#biological science

[importantwomensbirthdays]

Anita Roberts

Molecular biologist Anita Roberts was born in 1942 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Roberts' research focused on TGF-Beta, which plays an important role in both cancer and wound healing, and her work has helped form the basis for new breast cancer treatment approaches. She was among the top 50 most cited biological scientists in the world, and one of the first women to become a laboratory chief at the National Institutes of Health.

Anita Roberts died in 2006 at the age of 64.

Image: Bill Branson, National Cancer Institute

#science #scientists #stem #women in stem #biology #molecular biology #biological science

[er-cryptid]

Patreon

#studyblr #notes #my notes #biochemistry #biochem #bio chem #chemistry #organic chemistry #biological chemistry #molecular biology #bio #biology #biological science #biological sciences #biochemistry notes #study guide #biochemistry study guide #biochem study guide #biochemistry flashcards #metabolism #catabolism #anabolism #molecules #organic chemicals #mcat #mcat biochem #mcat biochemistry #mcat study guide

[science-for-the-masses]

#science #science communication #scicomm #stem #science education #science blog #biology #Biological science

[brhidge]

I made this compass to describe discrimination received from medical people to their patients. Note how the further the condition is in one direction, the more problematic I think it is. Also, this is my opinion and I take constructive criticism <3

#studyblr #biology #bio #human biology #human bio #anatomical structures #medblr #human anatomical structures #anatomy and physiology #biological science #196 #r/196

[lgcyab]

My Pronouns Are...

In the picturesque town of Harmonyville, nestled between rolling hills and lush greenery, lived a community that epitomized the idyllic charm of small-town life. Harmonyville, with its cobblestone streets and charming cottages adorned with vibrant flower gardens, was a place where everyone knew each other by name. The town’s population of around 5,000 people was a close-knit community that valued…

View On WordPress

#BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE #Christian #christian purpose #DECEPTION #DELUSIONS #fiction #LIBERALISM #MENTAL DISORDERS #MY PRONOUNS #PRONOUNS

[she-is-ovarit]

By "vagina owner" and "uterus haver", by "*pregnant person not pregnant woman", by "sex work is work", and by retaining the mentality that what is social is superior to and transcends what is biological, you are reducing biology and especially female biology down to a material, exploitable natural resource.

#and as both a woman and someone with a background in the biological sciences - ew #gender ideology #LGBTQ #queer #feminism #global feminism #anti-capitalism #biology

[atomic-chronoscaph]

The Biological Revolt - art by Frank R. Paul (1953)

#frank r. paul #50s sci-fi art #pulp art #science fiction plus magazine #preview of the future #the biological revolt #1950s #1953

[nochd]

This came across my dash via the #lgbt tag yesterday. I don't want to engage with the OP because that would get me into fights on radfem tumblr and I don't have the energy for that. But the post itself I think is worth answering, just because it's so neatly and exactly wrong.

(Not that my answer is going to spread very far, because I have 37 non-bot followers, of whom I think roughly 35.5 are just here for the nude photos. But anyway.)

Even if I agree just for argument's sake that the existence of intersex people proves that some people can have "nonbinary" sexes, or "third" sexes, and that "sex is a spectrum," how does that have any relevance to people who are not intersex? Like okay, let's "agree" for the moment that intersex people are something other than male or female. How does that make YOU, as a person who is not intersex, something other than male or female? Saying that intersex people's existence somehow makes sex "complicated" for you specifically is like saying that the issue of whether or not you can hear is "complicated" because some other people who are not you suffer from hearing loss or deafness. Like sorry but for 99% of the human population it is not "more complicated" than born with perfectly normal male genitalia = male and born with perfectly normal female genitalia = female, and chances are you fall into that 99%. Sex is not a social construct or a nebulous enigma of a concept. It is not debatable and made up in the manner that gender is. You cannot philosophize about whether there are two sexes any more than you can philosophize about whether humans have two kidneys. Someone having a missing or malformed kidney or accessory kidneys does not change the fact that humans as a species have two kidneys. Humans are gonochoric just like nearly all other animal species on Earth.

Let's start with the arithmetic. If 99% people are of binary sex, that leaves 1% of people who aren't. There are approximately 8 billion humans on Earth. 1% of 8 billion is 80 million -- about sixteen times the population of my entire country. Even just the number of intersex Americans is something like two-thirds the population of my country. This is not a negligible number of people.

There's a deeper error here, one that goes to the root not just of this misunderstanding but of many. Biology is always complicated, at every scale and at every level of explanation. It's messy, it's fuzzy, and it's always bottom-up, never top-down. Everything biological is the way it is because it grew that way. Biology never does the same thing twice.

Why does it seem like it does? Because, of all the ways you can arrange the parts of a living body, only an astonishingly tiny fraction of them actually make a living body. Any genetic mutation that nudges an organism outside of that fraction dies out and doesn't get passed on. Embryonic development is a gruelling tight-rope walk over a vast pit of non-existence.

Now for most of the body's systems, evolution has only had to produce one arrangement that works and survives. There's not an alternative plumbing plan where the oesophagus goes to the lungs and the trachea to the stomach. But for the reproductive system, evolution has to allow for two arrangements that work and survive, and it has to grow them both from the same starter kit.

What it does, therefore, is grow a body plan that works with a continuum of possible arrangements that includes both of those two. Various other points on the continuum may or may not be capable of producing viable gametes, but they're all survivable.

What biology doesn't do -- what biology never ever does -- is run new products on a conveyor belt stamping them into shape with cookie-cutters. The only things made that way are artificial constructs.

#science #biology #sex determination #evolution #embryology #lgbt #intersex #transgender #nonbinary #essentialism #biological essentialism #essentialism is not biological #biology is not friendly to transphobes

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Colin Wright

Published: Oct 2, 2023

On September 25, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) announced that they were cancelling a panel discussion titled “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why Biological Sex Remains a Necessary Analytic Category in Anthropology,” originally scheduled as part of their annual conference in Toronto from November 15–19. The cancellation and subsequent response by the two organizations shows the extent to which gender ideology has captured academic anthropology.

The panel would have featured six female scientists, specializing in biology and anthropology, to address their profession’s growing denial of biological sex as a valid and relevant category. While terminological confusion surrounding the distinction between sex and gender roles has been a persistent issue within anthropology for decades, the total refusal of some to recognize sex as a real biological variable is a more recent phenomenon. The panel organizers, eager to facilitate an open discussion among anthropologists and entertain diverse perspectives on a contentious issue, considered the AAA/CASCA conference an optimal venue to host such a conversation.

The organizations accepted the “Let’s Talk About Sex” panel without incident on July 13, and planned to feature it alongside other panels including those on politically oriented subjects, such as “Trans Latinx Methodologies,” “Exploring Activist Anthropology,” and “Reimagining Anthropology as Restorative Justice.” Elizabeth Weiss, a professor of anthropology at San José State University, was one of the slated panelists. She had intended to discuss the significance in bio-archaeology and forensic anthropology of using skeletal remains to establish a decedent’s sex. While a 2018 article in Discover titled “Skeletal Studies Show Sex, Like Gender, Exists Along a Spectrum” reached different conclusions, Weiss planned to discuss how scientific breakthroughs have made determining the sex of skeletal remains a more exact science. Her presentation was to be moderate; she titled it “No Bones About It: Skeletons Are Binary; People May Not Be,” and conceded in her abstract the growing need in forensics to “to ensure that skeletal finds are identified by both biological sex and their gender identity” due to “the current rise in transitioning individuals and their overrepresentation as crime victims.”

Despite having already approved the panel, the presidents of the AAA (Ramona Pérez) and CASCA (Monica Heller) unexpectedly issued a joint letter on September 25 notifying the “Let’s Talk About Sex” presenters that their panel was cancelled. They claimed that the panel’s subject matter conflicted with their organizations’ values, jeopardized “the safety and dignity of our members,” and eroded the program’s “scientific integrity.” They further asserted the panel’s ideas (i.e., that sex is a real and important biological variable) would “cause harm to members represented by the Trans and LGBTQI of the anthropological community as well as the community at large.” To ensure that similar discussions would not be approved in the future, the AAA/CASCA vowed to “undertake a major review of the processes associated with vetting sessions at our annual meetings.”

The following day, the panelists issued a response letter, expressing their disappointment that the AAA and CASCA presidents had “chosen to forbid scholarly dialogue” on the topic. They rejected the “false accusation” that supporting the “continued use of biological sex categories (e.g., male and female; man and woman) is to imperil the safety of the LGBTQI community.” The panelists called “particularly egregious” the AAA/CASCA’s assertion that the panel would compromise the program’s “scientific integrity.” They noted that, ironically, the AAA/CASCA’s “decision to anathematize our panel looks very much like an anti-science response to a politicized lobbying campaign.”

I spoke with Weiss, who expressed her frustration over the canceled panel and the two presidents’ stifling of honest discussion about sex. She was concerned about the continual shifting of goalposts on the issue:

We used to say there’s sex, and gender. Sex is biological, and gender is not. Then it’s no, you can no longer talk about sex. Sex and gender are one, and separating the two makes you a transphobe, when of course it doesn’t. In anthropology and many topics, the goalposts are continuously moved. And, because of that, we need to stand up and say, “I’m not moving from my place unless there’s good scientific evidence that my place is wrong.” And I don’t think there is good scientific evidence that there are more than two sexes.

Weiss was not the only person to object. When I broke news of the cancellation on X, it immediately went viral. At the time of writing, my post has more than 2.4 million views, and the episode has ignited public outcry from individuals and academics across the political spectrum. Science writer Michael Shermer called the AAA and CASCA’s presidents’ letter “shameful” and an “utterly absurd blank slate denial of human nature.” Timur Kuran, a professor of economics and political science at Duke University, described it as “absolutely appalling.” Jeffrey Flier, the Harvard University distinguished service professor and former dean of the Harvard Medical School, viewed it as “a chilling declaration of war on scholarly controversy.” Even Elon Musk expressed his disbelief with a single word: “Wow.”

Despite the backlash, the AAA and CASCA have held firm. On September 28, the AAA posted a statement on its website titled “No Place For Transphobia in Anthropology: Session Pulled from Annual Meeting Program.” The statement reiterated the stance outlined in the initial letter, declaring the “Let’s Talk About Sex” panel an affront to its values and claiming that it endangered AAA members’ safety and lacked scientific rigor.

The AAA’s statement claimed that the now-canceled panel was at odds with their first ethical principle of professional responsibility: “Do no harm.” It likened the scuttled panel’s “gender critical scholarship” to the “race science of the late 19th and early 20th centuries,” the main goal of which was to “advance a ‘scientific’ reason to question the humanity of already marginalized groups of people.” In this instance, the AAA argued, “those who exist outside a strict and narrow sex/gender binary” are being targeted.

Weiss remains unconvinced by this moral posturing. “If the panel was so egregious,” she asked, “why had it been accepted in the first place?”

The AAA also claimed that Weiss’s panel lacked “scientific integrity,” and that she and her fellow panelists “relied on assumptions that ran contrary to the settled science in our discipline.” The panelists, the AAA argued, had committed “one of the cardinal sins of scholarship” by “assum[ing] the truth of the proposition that . . . sex and gender are simplistically binary, and that this is a fact with meaningful implications for the discipline.” In fact, the AAA claimed, the panelists’ views “contradict scientific evidence” about sex and gender, since “[a]round the world and throughout history, there have always been people whose gender roles do not align neatly with their reproductive anatomy.”

There is much to respond to in this portion of AAA’s statement. First, it’s ironic for the organization to accuse scientists of committing the “cardinal sin” of “assuming the truth” of something, and then to justify cancelling those scientists’ panel on the grounds that the panelists refuse to accept purportedly “settled science.” Second, the panel was organized to discuss biological sex (i.e., the biology of males and females), not “gender roles”; pivoting from discussions of basic biology to murkier debates about sex-related social roles and expectations is a common tactic of gender ideologues. Third, the AAA’s argument that a person’s “gender role” might not “align neatly” with his or her reproductive anatomy implies the existence of normative behaviors for members of each sex. Indeed, this is a central tenet of gender ideology that many people dispute and warrants the kind of discussion the panel intended to provide.

The AAA’s statement made another faulty allegation, this time against Weiss for using “sex identification” instead of “sex estimation” when assessing the sex of skeletal remains. The AAA claimed that Weiss’s choice of terminology was problematic and unscholarly because it assumes a “determinative” process that “is easily influenced by cognitive bias on the part of the researcher.”

Weiss, however, rejects the AAA’s notion that the term “sex determination” is outdated or improper. She emphasized that “sex determination” is frequently used in the literature, as demonstrated in numerous contemporary anthropology papers, along with “sex estimation.” Weiss said, “I tend not to use the term ‘sex estimation’ because to estimate is usually associated with a numeric value; thus, I do use the term ‘age estimation.’ But just as ‘age estimation’ does not mean that there is no actual age of an individual and that biological age changes don’t exist, ‘sex estimation’ does not mean that there isn’t a biological sex binary.” She also contested the AAA’s claim that anthropologists’ use of “sex estimation” is meant to accommodate people who identify as transgender or non-binary. Rather, she said, “sex estimation” is used when “anthropologists are not 100 [percent] sure of their accuracy for a variety of reasons, including that the remains may be fragmented.” But as these methods improve—which was a focus of her talk—such “estimations” become increasingly determinative.

After making that unfounded allegation against Weiss, the AAA further embarrasses itself by claiming that “There is no single biological standard by which all humans can be reliably sorted into a binary male/female sex classification,” and that sex and gender are “historically and geographically contextual, deeply entangled, and dynamically mutable categories.”

Each of these assertions is empirically false. An individual’s sex can be determined by observing their primary sex organs, or gonads, as these organs determine the type of gamete an individual can or would have the function to produce. The existence of a very rare subset of individuals with developmental conditions that make their sex difficult to assess does not substantiate the existence of a third sex. Sex is binary because are only two sexes, not because every human in existence is neatly classifiable. Additionally, while some organisms are capable of changing sex, humans are not among them. Therefore, the assertion that human sex is “dynamically mutable” is false.

Weiss appropriately highlights the “false equivalency” inherent in the claim that the existence of people with intersex conditions disproves the binary nature of sex. “People who are born intersex or with disorders of sex development are not nonbinary or transgender, they are individuals with medical pathologies,” she said. “We would not argue that because some people are born with polydactyly (extra fingers or toes), often seen in inbred populations, that you can’t say that humans have ten fingers and ten toes. It's an absurd conclusion.”

On September 29, the AAA posted a Letter of Support on its website, penned by anthropologists Agustin Fuentes, Kathryn Clancy, and Robin Nelson, endorsing the decision to cancel the “Let’s Talk About Sex” session. Again, the primary motivation cited was the panel’s opposition to the supposed “settled science” concerning sex. The authors disputed the panelists’ claim that the term “sex” was being supplanted by “gender” in anthropology, claiming instead that there is “massive work on these terms, and their entanglements and nuances.” They also reiterated the AAA’s false accusation that the term “sex determination” was problematic and outdated. Nonetheless, the canceled panel could have served as a prime venue to discuss these issues.

In response to these calls for censorship, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) issued an open letter to the AAA and CASCA. FIRE characterized the groups’ decision to cancel the panel as a “retreat” from their scientific mission, which “requires unwavering dedication to free inquiry and open dialogue.” It argued that this mission “cannot coexist with inherently subjective standards of ‘harm,’ ‘safety,’ and ‘dignity,’ which are inevitably used to suppress ideas that cause discomfort or conflict with certain political or ideological commitments.” FIRE implored the AAA and CASCA to “reconsider this decision and to recommit to the principles of intellectual freedom and open discourse that are essential to the organizations’ academic missions.” FIRE’s open letter has garnered signatures from nearly 100 academics, including Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker and Princeton University’s Robert P. George. FIRE invites additional academic faculty to add their names.

The initial letter and subsequent statement by the AAA/CASCA present a particularly jarring illustration of the undermining of science in the name of “social justice.” The organizations have embarrassed themselves yet lack the self-awareness to realize it. The historian of science Alice Dreger called the AAA and CASCA presidents’ use of the term “cardinal sin” appropriate “because Pérez and Heller are working from dogma so heavy it is worthy of the Vatican.” Indeed, they have fallen prey to gender ideologues, driven into a moral panic by the purported dangers of defending the existence of biological sex to people whose sex distresses them. The AAA/CASCA have determined that it is necessary not only to lie to these people about their sex but also to deceive the rest of us about longstanding, foundational, and universal truths about sex.

Science can advance only within a system and culture that values open inquiry and robust debate. The AAA and CASCA are not just barring a panel of experts with diverse and valid perspectives on biological sex from expressing their well-considered conclusions; they are denying conference attendees the opportunity to hear diverse viewpoints and partake in constructive conversations on a controversial subject. Such actions obstruct the path of scientific progress.

“When you move away from the truth, no good can come from it,” Weiss says. The AAA and CASCA would be wise to ponder that reality.

==

I miss the days when anti-science meant creationists with "Intelligent Design," flat Earthers, and Jenny McCarthy-style MMR anti-vaxers.

It's weird that archaeologists are now denying evolution and pretending not to know how babies are made. Looks like creationists aren't the only evolution-denial game in town any more.

#Colin Wright #anti science #gender ideology #queer theory #anthropology #biology denial #sex is binary #censorship #disinvitation #cancel culture #genderwang #moral panic #biological sex #biology #human biology #ideological corruption #ideological capture #gametes #religion is a mental illness

[er-cryptid]

Human corneas are incredibly similar to shark corneas

#studyblr #notes #my notes #biology #bio #human biology #human bio #anatomy #human anatomy #anatomical vocabulary #anatomical variation #medblr #medical notes #med notes #anatomical structures #human anatomical structures #anatomy and physiology #anatomy & physiology #life science #biological science #note cards #flashcards #flash cards

[zeravmeta]

incredibly heated morphological debate in the hoenn region pokemon research community that while the flygon evolution line my exhibit many physical features similar to those of bug type pokemon including the sharing of egg groups it is actually the salamence line that qualifies for bug-dragon type because of a defined larva (bagon has many vestigial and underdeveloped features), pupal (shellgon is a walking cocoon), and metamorphosis (salamence emerges from a cocoon, looks drastically different and begins to fly) life cycle compared to flygon which does not undergo any sort of larva->pupa->metamorphosis within its evolution line especially when trapinch on its own is a functioning and accomplished ambush predator while bagons growth is entirely dependent on developing a shell to become shellgon, professor birch notably spotted being attacked in meteor falls in trying to answer this question

#pokemon #zerav meme #memes about the pokemon worlds mechanics and daily experiences are very fun to me #the intense ecological biological morphological evolutionary and every other life-science related topic debates i would dream for

[persnickety-doodles]

STEM students are wild af

Asami is warming up with an… integral exercise 🫠 before another study session. At this point they’ve started dating and just spend time studying together.

Korra here is still working on her International Relations degree since she wants to be a diplomat or a small bakery owner idk. I haven’t thought too much about it.

More college AU

#korrasami #I will introduce mako and Bolin… I love them in this AU #i have the dialogue written for a small comic… just have yo draw it is all #to* #oh and Kuvira… that’s another fun intro #for the record I am a stem major #they got me when I got to build a Lego robot in middle school #I programmed my little guy to get through a maze #it’s something about little robots and computers that I love do much #*so #and combine it with biological science and I’m just invested #alicia draws #persnickety doodles #Korrasami College AU #lok #avatar

[ksfoxwald]

So I'm reading "Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity" by Bruce Bagemihl.

And it's from 1999 so half of it is "yes for real homosexuality is found in nature, plz no discriminate :(" But then I got to the chapter on "Nonreproductive and Alternative Sexualities in Animals" and

Vitually every animal population includes nonbreeding individuals. There is a tendency to regard the urge to procreate among animals as instinctual, all-pervasive, and unstoppable. While heterosexual interactions often do have that quality, there are just as many examples of animals who do not reproduce: individuals who actively remove themselves from the breeding cycle...

and

Why do animals not reproduce? Biologists have coined the term reproductive suppression to refer to various forms of nonbreeding, implying that all animals would breed if they could but are somehow "prevented" from doing so. However, the underlying mechanisms involved in nonbreeding are far more complex than this name implies...animals are often "voluntary" nonbreeders...

And listen. Listen. There's another quote that I thought was referenced somwhere in this book (cannot for the life of me find which page it is on though) that's like "when animals do something we like, it's natural, and when they do something we don't like, it's animalistic." We don't need to "prove" that asexuality is biological in nature in order for asexual people to deserve rights and respects. We've gone through this dance with homosexuality and transgenderism.

But a human being is an animal, and studying other animals shapes our understanding of what it means to be one kind of animal among many. And the idea that an individual's purpose is to reproduce is pretty capitalistic, if you think about it.

The other half of this book is a list of which animals have documented homosexual behaviors, and a description of those behaviors, and even though a lot of it is "X percent of males were observed doing Y behavior, X percent of interactions were Y in nature," it really drives home that animals are complex individuals. No one wolf is going to behave exactly like another wolf, any more than any human will act exactly like another human. Maybe there is an evolutionary advantage, maybe evolution is just weird and messy, but that's how the world is. The whole argument that "if everyone were gay/asexual/engaging in nonreproductive sexualities then the species would go extinct" is technically true but that's an extremely individualistic viewpoint. As a species - as a community - there is room for so much more.

Basic biology teaches us that all animals are driven by the need to reproduce, but advanced biology once again reveals a more complex picture.

This is just a long way to say that I didn't think I needed ace affirmation in scientific literature but actually I kind of did.

#asexual #science #biological exuberance

[autogynecologist]

yes im a transsexual, im trans and im sexual

#AM I SECKSHEWWHOEA-AAL? #yeaaaah #but seriously the word transsexual is so riot grrrl zine coded and it sucks that the most awful trans people use it to distinguish #themselves from “fake trans” people #the word transsexual calls attention to the fact that biological sex is bullshit #it's a political construction: the gender binary came first and then came the science that “”“verifies”“” it

[gxlden-angels]

I think it's so funny when Christian flat out reject the concept of being intersex like oh so me and about 2% of the population aren't real but you expect me to believe homeboy's gonna come back after (holy) ghosting us for over 2000 years?

#I plan on coming out to my dad as trans this weekend #And thought about the time I explained what intersex is to my uncle #and how he flat out refused to except it as a real thing #which is fuckin wild #male and female should be used as adjectives not nouns #cause there's so many factors that contribute to biological sex that it'd be easier to say every person is their own sex #but yea i'm medically considered intersex cause of my flavor of PCOS #and other issues #it's just so wild cause you'd think that would be a great 'miracle' for them to brag about #'Look at science say there's female and male but Jesus says in Galatians there is no male and female because we are all one in Christ.' #Like the opportunity was literally right there #oh well #florida gov ronald desantis if ur reading this you know what would be so fuckin funny for you to say right now? #also I'll be back on the book soon I've been Working. got 38.5 hours the past 2 weeks tho let's gooo (limit is 40 as a pt student) #[pt working and full time student not pt student] #bro fundie christians' obsession with sex/genitalia in general is fuckin wild #ex christian #religious trauma