Differences in Sex Development (aka "intersex")

[Lplus]

Which comments about karyotyping? Show your work. Think you need to pay a bit more attention to what I'm saying.

My suggestion to use karyotypes in place of sex on passports and similar documents - if that's what you were referring to; not at all a case of "sarcasm" - was to "cut the Gordian Knot", to get off the horns of a dilemma caused by a conflict between, on the one hand, the biological definitions - which, mirabile dictu, have a great deal of relevance and utility in - zounds and gadzooks - actual biology and, on the other hand, the structure-absent-function definitions of Hilton and Company, of various so-called social scientists, which are largely useless and cause any number of quite serious conflicts and inconsistencies in actual biology.

There you go, I just knew you could work out what I meant, you just missed the earlier occasion where you said it worked for you. Maybe that occasion was sarcasm.

Tell that to the editors of Lexico, OED, the Journals of Theoretical Biology and Molecular Human Reproduction, and vast non-benighted swaths of the biological community that the biological definitions are "useless in the real world" ...

They aren't part of the real world.

 

[Steersman]

I'm on holiday. I'd sworn off this pointless nonsense for the duration, but this is getting ridiculous.

I thought you were retired - every day is a holiday.

Well yes, he does. Obviously (unless there's something else wrong with him). He has sperm with which a female may be fertilised if he has the vasectomy reversed, or if he undergoes a procedure to extract sperm directly from the testes which can then be used for artificial insemination. That can be done at any time.

You might note the definition for sex and the centrality of "reproductive function". You think vasectomees have any of that?

sex (noun): Either of the two main categories (male and female) into which humans and most other living things are divided on the basis of their reproductive functions.

https://www.lexico.com/definition/sex

You might note my earlier conjecture as to what Hilton might replace that by ...

Just as Ramon needs to get up and have the vasectomy reversed.

Then he gets to rejoin the congregation of the Lord males ...

Easy, peasy.

<snip>

Christ on a bike, does anyone in the entire world think this is what the words male and female mean to anyone? If we actually needed words for these concepts we should be coining new ones, because male and female are already taken. However, I can see no need or indeed demand for words to denote such difficult-to-define and difficult to verify organisms.

You too may wish to read that Regenmortel article - a suggestion that is likely to fall on deaf ears. But your "definition" is little more than one of "family resemblances", a "polythetic category", a spectrum:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure...n-the-case-of-8-individuals-18_fig1_309889266

https://www.researchgate.net/public...tes_on_definitions_and_names_of_virus_species

You - and PZ, and Hilton, and ...

It's not even technically correct. There isn't a single actual biologist (as opposed to philosophers playing at biology) who would use Steersman's definition in a technical sense. It's all based on a misunderstanding/misinterpretation.

Really? No true Scotsmen, eh?

You may wish to take a gander at a post by Australian feminist "philosopher" Holly Lawford-Smith at Medium - where she was apparently defenestrated for "offending" the transloonie tribe - on that point:

Whenever you chat to a biologist about what they understand ‘sex’ to be – and I have chatted to a few – they tend to talk about large and small gametes. Human sexual reproduction proceeds through the combination of sex cells of two different sizes (this is known as anisogamy): small gametes (sperm) and large gametes (ova). Males produce sperm, and females produce eggs. Almost no definitions that we give in philosophy have a single necessary condition, but sex is one of the few instances where such a definition works well. If a human individual produces sperm then he’s male, and if a human individual produces ova then she’s female. This is a definition that researchers in many different academic disciplines take as foundational to their work.

https://web.archive.org/web/2019050...lis/is-it-possible-to-change-sex-8d863ce7fca2

ETA. Someone (who appears to be having a laugh) doesn't realise that freemartinism doesn't occur in horses.

Another no true Scotsman?

PZ is not noted for his consistency or intellectual honesty or even biological knowledge.

 

[d4m10n]

If neither male nor female then what you're saying is that sex is spectrum.

Welcome to the thread. If you're going to make inferences like this, it might be helpful to search through the back catalog first.

IF we define the sexes such that producing gametes of either of two types are the "necessary and sufficient conditions" for sex category membership...

I think you'll find that people don't actually define the two sexes so as to require "producing gametes" in the present tense, since they keep referring to male infants and post-menopausal females, rather than pre-males and post-females. It might make more sense for you to adjust definitions to fit actual usage, as dictionary compilers do, instead of insisting you're the only one who understands what these words are intended to convey.

 

[Steersman]

There you go, I just knew you could work out what I meant, you just missed the earlier occasion where you said it worked for you. Maybe that occasion was sarcasm.

Show your work. I probably said that it worked for me as criteria for adjudicating competing claims to access various venues like toilets, change-rooms, and sports leagues.

They aren't part of the real world.

 

[Steersman]

Welcome to the thread. If you're going to make inferences like this, it might be helpful to search through the back catalog first.

So what? You're blathering or talking out of both sides of your mouth.

If intersex are neither male nor female but still have a sex then, ipso facto, sex is a spectrum.

 

[d4m10n]

If intersex are neither male nor female but still have a sex then, ipso facto, sex is a spectrum.

And if they don't have a sex?

 

[theprestige]

So what? You're blathering or talking out of both sides of your mouth.

If intersex are neither male nor female but still have a sex then, ipso facto, sex is a spectrum.

How can you have a spectrum with three discrete points and no continuum between them?

 

[Steersman]

And if they don't have a sex?

Then I guess they're sexLESS ...

sexless (adjective): Neither male nor female.

https://www.lexico.com/definition/sexless

 

[Myriad]

"That's not a Scotsman, it's Chinese. And female. And three years old. And a dog."

"Really? No true Scotsmen, eh? "

 

[Steersman]

How can you have a spectrum with three discrete points and no continuum between them?

There doesn't have to been any such "continuum"; see "Discrete spectrum":

A physical quantity is said to have a discrete spectrum if it takes only distinct values, with gaps between one value and the next.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrete_spectrum

Pretty much the whole of my earlier argument with karyotypes constituting such a spectrum; see my joint-probability distribution by karyotype and heights.

All you need for such a spectrum is two end points and one or more in between those:

spectrum (noun): Used to classify something in terms of its position on a scale between two extreme points.

https://www.lexico.com/definition/spectrum

If you only have two points then you have a binary, 1 or more in between then you have a spectrum, discrete or continuous.

 

[d4m10n]

For there to be a spectrum you need a variable you are measuring, e.g. wavelength.

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[Steersman]

For there to be a spectrum you need a variable you are measuring, e.g. wavelength.

Nope.

spectrum (noun): 1.1 (the spectrum) The entire range of wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation.

https://www.lexico.com/definition/spectrum

range (noun): A set of different things of the same general type.

https://www.lexico.com/definition/range

"range" and "spectrum" are more or less synonymous; being able to order those "different things" by some common quantifiable property is NOT a necessary property of either term.

One can have a set of "different things" - of the "thing" type - that have nothing in common that might provide an intrinsic order. They're "artificial kinds" as opposed to "natural kinds":

Groupings that are artificial or arbitrary are not natural; they are invented or imposed on nature. Natural kinds, on the other hand, are not invented, and many assume that scientific investigations should discover them.

https://iep.utm.edu/nat-kind/

For example, a set - the "thingy" set - of, say, an apple, a book, a clown suit, and a picture (say of a pipe)

Nothing in common, that's immediately evident but still an order imposed by their position in the set from first to last such that we can say that "clown suit" > "book".

A spectrum, a range.

 

[theprestige]

There doesn't have to been any such "continuum"; see "Discrete spectrum":



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discrete_spectrum

Sex in humans isn't a physical quantity, though.

 

[Steersman]

Sex in humans isn't a physical quantity, though.

Yes, quite agree.

Classes and categories are generally just abstractions, a perception that different things have properties in common. The only thing that's "really real" are the properties that determine category membership; note the "regarded", i.e., "perceived":

category (noun): A class or division of people or things regarded as having particular shared characteristics.

https://www.lexico.com/definition/category

And in the case of the sexes - at least as they're sensibly and logically defined by most biologists worth their salt - the "shared properties" that constitute "necessary and sufficient conditions" for category membership are "produces (habitually) ova" and "produces (habitually) sperm".

Those properties are quite real, but the categories themselves - "male" and "female" - are just abstractions that many people insist on turning into real things - the "sin", the logical fallacy of reification. Nobody HAS a "female" or a "male" - I defy anyone to measure the volume and size of their sexes, locate them so many inches to the east and south of their kidneys.

You might check out that Regenmortel essay which elaborates on those concepts in some detail, the abstract and section 2 in particular:

Abstract:

Whereas monothetic classes are defined by one or a few properties that are both necessary and sufficient for membership in the class, polythetic classes are defined by a variable set of statistically covariant properties, none of which is a defining property necessarily present in every member of the class.

2. The logic of hierarchical virus classification

The root of the word classification is class, a term that refers to all the classes of viruses or organisms that have concrete objects as their members. Every membership condition determines a class and since whatever is said about a thing ascribes a property to it, properties and classes are related entities (Quine 1990: 22–24). ....
Class membership is the logical relation that makes it possible to establish a bridge between two logical categories, namely an abstract class or taxon which is a mental construct and its concrete members that are objects located in space and time.

https://www.researchgate.net/public...tes_on_definitions_and_names_of_virus_species

That the sexes or other categories are only "mental constructs" does not mean that we can't order - one way or another - the quite tangible properties that determine which "concrete members" are in one category or another - binary, or spectrum.

But see Regenmortel's Figure 1 for a nice illustration of the differences between polythetic and monothetic categories:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure...n-the-case-of-8-individuals-18_fig1_309889266

 

[d4m10n]

"range" and "spectrum" are more or less synonymous; being able to order those "different things" by some common quantifiable property is NOT a necessary property of either term.

Okay, so a qualitative spectrum which cannot be plotted out with an underlying variable the way wavelengths are.

I think you pasted in the wrong defintion from lexico, though, since the range of EM wavelengths is very much quantifiable. You might well consider defintion 2.


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[Emily's Cat]

As for your, "you, all by your lonesome, have declared to not have a sex", you may wish to try reading up on the concept of "necessary and sufficient conditions"

I'm extremely familiar with the concept of necessary and sufficient conditions. I'm quite confident that I have a better understanding of it than you do. In fact, I've explicitly addressed your arguments from that perspective a number of times, which you seem to have ignored. Specifically... the active production of a specific gamete is a SUFFICIENT condition to be categorized as either male or female... but it is NOT a NECESSARY condition. One can be male while not actively producing sperm. One cannot be a fertile male without actively producing sperm, but one can still be male.

The NECESSARY condition is the presence of the anatomical organs associated with the production of gametes.

I've made several good faith arguments and analogies attempting to address your misunderstandings. So far, you've either completely ignored those posts... or you've responded with condescension and arrogance even when the topic is outside of your area of expertise and well inside mine.

 

[bruto]

A discrete spectrum: motor vehicles, perhaps? Some have two wheels, some have three, some four, some 6 and so on, up past 18 for the big ones. But I think you will wait a long time for one with seven and a half wheels to roll by.

 

[Emily's Cat]

IF we define the sexes such that producing gametes of either of two types are the "necessary and sufficient conditions" for sex category membership...

You can stop right there. We don't. We do NOT define sexes that way. Your premise is fatally flawed, and thus it is rejected.

 

[Emily's Cat]

If intersex are neither male nor female but still have a sex then, ipso facto, sex is a spectrum.

You cannot have a spectrum of categorical variables. In order to have a spectrum, the variable under consideration must be ordinal.

 

[Emily's Cat]

There doesn't have to been any such "continuum"; see "Discrete spectrum"

A discrete spectrum still requires the variable under consideration to be ordinal.