Concept of Male and Female Under Siege
Around two billion years ago, and then some one billion years later, two enormously important events occurred.
They changed Earth forever.
The first, the Great Oxygenation Event, pumped vast amounts of what had been until then just a trace gas into the atmosphere, oxygen remaking the entire biosphere.
The second was just as transformative: male and female bursting upon the scene.
It’s not known precisely when or how the first primordial lifeforms came into being, possibly as early as just after the formation of the oceans themselves some 4.4 billion years ago. Eons passed however with only primitive, single-celled and obviously sexless organisms holding sway on Earth.
Sexual reproduction was the thunderbolt supercharging evolution.
It allowed for the exchange of genetic material in a way previously impossible since the dawn of creation. The dynamic that pulled life on Earth out of the primeval, rudimentary, simplistic, homogeneity of elementary species to explode into a profusion of the most diverse and complex creatures was the great biological revolution of sexual propagation.
Earth was one planet before — another after.
Insofar as humanity is concerned, there is no dichotomy, no dual archetype, nothing in the 300,000 year chronicle of Homo sapiens that impinges more strongly on the very identity of our race than the concept of male and female.
Even our pre-human primate forebears, millions of years in the past, knew hot and cold, hungry and sated, up and down, safe and endangered — and male and female.
Homo erectus of course comprehended nothing of sexual gametes, base pairs, or mitosis but he could make fire, construct basic tools and certainly procreate.
He was smart enough to tell a rock from a tree, a predator from prey, storm clouds from clear skies, and men from women.
Francis Crick and James Watson pieced together centuries of investigation with their epoch-making discoveries concerning the double-helical model of DNA, winning the Nobel Prize for their efforts in 1962.
Since that time modern science has been well aware of what chromosomes are and how each of more than 30 trillion cells in our bodies are imprinted with the biological coding for our very makeup within those twenty-three paired strands encapsulated inside the cellular nuclei.
Being either male or female is coded as well in every of those trillions of cells, irrevocably stamped into the individual from the first microsecond of existence at the moment of conception to the last breath drawn on one’s deathbed.
The 21st century then should be a heyday for geneticists, with their science coming into its own in courtrooms, legal codes, boardrooms, and throughout the culture.
Unfortunately, however, there are dark clouds casting a shadow on what should be the halcyon days of genetics. Strident far-leftist advocacy groups, none of whom care much for Nobel Prizes and few other institutions of civilization in the West, have come to the conclusion that the concept of male and female doesn’t fit with their extremist agenda and that therefore it will have to go.
Dozens of "genders" have miraculously been summoned into being after mankind having made do with only two since time immemorial, with scientists and everyone else constrained to pretend to acknowledge these new forms of humanity, created not by the hand of any omnipotent deity but through the auspices of avant-garde committees called into session among revolutionary free-thinkers.
It’s not so stunning after all that radical activists should attempt to undo the very concept of the clear duality of humanity. During the French Revolution ultraist die-hards sought to eradicate everything that came before as well, changing the days of the week, the months of the year and anything else that harkened back to the despised Ancien Régime.
What is shocking, however, is the incredible fecklessness of geneticists and biologists worldwide who are content to say nothing about this take-over of their discipline by political theorists, not even demurring in the slightest.
It would be as if archaeologists were forbidden to examine ancient artifacts, oceanographers disallowed from plumbing the depths of the seas, or economists precluded from discussing money.
In an equally upside-down fashion, life scientists are being bullied into cowed, silent acquiescence as politicos issue fiats declaring that XX and XY chromosomes henceforth are to mean nothing.
A fitting end returns to a final note on oxygen, the element ultimately discovered when the gas was separated from the air — in Britain by Joseph Priestly and in France by Antoine Lavoisier.
The latter met his untimely death convicted of being an aristocrat and guillotined in Paris during the French Revolution. According to legend the judge who refused to spare his life denied the reprieve with a curt rebuff becoming dangerously germane in our own time: "The revolution has no need of scientists."
David Nabhan is a science writer, the author of "Earthquake Prediction: Dawn of the New Seismology" (2017) and three previous books on earthquakes. Nabhan is also a science fiction writer ("Pilots of Borealis," 2015) and the author of many scores of newspaper and magazine op-eds. Nabhan has been featured on television and talk radio all over the world. His website is www.earthquakepredictors.com. To read more of his reports — Click Here Now.
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