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DarkHorse Podcast

#120 What is a Woman? (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)

DarkHorse Podcast

Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying

Natural Sciences, Society & Culture, News, Adaptation, Modernity, Culture, Politics, Science, Evolutionary Biology

4.6 • 5.3K Ratings

🗓️ 26 March 2022

⏱️ 102 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this 120th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.

This week, we discuss the definition of woman. What are women? Adult human females. What are adults, and humans, and females? Are we suffering a plague of sophistry? (Yes.) Must we turn this around? (Yes.) Are humans ever hermaphroditic? (No.) What about banana slugs? (Yes. What about them?) And clown fish? (Also yes—again, so? They’re clown fish, not humans.) We discuss the evolution of sex and sex roles (aka gender). We talk about Genetic Sex Determination and Environmental Sex Determination. We discuss anisogamy and monoecious and dioecious plants, and it’s interesting and not full of uninterpretable words. We do not discuss the paired hemipenes of snakes and lizards. Our apologies.

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Our book, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, is available everywhere books are sold, and signed copies are available here: https://darvillsbookstore.indielite.org

Check out our store! Epic tabby, digital book burning, saddle up the dire wolves, and more: https://store.darkhorsepodcast.org

Heather’s newsletter, Natural Selections (subscribe to get free weekly essays in your inbox): https://naturalselections.substack.com

Find more from us on Bret’s website (https://bretweinstein.net) or Heather’s website (http://heatherheying.com).

Become a member of the DarkHorse LiveStreams, and get access to an additional Q&A livestream every month. Join at Heather's Patreon.

Like this content? Subscribe to the channel, like this video, follow us on twitter (@BretWeinstein, @HeatherEHeying), and consider helping us out by contributing to either of our Patreons or Bret’s Paypal.

Looking for clips from #DarkHorseLivestreams? Check out our other channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAWCKUrmvK5F_ynBY_CMlIA

Theme Music: Thank you to Martin Molin of Wintergatan for providing us the rights to use their excellent music.

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Q&A Link: https://youtu.be/ilHD18Bqnkw

Mentioned in this episode:

Digital Public Square – bringing a plug-and-play experience to the decentralized web: https://www.samizdapp.com/

Akira the Don, Dr. Seuss, and Bret Weinstein: https://youtu.be/1pJhF2GjwDM

Ketanji Brown Jackson, nominee to the Supreme Court of the U.S., is asked what a woman is: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/ketanji-brown-jackson-says-she-can-t-define-woman-because-i-m-not-a-biologist/ar-AAVnX6b

Dictionary.com definition of woman: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/woman

(also see: the Oxford English Dictionary, and also A Dictionary of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics (2nd ed, Lincoln, Boxshall and Clark), for a definition of “female”)

Daly and Wilson 1983. Sex, Evolution and Behavior. https://books.google.com/books/about/Sex_Evolution_and_Behavior.html?id=VodHAAAAMAAJ

Leshem 2016.

R

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream coming to you from Dark Horse

0:11.8

headquarters here in Portlandish.

0:14.6

Something.

0:15.6

In any case, it is live stream number is it 120?

0:20.8

It's 120 and you, I feel like we have not mentioned this for a while.

0:25.4

You are Brett Weinstein.

0:26.4

Yes.

0:27.4

And I am Heather Heine.

0:28.9

I am Dr. Brett Weinstein.

0:30.2

You are Dr. Heather Heine and this may become relevant in this year's podcast as we are

0:35.8

biologists.

0:36.8

Most of you know that.

0:37.8

Yes.

0:38.8

Doctors of philosophy, which many PhDs do not actually take seriously, nor do their departments.

0:43.8

In fact, I have once had a historian, I believe it was, laugh at me when I suggested that

0:48.8

actually the PhD, that scientist, that academic scientists earn, is precisely because one ought

0:55.6

to be schooled in the philosophy of science and she thought that was hilarious because

1:00.1

so patently untrue.

1:01.1

And I have to say largely it is untrue, but not in our case or not in many other scientists'

1:06.3

case.

1:07.3

You had ought to be schooled in the philosophy, less you get schooled by the philosophy.

1:12.0

That's what happens if you don't understand the philosophy of science.

...

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