Of course biological sex exists, Jo
by Tom Chivers, UnHerd:
Male and female are scientific reality — even if Jo Swinson doesn’t agree.
There is a quote that I half-remember from my philosophy degree. It went something like: “The existence of the twilight does not mean we cannot distinguish the day from the night.” It is usually (and possibly apocryphally) ascribed to either Samuel Johnson or Edmund Burke, and describes the continuum fallacy, sometimes called the “fallacy of the beard”.
Most of the time we don’t mind simply saying that some cases are ambiguous. But science loves categories. For instance, species are defined as groups of organisms that can interbreed and produce fertile organisms. House mice, Mus musculus, can breed with other house mice and their offspring are fertile. They are a species. They cannot interbreed with the black rat, Rattus rattus, but rats can breed with each other. The black rat is a separate species.
But there are intermediate cases. There are species of finch on the Galapagos which were thought separate, but a hybrid intermediary has been discovered which can breed with both. Does that mean that, instead of two species, the existence of the intermediate means there is now one? Lions and tigers can interbreed, but only the female offspring are fertile. Are lions and tigers therefore the same species? How about dzo, the cross between cows and yaks? Again, the female is fertile, the male not. Do species therefore not exist?
Or, consider the famous case of Pluto. There are asteroids, and there are planets. Planets are defined by the International Astronomical Union as celestial bodies which are in orbit around the sun, are big enough to have formed a near-spherical shape under their own mass, and which have “cleared the neighbourhood” — that is, swept its orbit clear of other objects. All those criteria are comfortably met by eight of the planets.
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