Science is absolutely on the side of journals like Nature, and pays barely any notice to valueless rags like Quillette.
Argument from Authority?
Anyway, this is not Quillette versus Nature: the article points out the reviewed book comes to conclusions (no sex-differences in brains) that disagree with work already published — in Nature (sex differences in grey matter volume, effects of testosterone on in utero brain growth).
> valueless rags like Quillette.
It's clearly not valueless to subscribers who fund it.
Science is an authority. It authoritatively endorses the view that climate change is happening, and that gender isn't as simple as just the binary. If you view that as fallacious, you're anti-science.
And by subtly (and often not-so-subtly) blocking the careers of scientists who express a different view, politicians try to ensure that authority supports their agenda. It's a mechanism of social control that's been used by authoritarian regimes for a hundred years.
And if you think that view makes me "anti-science", you should know that I'm currently a graduate student studying science. I'm very much in favor of fair and painstaking examination of empirical evidence.
I'm against "science" as a political cudgel. I'm against supporting or rejecting theories based on ideology rather than evidence. I'm against politicians and political activists meddling in science or using selective quoting of unsettled science for political ends.
Considering you just invoked appeal to authority, does this seem the slightest bit ironic to you?
> I'm against "science" as a political cudgel. I'm against supporting or rejecting theories based on ideology rather than evidence. I'm against politicians and political activists meddling in science or using selective quoting of unsettled science for political ends.
Awesome. Considering the overwhelming evidence that gender isn't determined in a simple binary fashion, I'm sensing a contradiction here. Have you considered that perhaps you may be wielding a political cudgel of your own?
BTW, both "binary gender" and "climate change" are off-topic in this discussion about neurobiological differences between the sexes. You have no reason to bring them up here other than to suggest that disagreeing with you is somehow equivalent to denying climate change.
I'd find you much more convincing if you contributed some empirical evidence to the discussion instead of invoking "science" as a magic word.
Which ones do you want to discuss the differences, between?
Biological sex isn't actually a spectrum (it's not one-dimensional), but using that analogy, it's bimodal, not binary.
Only how (or if) one chooses to include those few who don't fit these categories is fluid.
In other words, there's some uncertainty at the margins, but in the vast majority of cases, biological sex is clear.
If you can't clearly define a category, any intrinsic traits of that category are not ascribed clearly to individuals. Any uncertainty, even on the margins, makes the definition uncertain. Clear definition is a lack of uncertainty.
The fallacy is the argument that two states or conditions cannot be considered distinct (or do not exist at all) because between them there exists a continuum of states.
In other words, your reasoning is a textbook example of this fallacy.