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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

Sad?

No, it is just a consequence of complex reality butting up against a "common sense" (including the quote marks) derived from incorrectly assuming that words accurately and unambiguously carve up reality.

If biologists instead used a different common definition such as "female == able to get pregnant, otherwise male" then birds would be all be male, and seahorses wouldn't be associated with the sentence "weird biology fact: the males get pregnant!"

See also: "There's no such thing as a fish", and "how many moons does the Earth have?"

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Birds are not mammals. Fish are not mammals. Mammals on the other hand have males that impregnate the females.

Producing a more complicated definition with a special case for mammals vs. not mammals doesn't really add anything, even if it weren't for the platypus or the echidna being further examples of things not working like that.

Biology is messy, the boundaries are messy, the words we use are merely for our own benefit to simplify a messy and complex reality.

Messy edge cases doesn't mean let's just throw everything away.

I didn't ask you to throw anything away.

Someone forgot that the platypus exists.

The exception is not the rule.

Abstractions are useful, this is true, but the exceptions are a reminder that they are not reality, they are just a categorization we overlay on top of reality to help us understand it. Their utility is contextual.

Your abstraction ignores all the sterile men and women too, by the way. That's because it is a particularly bad one.

The fact of the matter is that if someone is missing a leg they are absolutely human but they are broken nonetheless.

That analogy illuminates nothing.

To be sterile is to be broken but it doesn't reduce ones humanity.

Nobody's suggesting that it might.

You're the one who wrote:

> Mammals on the other hand have males that impregnate the females.

We're all saying "that's not a very useful definition".

someone forgot the echidna exists

Back when I was taught Biology in school, “female“ meant “having the larger gamete”.

Strange, I was taught that sex that determines whether a sexually reproducing organism produces male or female gametes.

You're describing anisogamy. Large males are sexually selected for in elephant seals because they can fight off other males, but small males are sexually selected for in spiders for they can mate with the female quickly while avoiding being eaten.

They said larger gamete, not larger adult size.

Huh, is this actually universal? I'd have guessed there'd be at least one or two exceptions.

There are no exceptions to it if you make it the definition. Which is what the comment of BuyMyBitcoins says was taught to them.

Yep, fair enough, if it's a strict definition. You could potentially then have weird edge cases in the other direction, though; if the same sex chromosome layout in related species X and Y leads to different sexes due to the size of the gametes (especially if the size of the gametes was pretty similar to start with), that seems very odd/confusing.

It looks like there are cases where the size of the gametes are identical. But when this happens they don’t refer the organism’s sex as “male/female” and instead use “+/-“. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isogamy

Going a step further I found this: >Depending on the group, different mating types are often referred to by numbers, letters, or simply "+" and "−" instead of "male" and "female", which refer to "sexes" or differences in size between gametes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mating_type

So it does seem to be a strict definition and anything outside of the strict definition is given an alternate identification scheme.

Here's a fun edge case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indotyphlops_braminus#Reproduc...

All individuals of this snake are female (presumably 'female' here is defined relative to other snakes) and reproduce parthenogenetically (sic?). By your definition, these wouldn't have a sex at all, presumably.

A closely-related species using the same or similar chromosomes, where male/female exist, is likely where it came to be that the observed individuals of these snakes have all been determined "female", even if no "male" has been observed.

And that's the definition used in the article. (Where "egg" = "larger gamete")

> If biologists instead used a different common definition such as "female == able to get pregnant, otherwise male" then birds would be all be male, and seahorses wouldn't be associated with the sentence "weird biology fact: the males get pregnant!"

"Common definition"? I don't think so. If it was my post-menopausal wife would now be a man

I very much doubt that common-sense folks "assum[e] that words accurately and unambiguously carve up reality" either. Is it likely that a grown-up has never had a discussion about whether something was blue or green, or whether something is a fruit or vegetable?

> "Common definition"? I don't think so. If it was my post-menopausal wife would now be a man

I didn't say it was a good definition :)

In fact, the very point you're making here is also commonly brought up whenever someone uses this common definition to try to argue against trans issues, which is how I know it's commonly used.

I rather hopped that me saying "birds would be all be male" would be a hint that I didn't hold this definition in high regard.

> whether something is a fruit or vegetable?

Tom-ah-to, to-may-to, but either way I really need to figure out how to use it in a fruit salad.

Sure, almost everyone has had such an argument; but I've noticed many tend to say "it's common sense" and stop listening from then on.

I think you're straw-manning the "common sense" view. "Unable to get pregnant" is actually not a common definition of "male", afaics

At worse, nut-picking rather than straw-manning. This specific (bad) definition comes up a lot, though it's certainly possible I've mistaken frequency of observation for frequency of beliefs.

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