I’m saying this as an evolutionary biologist and a very vocal atheist: Richard Dawkins is an ass.

His transition from scientist to celebrity happened largely with Selfish Gene (which was honestly not that good, and he had to walk it back in his next pop science book). It reached its peak when he became one of the Four Horsemen of modern pop atheism. All of that is fine, but he is now wandering into crank territory, and the thing of it is that, as a biologist, he absolutely should know better. I’m not going to get into everything we know about the biology and the very related psychology of the trans community, and I’m not going to get into the massive amount we don’t yet know.

I will say that his genetic determinism is horseshit, as a biological term of art. I don’t know a biologist who doesn’t know this. When your transphobia is so strong that you push the discredited notion of genetic determinism, it’s not a great sign.

Sex is biological. There are more than two. Gender is a social construct. It changes between cultures and over time. There are socially and historically many genders, and no construct has a primacy of place other than “this is what some people in this culture believe in this time period.” Gender identity is a psychological and biological construct that is informed but not determined by the other two factors. This is not difficult, until it becomes a culture war thing where people invest their ego-identity in supporting some notion that they’re unwilling to investigate and let the scientists who research the subject have their say. Dawkins gets the sociology and psychology so wrong that he’s letting it back flow to the point that he’s also getting the biology wrong. As a biologist, it’s as embarrassing as a drunk uncle at a wedding.

I saw an interview with a rather famous biologist who worked in genetics - and his work actually had some merit. At some point, he became a born-again christian. He was saying things like the bible must be true because it is the only book in all of human history to contain no errors, and that it contains no contradictions despite being written by multiple authors over the course of millennia. All of that is obviously factually wrong. Even from a purely textual standpoint, the bible is all over the map. It’s historically incorrect about the historical events it documents, and obviously genesis is factually incorrect. This should be obvious to anyone who gives it even a cursory thought, but a biologist? I was stunned.

Anyway, all of this is to say that Dawkins is wrong, but there’s also a larger truth here. Laypeople - and by that I generally mean anyone who is not well versed in a particular area - will consider someone like Dawkins to be a great biologist because he is in fact a biologist and they’ve heard of him. We tend to assign fame more credence than it deserves, because (from an evolutionary standpoint) there’s a wisdom of crowds as well as a “I think like my fellow people do” unification thing going on.

Dawkins is not and never was a great biologist, scientifically speaking. He’s a middling atheist, who we can credit with helping people identify and come out but whose philosophical foundations are sometimes wanting (and Daniel Dennett actually does a better job of looking at the evolutionary origin and effects of religion).

Don’t mistake fame for competence in a field, and be conscious of the halo effect (defined by someone who both got some fame and truly made contributions that changed their field forever).