Steve Stewart-Williams explains his aversion to the term “Gender.”

Steve Stewart-Williams explains "Why I'm not a Fan of Gender." Excerpt from his upcoming bok, "A Billion Years of Sex Differences":

Many social scientists draw a distinction between sex and gender where, roughly speaking, sex refers to biological aspects of female and male, and gender refers to social aspects. ... I’m not a fan of the concept of gender, which I think confuses more than it enlightens.

There are several reasons for this. The first is that the term has multiple meanings. Sometimes gender refers to female–male differences that are (supposedly) shaped by nurture rather than nature; sometimes it refers to masculinity and femininity; sometimes it refers to psychological profiles that are more common in one sex than the other; sometimes it refers to widely held stereotypes of the sexes; sometimes it refers to the roles that society provides for females and males; sometimes it refers to people’s gender identity (their sense of themselves as a boy or a girl or a man or a woman); and sometimes it’s just a polite synonym for sex: a term that makes it clear that you’re talking about biological sex rather than the fun kind of sex. The profusion of partially overlapping meanings makes it difficult to know what people using the term are actually talking about. It’s like trying to juggle jelly.

A second reason I prefer not to partake of gender is that, even if we could agree on a definition, most of those on offer are profoundly flawed. Take, for example, the idea that gender refers to female–male differences due to nurture rather than nature. An initial problem is that this is invariably assumed rather than demonstrated; indeed, describing a female–male difference as a gender difference often seems to be a way to settle the nature–nurture issue by definitional stipulation rather than arguments and evidence. . . .

Other definitions of gender face similar problems. Consider, for example, the idea that gender refers to psychological profiles loosely linked to sex: Men tend to be stoic and assertive, for instance, whereas women tend to be caring and emotional. This definition is assumed by people who argue that there are multiple distinct genders, rather than just the two vanilla options of man and woman. Again, this doesn’t strike me as a useful way to construe things. The problem is that it involves imposing categories – even if more than just two – on what is actually continuous psychological variation. No two human beings have exactly the same psychological profiles, so the logical endpoint of this approach is that there are as many genders as there are human beings – and we’re really just talking about personality.

I've subscribed to Steve's excellent Substack for the past year and highly recommend it.

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Jordan Peterson and Glenn Greenwald Discuss Censorship and Meaning

a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3h7pmhyIwg">

I've listened to this podcast several times. It's long, but it is extremely thoughtful, engaging, disturbing, but also hopeful and celebratory of the human spirit. It involves Jordan Peterson and Glenn Greenwald. These are two of my most cherished thinkers. I am inspired and provoked by many of the topics that they explore here. Topics include censorship, propaganda, the history of these things in the United States. Also, the relationship between religion and politics, and what goes wrong when religion is absorbed into politics. And there's even some meaning of life moments. I took the time to transcribe a large chunk of this discussion, and I am sharing it with the hope that those of you who listen to it or read it will also find it worthwhile.

I asked Grok to crank out a basic table of contents to this interview:

Min 21:30

1. Censorship of RFK Jr. by Google and the tactic of starting with hated figures like Alex Jones

2. Expansion of censorship to mainstream voices, including Devin Nunes and Rand Paul

3. Reasons for increasing censorship: Generational shifts in values among Millennials and Gen Z, and the impact of Trump's election

4. Depiction of Trump as an existential evil justifying extreme measures, including the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and Sam Harris's views

5. Connection to post-9/11 clampdown on civil liberties, transformation of airports into authoritarian spaces

Min 27:35

6. Reflections on 9/11 trauma, the war on terror, and how airport security conditioned obedience to authority

7. Threats to liberty from fear rather than greed; free speech as equivalent to free thought and essential for adaptation

8. George Orwell on tyranny through mind control; the internet's shift from liberation to control, Snowden revelations

9. Biblical phrase "render unto Caesar"; collapse of religious domain into politics leading to unsophisticated good vs. evil wars

10. Personal background on religion; hubris in censorship; human need for spirituality, politics as a substitute for religion

11. Discussions with Douglas Murray on humanism needing a religious framework; Carl Jung on rationality bounded by the dream

12. Grappling with ethics and morality without religion; necessity of spirituality to avoid nihilism

13. Response to materialist atheists; human relationship with the larger whole; introduction to the story of Abraham

These excerpts start at Minute 21:30 of the above video. Glenn Greenwald 20% of Democratic Party voters say they intend to vote for RFK, Jr. for president. And the most powerful corporations, or one of the richest and most powerful corporations ever to exist, Google sweeps in and says, This is something that you are not permitted to be heard. Glenn Greenwald And what happened was, what always is the tactic of sensors is they always pick a test case in the beginning that they believe is someone who is sufficiently hated or disliked so that everybody will acquiesce to the precedent, simply because their emotions for that person are so high. So the first person to really be deplatformed in this collusive effort by Silicon Valley was Alex Jones. And Peter Thiel was on the board of Facebook at the time. Mark Andreessen in Silicon Valley, and a few other people stood up at the time and said, no matter how much you hate Alex Jones, this precedent is going to work its way slowly, or maybe not even so slowly, to expand into the kinds of voices that you probably think shouldn't be censored. And by the point that you cheer the precedent in the first instance, because you allow your emotional dislike for this person to outweigh your rational capacities, it will be too late the precedent is already implemented, and then you're left to just bicker about its application, rather than the principle itself. Glenn Greenwald And that's precisely what has happened. They began quickly censoring mainstream conservative voices. Devin Nunes went to rumble in part to escape from Google censorship, and then a huge stream of people did as well. One of the most shocking things that happened along those lines, Rand Paul questioned a couple of epidemiologists, scientists who were testifying before the US Senate about the possible efficacy of ivermectin and other alternative medication for covid. It was a Senate hearing, a hearing in the United States Senate. Rand Paul put it on his YouTube channel as a excerpt of this hearing, and Google decided that was something that ought not to be heard as well.

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Research

RFK, Jr: "My father told me when I was a little boy that people in authority lie and the job in a democracy is to remain skeptical. I've been science based since I was a kid. Show me the evidence and I'll believe you, but I'm not going to take the word of official narratives. The way you do research is not by asking authoritative figures what they think. Trusting experts is not a feature of science, and it's not a feature of democracy. It's a feature of religion and totalitarianism."

https://x.com/RealJessica/status/1998964655620804897

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How Much ATP Does a Human Body Produce Every Day?

Today I learned that the human body makes its weight in ATP (a key component of the Krebs cycle") every day. When I read this I wondered if it could possibly be true. Here's what Grok had to say:

My Query to Grok: Is it true that we make our body weight worth of ATP every day?

Yes, it's true. The human body turns over (produces and consumes) an amount of ATP roughly equivalent to its own body weight each day, though the exact figure varies by activity level and individual.

At any given moment, the body contains only about 250 grams of ATP (plus some ADP). However, ATP is rapidly recycled: it's hydrolyzed to ADP + phosphate to release energy, then resynthesized using energy from food. This cycle happens thousands of times per day per molecule.

Reliable sources estimate daily ATP turnover as:

    • 50–75 kg for an average adult (often cited as ~100–150 moles of ATP hydrolyzed and regenerated daily).

    • Around 50 kg in sources like Wikipedia.

    • ~60 kg in BioNumbers database.

    • Up to 100 kg or more during high activity in some physiology texts.

For a typical 70 kg person, this is approximately one body weight's worth per day at rest or moderate activity. During intense exercise, the rate can increase dramatically (e.g., up to 0.5–1 kg per minute). The key point is the enormous flux: even though net ATP storage is tiny—your cells are constantly churning through it to power everything from muscle contraction to brain function.

This fact is widely accepted in biochemistry and physiology textbooks and is often used to illustrate how dynamic cellular energy metabolism is.

Tutorial on the Krebs Cycle (Also from Grok):

The Krebs cycle, also known as the citric acid cycle or tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle, is a central metabolic pathway in cellular respiration that occurs within the mitochondria of eukaryotic cells, efficiently converting nutrients from carbohydrates, fats, and proteins into usable energy. It begins when acetyl-CoA—derived primarily from the breakdown of glucose via glycolysis—combines with oxaloacetate to form citrate, initiating a series of eight enzymatic reactions that systematically oxidize the molecule, releasing carbon dioxide as a byproduct (which we exhale) and generating high-energy electron carriers like NADH and FADH2, along with a small amount of ATP directly through substrate-level phosphorylation. These electron carriers then feed into the electron transport chain to produce the bulk of the cell's ATP via oxidative phosphorylation, yielding up to 38 ATP molecules per glucose molecule overall. The cycle is highly efficient, regenerating oxaloacetate to allow continuous operation, and it's tightly regulated by factors like ATP levels and enzyme inhibitors to match the cell's energy demands, playing a crucial role not only in energy production but also in providing intermediates for biosynthesis of amino acids, nucleotides, and other essential compounds.
 

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What the Social Engineers Miss About Multiculturalism

Jowan Mahmod discusses the paradox of multi-culturalism in his article: "The Multiculturalism Paradox: How identity-affirming policies fuel the competitive group dynamics that weaken national cohesion."

[T]he core creed of multiculturalism: noble intentions and moral rhetoric paired with total disregard for real-world outcome . . . . Multiculturalism promotes the celebration of difference on the assumption that strengthening one’s group identity naturally produces greater openness toward, and acceptance of, others. Few ideas have been more widely embraced—and more poorly understood—than this. . . Ultimately, tolerance does not grow out of abstract ideals. It grows from loosening the grip of collective identity and seeing others not as representatives of a category but as individuals. Societies must ensure that people of all backgrounds can develop a strong sense of personal identity. This is not merely desirable but essential for any nation that hopes to remain both diverse and cohesive. Prejudice is rooted in group belonging and in the basic psychology of us-and-them. When institutions encourage people to define themselves primarily through group identity, they inevitably reinforce the very us-and-them thinking that fuels prejudice and division.

A functioning multicultural society is not one that obsessively manages groups and their identities, but one that enables individuals to move beyond them and form connections based on shared human and civic values. Only then can we approach the kind of multicultural society we claim to aspire to, and that can be achieved only by loosening, not tightening, the hold of group identity.

Mahmod's full article can be found here.

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