Yes, who asks scientists about science questions? Proudly idiotic politicians are the only people who can be trusted as educators.
They're students, and he's a Black professor. It doesn't take much.
Do you agree with the professor about male and female skeletons being indistinguishable?
Yes. Or at least, I agree with his actual statement, which you are of course misquoting.
Well, I heard her say 100 years from now, not 2000 and based on the point she was making, it was implied in her statement that the male and female skeletons were fully intact, and that she WAS referring to biological sex and not gender.Yes. You can make an educated guess about biological sex if enough diagnostically relevant remains are present, but there's no way to derive any knowledge about cultural categorizations of gender or gender identity from material remains alone. The question posed was whether you could tell the difference between a man and a woman two thousand years from now. No, you could not do so with certainty, and if they belonged to a culture that lacked a written record, your guess would be even less accurate as you would have no basis for hypothesizing how that culture regarded gender differences at all, let alone how those individuals were regarded when they were alive. This would be true for an anthropologist now, looking at the past. But since in this case the question is about a future anthropologist, they would presumably have access to a plurality of knowledge about our strategies for defining gender, and as such they would be well aware that many of our modern day cultures acknowledge a gender trinary and the possibility of gender transition, up to and including a fair number of surgeries and therapies that would affect several of those diagnostic criteria. Ergo, they would know for certain that their data could only lead them to a guess, of uncertain probability.
I love how she failed to so much as correctly define anthropology as a field, yet believes herself to be more expert in the subject than her interlocutor!
Well, if she's going to ask a scientist questions and mock them for their responses, she'd better learn to say what she means rather than "implying" it. And the answer only changes so much, in any case, as the sexing of a skeleton always requires guesswork. If you had a perfect specimen, you would certainly be able to state chromosomal sex with certainty as you would be able to sequence their genome, placing the individual within the six or eight (not two) commonly encountered patterns. You would also be able to make a guess of fairly high but not certain probability about hormonal and anatomical sex, and that probability would not be the same for all individuals or specimens. But that would not tell you whether someone socially identified as "a man", or "a woman", or some other term, nor whether they did so throughout their entire life. That's a question of cultural categorization, psychological conviction, and social interaction, so a skeleton alone cannot answer it for you.Well, I heard her say 100 years from now, not 2000 and based on the point she was making, it was implied in her statement that the male and female skeletons were fully intact, and that she WAS referring to biological sex and not gender.Yes. You can make an educated guess about biological sex if enough diagnostically relevant remains are present, but there's no way to derive any knowledge about cultural categorizations of gender or gender identity from material remains alone. The question posed was whether you could tell the difference between a man and a woman two thousand years from now. No, you could not do so with certainty, and if they belonged to a culture that lacked a written record, your guess would be even less accurate as you would have no basis for hypothesizing how that culture regarded gender differences at all, let alone how those individuals were regarded when they were alive. This would be true for an anthropologist now, looking at the past. But since in this case the question is about a future anthropologist, they would presumably have access to a plurality of knowledge about our strategies for defining gender, and as such they would be well aware that many of our modern day cultures acknowledge a gender trinary and the possibility of gender transition, up to and including a fair number of surgeries and therapies that would affect several of those diagnostic criteria. Ergo, they would know for certain that their data could only lead them to a guess, of uncertain probability.
I love how she failed to so much as correctly define anthropology as a field, yet believes herself to be more expert in the subject than her interlocutor!
So, apparently there are chemical methods involving tracking proteins that end up in the teeth.Yes. Or at least, I agree with his actual statement, which you are of course misquoting.
You can make an educated guess about biological sex if enough diagnostically relevant remains are present, but there's no way to derive any knowledge about cultural categorizations of gender or gender identity from material remains alone. The question posed was whether you could tell the difference between a man and a woman two thousand years from now. No, you could not do so with certainty, and if they belonged to a culture that lacked a written record, your guess would be even less accurate as you would have no basis for hypothesizing how that culture regarded gender differences at all, let alone how those individuals were regarded when they were alive. This would be true for an anthropologist now, looking at the past in most locations at that time distance. But since in this case the question is about a future anthropologist, they would presumably have access to a plurality of written and video knowledge about our culture's strategies for defining gender, and as such they would be well aware that many of our modern day cultures and social classes acknowledge a gender trinary and the possibility of gender transition, up to and including a fair number of surgeries and therapies that would affect several of those diagnostic criteria. Ergo, they would know for certain that their data could only ever lead them to a guess, of uncertain probability, even they had a very strong guess about biological sex, which is also not always the case. This is not unusual, in the real sciences, the possibility of uncertainty.
I love how she failed to so much as correctly define anthropology as a field, yet believes herself to be more expert in the subject than her interlocutor!
In other words, hormonal sex as I describe in the post above. There are a few clever ways of trying to guess at this, actually. For instance, if someone has given birth, they must have been hormonally female at birth as far as we know, and experience of pregnancy and birth often leaves quite a few clues on the skeleton. You may laugh - students often do - but this is often a means by which remains are sexed if no cranium is extant and pubic anatomy is otherwise indeterminate.
Oh, I'm not laughing at all. I'm just pointing out that 100% confidence of "female" CAN be ascertained from SOME skeletons, but often not from the actual shape of the bones, and as mentioned, that says nothing of whether they were a man or woman.
Oh ffs, scientists are not infallible. It really is a religion for you isn’t it? We must not question the high priests who bestow knowledge upon us with their immutable wisdom. Keep your mask on buddy.
No one said that they were. But that doesn't make pointed and purposeful ignorance any more desirable a path. If you laugh at the very idea of encountering professional expertise, the results of that attitude will eventually show quite plainly as more advanced nations eclipse and leave this yours behind.
So, between scientists, jackasses sitting on their couch, and jackasses sitting in congress do you think is the most.appropriate group to ask about the behavior of reality on a technical level?
Your snotty response implied. Ooooh we can’t question it because a “scientist” said so. Piss off.
Because a scientist said, you are more than permitted to question it. Science is a philosophy entirely contingent on asking questions.
The issue is that TSwizzle wants to question science without using science at all.
How did you arrive at that conclusion? Given the facts you introduced, and bearing in mind that "a man and a woman" does not mean "persons who have not undergone puberty", and bearing in mind that intersex people are rare, and bearing in mind that the question said "two humans", not "partial remains of two humans with the pelvises missing" it appears the correct answer would be something along the lines of "yes, with 99%+ probability of being right." It seems you are calling that answer "no". Why? Are you assuming the question contained an implicit "with 100% certainty" qualifier?
Very likely. Specifically, Professor Yearwood's dogma.
If in fact the reason Professor Yearwood answered as he did was because he sincerely took the "a man and a woman" bit to mean that Gaines was asking him whether an archaeologist digging up two human skeletons could tell which person had identified as a man and which had identified as a woman, or was asking him whether the archaeologist could tell whether the humans would have been categorized by some unknown remote illiterate culture as man or woman, then Yearwood is an even more complete idiot than the transcript suggests he is. Gaines was plainly not asking him a question about gender identity or cultural gender. If those are what "man" and "woman" mean to Yearwood, well, one of the risks you run when you choose to train yourself to speak Humpty Dumpty instead of English is that you will make laughably idiotic misinterpretations of the words of people who are not initiates into your subculture's private language, and who therefore address you in plain English.
Let's go over it point by point:
Then she's illiterate on gender studies, as are you.
