These are the last 6 slides from a BIOL 104: Principles of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology lecture at Yale, a required course for all pre-med students. The slides attempt to obfuscate what males and females are by asserting that the binary concept of sex is "essentialist" and insisting that "Evolution is fundamentally anti-essentialist." Therefore, the binary notion of sex is unscientific and wrong. They claim that "sex" is: ▫️ "a fact about history, not individuals" ▫️ "a cluster of iterative, coevolved, differentiated reproductive homologies" ▫️ "a becoming or enactment—a performance of the self" They also claim that an organism's phenotype is "the performance of the individual self" and that "biology needs queer theory to get the phenotype right." This is pure biological pseudoscience masquerading as science. This is a lecture I can envision Deepak Chopra giving. There are many deep flaws with this portrayal of sex, but one of the most significant errors is the portrayal of binary sex as "essentialist." And while it is correct that biology is "anti-essentialist," it is not "essentialist" to point out an actual defining property of certain categories. "Essentialism" in biology implies something immaterial and unfalsifiable. But having the function to produce either small or large gametes is a material reality, and therefore not "essentialist." Do not conflate "essentialist" and "reductionist." Many natural phenomena or categories don't have a single defining trait. Species are reproductively isolated, lineage-based taxonomic classifications. Things like "races" are nonrandom statistical clusters of genetic relatedness. But some biological phenomena, like the sex categories male and female, really do have single defining properties, which is rooted in the type of gamete—sperm or ova—an individual has the function to produce. This isn’t “essentialism,” it’s just observing and describing biological reality. Different types of biological phenomena are described differently, because the world is what it is and it's the job of biologists to describe and explain it. It is very worrying that Yale requires their medical students to take courses promoting biological pseudoscience.
