{"id":35528,"date":"2022-03-19T20:42:31","date_gmt":"2022-03-20T01:42:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=35528"},"modified":"2022-03-19T20:42:31","modified_gmt":"2022-03-20T01:42:31","slug":"precision-counts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2022\/03\/19\/precision-counts\/","title":{"rendered":"Precision Counts"},"content":{"rendered":"

In NewScientist<\/strong><\/em> (12 March 2022, paywall), Lucy Cooke recounts<\/a> the natural history of female animals sleeping around, and then misinterprets the bigger picture:<\/p>\n

When Patricia Gowaty began doing DNA paternity tests on songbird eggs in 1984, she discovered that each nest frequently contained multiple fathers, despite the apparent monogamy of their parents.<\/p>\n

Members of the male ornithological establishment responded by insisting the females had been \u201craped\u201d. But radio trackers subsequently revealed females actively seeking sex with neighbouring cocks. Since then, a polyandry revolution has revealed that multiple mating is the norm for females, from lions to lizards. The reason is quite obvious: don\u2019t put all your eggs in one basket \u2013 greater genetic diversity means healthier offspring.<\/p>\n

Gowaty, like me, has never tried to hide her politics. She believes in equal representation of both sexes. But, as Darwin\u2019s Victorian values show us, science is always political. A feminist perspective is urgently needed to topple centuries of androcentrism and rebrand female sexual agency, in lionesses or songbirds, from unexpected to a winning maternal strategy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Not political<\/em>, but culturally biased<\/strong>. The intellectual error of projection, of anthropomorphism, is a well-known problem in science, from physics to natural history, by which I mean the study of animals’ social structures. Early scientists grew up in societies in which females were nominally monogamous. This is a cultural tradition. They made the mistake of applying cultural mores to turtles, and that just doesn’t fly.<\/p>\n

Politics is about governance. Science is about reality, wherever that may lead. Her ornithologists were using bad assumptions. But to call it politics is just wrong.<\/p>\n

But I think what we’re seeing here is the influence of the far-left’s view that everything<\/em> is politics, particularly if someone’s feeling offended by it. Call it politics, turn the weapons du jour<\/em> upon all those who happen to hold such a view, and pull the trigger.<\/p>\n

It’s crude, it’s intellectual bullying, and, unlike in many areas, it doesn’t really get the job done. Science depends on studying reality and coming to conclusions based on evidence, not imposing a conclusion and then twisting the evidence to match. That disastrous approach has been tried a time or two before, most notably by Soviet scientist Lysenko<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Call it misapplication of cultural mores and be done with it. Call it politics and end up paying for that mistake for decades.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In NewScientist (12 March 2022, paywall), Lucy Cooke recounts the natural history of female animals sleeping around, and then misinterprets the bigger picture: When Patricia Gowaty began doing DNA paternity tests on songbird eggs in 1984, she discovered that each nest frequently contained multiple fathers, despite the apparent monogamy of \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35528"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35529,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35528\/revisions\/35529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}