Richard Dawkins: Race is on a Spectrum, Sex is “Pretty Damn Binary.”

Richard Dawkins answers the "dangerous" question he asked in April 2021, the question that caused him to be disowned by the American Humanist Association. The title to his article at Areo: "Race Is a Spectrum. Sex Is Pretty Damn Binary."

Were race not a spectrum, Rachel Dolezal’s critics should have spotted that she wasn’t “really” black, simply by taking one look at her. It’s precisely because black Americans are a spectrum that it wasn’t obvious. With negligible exceptions, on the other hand, you can unwaveringly identify a person’s sex at a glance, especially if they remove their clothes. Sex is pretty damn binary.

If I chose to identify as a hippopotamus, you would rightly say I was being ridiculous. The claim is too facetiously at variance with reality. It’s marginally more ridiculous than the Church’s Aristotelian casuistry in identifying the “substance” of blood with wine and body with bread, while the “accidentals” safely remain an alcoholic beverage and a wafer. Not at all ridiculous, however, was James Morris’s choice to identify as a woman and his gruelling and costly transition to Jan Morris. Her explanation, in Conundrum, of how she always felt like a woman trapped in a man’s body is eloquent and moving. It rings agonizingly true and earns our deep sympathy. We rightly address her with feminine pronouns, and treat her as a woman in social interactions. We should do the same with others in her situation, honest and decent people who have wrestled all their lives with the distressing condition known as gender dysphoria.

Sex transition is an arduous revolution—physiological, anatomical, social, personal and familial—not to be undertaken lightly. I doubt that Jan Morris would have had much time for a man who simply flings on a frock and announces, “I am now a woman.” For Dr Morris, it was a ten-year odyssey. Prolonged hormone treatment, drastic surgery, readjustment of social conventions and personal relationships—those who take this plunge earn our deep respect for that very reason. And why is it so onerous and drastic, courageously worthy of such respect? Precisely because sex is so damn binary! Changing sex is a big deal. Changing the race by which you identify is a doddle in comparison, precisely because race is already a continuous spectrum, rendered so by widespread intermarriage over many generations.

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The Re-Emergence of Politically Correct Culture on Campus

Greg Lukianoff (President of FIRE and co-author with Jonathan Haidt of "The Coddling of the American Mind") is delivering the bad news: Politically Correct culture went underground where it gained substantial followings and it has now re-emerged, led by an army of college administrators, many of whom come from colleges of education.  His article includes a lot of doom and gloom, but also offers hope. The title to Lukianoff's article at Reason is "The Second Great Age of Political Correctness: The P.C. culture of the '80s and '90s didn't decline and fall. It just went underground. Now it's back."

Amid the Second Great Age of Political Correctness, American higher education has become too expensive, too illiberal, and too conformist. It has descended into a period of profound crisis wrought by shifts in hiring, student development, and politically charged speech codes developed during the Ignored Years, when too few were paying attention. American campuses should be bastions of free expression and academic freedom. Instead, both are in decline. We cannot afford to just give up on higher ed. College and university presidents can and should do the following five things:

1. Immediately dump all speech codes.

2. Adopt a statement specifically identifying free speech as essential to the core purpose of a university and committing the university to free speech values.

3. Defend the free speech rights of their students and faculty loudly, clearly, and early.

4. Teach free speech, the philosophy of free inquiry, and academic freedom from Day One.

5. Collect data and open their campuses to research on the climate for debate, discussion, and dissent.

Those who donate to colleges should refuse to do so without demanding these changes.

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Consciousness as the Tip of the Cognitive Iceberg

Perhaps you will enjoy this passage, but perhaps you will find it disturbing. Here is one of my favorite passages on the fact that we are not ultimately (in any meaningful way) the conscious authors of what we do. The passage is from Johnson/Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh:

Consider, for example, all that is going on below the level of conscious awareness when you are in a conversation. Here is only a small part of what you are doing, second by second:

    • Accessing memories relevant to what is being said.

    • Comprehending a stream of sound as being language, dividing it into distinctive phonetic features and segments, identifying phonemes, and grouping them into morphemes

    • Assigning a structure to the sentence in accord with the vast number of grammatical constructions in your native language

    • Picking out words and giving them meanings appropriate the context

    • Making semantic and pragmatic sense of the sentences as a whole

    • Framing what is said in terms relevant to the discussion

    • Performing inferences relevant to what is being discussed

    • Constructing mental images where relevant and inspecting them

    • Filling in gaps in the discourse

    • Noticing and interpreting your interlocutor’s body language

    • Anticipating where the conversation is going

    • Planning what to say in response

Cognitive scientists have shown experimentally that to understand even the simplest utterance, we must perform these and other incredibly complex forms of thought automatically and without noticeable effort below the level of consciousness. It is not merely that we occasionally do not notice these processes; rather; they are inaccessible to conscious awareness and control.

The above passage should severely reduce our confidence in introspection as a tool for what is going inside of us, as part of "cognition." And, in fact, the work of Johnson and Lakoff requires us to expand the geography of "cognition" to include far more than the brain.  It needs to include the entire human body:

As is the practice in cognitive science, we will use the term cognitive in the richest possible sense to describe any mental operations and structures that are involved in language, meaning, perception, conceptual systems, and reason. Because our conceptual systems and our reason arise from our bodies, we will also use the term cognitive for aspects of our sensory-motor system that contribute to our abilities to conceptualize and to reason, Since cognitive operations are largely unconscious, the term cognitive unconscious accurately describes all unconscious mental operations concerned with conceptual systems, meaning, inference, and language.

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About the COVID “Trusted News Network”

I'm still in the process of watching Joe Rogan's fascinating interview of Dr. Robert Malone.

Why might we want to listen to Malone (even though his Twitter account of 500,000 followers was suspended by Twitter two days ago)? Consider this brief description of his accomplishments:

Dr. Robert Malone is the inventor of the nine original mRNA vaccine patents, which were originally filed in 1989 (including both the idea of mRNA vaccines and the original proof of principle experiments) and RNA transfection. Dr. Malone, has close to 100 peer-reviewed publications which have been cited over 12,000 times. Since January 2020, Dr. Malone has been leading a large team focused on clinical research design, drug development, computer modeling and mechanisms of action of repurposed drugs for the treatment of COVID-19. Dr. Malone is the Medical Director of The Unity Project, a group of 300 organizations across the US standing against mandated COVID vaccines for children. He is also the President of the Global Covid Summit, an organization of over 16,000 doctors and scientists committed to speaking truth to power about COVID pandemic research and treatment.

Malone's interview is leaving me with the concern about who in the hell I can trust about anything at all related to COVID. I would recommend it to anyone who is thinking that the mainstreams news messaging about COVID is too pretty, too consistent, too sterilized.

Which brings me to a related point. Malone mentions and describes the "Trusted News Network," a truth commission of sorts established by many large media players. I'm merely beginning my education of the function of that Network, but wanted to share this link as I move forward.  It is from an article by Elizabeth Woodworth titled "COVID-19 and the Shadowy “Trusted News Initiative”" that begins with this paragraph:

What do the inventor of mRNA technology; the lead author of the most downloaded paper on Covid-19 in the American Journal of Medicine; a former editor of the American Journal of Epidemiology; renowned epidemiologists at Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford; and France’s leading microbiologist – have in common?They have all been censored by a repressive media network that most people have never heard of. This network has outrageously conceived and conveyed a “monopoly of legitimate information.”

Here are a few excerpts:

Two weeks after WHO announced the Covid-19 pandemic on March 11, 2020, Canada’s CBC reported that the Trusted News Initiative had announced plans “to tackle harmful coronavirus disinformation.”

“Starting today, partners in the Trusted News Initiative will alert each other to disinformation about coronavirus, including ‘imposter content’ purporting to come from trusted sources. Such content will be reviewed promptly to ensure that disinformation is not republished.” [xiii]

Woodworth further reports:

An international process of editorial standardization has delivered unprecedented news coverage of the monopolized message:

The pandemic threatens the survival of all humanity

There is no therapy to cure the sick

It is necessary to confine the whole population, and

The delivery will come only from a vaccine.[iii]

Many people have been dismayed by the singularity of this propaganda, and how it could possibly have been achieved. That is the subject of this study.

Fascinating and disturbing.  Agreeing as a group to report any version of "truth" inevitably conflicts with what should be the job of a serious journalist:  To follow the facts wherever they lead.  The proper way to do journalism inevitably leads to different interpretations and even different relevant facts.  Journalism should lead to an ever-churning cacophony that will continually be processed in the marketplace of ideas. The Trusted Network appears to be a "truth-cartel" aimed at justifying pre-determined conclusions, which is exactly what is bearing out when one follows the censorship of news providers and social media.

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