Assholes, then balls

[avram]

I keep thinking I’m gonna have to give up reading political blogs. Between filthy James Lileks’s cowardly half-accusing Oliver Willis of antisemitism and Glenn Reynolds’s whining yet again about bias in the NY Times (“chief architect”, aieee, oh the pain) I feel like hitting someone and not stopping till I topple from exhaustion.

But then every once in a while I find something like a link to a story about study of scrotum shape in ancient Greek sculpture, and it all seems worthwhile.

Oh, and I found that scrotum link through Kevin Drum, who also linked to an article in the LA Times about how genetic sex differences. Apologists for sexism will gleefully jump on bits like this:

All told, men and women may differ by as much as 2% of their entire genetic inheritance, greater than the hereditary gap between humankind and its closest relative — the chimpanzee.

...but I note that it’s an article on a technical topic written by a staff writer for a general news source, and according to Grumer’s First Law of Science News must therefore contain at least one glaring error. Wait to discover what the error is before using this news to buttress your worldview.

Comments

[scl1106.livejournal.com]

Well, the thing that stuck out to me is that as far as I know from what I do know about genetics is that it's accepted that humans and chimps vary genetically by 2%, we share 98% of our genetic make up with them. So to say that men and women vary by 2% is a little odd I would think. Since the 2% makes such a difference between chimps and humans. I think logically men and women would vary less than that, a whole lot less. Or else one of the gender might look more like chimps....just some food for thought.