’s “fairly reliably” here because it’s entirely the gonads that define sex (pre-emptively, yes it’s gamete size, no I’m not changing the definition, but gonads are what produce gametes, stop trying to misread plain language for gotchas). If you restrict yourself from looking at gonads then you’re limiting yourself to correlates

No agenda here other than scientific accuracy. I’ll recommend you read this [peer-reviewed and written by a biologist] paper (Why There Are Exactly Two Sexes), which explains the sex binary:

Across anisogamous species, the existence of two—and only two—sexes has been a settled matter in modern biology

Here I synthesize evolutionary and developmental evidence to demonstrate that sex is binary (i.e., there are only two sexes) in all anisogamous species and that males and females are defined universally by the type of gamete they have the biological function to produce—not by karyotypes, secondary sexual characteristics, or other correlates.

The commenter you’re responding to is sadly confused. Nobody (or at least certainly not me) is saying that “a woman is someone that is born with eggs” or that “chromosomes strictly determine what these cells become”. They’re trying to misinterpret what the scientific consensus is, and I would be wary of their agenda. Reading papers like the one I linked is a much better source than the inaccuracies of the commenter you’re responding to. If reading papers isn’t your thing, here’s another quote from biologists elsewhere in the thread:

In animals and plants, binary sex is universally defined by gamete type, even though sexes vary in how they are developmentally determined and phenotypically identified across taxa.

Those are variations within a sex. Chromosomes/genes/etc aren’t how sex is defined. The paper that I link to in my sibling comment (Why There Are Exactly Two Sexes) explains why trying to use that as the definition of sex is incoherent.

The analogy to a messy room fails. I recommend you read this (and the rest of the archive, it’s great stuff):

https://talkorigins.org/indexcc/CF/CF001.html

Of note is “The Earth is not a closed system”

Realizing that the root cause is just because you want it to be true is fine, commendable even. Just don’t try to justify it post hoc with sciency-sounding arguments.

I disagree with everything you’ve said, but upvoted because you answered the question.

I encourage you to read this peer-reviewed follow-up from a biologist to that paper, which points out why it’s wrong (in the section “The Multilevel Sex Model”):

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-025-03348-3

As that paper also points out, this is not a new definition. It references that definition from 1888. Biology has always used this definition of sex, and XX/XY being involved in the definition is simply a common misunderstanding, not the latest in a long chain of anything. Trying to paint this as new or transphobia is simply wrong.

You should ask your biologist friends why people today aren’t being born with a third gamete type. I’ll be honest, that’s just a bizarre claim. Where are you sourcing that from? I’ll explain why it’s wrong if you give a link. Also, as I’ve said before, none of these claims are mine. I’m simply stating what the scientific consensus is.

The meme is incorrectly trying to say “sex is only mostly a binary”. That is flat out wrong according to scientific consensus. Again, if you don’t like that, take it up with the experts. Publish a paper pointing out why these statements from a biologist are incorrect and become rich and famous (or at least famous):

Across anisogamous species, the existence of two—and only two—sexes has been a settled matter in modern biology

Across anisogamous taxa, males and females are defined by gametic dimorphism. Proposals to redefine sex in terms of karyotypes, secondary sexual characteristics, behavior, or other correlates are incoherent and invariably presuppose this foundation, because the categories “male” and “female” are intelligible only by reference to sperm and ova.