Weekly Roundup
Dear Quilletters, Last week the world lost one of the true greats of biology—E.O. Wilson, who died at age 92. While known to the public primarily for his work on ants and later as a leading popularizer of conservation biology, Wilson was also perhaps the first major target
On Sex and Gender, The New England Journal of Medicine Has Abandoned Its Scientific Mission
Two years ago, “Titania McGrath,” whose satirical Twitter account regularly skewers the ideological excesses of social-justice culture, suggested that “we should remove biological sex from birth certificates altogether to prevent any more mistakes.” The joke (obvious to those who follow the culture wars closely, but perhaps obscure to those who
Think Cancel Culture Doesn’t Exist? My Own ‘Lived Experience’ Says Otherwise
Given the moral authority that many progressives assign to the lessons of “lived experience,” it seems counterintuitive that they are the ones now strenuously downplaying the scourge of cancel culture. No less a progressive icon than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently brushed off the phenomenon as just a bunch of entitled people
JK Rowling Is Right—Sex Is Real and It Is Not a "Spectrum"
JK Rowling recently drew fire on social media for tweeting the statements to the effect that “biological sex is real.” The tweets began when she mocked an opinion piece that used the term “people who menstruate” in place of “women” to account for the
The New Evolution Deniers
Evolutionary biology has always been controversial. Not controversial among biologists, but controversial among the general public. This is largely because Darwin’s theory directly contradicted the supernatural accounts of human origins rooted in religious tradition and replaced them with fully natural ones. The philosopher Daniel Dennett has described evolution as
