I have seen a number of pieces claiming that there are no biological differences between men and women that would lead to men having a clear cut advantage in athletic competitions.

I remember reading something like that in The Atlantic which was roundly criticized because it was stupid. August thought The Atlantic may be, I don't consider it a scientific publication; what articles are you referring to?

What published scientific articles cite the age of the Earth as 6000 years?

Cranks exist across the political spectrum.

There are many people in my life (that I care about and respect) who believe in young earth creationism; I do not believe it’s actually a fringe belief in the US.

That said, I do not believe they would do well in a science/academic role because it shows a clear disregard for many separate academic disciplines at this point. And these religious views are not evenly distributed across the political spectrum.

Ok, sure.

I don’t think people who believe there are no significant biological sex differences should be in a science/academic role either.

I think one would be hard-pressed to find anyone who claims there are no significant differences (at some point, the question reduces to one of definition).

The argument is over what those differences are, how much they matter (i.e. a 1% difference in the mean? Who cares), and how malleable they are given modern medical science.

(And that's before one gets on the topic of whether those differences should imply a societal structure that pigeon-holes people based on their biological sex).

I’ve never met anyone who has said this, and I’ve worked in quite left wing spaces for a long time. I believe you may have fallen for some caricature or other of the left. I’ve no doubt someone has said that, but I think you’d find that belief in bigfoot or flat earth is more common, because it’s quite apparent to most that there are indeed differences between sexes. I think what tends to trip people up are what I call “dude looks like a lady” situations where people, either through accident of birth or other means, appear androgynous; it seems gender is more of a bimodal distribution rather than a strict binary. Again, this seems rather apparent to me just having met some people who don’t exactly fit the mold, but apparently this is also something of a political controversy.

> I am not aware of instances where the left disagrees so ardently with firmly established science

Let me introduce you to the "lab leak hypothesis", which was decried as racist for years by prominent Democrats and scientists. It lost this reputation around the time that another prominent liberal (Jon Stewart) saw fit to mock its detractors on national TV a while back. This was not firmly established science at first, but those on the left made impossible to even discuss in mixed company, which shut down the conversation and any rational investigations.

For other examples, check out Vinay Prasad's writings. He's a Bernie supporter, a UCSF professor, and the rare progressive who is willing to call out hypocrisy and graft even when it appears on the left.

Indeed, I do not think that there are firmly established facts as to the origin of Covid-19.

One firmly-established fact is that it was not unreasonable to consider the lab leak hypothesis. This fact was anathema in progressive circles.

And to me, as a Chinese-American person, it was insulting (and a bit bizarre) to insist that it's "racist" to say the virus leaked from a lab, rather than having spread via an unsanitary wet market. But this was the party line, and many people toe'd it for years.

Prasad clearly has another agenda or two to serve.

I have wondered about this, but the most I've come up with is that he is making a name for himself as a heterodox thinker. This would incentivize him to be critical of orthodoxies in medicine/higher education, and could explain why he takes some of the positions he has taken.

On the other hand, it seems that there almost zero medical professionals on the left who are interested in debating him and showing how he has been wrong about various topics. He calls for universities to host debates on these topics of public concern, but pretty much no one is willing to do it. This makes me think it is somewhat less likely that he is just completely wrong, and more likely that he is the one saying that various (naked) emperors have no clothes. I'm sure he's not always right, but much of what he says seems quite plausible to me (a fairly well-educated person with some understanding of statistics).

I'd love to know where folks have mounted successful critiques of his work, or if he has any conflicts of interest that he doesn't mention.