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Comment by defrost | Hacker News Reader

Is there an issue with the removal of an actual scientific inaccuracy from a science program?

This:

> "See, there are only two possibilities: XX, a girl, or XY, a boy. The chance of becoming either a boy or a girl is always 1 in 2, a 50-50 chance either way. It’s like flipping a coin: X you’re a girl, Y you’re a boy.”

is out by a few percent .. numbers wise it's more inaccurate than claiming there's no gold in the earths crust. ( see [1] )

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex

I imagine Nye himself authorised the change to his own work as I assume he later corrected himself (as appears to be implied in your link).

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is out by a few percent .. numbers wise it's more inaccurate than claiming there's no gold in the earths crust. ( see [1] )

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex

I thought you were going to mention how there are more male embryos than female embryos created since males have a higher death rate. Why is sex the only category in which we have to constantly qualify ourselves with regard to birth defects? Someone who's talking about how the three types of cones work to create color vision doesn't have to constantly harken back to how some people are color-blind, despite that population being an order of magnitude larger than intersex individuals. Not mentioning people with phocomelia does not mean your lesson on the anatomy of the arms and legs is wrong or inadequate.

>Someone who's talking about how the three types of cones work to create color vision

This isn't scientifically accurate either. Some people have 4 types of cones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy

Take a look at the chart you provided "Prevalences of various conditions that have been called intersex"

Why does it have a "Sex specificity" column? Why does it contain the words male and female?

that column also contains the word "none" in some cases. And in either case it is all just a judgement call people made for the conditions.

The semantic sparring over sex and gender has a pretty simple compromise, that people who want to say it is a spectrum and people who want to say it is binary should be able to agree on and be happy with:

it is a bimodal distribution

of course the problem is that is a nuanced idea and humans can't handle nuance. Maybe you can, and I can, but WE as a human group can't. We prefer to drive ourselves literally insane over the semantic argument. oh well.

The idea has always been that it is essentially binary with edge cases.

"Always" to whom? There are countless cultures out there - both historical and contemporary - with non-binary interpretations of sex and/or gender.

First of all there are definitely a countable number of cultures... secondly ... well rolf.

I mean, yes, the number of cultures is probably mathematically countable, but considering how quickly they split and merge and mix and such (and have been doing so for likely the entirety of human existence), do you really think it would be practical to do so? ;)

> it is a bimodal distribution

this isn't something that most people are familiar with, especially people who tend to see things in binaries (not because they're stupid, but because they're trained to see the world in binaries, because it's the simplest classification system which makes it easy to manipulate by politicians and media).

If sex can be plotted as a bimodal distribution, then what do you believe is on the y-axis, and how do you measure this variable?

Australia, the country I live in, has an official passport that has for Sex: the valid responses M | F | X.

The reason for that is the actual verifiable existance of people who were born here clearly, scientifically, medically as neither M NOR F.

They are valid exceptions to the above quote from the Nye program and there are enough people born this way to number in the thousands in a country of some ~ 23 milllion or so.

The passport system was changed as a citizen of this country fronted and objected to having enter M or F when they were born clearly neither.

As someone with a science background who measures and models reality I approve of systems that track the world and its elements as it is and as they are .. rather than models that force a world view that doesn't match reality.

Sad to hear that a country is anti-science.

As Richard Dawkins recently clarified, "As a biologist, there are 2 sexes. And that's all there is to it." It's binary and there is no exception. People that claim otherwise are confused.

I believe there are cases of people being born with a set of sex chromosomes that are different from XY and XX. This is what your parent commenter is referring to and I fail to see how it's a valid point ("anti-science"), on the particular topic of determining biological sex in people.

If one wants to make a simple statement that encompasses the largest group of people they might say, "There are 2 sexes." If they want to make a more complex statement that encompasses all humans they might add a qualifier such that they instead say, "There are 2 typical sexes." That "typical" adds a whole lot of complexity in order to generalize the statement.

There are more exotic three letter variants too.

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