Neil deGrasse Tyson – probably should stay in his lane

NdT’s latest book takes him far afield from his areas of expertise -- and it shows.

I own a signed copy of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s latest book “Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization”. The book was generously given out for free to all attendees at a conference a little over a year ago (CSICon ‘22). Tyson was the keynote speaker at the meeting, and I was really looking forward to hearing his presentation. The talk, though, simply consisted of a very brief summary by him of what he considers to be the main point that he was trying to make in each of the ten chapters of his book – quite a disappointment. Moreover, in those few places where he spoke about a topic I know something about, I found his ideas to be shallow (at best). So – trigger warning – if you admire Tyson, now would be a good time to stop reading (actually – and rather obviously given its title – you shouldn’t have started reading this post at all).

When I got home after the meeting, the first chapter of the book that I read was chapter seven: Gender and Identity. That was enough for me at the time. It’s not that the book is long or difficult to read and comprehend. On the contrary – it’s quite short and an easy breezy read. It’s just that – how much Tyson waxing philosophically on topics he hasn’t thought deeply about can one person take?

What did Tyson actually say in the chapter on Gender and Identity that made me stop reading and that served to rather drastically lower my opinion of him? Quotes from the chapter are below (in italics) and my comments follow each quote.

(P. 129) Can you be both male and female? Can you be neither? Can you move fluidly between being a man and a woman? Is your sexual preference fluid too? Maybe we’re all male-female qubits. Such questions are hard for some people to grasp

Here Tyson sets up the theme of the chapter – that everything about sex and gender falls along a continuum, and people who can’t grasp that are ... the “some people” who are not as smart as him. The reference to “qubits” in the quote is a reference to a concept in quantum physics, implying that some of the odd phenomena discussed by quantum physicists are somehow relevant to understanding human sex and gender. This argument is similar to (albeit not even as apt as) the one made by some parapsychologists who claim that quantum physics provides an explanation for telepathy and psychokinesis. It doesn’t – and drawing a parallel between quantum physics and the question of whether there are any sexes other than male or female is even more of a stretch; it basically makes no sense at all. It is also worth noting here that Tyson gloms together questions about sexual orientation with questions about sex itself with questions about gender identity. Surely he understands the differences between these concepts, and understands that arguments about sexual orientation as a continuum cannot simply be used to support the view that there are more than two sexes. Or at least, I hope he does – although based on his frequent slippage between these different concepts throughout the chapter, I can’t really say for sure.

(P. 129 - 130). An analysis of colors offers insight....What hardly anybody talks about, but which astrophysicists know deeply, is that the colors from red through violet fall on a continuum.

Here, Tyson is claiming that hardly anybody knows that colors actually fall along a continuum of wavelengths (with no sharp demarcations between different colors on the spectrum). BUT – because Tyson is an astrophysicist, HE (and his fellow astrophysicists) DO know that colors have this characteristic. In other words, Tyson is arguing here that he and his fellow astrophysicists have a particularly good understanding of continua in nature by dint of their understanding of the continua of wavelengths of light – an understanding not shared by the huge majority of other mortals.

What is there to say about a claim this arrogant – and wrong. First – I suspect there are a LOT of people who are not astrophysicists who know that wavelengths of light fall along a continuum. Second, surely everyone knows that there are other phenomena of nature – like temperature – that fall along a continuum, so why would understanding the continua of wavelengths of light be so critical for understanding other continua in nature?. Third, why would any of this have anything to do with whether or not there are more than two biological sexes?

(P. 131) The list of letters currently represented by the rainbow flag is LGBTQ+

Aha. Now Tyson makes his point explicit, although it’s as rather odd analogy. He now is saying that the rainbow flag of sexual orientations and identities, while consisting of different non-overlapping colors, actually reflects continua of sexual orientations and identities in the same way that an actual rainbow in the sky is actually made up of a continuum of wavelengths of light rather than separate color categories. Well actually – he doesn’t explicitly say that. This is what he implies, and it’s what he should have said to make the juxtaposition of paragraphs about rainbows and about the rainbow flag make any sense at all. So in fairness, I need to be clear that whatever sense there is in Tyson discussing rainbows and the rainbow flag in sequential paragraphs is the “sense” that I added in my own mind as I read the chapter. Tyson himself doesn’t really explain what the point is at all.

(p. 131) In the 1961 version of the film West Side Story, a kid named Anybodys wants to be part of the Jets gang of boys. She has a dirty face... She’s ready to fight. She wears pants. There’s nothing dainty about this archetypal Tomboy. No, they won’t let her join the jets because ... she’s a girl. If you’re not a boy, you’re a girl.... The world was quite binary back then.

Is Tyson arguing here that “Anybody” is NOT a girl? If not — then what is he trying to say here? The strong implication is that if someone who seems to be a biological girl wears pants and likes to fight, then that person is not really a girl – that tomboys were/are some kind of third sex and not really girls at all. That argument is patently ridiculous, not to mention offensive – and dependent upon the acceptance of sex stereotypes of the most extreme kind. I happen to know a lot of women who rarely wear dresses. Some of them like to play sports and are not big fans of wearing lipstick and would never be considered “dainty”. Tyson sure seems to be saying that they are not really women – that they are some kind of sex that is in between make and female (some place toward the middle of the “sex continuum”). Unbelievable.

(p. 132) The presumed binary of sex in nature is overrated and rife with exceptions, not only in ourselves but also in the rest of the animal kingdom.

Tyson provides no examples here for this astonishing claim. At a minimum, it would have been helpful if he had described the human sexes that exist other than male or female. Is he hinting here that gay men aren’t male? Is he talking about people with disorders of sexual development (dsd’s) – virtually all of whom are clearly either male or female, and none of whom are a third sex? Is he talking about transsexual individuals – individuals who have the biology of one sex but would like to live as the other (thereby reinforcing the idea that there are exactly two sexes and that sex is not a continuum). Is he arguing that there are numerous categories of sex, or is he arguing that sex is a continuum with no real categories at all? I can’t answer those questions about what he’s arguing because – he never makes it really clear what his argument about sex actually is.

[P.132-134 On these pages, Tyson notes that most people make an effort to present themselves visually in a way that identifies them as either male or female. He then writes:] “Without these tools and social standards available to use and without our daily investment in gender expression, how different would we really look from on another? How androgynous wojld we all become? With or without an overcoat?”

So yes – males and females would look more alike if we all wore our hair the same length and in the same styles and if we all wore the same clothes. So what? Does that mean there are not two sexes? How is what he is talking about here at all relevant to the theme of the chapter? And BTW – if Tyson thinks that even if everyone wore their hair in similar ways and wore similar clothes that we would not be able to categorize others as male or female at a rate far better than chance – perhaps he’s never seen what people look like naked, or noted the sex-related differences in facial hair and baldness (and body shape and size). What a weird argument to make.

OK – just one more quote from the chapter:

[p. 135 - 136] One day, we may discover or otherwise affirm no discrete categories at all, as the multidimensional gender universe unfolds along a continuum, like the colors contained in sunlight.

Here, and elsewhere in the chapter, Tyson slips into talking about gender rather than sex (while never defining the difference). The more important point here is that this sentence epitomizes the lack of depth and precision in Tyson’s writing in this book, and his intellectual arrogance in claiming that he has particularly sharply honed insights into continua in nature that are not seen by the rest of us.

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I actually HAVE read several of the other chapters in the book. They are equally bad. In the Law and Order chapter, for example, Tyson seems to be arguing that we need to replace our current judicial system – that involves an adversarial relationship between prosecutors and defendants – with a system that focuses solely on an evidence-based “pursuit of truth”, OK. I guess that would be nice. But what Tyson doesn’t explain (at all) – is exactly how that would work, Tyson explicitly says in the chapter that he doesn’t accept the claim that the adversarial system of justice may be imperfect but is still better than any other system that humans have invented. Instead, he is arguing for a radically different kind of system. Does he want the kind of “single investigator” model used by many colleges when handling claims of sexual harassment or assault? Is he aware of the problems that approach has produced? Does he even believe in providing defendants with due process rights (which is not the case with single investigator models)? He never says (details details). Of course, it’s certainly possible that I’m just being overly critical and simply cannot appreciate the depth of his arguments. After all – I’m not an astrophysicist.

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If you think that Tyson’s general comments about sex and gender in this book are poorly thought through – even that won’t prepare you for the wrongheadedness of what Tyson has argued about permitting transwomen to compete in women’s sports. I’ve listened to several interviews with Tyson where he has discussed this topic – in all of which he’s made the same basic arguments (interestingly – in each of the interviews I’ve listened to he has also claimed that he’s just coming up with the ideas he’s presenting on the fly). For illustrative purposes, here’s the link to his recent appearance being interviewed by Piers Morgan.

As best as I can tell, Tyson’s not-fully-coherent argument here is that we should do away with “women’s” sports as a category all together, and instead – in the interests of fairness – have categories based on other biological AND performance-based categories. His first suggestion was to create categories based on hormone levels – but Morgan points out that the evidence is clear that females would still never win a gold medal at the Olympics if that were done, for the incontestable reason that individuals who pass through male puberty retain an athletic advantage (on average) over those who go through female puberty (even if the males later reduce their testosterone levels to a level close to the female range). At that point, Tyson suggests adding other category definers, using, as a guide, the way categories of competition are defined in boxing and wrestling. In those sports, of course, there are a number of different weight categories, in addition to categorizing by sex. Tyson would do away with the sex-based categorization, and replace it (along with weight) with ... some other stuff (probably hormone levels, but maybe something about muscle mass). In other words – if we do what Tyson is suggesting – sports would have multiple size categories (perhaps involving weight for some, height for others, or both) crossed with hormone levels. But even that’s not the end for Tyson. He also advocates crossing all of that with performance-based categories (for example, he *seems* to argue that it might make sense in tennis to time how fast each individual can serve and then use that information to place individuals into categories). Sure will be a lot of categories when he takes over! But then, to add to the incoherence of his argument, he laughingly points out (as have others) that Michael Phelps has a number of genetics-based advantages that helped him become such a phenomenal swimming (Tyson specifically mentions the flexibility of his ankles). Tyson (like others) points this out to make the argument that no matter how we create sports participation categories, some people will have genetic advantages over others. Well of course! But it’s TYSON who says we should try to control for all of those, and that the sole genetic difference that should NOT be considered is whether an individual is male vs female.

I kid you not. That really is what he says.