this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
909 points (96.0% liked)

Science Memes

16356 readers
2306 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] affiliate@lemmy.world 58 points 12 hours ago (4 children)

i think that if more people were exposed to advanced math there would be a reactionary trend of people going around and asking mathematicians “what is a number?”

[–] dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

sort of like the reactionary trend of pulling your kids out of school because Common Core has changed how math is taught so critical thinking and conceptual understanding is incorporated, rather than teaching math by rote memorization?

[–] IzzyJ@lemmy.world 2 points 3 hours ago

Can confirm. I was already struggling. But I just straight up refused to math with i

[–] x0x7@lemmy.world 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

There is a slight difference though in that complex numbers are a part of math but gender isn't really a part of biology.

Also the mathematicians wouldn't decline to give an answer.

[–] monotremata@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

Also the mathematicians wouldn’t decline to give an answer.

Are you sure? I only minored in math, but even I would struggle to provide an answer to this. It would have to be something incredibly vague, like "a number is a mathematical object that has certain consistent properties relevant to the field of study." Because otherwise you get situations like "is infinity a number?" and you can't answer categorically, because usually it's not, but then you look at the transfinite numbers where you can indeed have omega-plus-one as a number. And someone asks if you can have an infinite number of digits to the left of the decimal place, and you say "well, not in the reals, but there are the P-adic numbers..." and folks ask if you can have an infinitely small number and you say "well, in the reals you can only have an arbitrarily small number, but in game theory there are the surreal numbers, where..."

So yeah, I'm not sure "what is a number" is even a math question. It's more a philosophy question, or sometimes a cognitive science question (like Lakoff and Nuñez's "Where Mathematics Comes From").

[–] szczuroarturo@programming.dev 0 points 4 hours ago

Ehh not really its just to old if a concept for us to be appaled by that. Its not 15 century for imaginary numbers to cause riots.

[–] k4gie@lemmy.world 11 points 10 hours ago (6 children)

Do the two tails left of M and right of F mean there are males more male than cis males, and similarly with females?

[–] dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 14 minutes ago)

The peaks do not designate "cis", you can be cis and fall anywhere on the chart - being cis is about the sex you were arbitrarily assigned at birth (and whether that assignment aligns or conflicts with your actual gender identity).

And when doctors change assignments, it's really unclear whether you're cis or not if you transition - e.g. a baby assigned female at birth who is then weeks later assigned male at birth later transitions to be a girl, she was originally assigned female at birth - is she trans or cis?

Instead the peaks represent the most common combination of male and female sex traits in humans, with the slopes representing less common combinations of traits, e.g. to the left of the male peak might be men who experience excessive androgenization like lots of body hair, maybe precocious puberty, early balding, and so on (more male traits than average).

This chart as a model of sex actually doesn't make much sense, since sex has been redefined in light of how complex sex is and the differences in sexual development that occur.

Where on the chart would we put someone with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS)? With CAIS a person is born with XY chromosomes and thus has a typical male karyotype, but their androgen receptors do not respond to androgens, so none of the masculinization is able to occur - leading the person to look, develop, and usually live as a woman.

The chart implies a spectrum, when the reality of biological sex is much more complex than a simple spectrum would allow - more like a constellation. Each sex differentiated trait is an axis / spectrum of its own, and there are thousands of ways differentiation can happen.

EDIT: oh, and to answer your question, it sounds like your question is really whether on a bimodal distribution if the peaks represent a smaller number than the tails in aggregate, and the answer is that it depends on how you select your aggregates and how much of the peak you lump together. I think the entire point of the bimodal distribution, though, is to show that the majority fall on the peaks while the tails represent a minority.

That said, a MRI study found that when examining brain sex, >90% of people (mostly cis) were not able to be classed as having fully male or female brains, so realistically I think it's fair to say most people are sexually divergent in some way.

[–] outhouseperilous@lemmy.dbzer0.com 30 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Yes, hyperreal genders do exist, but are not stable outside lab conditions.

[–] Mastema@infosec.pub 3 points 2 hours ago

I would submit David Bowie as a counter example.

[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 11 points 9 hours ago

Well, clearly. If you define a male characteristic as something that's more common in men than in women and vice-versa, then e.g. being tall would be a "male characteristic".

Height isn't a binary thing with men being exactly Xcm tall and women exactly Ycm, so there's people who have more of said male characteristic and people who have less. And you also have women who have more of this characteristic and some men (e.g. there are some women that are taller than some men).

The same can be done for every characteristic that's associated with a gender. Genitals are on a spectrum (large clitoris vs micropenis), fat distribution is on a spectrum (e.g. there are men with breasts and women without), body hair is on a spectrum, hormone distribution is on a spectrum and so on and so on.

If you take a lot of characteristics at once it becomes clear in most cases whether the person you are dealing with is a man or a woman (though there are some where that's more difficult or impossible), but if you take just a single characteristic (e.g. height) it's impossible to say whether the person you are dealing with is definitively a man or a woman.

[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 4 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

It means that traditionally understood cis male can still have some female characteristics (no facial hair, higher pitched voice, bad at driving) but some males will have none.

[–] dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (1 children)

bad at driving is a male trait

(though that's partially for social reasons, biological factors are not the only relevant)

[–] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 1 points 2 hours ago

Yeah, I was kidding.

[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

I don't think it's an accepted term anymore, but you reminded me that they used to call the triple X chromosome syndrome by the term Super-Female-Syndrome.

Probably not what the author intended though.

[–] Cracks_InTheWalls@sh.itjust.works 5 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

...

I am a horrible person, but the only thing I can think of reading this is a small-circuit pro wrestling event where all participants have this set of chromosomes, billed as 'The Triple X Throwdown', for the title of Supreme Female.

[–] jsomae@lemmy.ml 4 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah but they decay into sometjing indistinguishable from a cis person in like five seconds outside of extremely exotic lab conditions, so it's more accurate to say they're possible than "they exist".

[–] ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip 75 points 16 hours ago (5 children)

I'm a career physicist, and I honestly have no idea what a state of matter is anymore.

[–] nova_ad_vitum@lemmy.ca 7 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

I would wager you have more of an idea of what a state of matter is than biologists do of what a species is. Humans like to put things into neat boxes but nature is under no deal obligation to cooperate.

An abstraction used for grouping kinds of things together for the purposes of making thinking about them a lot faster.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 3 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

Interacting fields of non-causality?

[–] HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 10 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

Simple, "solid state" means "no moving parts", like a vacuum tube, for example.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 points 6 hours ago (1 children)
[–] HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 4 points 6 hours ago

Well I know the liquid phase is what happened after I ate at that filthy pizza place. Yikes.

[–] yermaw@sh.itjust.works 4 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

Could there be a spherical object inside that tube? Just for familiarities sake

[–] HugeNerd@lemmy.ca 2 points 5 hours ago

Are gas atoms spherical?

[–] TomasEkeli@programming.dev 8 points 9 hours ago

Only if it's a cow

[–] la508@lemmy.world 35 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Can I offer you a nice smectic B3 liquid crystal in this trying time?

[–] MycelialMass@lemmy.world 20 points 15 hours ago

You may not.

[–] Rozz@lemmy.sdf.org 31 points 14 hours ago

If certain people could almost understand they would be very upset

[–] serenissi@lemmy.world 100 points 20 hours ago (6 children)

though the meme is cool, gender isn't particularly a biology (or 'advance biology') thing. biology deals with sexes, their expressions and functionalities. gender is more of a personal and social concept but often related to sex characteristics (cis).

and yes, advanced biology tells sex determination isn't as easy as XX or XY or even looking at genitals like a creep.

and oh, for giggles consider fungi :)

[–] jsomae@lemmy.ml 5 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

I don't entirely agree, because gender identity is known to be at least partially biological, e.g. there are correlations between transgenderism, skin elasticity, and hyper-flexibility.

[–] dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

just FYI, "transgenderism" is a word to avoid (at least if you don't want to be perceived as transphobic)

and yes, gender identity seems to be biological, and genetic.

[–] oyfrog@lemmy.world 62 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Adding to this: XX and XY works for mammals, but not for other vertebrates (fish, birds, reptiles, amphibians). Birds and reptiles have Z and W chromosomes, and unlike in mammals where females are homozygotes, males in these groups are homozygotes. Some reptiles have temperature dependent sex determination, where ambient temperature above some value will produce males or females (depends on species). Some reptiles are composed entirely of females.

Some fish will straight up change sexes depending on age and male-female ratio in a social group.

In other groups it's not even different chromosomes but simply copy number of specific genes.

Plants can do all sorts of whacky things like produce seeds and pollen in the same individual.

Fungi are an entirely different cluster fuck because they have mating types which are not simple binaries.

Eukaryotic sex determination isn't a binary and it isn't even a nicely categorizable spectrum. It's a grab-bag of whatever doesn't perma-fuck your genome.

Source: me, I'm a biologist. Though admittedly I work on animals so my understanding of fungi and plant stuff is fuzzy at best.

[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 2 points 9 hours ago

And bee queen generate full-animal-sized flying sperm, aka drones.

[–] AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 37 points 18 hours ago (4 children)

https://xkcd.com/435/

I would say gender is probably centered about around psychology, ranges mostly from sociology to biology, with a just little bit going into chemistry

maybe like

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today 21 points 16 hours ago

Slime mold(which is not a mold or fungi) looks around nervously in it's 13 different sexes.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 103 points 21 hours ago (1 children)
[–] skisnow@lemmy.ca 5 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

A lot of problems in the world can be attributed to people who think "if I don't understand something, it must be because the experts saying it are all wrong".

load more comments
view more: next ›