When I was in like 4th grade we learned punnett squares. Kids wanted to know if we could use them to predict eye color.
In 4th grade I learned that something as simple as eye color was way more complicated than 1-gene inheritance could explain. It's no wonder at all sex follows suit.
It's honestly not even "advanced" biology, at this point it's intermediate biology. We're not even getting into the myriad factors that can determine whether or not a single gene is expressed or the wild things that can happen on HRT, like *developing new allergies*
a thing i have noticed about people who say "uh this fact is [subject] 101, pick up a book" is that they themselves AT BEST stopped listening halfway through the 101 course, and refuse to acknowledge the existence of the 201 courses
"This is grade school *x subject*!" Always ignores that grade school versions are heavily simplified and frequently feature rules that have loads of exceptions at higher levels.
Grade school English will teach you that double negatives are always grammatically incorrect, but J.M. Barrie will tell you about how Captain Hook is not entirely unheroic.
What’s depressing about the “its basic biology!!1!” crowd is that the actual, underlying complex biology is, even at a laywoman’s level, cool as all hell?? Human bodies (and the bodies of most living things, for that matter) are weird and bizarre in ways we still hardly understand and that’s rad
Right? It’s FASCINATING. I was that (late-diagnosed autistic) kid who read encyclopedias instead of storybooks and learned at a very young age that people who think they know everything know nothing because anyone who actually knows stuff knows how little we actually know, ya know? 😅
Love the idea of "basic biology" as if biology itself is not the culmination of millions of years of the most complex chemical reactions in the universe
Comments
https://www.nature.com/articles/518288a
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07789-z
https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/58/11/586
https://cces.ca/transgender-women-athletes-and-elite-sport-scientific-review
(Excellent thread by the way)
Take economics 102.
In 4th grade I learned that something as simple as eye color was way more complicated than 1-gene inheritance could explain. It's no wonder at all sex follows suit.
https://x.com/ScienceVet2/status/1035246030500061184
:3