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studiot, Before I approach your thoughts I should state that I am currently installing major heat pump installations in a large Hospital in Brisbane as part of a project that is removing an old coal burning system. As I have said here on other occasions I am not a scientist (though I have returned to study science at Uni) but do deal with engineering, installation and commissioning loosely in air-conditioning and building services - the technology side of construction, if you will. I would agree that an air-cooled heat pump may not match a gas boiler in the residential environment. Also that the tech data published regarding "efficiencies" of heat pumps is used to suggest otherwise. Even engineers get confused on that. But it's like using a truck as a taxi, it's just not where the device is strong. Any refrigerant cycle will produce heat on one side and cold on the other. If you only harness one side you've missed half the benefit. Quite literally. Worse - in most air-conditioning systems that unused heat needs an additional heat rejection system which costs additional energy. If you have a need for cooling and heating, at the same time, NOTHING will match the efficiency of a heat pump. If you don't, then more investigation is required before you commit if you want the optimum solution. We've had to be creative in the hospital with dispersed plant rooms, having to tap in to the existing systems that are available as we spread from one end of the campus to the other. And we are competing with a very efficient centralised coal burning steam system. Tough gig to match that let alone beat it. In part it works like this: The huge coal burning boiler (which run a large steam system) are to be decommissioned. The coal burner, which all things being equal will not be beaten on efficiency by anything, will be replaced by smaller dispersed gas or electric fired steam generators. Coal is better than, gas, which is better than electric. <Don't trust those words, do the engineering, but mostly it is adequate as a generalisation>But all things are not equal. Overall capacity is reduced by a combination of thermal heat pumps (driving air-conditioning) and potable hot water heat pumps. And where we had to, we use residential style electric Hot Water Units just to get load down to make the rest of the system work. It's a negative on efficiency but against the full system one we could cope with. There is the obligatory and pointless but visible PV system thrown in - a green sticker slapped on the building as these days to be virtuous must be signalled to the world. They have their place (I have them at home) but this is not really it. The thermal heat pumps, on the hot side, feed thermal or potable hot water. On the cold side they feed whatever we could find - chilled water (on the return leg hence "pre-conditioning" the return water before it gets to the chillers); - condensate water (on the flow side giving additional cooling to equipment that needs it). It would have been pointless to install heat pumps that simply wasted the cold generated. On a personal basis I am now investigating heat pumps at home for pool heating combined with air-conditioning. It's problematic as we don't necessarily need to heat the pool in summer, when the air-conditioning is running. But I'm working on it. The trick on this one will be performance on "the shoulders", ie not either peak summer or winter but the messy bits between where the engineering is more tricky and much more experience is required. Your experience with efficiency measured as operational cost (and that is actually a very good indicator) comparing a heat pump (where half of the benefit simply goes to waste) compared with a gas boiler does not surprise me in the slightest. Your maintenance cost will increase as well, by the way. But it is wrong to call these systems twaddle. PS At home my hot water is an instantaneous gas system. I'd consider solar but there is not enough roof real estate once the extensive PV system was installed, it's a three phase system to cope with air-conditioning and pool pumping. It's working fabulously well. And I like my gas hot water.

A man that covers his eyes cannot see...

Extraordinary talent requires extraordinary self-criticism?

RIP Stephen Sondheim. Listening to Sweeney Todd later. Maybe some clips from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. A towering eminence of musical theater. I recall an interview where he said his only past work that embarrassed him was the lyrics of "I Feel Pretty," because he has this young Puerto Rican immigrant using vocabulary more suited to Noel Coward. Hey, you were 27, give yourself a break.

This is dedicated to @Moontanman. What's become of you, bro?

Humans have in their genome, a characteristic of having two legs, two arms, two eyes, and... Two sexes, male and female. It is like saying that humans with one leg or one or more arms are a different type of human than one with two legs. Klinefelter's Syndrome, Turner's Syndrome, XX males and XY females are that, chromosomal abnormalities, exceptions that neither prove the rule nor characterize themselves as "Sex". I regret that science does not follow its ideological agenda to the letter. Show me my ideological bent. By the way, prove to me that deleterious anomalies and mutations are characterized as new "Sexes" XD

Deaths seems an obnoxious term to me. How about " end of life events" ? ☺️

No, the argument is that a SMALL percentage is not the same as a ZERO percentage. Does this allow you to more accurately comprehend my point without leaving in a huff? There’s only one person here saying others are dicks and calling their positions grotesque idiocy. It’s certainly not me.

Please stop pretending to be a spoiled child.. This is a public forum where anybody can ask you tough questions that undermine your weak position you are already sitting on..

I mean, if you wanted to you can. The difference is that in single-celled organism, sex is decoupled from reproduction. In a way we could argue that the combination of sex and procreation is a kind of abnormality, as originally they were clearly two different aspects. In bacteria you can find genetic elements (together often called Fertility factors, as originally their identity were not known) which allow horizontal gene transfer via conjugation. Typically, cells that already have those only conjugate with cells that do not have them. So in a way it could considered binary (presence of absence of these genes), and a distinction among single cells would actually be much more obvious than in multi-cellular organisms. Please go ahead and define a good classification scheme that allows us to capture the whole diversity in human sexual development using only two categories. If nature is strictly binary, there must be technical characteristics that we can use to build these classification without selectively throwing out things that don't fit (which is the very definition of a biased approach). The argument that you may have missed is not that there are three sexes, rather that any classification we use is artificial and, while it captures much of nature, is always incomplete. If folks here think that they have such an impeccable understanding of biology, I would really like to see some evidence of an unambiguous definition that we can use. What people fail to see is that nature does not define "normal" or "exceptions". Those are human constructs. Or alternatively we could argue that we are all exceptions as we all carry some form of mutations or "abnormalities". However, at this point the distinction is at least equally meaningless. What we can define are frequencies (i.e. how common certain traits are- e.g. most humans are bipedal, all viable humans have a brain etc.) and roughly outline the range of variability. The idea of (strict) normality runs against the very idea (and basic understanding) of evolutionary processes where a huge range of variety is generated. If nature adhered and forced a given norm, we would still be normal single-celled organism with a decent separation of sex and reproduction. As I mentioned, one can force an accurate binary definition (e.g. every human with a Y chromosome is male, everyone without is female) and as definitions go, it would neatly and completely separate a given human population into two groups. The issue is that this definition then runs across other definitions used by posters here, which rely on traits such as female outward features.

You can repeat your incorrect point as often as you desire. That won’t magically render it true. The question is are there more than 2 sexes. There are at least male, female, and other. That’s 3, so the answer is an unequivocal yes. You already quoted it. Perhaps try reading again, maybe more slowly this time.

No, it’s like some people saying ALL humans are born with 2 legs, others pointing out that sometimes people are born with fewer or more than 2 and providing copious examples of this happening, then the original person holding firm to their original claim that ALL humans are born with 2 legs. There. FTFY. It’s interesting how ideological the motives seem to be of those individuals willy nilly tossing the ideological label at others. Yep. No ideological bent in your post. Nope. No sir. Nothin to see here. 😂 I’d encourage you to avoid mirrors, and maybe lookup the idea of psychological projection. On another note, this OP has only 1 single post here and this was it. They were clearly a hit and run poster merely trying to stir the pot and divide communities.

I'll give you my honest opinion: no, there are no more than two sexes, and let's understand why: "Sex is a spectrum." False. Very few of the sexual species are exceptions to anisogamy: there are small gametes abundant in numbers that we call male, large gametes with high energy investment that we call female. Sex is binary. Why do they say that then? In addition to ideological motives, they use the phenotypic variation of secondary sexual characteristics as supposed evidence against the binary of sex. These features are called secondary for a reason: they are more contingent than primary features and anisogamy. The secondary ones are beard, breasts, fur, etc. It's basically the things that come up only after puberty. The primaries are the genitalia and, importantly, the gonads, and in the gonads the gametes, and there are only two in our species: sperm and oocyte (egg). No there is the "spermatocyte", no there is the spectrum. Another thing they use is rare variations like ambiguous genitalia, Klinefelter and Turner (chromosomal syndromes). Here, we see even more that their problem is incompetence of conceptual analysis. The species is not defined by exceptions, especially those that are deleterious (I've even seen some here citing fish species, which is totally beside the point as far as I know we're dealing with Humans, not fish). Claiming that humans are not binary in sex because there are XO (Turner), XXY (Klinefelter) etc. people. it's like saying that human beings don't have two legs because people are born with less or more. Or say men produce milk because they saw a man produce milk on some TV show once. It is a biologist's duty, I think, to have a sense not only of the variation in a species he is interested in, but also of the necessary characteristics to say that species is that species. Looking only at variation is like doing statistics with variance only, not mean. Another obligation is to be aware, however vague, of how stable the characteristic is. How fundamental it is. Now, natural selection is based on reproduction and survival. Intellectual neglect with characteristics linked to reproduction is one of the worst possible crimes against biology. A third thing they use is an adherence to the notion that there is a separation between "gender" (the social and cultural part) and "sex" (the biological part). Biologists, great sociologists, as this notion came from outside biology and is by no means consensual. For many biologists it seems rather that sex is an "open" trait enough to allow for the addition of elements that are influenced by society and culture. There is no need to try to remove the cultural part and call it another name, in fact that it is not even possible, as no one knows what "totally cultural" is, if there is any such sexual characteristic. Progressive biologists are under the influence of postmodernism, one of the worst intellectual fads in academia, an intellectual cancer that at its core is deeply unscientific, as it is anti-objectivity, anti-universalism, ie, anti-epistemic values of science . Nothing I have said here is new. The science of sex as a human phenotype is not new, it has not changed substantially in the last 5 years. What highlights that those who changed were progressive biologists, who became radicalized, embraced identity, and do not know how to separate ideology from science.

Pot, kettle and such. A discussion does not require to accept everyone's argument, rather. Especially in science we look at the limitations of an argument. You are not accepting the counterarguments provided so why should one blithely accept your position, especially as they appear to be faulty? Anencephaly is a lethal condition. So what it is your argument? That a species which requires a brain to survive can produce unviable offspring without a brain? Sure that is correct. So if you want you can add as folks without brains as a specific group of humans (which will die shortly after birth). Whether that distinction is useful, depends on context, but clearly they exist and it is not wrong to say so. Interestingly, that should actually challenge your thoughts on that matter how things should be, as everything that nature produces, literally exists. Whether to call something faulty requires to develop a narrative context that requires an observer to interpret and is therefore not a reflection of nature itself. Think about it that way, is the ability to digest lactose a genetic defect or not? Most adult mammals used to lose the ability to digest it in adulthood. So the "normal" development is to lose lactase once one weans off milk. But in some humans we find the "abnormal" mutation that allows the enzyme to be produced also later in life. So based on what one might consider "normal" this is clearly an abnormal trait. Same goes for lack of pigments, or any other range of traits. Some persist while being detrimental. So again, the issue is that nature does not classify things as normal or abnormal. We do and we can discuss that. However, stating that just because two things are similar are the same (any organism without a brain is the same species) is faulty logic and you know better.

So youre treating anomalies which the intersex people suffer as additional sexes. I’m trying to let that idiocy sink into my mind and think of something decent to reply to you but only indecent words and sentences come to mind.

I think it might be due to some personality traits, I guess I'm trying to find objective truth in things and I'm looking at this subject from a broader perspective. I have a hunch that we would be tending to agree on more things if the context and medium would be different. I can't agree on your creationist analogy though, I just don't see where stuff overlaps in this analogy. Please stop quoting me and posting to me, thank you.

There is a small percentage of people born without a brain, Anencephaly. The argument being currently presented is that if you are born that way,it is not a 'defect'. Obviously then, there are humans without brains. Lobsters don't have brains either. So 'lobster' is a type of human, just a variation on the brain volume spectrum. Maybe J Peterson was right to compare humans to lobsters. PS I have many friends here. I'll be back when we start respecting each other's opinions, and actually listening to each other without the accusations. So long.

So go ahead, show me empirical proof of this supposed "3rd sex", following your logic, there is a kind of Human, who doesn't have two arms LMAO Giant Cope By the way, I don't even know why I'm still answering you, you just dont add anything in any debate. Mainly on this one. Go back, prove that anomalies involving sex chromosomes give rise to a 3rd sex, otherwise I won't answer it again, I'll just ignore it I just want to see the magic in trying to accomplish that hahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahah

This is utter rubbish. That is GENETIC recombination.

Then explain to me the fundamental difference and how we biologists got it so wrong for decades.

What about a tiger born with 2 legs? Or why aren't you 215cm and 140kg and playing for the NBA?