This is amazing news!

Few examples of biologists arguing against it:

https://www.asrm.org/advocacy-and-policy/fact-sheets-and-one-pagers/just-the-facts-biological-sex/

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.01.26.525769v1

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40199245/

https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/news-and-ideas/ideology-versus-biology

By the way, when I look towards more sources for your claims, I often find christian institutions and TERF adgacent sources. Some even argue for teleology. This, again, contredicts the theory of evolution, which we are still abiding by, correct?

Also, your section on determination vs. definition (in your last message) is cyclical. People determine based on definition. To say the opposite would beg the question: “determined based on what?”, and the answer will be a definition, right or wrong.

I’m not the one saying “it could be a baboon, who knows”. You are lol. I’m saying that there is no such thing as a “could be” in concrete empirical analysis of nature, just a “be”. We can make educated guesses based on the empirical data, but they’re just that: guesses. We can say “they are missing a foot”, but it is a shorthand for “this person has no foot. Usually, people have a foot there. It might allow them to walk more stabily, so let’s try sollutions that mimic the structure of a foot”.

Because how can they be lierally “missing a foot” if they never had one in the first place? The supposition that something is “supposed to be there” is a cognitive shortcut, but nothing is supposed.

It is teleological, because there are two options in interpreting this sentence:

A human body tries to build a foot at the end of the leg.

1. The empirical one, which, as you should know, is a concrete observation of what is going on. You’d rephrase the sentence as:

This person has no foot at the end of their leg. Typically, humans have feet at the end of their leg.

Using this interpretation, it would be ridiculous to define a human empiricaly around the fact that they are “supposed” to have feet at the end of their leg, since “supposed” is not empirical (neither is organized, which implies a plan and therefore a bias). You can find a trend, but not a “supposed”. You can try to define it empiricaly, by saying “typicaly”, but that implies other possibilities, as it should do. Finaly, you can try by simply ignoring it by saying “humans have feet at the end of their legs”, but you’d just be plain wrong, since there are examples contradicting you. Remember, right now we are using terms in order to explain something more concrete.

2. The human body actually tries to make a foot at the end of the leg -> same teleological argument as I explained in my previous reply.

The “stable, iherited body plan” is still a teleological sentence lmfao. You’re basically disaproving my argument on the basis of it not being teleological.

Since you’re arguing for teleology, I suppose that you have a fickle understanding of evolutionary biology. Tne human body doesn’t “try to do something”. It either doesn’t or it does. Ascribing a certain attempt or will to the body is a shorthand, like i’ve said several times, but it is not accurately depecting the experience.

As a thought exercise, can you describe your definition of sex without using teleological language? But then again, your reply shows a lack of understanding on what teleology is, so if you reply with anothe misunderstanding of the concept, I’ll just move on from this.

You also stated that you’re autistic in your bio. As someone that is also autistic, you might want to reflect if you’re actually arguing for science, or rather for a more rigid worldview that you want to stay the same. This argument of yours seems repetitive and circular, so I’d suggest reflecting on

No it is still not empirical. The definition of sex is difficult to set in stone, and yours fails to argue for itself on the basis of a result that is just a stretch of the empirical truth. In fact, you saying that it is a consensus in the field of biology when a notable amount of biologists argue against this is very far-fetched.

Again, take someone with Swyer syndrome that don’t have the ability to produce any large gametes. By saying it is “organized around the production of large gametes”, you are extending that empirical fact related to that person, and ascribing them an alternate reality where there can produce large gametes. You’re defining someone around something that they cannot do.

Concretely, this means that sex is way more complicated than just “revolving around the production of gametes”. I am not an expert in biology, and will not be able to tell you exactly what it is without not considering all of the edge-cases of it’s definition. But there are too many contradictions with saying that it’s binary because XYZ.

I am of the opinion that our society’s obsession with figuring out someone’s sex, if it is assigned by birth by a doctor, determined by an onlooker, etc. is in it of itself harmful. Not that there’s anything wrong with knowing about your body, but the way it’s been morphed into these essential classes is harmful for those that defy said class, intentionally or not.

That said, I hope you look at more examples of teleology in biology. In fact, what I explained should be understandable if you have a look at the wikipedia article. If you do not mean “organized around” in a teleological sense, then what do you mean? Also, you failed to address my previous analogies in your response. If it’s because you feel like it’s fallacious, or that it’s simply wrong, then why not respond accordingly? I’m starting to suspect the use of AI…

Edit: I think this is the last piece of effort I’ll put into this, because it gets obvious up to a point. Your argument falls into this category of teleological arguments:

[…] they are appropriate “in reference to structures anatomically and physiologically designed to perform a certain function.”

Taken from the wikipedia page. This is a teleological sentence, but it is used to explain a concept, not actually what is going on. No one actually designed said functions. If you want to know more, read the section on Irreducible teleology in the wikipedia article, which addresses the limitations of getting rid of teleology completely and how to go about it, whilst navigating things empirically.

Except this isn’t “biology being real”. It’s non empirical. If you abide by the theory of evolution (which I assume you do), then you should be against teleology in biology, since there is no such thing, concretely, as a “body that’s supposed to do things”. It’s just layman speech to inform those that aren’t that far in biology (or to shorten things, since you assume your college knows anyway) “this is one of the possible things that a being (or its system) does in order to survive/reproduce”, not that it is necessary. To imply that it’s necessary would be to imply that nature has a will, or that there is some sort of supernatural will Teleology in biology

Edit: clearing things up and syntax

The issue with your argument is that you’re ascribing a simple explanation of how biology works to the actual reality of things. When doctors or evolutionary biologist say that something was “supposed to be done”, in the context of biology, they usually mean “this is what the being (as in, its system) does for the possible outcome of reproduction or survival, but there are other possibilities”, because it is implied that what they say is to be interpreted as something that comes with the intention of being empirical. They don’t actually mean that this is what is supposed to be done. It’s a way for people to understand it more simply.

You should read the Wikipedia article on Teleology in biology. But this paragraph is the most central part of the argument against your point. Teleology means a certain “goal-oriented”-ness.

Statements which imply that nature has goals, for example where a species is said to do something “in order to” achieve survival, appear teleological, and therefore invalid to evolutionary biologists. It is however usually possible to rewrite such sentences to avoid the apparent teleology. Some biology courses have incorporated exercises requiring students to rephrase such sentences so that they do not read teleologically. Nevertheless, biologists still frequently write in a way which can be read as implying teleology, even though that is not their intention.

As an example, take a meteorologist providing forecast for tomorrow’s weather. With whatever means they collected data, they assert: “it will rain tomorrow”. Tomorrow comes, and it is sunnier than ever. Scientifically speaking, the meteorologist cannot say “the atmosphere failed to make it rain, even though it tried to”. If this seems absurd, it’s because it is. In that case, the meteorologist is supposed to adapt their model into something that more accurately reflects the data given.

The problem is even more visible once you take the example of an intersex person, born with XY chromosomes, but with a uterus (Swyer’s Syndrome). One person could base themselves on the XY chromosomes to say that the person was “supposed to produce small gametes”, as you put it. Another person could base themselves on the fact that (with medical intervention) the person can produce large gametes, therefore, that the person was “supposed to produce large gametes”. Either answer is wrong, since the body isn’t actually “supposed” to do something. It just does what it does, regardless of what you think it is supposed to do. The correct thing to do would be to say: “They aren’t supposed to do something. If our model is to be empirical, it should be supposed to reflect what is actually going on with their body, not ascribe a will to it. We should rethink how we see the definition of sex”

Edit: Clarifications

Great analogy! Stealing it…

Bandcamp, but also get to know the artist behind the music. Maybe follow their socials and see if they have other friends that publish music.

No like I mean there are parts that don’t make sense. This goes way past style.

Like what was your friend trying to do here? It doesn’t even look like it was randomly erased

And this part. It looks like a mistake in coloring. Is it details in the ground or part of the roots? Nothing else in the art seems to be trying to do that, so it doesn’t seem intentional

Well it does look ai generated. A lot of parts just don’t make any sense, mostly in the roots.

Always the people with the money that know what they’re talking about/s

Tf does jewish app even mean???

Yeah Kris has elite game it’s called Deltarune

The reason it’s like that is because if people want to use the same machine, but store different sizes of information (ex someone wants to store 5 bits, while another wants to store 24), 2^n is the best way to fetch that information quickly.

For example, let’s say you have a memory that has as many sets as you want, but with only one bit in each set. I store information that is 2 bits of size. I can split the 2 bit information into two and store each bit in a set that’s one index appart. So if I wanted to read the information, I’d just read 0 and 1, 10 and 11, 100 and 101. This follows a rather simple pattern, where the leftmost bit to the one before the rightmost is the index of each information packet, and the rightmost just signals if it’s the first or the last bit of the packet.

For example, if I have 11 01, the memory would look a bit like this:

00: 1

01: 1

10: 0

11: 1

If I want to get the first packet , I just have to ask: what data has the leftmost bit to 0? We can add as many more information as we want, and it would still follow.

If you were to send information with 3 bits of size, or any that isn’t a power of 2, you wouldn’t get an easy adressing pattern. If I were to send, for example, 101 110, I would get something like this:

000: 1

001: 0

010: 1

011: 1

100: 1

101: 0

There is no pattern I can take out of the indexing of the memory to access the information. Where when I send an information that is 2 bits of size, I can take n-1 bits from the left and index it, I can’t do that for information that isn’t sent at 2^n (3, 5, 10, etc.)

The sollution, of course, would be to have the memory sets be of size 3, but we’d run into the same “problem” if the information received is not base 3. Heck, we’d run into another problem that is similar, but is more hidden in the sets themselves rather than the indexing.

Let’s say we want to put information that is 1 bit lenght in memory that has infinite sets that are 3 bits of length, and i put in 1 0 1 1

0: 101

1: 001

I can’t easily put in a pattern either. If I want to get the second information ( index 1), I would have to do 1 / 3 to check if it goes in the first or second memory adress, then, i would have to do 1 % 3 to check what position it’s at. If I wanted to get the 4th information (index 3), for example, I would get 3 / 3 = 1, then 3 % 3 = 0, so second set, index 0. Granted, both operations are done in one division operation, but it’s still slower than just shifting bits.

One could also just skip one bit if they receive 1 bit information with 3 bit sized sets. The memory would then look like this:

0: 001

1: 101

You could then just access the nth information by taking the leftmost bits for the index of the memory, then the right most bit to see if you should take the first or the third bit. For example, I want to take the 4th information (third index, 11). 1, the left bit, is the index of the set, and 1, the right one, says we need to take the 3rd bit.

This is better, but then we’d need to calculate how much space is given for different sizes of information. Four bits would have 2, 5 bits would have 1, 1 bit has 1. The formula here would indicate 3 - (n % 3) bits. That needs another modulo for it, so while accessing it is less of a problem, determining what space it needs requires another weird computation.

A final example, putting 1 bit information in two bit sized sets gives us this ( with the same input as before )

0: 01

1: 11

The third bit (index 10) can be accessed by taking set 1 (leftmost bits) at the position 1 (rightmost bit), which does give us the bit 1, the third bit of 1011.

Now if we were to store information of size 3, we’d have to use the same technique as with storing 2 bits in 3 bits: adding spaces.

Let’s say we want to store 011 101 in 2 bit sized sets:

00: 01

01: 01

10: 10

11: 01

To determine the numbers of space, we have to do 3 % 2, but the operation % 2 is very easy to do for computers, since you just take the last bit (the rule follows for % 2^n: you take the last n bits). Next, if I want to access the second information (index 1), I just mutliply the index by 2 (easy to do for computers, since it’s just a bit shift), then take the current block and the block right after it. So 10 and 11, which give me 101.

Keep in mind, this is only for machines that are made to use, as optimally as possible, any information at any bit sizes. If you have only 5 bit size information, there is no use for you to stick to a 2^n size, as you figured.

This explanation was also me just pulling out counter-examples on the fly, and I’m not in the best of states, so if there are passages that seem a bit weird or don’t explain things very well, please let me know.

Edit: formating

Bunni bunni bunni bunni bunni

I’m just saying: there’s a new train system in my city and they could just use one of the golfs near where i live to turn it into a station. I could then walk to take the train and go to school.

They have 3 golfs. One less wouldn’t be much, right?

Seeing the word “luckshit” on Lemmy was a jumpscare

Edit: luckchromatic i guess, but my point still stands

It makes me sick that I ever gave money to these bastards

The wash for the fire is genius

I have a neurodivergent cousin who’s a kid. When they get sick, they can’t stop themselves from coughing, because to them, coughing brings a little relief. They cough really loudly though, and their parent don’t really understand that to the kid, it doesn’t really matter how loud they cough because it feels unbearable.

I recommended cough drops (but be warned, don’t give too many to kids), but another thing I noticed is that when we engaged in their special interest (minecraft), they would cough less. I think that it was because they were too focused on something.

A little tangeant, but since you need multiple copies of minecraft to play together I just installed Luanti 😉

12 gang? 🥹

Mine! I recently started it. I currently only play games and draw: https://peertube.wtf/c/binette_streams/videos