Are there more than 2 sexes?

[TheVat]

8 minutes ago, MigL said:

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'.

I will admit you seem well positioned to make that argument.

[studiot]

49 minutes ago, koti said:

In the context of intersex people which this is, maybe anomaly would be a more appropriate term.
Also, you do realise that I was quoting iNow not you, right?

Yes thank you, I realise whom you were quoting.

But I am disappointed that you chose to label such people as defective humans.

Seems an obnoxious term to me.

At least you acknowledged that they are humans.

However I wonder if there are any humans truly without any defects at all?

Or do all humans have some defect or other ?

[koti]

47 minutes ago, studiot said:

Yes thank you, I realise whom you were quoting.

But I am disappointed that you chose to label such people as defective humans.

Seems an obnoxious term to me.

At least you acknowledged that they are humans.

However I wonder if there are any humans truly without any defects at all?

Or do all humans have some defect or other ?

Oh sure, were all imperfect in various ways. Your argument leads to the conclusion that there are currently 7.7 billion people with different sexes in the homosapiens species living on Earth and counting. I’m sory that youre disappointed that some people suffer from various defects, I’m disappointed too,  I’d much prefer that my daughter didn’t have diabetes but the fact that she has that condition (does that sound better than defect?) doesn’t sound „obnoxious” to me. 

[iNow]

34 minutes ago, koti said:

Your argument leads to the conclusion that there are currently 7.7 billion people with different sexes

No, it simply doesn’t. You said there are only 2 categories: Male and female. You then acknowledged “defects” that don’t fit into either, yet refuse to acknowledge this leads at least to a 3rd category of Other.

Nobody is saying there are 7.X Billion sexes. They’re saying words like defect are both unkind and irrelevant to the conclusion that there are more than 2 sexes. They’re saying you don’t get to dismiss the aforementioned “Other” category just by calling them defects, anomalies, low probability, or now “conditions.”

[swansont]

2 hours ago, MigL said:

I'll be back when we start respecting each other's opinions, and actually listening to each other without the accusations.

I agree with the latter, but I don’t know what place opinion has in the discussion. It’s about science, and evidence. Or at least, it’s supposed to be.

[mistermack]

2 hours ago, studiot said:

Or do all humans have some defect or other ?

Quote

Birth defects affected about 96 million people as of 2015.^[11] In the United States, they occur in about 3% of newborns.^[2] They resulted in about 628,000 deaths in 2015, down from 751,000 in 1990.^[12][9] The types with the greatest numbers of deaths are congenital heart disease (303,000), followed by neural tube defects (65,000) 

Wikipedia.

 

2 hours ago, studiot said:

Seems an obnoxious term to me.

Quote

Birth defect is a widely used term for a congenital malformation, i.e. a congenital, physical anomaly that is recognizable at birth, and which is significant enough to be considered a problem. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), most birth defects are believed to be caused by a complex mix of factors including genetics, environment, and behaviors,^[13] though many birth defects have no known cause. 

Wikipedia

 

Deaths seems an obnoxious term to me.

How about " end of life events" ?   ☺️

[CharonY]

5 hours ago, MigL said:

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.

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.

 

[Luiz Henning]

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.

[iNow]

12 minutes ago, Luiz Henning said:

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.

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. 

18 minutes ago, Luiz Henning said:

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 .

Yep. No ideological bent in your post. Nope. No sir. Nothin to see here. 😂 

19 minutes ago, Luiz Henning said:

What highlights that those who changed were progressive biologists, who became radicalized, embraced identity, and do not know how to separate ideology from science.

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. 

[Luiz Henning]

Agora mesmo, iNow disse:

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. 

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.

 

Agora mesmo, iNow disse:

Yep. No ideological bent in your post. Nope. No sir. Nothin to see here. 😂 

1 minuto atrás, Luiz Henning disse:

Show me my ideological bent. By the way, prove to me that deleterious anomalies and mutations are characterized as new "Sexes"

 

Agora mesmo, iNow disse:

I’d encourage you to avoid mirrors, and maybe lookup the idea of psychological projection.

 

XD

Edited November 27, 2021 by Luiz Henning

[iNow]

40 minutes ago, Luiz Henning said:

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.

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. 

41 minutes ago, Luiz Henning said:

Show me my ideological bent.

You already quoted it. Perhaps try reading again, maybe more slowly this time. 

[Luiz Henning]

Just now, iNow said:

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. 

Just now, Luiz Henning said:

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 

Just now, iNow said:

You already quoted it. Perhaps try reading again, maybe more slowly this time. 

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

[studiot]

Let us return to some facts and Science in this thread.

The OP was about sex from a gentic point of view, and perhaps only for humans.

However Nature most definitely offers more than binary sexual genetic activity as perfectly normal.

Quote

There are generally two types of reproduction in nature: with and without sex. During sexual reproduction, the genetic material from two individuals is combined, and used to form a new organism. The sexless form of reproduction is called asexual reproduction.

...

...

Eukaryote microbes can either reproduce sexually or asexually. Or both. An example of this is the nematode (Caenorhabditis elegans). C. elegans are either male or hermaphrodite – which means they possess both male and female sex organs. During sexual reproduction, a male and a hermaphrodite lay next to each other. The male introduces sperm and fertilises the eggs of the hermaphrodite. But the hermaphrodite can also fertilise itself.

This website is semi technical.

https://www.micropia.nl/dossiercontent/microworld/en/11/?ph=1

 

Would anyone like to tell me how to 'sex' a single cell organism ?

[CharonY]

5 hours ago, studiot said:

Let us return to some facts and Science in this thread.

The OP was about sex from a gentic point of view, and perhaps only for humans.

However Nature most definitely offers more than binary sexual genetic activity as perfectly normal.

This website is semi technical.

https://www.micropia.nl/dossiercontent/microworld/en/11/?ph=1

 

Would anyone like to tell me how to 'sex' a single cell organism ?

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.

 

13 hours ago, Luiz Henning said:

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

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. 

[studiot]

22 minutes ago, CharonY said:

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.

Thanks for the additional sane information. +1

[CharonY]

9 minutes ago, studiot said:

Thanks for the additional sane information. +1

I think OP could have saved themselves a lot of grief if they had framed the question more narrow. E.g. does human reproduction only involve two sexes? 

Once we include things like general physiology and the finer points of genetics biology gets really messy. I also think because we are all biological entities, we tend to overestimate our understanding of how we function. Many folks use simple concepts and then think that this all there is to it. Feynman was a good example who summarily dismissed biology as a student but came around when he actually did tried his hands on biological problems.

[koti]

2 hours ago, CharonY said:

...What people fail to see is that nature does not define "normal" or "exceptions"...

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

[CharonY]

1 hour ago, koti said:

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

What are you trying to say? Anything beyond a certain distribution is not part of the population anymore? I.e. NBA players are abnormal and therefore not human? Because if you argue that they are human, then obviously it means that whatever you define as "abnormal" is actually part of the population (just at the edge) and therefore are part of any categories you make.

If you say all tigers have for legs, a two-legged animal born to a tiger would, according to this definition, not be a tiger. Since that does not make a lot of sense, it simply means that this definition on its own is not sufficient (e.g. to categorize that animal, one would need information like the identity of parents or genetic analyses). Likewise if a definition of a human would include being a maximum of 1.90 cm then clearly the definition is wrong. You cannot make the definition correct by declaring that anything not fitting into it is simply an outlier. Trying to bend existing reality according to ones definitions is a rather dogmatic approach, but we have been over that a couple of times by now.

Objective reality is what exists, even in the absence of an observer. But only an observer defines what is consider normal and what is not. And any deeper dive into things we consider normal typically just reveals that it is either just something that we experience frequently or that we otherwise assume to be common. And as such, it is not a property of the object itself. There is no "normal" gene or normal height. Just a range of variation that exists in nature that we can segment in order to investigate or even talk about it. 

After all, you would not claim that a photon is actually a particle and if it behaves like a wave, well that is just an exception.

What you seem to think is that just because nature does not have clear delineation, everything must be the same. That is of course not so. If there is a continuum, there are quantitative differences. A 2.14 person is not the same as 2.13 or a 2.12 person, despite the fact that most would call all of them tall. That just shows that a category such as "tall" can be helpful for rough distinctions but clearly it is not a fixed property. For example, depending on population a 1.80 m person might already be considered tall. But moving that person into a group of NBA player that description would seem out of place.

Thus, the moniker of "tall" is variable and is only useful in a particular context. It is not the same as specific property that is largely invariable (e.g. having a certain DNA sequence or using height as continuous, rather than a categorical variable). 

I suspect that it won't help much to clarify as there is clearly some ideological overlay here, but what one could (mostly) accurately state is that in humans (and mammals) reproduction involves two sexes. However, this definition uses the reproductive angle, which means that individuals who are e.g. sterile from birth would not fall under either category. 

[mistermack]

10 hours ago, studiot said:

Would anyone like to tell me how to 'sex' a single cell organism ?

You do know what asexual means, don't you? It means NON-sexual. 

I hope you're not trying to argue that non-sexual is a sex? Even for this thread, that is a loopy loopy notion.

[CharonY]

3 minutes ago, mistermack said:

You do know what asexual means, don't you? It means NON-sexual. 

I hope you're not trying to argue that non-sexual is a sex? Even for this thread, that is a loopy loopy notion.

No, they are doing asexual reproduction. But they actually do have sex (in the biological sense i.e. sexual recombination, not the common use... though sex pili are involved, so perhaps not that far off).

[mistermack]

9 minutes ago, CharonY said:

No, they are doing asexual reproduction. But they actually do have sex (in the biological sense i.e. sexual recombination, not the common use... though sex pili are involved, so perhaps not that far off).

This is utter rubbish. That is GENETIC recombination. 

[CharonY]

Just now, mistermack said:

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.

[mistermack]

2 minutes ago, CharonY said:

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

No, you provide me your link. Here is what wiki says :

Genetic recombination and recombinational DNA repair also occurs in bacteria and archaea, which use asexual reproduction.  And : 

Asexual reproduction is a type of reproduction that does not involve the fusion of gametes or change in the number of chromosomes. The offspring that arise by asexual reproduction from either unicellular or multicellular organisms inherit the full set of genes of their single parent. 

[koti]

51 minutes ago, CharonY said:

I suspect that it won't help much to clarify as there is clearly some ideological overlay here, but what one could (mostly) accurately state is that in humans (and mammals) reproduction involves two sexes. However, this definition uses the reproductive angle, which means that individuals who are e.g. sterile from birth would not fall under either category. 

And that category is not a 3rd sex in humans now is it Charony.
Just spit it out and say it through the downvotes, the subtle accusations and implications of homophobia, racism, conspiracy theory throughout the previous transgender thread and this one, just please f say it - "Individuals who are e.g. sterile from birth, are intersex or have other deviations from the standard distribution are NOT a 3rd SEX in homosapiens !"

Edited November 27, 2021 by koti

[iNow]

Why would we say that intersex is NOT different from the male sex and the female sex? That would be absurd, yet that’s your stance.