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[–] 185 points 11 months ago (11 children)

When Newton worked out the laws of motion, he figured they had to be correct because they were so simple and elegant.

He had no idea that relativity was going to come in and fuck his shit up.

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  • [–] 78 points 11 months ago (3 children)
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    [–] 121 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    A genderino sounds more like something you'd find in particle physics than biology anyway

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  • [–] 16 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Physicists are freaky, like who was out there going and asking quarks what is their power dynamic in sex?

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    [–] 120 points 11 months ago (18 children)

    though the meme is cool, gender isn't particularly a biology (or 'advance biology') thing. biology deals with sexes, their expressions and functionalities. gender is more of a personal and social concept but often related to sex characteristics (cis).

    and yes, advanced biology tells sex determination isn't as easy as XX or XY or even looking at genitals like a creep.

    and oh, for giggles consider fungi :)

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  • [–] 77 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Adding to this: XX and XY works for mammals, but not for other vertebrates (fish, birds, reptiles, amphibians). Birds and reptiles have Z and W chromosomes, and unlike in mammals where females are homozygotes, males in these groups are homozygotes. Some reptiles have temperature dependent sex determination, where ambient temperature above some value will produce males or females (depends on species). Some reptiles are composed entirely of females.

    Some fish will straight up change sexes depending on age and male-female ratio in a social group.

    In other groups it's not even different chromosomes but simply copy number of specific genes.

    Plants can do all sorts of whacky things like produce seeds and pollen in the same individual.

    Fungi are an entirely different cluster fuck because they have mating types which are not simple binaries.

    Eukaryotic sex determination isn't a binary and it isn't even a nicely categorizable spectrum. It's a grab-bag of whatever doesn't perma-fuck your genome.

    Source: me, I'm a biologist. Though admittedly I work on animals so my understanding of fungi and plant stuff is fuzzy at best.

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    [–] 119 points 11 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 103 points 11 months ago (12 children)

    i think that if more people were exposed to advanced math there would be a reactionary trend of people going around and asking mathematicians “what is a number?”

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    [–] 97 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    I'm a career physicist, and I honestly have no idea what a state of matter is anymore.

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    [–] 65 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Honestly, people would probably object more to advanced math than advanced biology if they were exposed as much to it. Or basic math. Or elementary math...

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  • [+] [S] 52 points 11 months ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)
  • [–] 36 points 11 months ago

    If certain people could almost understand they would be very upset

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  • [–] 29 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

    So true and it's a great to remind them of that sort of thing.

    You know, you'd think all of the people who say it's purely down to genetics would be natural allies with, you know, molecular biologists (applied genetics). They'd be all like "it's a Y chromosome or nothing" and the biologists would be all like "yeah chromosomes!" because we fucking love chromosomes but no. In fact, it's noticeably absent when you start to think about it.

    I wonder why that might be?

    The short answer is "because it's infinitely more complicated than that."

    Just because you carry the genetic code for anything at all, it doesn't mean you'll express it. The default setting for our DNA is off. So, if something isn't telling it to transcribe, it won't do it. A whole load of reasons could cause that, even before we get to mutations and partial expression or chimeras etc.

    Anyway, what i mean is yeah, this meme!

    Edit: also, don't beleive the AI. Early fetuses are female, until the Y is activated. You could have an inactivated Y and the fetus could be a woman capable of having children. The default setting is female, not intersex. It could be either but unless a specific event happens, it will always be female. It's a subtle but important difference. This means that all fetuses are female and then turn into a male.

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  • [–] 20 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Bigot: "trans people aren't natrual according to science!!"

    Scientist: "we've learned that trans people are natrual and this has helped us broaden our understanding of gender and human psychology"

    Bigot: "stfu!! >:c

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    [–] 14 points 11 months ago (14 children)

    Do the two tails left of M and right of F mean there are males more male than cis males, and similarly with females?

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  • [–] 22 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (8 children)

    The peaks do not designate "cis", you can be cis and fall anywhere on the chart - being cis is about the sex you were arbitrarily assigned at birth (and whether that assignment aligns or conflicts with your actual gender identity).

    And when doctors change assignments, it's really unclear whether you're cis or not if you transition - e.g. a baby assigned female at birth who is then weeks later assigned male at birth later transitions to be a girl, she was originally assigned female at birth - is she trans or cis?

    Instead the peaks represent the most common combination of male and female sex traits in humans, with the slopes representing less common combinations of traits, e.g. to the left of the male peak might be men who experience excessive androgenization like lots of body hair, maybe precocious puberty, early balding, and so on (more male traits than average).

    This chart as a model of sex actually doesn't make much sense, since sex has been redefined in light of how complex sex is and the differences in sexual development that occur.

    Where on the chart would we put someone with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS)? With CAIS a person is born with XY chromosomes and thus has a typical male karyotype, but their androgen receptors do not respond to androgens, so none of the masculinization is able to occur - leading the person to look, develop, and usually live as a woman.

    The chart implies a spectrum, when the reality of biological sex is much more complex than a simple spectrum would allow - more like a constellation. Each sex differentiated trait is an axis / spectrum of its own, and there are thousands of ways differentiation can happen.

    EDIT: oh, and to answer your question, it sounds like your question is really whether the peaks on a bimodal distribution represent a smaller number than the tails in aggregate, and the answer is that it depends on how you select your aggregates and how much of the peak you lump together. I think the entire point of the bimodal distribution, though, is to show that the majority fall on the peaks while the tails represent a minority.

    That said, a MRI study found that when examining brain sex, >90% of people (mostly cis) were not able to be classed as having fully male or female brains, so realistically I think it's fair to say most people are sexually divergent in some way.

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  • [–] 18 points 11 months ago

    Well, clearly. If you define a male characteristic as something that's more common in men than in women and vice-versa, then e.g. being tall would be a "male characteristic".

    Height isn't a binary thing with men being exactly Xcm tall and women exactly Ycm, so there's people who have more of said male characteristic and people who have less. And you also have women who have more of this characteristic and some men (e.g. there are some women that are taller than some men).

    The same can be done for every characteristic that's associated with a gender. Genitals are on a spectrum (large clitoris vs micropenis), fat distribution is on a spectrum (e.g. there are men with breasts and women without), body hair is on a spectrum, hormone distribution is on a spectrum and so on and so on.

    If you take a lot of characteristics at once it becomes clear in most cases whether the person you are dealing with is a man or a woman (though there are some where that's more difficult or impossible), but if you take just a single characteristic (e.g. height) it's impossible to say whether the person you are dealing with is definitively a man or a woman.

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    [–] 10 points 11 months ago (8 children)

    Sqrt(-1) is still wrong tho. I'm commuting a sin by writting it. Correct expression is i^2=-1

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