Science Question

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Stu
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Science Question

Post by Stu »

My wife and I have a couple of friends who are both scientists; Ian is a physicist and Mary is a biologist.

The other evening, we were conversing over a glass of wine when Mary told us her daughter believed that a person's sex was determined by the child themselves when they were able to articulate their decision for themselves. Being scientists, they both disagreed. Mary said that a child's sex was determined at conception with the passing of the sex chromosome. Ian had a different view, saying that sex was determined the first time the child was actually seen, either at the ultrasound scan or at the moment of birth.

I don't agree with the daughter as I think she is speaking from an ideological rather than scientific perspective. As for which of her parents is correct - I confess my ignorance.
rode_kater
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Re: Science Question

Post by rode_kater »

This is more a philosophy question, since really it's about "does something exist before you know of its existance?". Does a foetus have a biological sex before anyone observes it? There are lots of philosophical debates you can have here, there is no one right answer.

This is closely related to "is the biological sex of the foetus an objective truth, or is it subjective?". I would argue nature doesn't care about sex and chromosomes and the fact we give them labels makes the concept subjective. Sure, there is an intersubjective classification where for ~99% of people we'd agree on what their biological sex is upon close examination. And in particular, we make the determination without examining the chromosomes, so the chromosomes are not relevant for the normal person when determining sex. But there are individuals which defy clear classification and just because we don't agree, doesn't mean they don't exist or they should be treated differently because of that. They didn't choose their condition.

I find it interesting you describe the daughter a being ideological, because clearly they didn't get it from their parents. It also happens to be the position that respects the individual the most. If that's what the next generation thinks, then that's what it will be be, because we'll all die off before them.
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Re: Science Question

Post by ScotL »

rode_kater wrote: Thu Jun 22, 2023 9:39 am I would argue nature doesn't care about sex and chromosomes and the fact we give them labels makes the concept subjective.
Hundred percent agree with your statement “we give them labels that makes the concept subjective”

However, I would argue sex versus gender are two different concepts. There’s biological sex ie which chromosomes are in the genome. Biological sex is not as simple as male versus female since there are people with multiple sex chromosomes. As a biologist, sex is important for reproduction concepts even though asexual reproduction does exist.

Gender is more difficult to define so I asked Oxford and got a vague answer that feels like it starts old school but adds a caveat at the end in reaction to some current schools of thought. Like two scholars couldn’t agree so they put both definitions together.

Gender: “the male sex or the female sex, especially when considered with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones, or one of a range of other identities that do not correspond to established ideas of male and female.” In my opinion, gender is harder to define right now because we are all re-establishing what everyone agrees are the “established ideas of male and female.” And we know everyone will not agree with everyone so it’s an impossible task.

I still have yet to hear an appropriate definition for masculinity and femininity whose defined characteristics can’t be applied to all people. Everyone can be strong in their own way and everyone has things they nurture. Some just have more of one and less of the other but where’s the threshold that gets crossed to absolutely and undeniably label someone one of two choices? In my opinion, these thresholds do not exist. Think shades of gray not black versus white.

I believe it used to be “easier” on society when sex always corresponded to the “established ideas of male and female” due to society’s rigid gender norms that disregarded real life where people do not exist as purely male or purely female. And I do not believe this is a new concept as we’ve always had “tomboys” and “sissies” around us. I believe we talk about this more now because society’s rigid gender norms are being challenged and name calling less and less intimidates people who don’t fit Oxford’s definition of society’s “established ideas of male and female.”

Note: I am only answering the question posed to the cafe. Please do not criticize me for simply answering a member’s posed question.
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Re: Science Question

Post by rode_kater »

ScotL wrote: Thu Jun 22, 2023 10:25 am Gender is more difficult to define so I asked Oxford and got a vague answer that feels like it starts old school but adds a caveat at the end in reaction to some current schools of thought. Like two scholars couldn’t agree so they put both definitions together.
What makes it difficult is that our brains do not work from definitions, they work from archetypes. The classic example is trying to define a chair, you can't make a definition that covers everything chair-like, but everyone knows a chair when they see one. So we have an archetype "male" and an archetype "female" and when looking at someone your brain classifies as one or the other or figures it's an unknown category (leading to the surprise effect, unless it's common enough to form a new known category).

So, you can't make a definition of "male" and "female", and yet you know it when you see it.

The archetypes are created by experience of what is seen in the real world. What happening now is that as people see more men in skirts on TV that the archetype in their brains is being expanded to cover this possibility, so over time it will become less noticable. And less double-takes. There will always be edge cases where people disagree on where the boundary lies, but in my opinion the boundary is moving in our favour.

I would argue that what those celebrities are doing does help, because it's expanding the archetype in the brains of many many people without them necessarily being aware of it. But we have to do the legwork (pun intended) to cement it in.
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Re: Science Question

Post by denimini »

This has probably been thrashed out in other threads. A person's sex is biologically determined at fertilisation and pronounced at birth (or before) except for the rare intersex variant where it is not so clear. Gender is a personal construct of how one wishes to portray themselves, generally coinciding with a person's sex in most cultures, but becoming more flexible these days.
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Stu
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Re: Science Question

Post by Stu »

denimini wrote: Thu Jun 22, 2023 12:01 pm A person's sex is biologically determined at fertilisation and pronounced at birth (or before)
OK - that's what the biologist says, but the physicist says the physicist says that the child is both male and female at the same time and only becomes one or the other as soon as it is seen - e.g. with an ultrasound, or at birth.

See the issue?
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Re: Science Question

Post by Stu »

While I think we mostly agree that biological sex is a binary and biologically determined, the issue which causes controversy is gender. In my specialism, there are three genders - masculine, feminine and neuter. That's it. But there are other definitions of gender and some of these carry ideological implications and that's a rabbit hole I have no particular wish to explore. The other definition of gender I would agree with is the continuum from hyper-masculinity to hyper-femininity. This is a social/cultural construct, but one which mostly, but not always, has a degree of alignment with biological sex. Examples might include red lipstick or stilettos, the wearing of which has strong biological alignment to being female - while wearing pink or carrying a handbag/purse has almost no such alignment and is 100% cultural.
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Re: Science Question

Post by Coder »

Stu wrote: Thu Jun 22, 2023 12:37 pm
denimini wrote: Thu Jun 22, 2023 12:01 pm A person's sex is biologically determined at fertilisation and pronounced at birth (or before)
OK - that's what the biologist says, but the physicist says the physicist says that the child is both male and female at the same time and only becomes one or the other as soon as it is seen - e.g. with an ultrasound, or at birth.

See the issue?
For someone’s sex, that’s ridiculous. This isn’t quantum theory - there is a physical reality of the DNA and how a body is predisposed to be configured. True, you don’t know the sex, but the reality is whatever the baby is it is going to be whether it is observed or not.
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Re: Science Question

Post by Stu »

Coder wrote: Thu Jun 22, 2023 1:13 pm For someone’s sex, that’s ridiculous. This isn’t quantum theory - there is a physical reality of the DNA and how a body is predisposed to be configured. True, you don’t know the sex, but the reality is whatever the baby is it is going to be whether it is observed or not.
So quantum superposition and collapsing the wave function isn't reality, then?

Crumbs! You might want to explain to Ian that the physics he works with is all wrong. He has been working on super-computers that depend on such ideas.
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Re: Science Question

Post by Coder »

Stu wrote: Thu Jun 22, 2023 1:18 pm
Coder wrote: Thu Jun 22, 2023 1:13 pm For someone’s sex, that’s ridiculous. This isn’t quantum theory - there is a physical reality of the DNA and how a body is predisposed to be configured. True, you don’t know the sex, but the reality is whatever the baby is it is going to be whether it is observed or not.
So quantum superposition and collapsing the wave function isn't reality, then?

Crumbs! You might want to explain to Ian that the physics he works with is all wrong. He has been working on super-computers that depend on such ideas.
I never said any of that - we aren’t talking about subatomic particles. In my book, once the egg is fertilized, the dna structure is set in stone (erm, cells). I think “observation” isn’t at play here since we are talking about the cellular level, and the minute the body starts nurturing the egg/baby it has been observed.
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Re: Science Question

Post by Stu »

Coder wrote: Thu Jun 22, 2023 1:23 pm For someone’s sex, that’s ridiculous. This isn’t quantum theory - there is a physical reality of the DNA and how a body is predisposed to be configured. True, you don’t know the sex, but the reality is whatever the baby is it is going to be whether it is observed or not.
...
we aren’t talking about subatomic particles. In my book, once the egg is fertilized, the dna structure is set in stone (erm, cells). I think “observation” isn’t at play here since we are talking about the cellular level, and the minute the body starts nurturing the egg/baby it has been observed.
What you are saying is intuitively true, but our human intuition may or may not be reliable. If something works in a particular way at the sub-atomic level, then I can't see why it wouldn't also work at the cellular level or at any scale. I am not a physicist, so maybe there are reasons in physics which answer that point that I don't know about, but my experience of living in the "real world" is that laws tend to be consistent regardless of size. Our "common sense" mental model of the world is convenient and is reliable 99.9% of the time, but there are features of reality which might not work the way we think.
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Re: Science Question

Post by Coder »

Stu wrote: Thu Jun 22, 2023 1:44 pm I am not a physicist, so maybe there are reasons in physics which answer that point that I don't know about, but my experience of living in the "real world" is that laws tend to be consistent regardless of size. Our "common sense" mental model of the world is convenient and is reliable 99.9% of the time, but there are features of reality which might not work the way we think.
I'm not one either, but I have a STEM background. I'm pretty sure what we consider the "standard laws of physics", they start to break down once you get to subatomic particles - I don't know what the cutoff is for that size (ie, electrons, quarks, etc...). What was discussed is similar to the "if no one is around, does a tree make a noise when it falls?" This Reddit thread tries to answer this question:

https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/com ... k_down_to/
There is actually a continuum here, not some sharp distinction. Also, there are no two 'sets of rules' that operate at the same time.

Let me elaborate a little: quantum physics completely describes everything (edit: okay, this is too much of a sweeping statement but the question was not about gravity so I felt no need to involve the problems of a quantum theory of gravity) in the entire universe: there is a general consensus that all 'normal'-scale phenomena can be perfectly described in terms of elementary particles and their interactions, using the quantum physical formalism. This is part of a broader philosophical concept called epistemological reductionism, which can be summarized by the statement 'the knowledge of the the whole is the sum of the knowledge of its parts'.

Now, why do we then still use classical mechanics instead of QM when describing everyday systems? Because it's simpler, and under 'normal' circumstances, classical (Newtonian) mechanics is a very accurate approximation of reality. Very briefly, one could say something like: the bigger your system becomes, the better of an approximation classical physics is. There is no single point where CM becomes 'correct' and QM 'stops working'. Describing large (compared to quantum scale) systems in QM formalism is just a really big load of work and wouldn't really give very different results.

But all this does not change the fact that there really is a chance that a ball can end up on the other side of a wall (or another so-called potential barrier) by quantum tunnelling!! The chances are just really really really ridiculously small (say, 10-(101010) or so): the classical approximation which says that the chance is exactly zero is close enough under any normal circumstances to describe whatever we want. But it is really just an approximation, and quantum physics is the only set of rules there is that are truly correct (as far as we know).
So perhaps he's insinuating that quantum theory allows for the possibility of the baby to be either or, but the chances are really small.

I would be interested in hearing his reasoning, but just on the face of how you described it, I'm not convinced. The other thing one would have to accept - is that any biological features that develop at those early stages would have to "pop into existence and pop out of existence" when observed - but I think when we say observed we are talking some kind of physical interaction - whether it be a measurement, touch, etc.... so just going by that, if the egg is in constant contact with the mother's body, it has already been observed so no real change could take place.
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Re: Science Question

Post by rode_kater »

Coder wrote: Thu Jun 22, 2023 1:23 pm I never said any of that - we aren’t talking about subatomic particles. In my book, once the egg is fertilized, the dna structure is set in stone (erm, cells). I think “observation” isn’t at play here since we are talking about the cellular level, and the minute the body starts nurturing the egg/baby it has been observed.
That's why I said it's a philosophical question. Yes, if the world worked the way you suggest then it would be fixed, in a sense. But since you cannot be sure anything exists until you observe it, there no way to prove this. You could all be an elaborate simulation that exists all for my benefit, there's no way to know.

Ergo, you have a choice how you want to interpret it, and I find the "biological sex isn't defined until it's observed" perfectly defensible.
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Re: Science Question

Post by pelmut »

You could, in theory, determine the chromosome makeup of the embryo a few moments after fertilisation (but with present methods you would kill it in the process).  If you wait a little longer, until it has enough cells to allow you to take a few without harming it, you could most definitely examine the chromosomes of that sample -- and if it wasn't a chimera, that would tell you its sex.

If you wait a little longer, until the cells have begun to differentiate, you may be able to get a sample from the tissue from which the gonads will eventually develop, which might give you a better idea of what those gonads were programmed to develop into, even if some other part of it was chimera.  Waiting longer still would allow you to see how and where the gonads were developing, whether they were descending through the abdomen to become testes or staying put with a uterus developing nearby.  Of course, they may not develop at all, or the rest of the sex organs may be absent or unrecognisable.

Only as the baby approaches birth will it develop genitalia that can be clearly recognised by a non-specialist -- if it is going to develop in that way.

Much later, around the age of four or five, it becomes aware of its gender.
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Re: Science Question

Post by Midas »

It seems to me that the disagreement isn’t about whether gender as a scientific fact is determined at conception or at the point (well before birth) that it can be objectively identified. None of that alters the fact that the gender of an individual is a matter of genetic fact rather than choice.

The self identification thing is a social construct and cannot alter the scientific facts.
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