ASM021 Superheroes, Women in Church, and the Science of Intersex

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[Music] superheroes women in church and the science of intersex all that and more on this episode of ask science mike

[Music]

welcome to another episode of ask science mike the weekly podcast where i answer your questions about science faith and life and it's kind of an old school episode i actually picked the questions for this week's show i've got a lot going on didn't really have time to get questions out on patreon but we'll uh return to that schedule in a few weeks but we're doing it old school today what the heck let's get it started [Music] hi science mike my name is paige i really love listening to your show my question relates to the idea of super powers in our society the idea of superhuman abilities is really prevalent on television and novels and movies and comics we've created these ideas of people who have supernatural powers like in the justice league or x-men who can do things that are amazing we've streamed to people who can read minds who can heal who can change in animals who can fly i feel our culture is obsessed with the idea of superpowers and of humans doing things that physically are not possible for us to do i guess my question is why do we extremely desire something that our physical world isn't equipped with to give us it just seems kind of fruitless that despite having all we need there's obviously still this lack of contentment with the way our world is set up for me ever since i was little i've really wanted to fly and at times i almost feel like ordinary life isn't enough so i wonder if there's a reason that we desire these powers is there some evolutionary advantage for always desiring greater things does it help us to advance as a species when we're always looking for the next great thing or is it something more spiritual i read a c.s lewis quote once that says if i find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy the most probable explanation is that i was made for another world so could it be that there is an afterlife where we can do these things or do you think that it will one day be possible for us on earth to do some of the things we imagine today i'd love to hear your thoughts on this and i really appreciate all that you do the show means so much to me so thank you for all your great work well paige what a wonderful and interesting question and i'd actually like to take a moment to digress from it because you did something that a lot of people do is that you told me you liked listening to the show and you thanked me for doing the show so i'd like to thank you for asking your question um the hardest thing for me about podcasting or writing or creating things is trying to figure out what to create what to talk about what people want to know and what's so great about this show is you guys just tell me what you want to talk about and it takes all the work away from me so paige i really need you to know i literally couldn't do this show without you without people like you and that not only did i listen to your question but i listen to every single question that people record and send in and i read every single question that people send in now right now we get a lot more questions than we could ever put on the show but i read them all and it's fascinating and actually helps shape the things i research and look into and you know you're going to see your ideas reflected in my work so i want to thank you for that it means a lot to me now let's talk about superheroes why do we want to be superheroes i do i've wanted to fly my whole life since i was a little kid all the way till now if i could fly i would i'd be in i'd love to be able to turn invisible i've always thought it would be amazing to turn invisible and play pranks on people because i'm basically a giant middle schooler and that might even be offensive to middle schoolers [Music] i don't know but i feel like i identify with being a giant middle schooler or something's gonna hang with that um super speed super speed would be a lot of fun i'd love to be as strong as superman and then enter arm wrestling competitions and uh just put up a good fight and and you know not break the guy's arm off or whatever yeah i get it's funny all my superhero powers other than flying tend to relate to playing jokes on people i wonder what that says about me but we all i think have these fantasies these dreams of as you said having abilities beyond our physical limitations and you asked me if there are evolutionary advantages to those fantasies and i'd say absolutely you know as i researched this one the most common theme i found from sociologists and psychologists is that modern superhero narratives and movies and media are like justice porn it's a way for us to project a need for certainty onto a chaotic world and uh as evidence uh i found several articles that pointed to the heightened popularity of superhero negatives post 911 there could be merit to that i didn't dig deep enough to find out but i don't need to because i've done enough research already to know that there's absolutely an evolutionary advantage to these kind of fantasies because you can imagine a couple hundred thousand years ago someone who looked a lot like you but didn't live in a civilization lived in a tribal setting who had adapted to include more animal protein in their diet looked at animals that were faster and hard to catch and imagined if only we could strike animals down from a distance one day wheeled at a branch and realized you could club things and then someone else said well if only we could make really long clubs uh and then we learned to throw and you know human beings are absolute freaks of nature in our capacity to accurately throw things there's no animal on the planet that can execute a throw like we can which is why when we figured out how to sharpen sticks and throw them as spears we became the deadliest animal on the planet suddenly the largest of prey could be felt by a ban of humans and the most powerful apex predators were afraid of these apes with pointy sticks our ability to dream and imagine a future that doesn't exist is largely responsible for our success over other species so imagining the impossible is how we invent and innovate so while we may not be able to breathe underwater naturally we can build scuba gear while we may not be able to fly we can build hang gliders it is the combination of our dexterity and our imaginations that makes humanity humanity now c.s lewis is the fact that we can imagine these things a sign of some immaterial realm well i hope not because we imagine terrible things as well we imagine the ability to defeat our adversaries in war and we split atoms and make tanks and bombs whatever the spirit world is i don't think our fantasies are the best way to understand it i often lean into my hopes my dreams of what could be i often tell people i hope for god i hope for reconciliation with him in the next life but as i've said so many times on the program i just don't think we have an empirical way to nail down those sorts of things all we have is the fact that we have extremely powerful subjective experiences that make us feel like there is more to life than an emergent phenomenon from physics that there is more to consciousness than neurons and uh i hold out hope in those situations so superheroes i absolutely think they're born of evolution and the afterlife it will be what it will be and i trust god to take care of that [Music] hey science mike this is bill in baltimore maryland and i was hoping you could talk a little bit about um well i guess intersex people and the implication that that has for our overall gender binaries and if you want to connect that to how theology works and how christian theology has developed especially as it relates to genesis that would be awesome bill what a timely question yeah i haven't really weighed in on the bruce jenner caitlyn jenner situation other than episode 20 of the liturgist podcast where we talked about lgbtq equality and the church but this is certainly a topic that is timely a lot of people are discussing and curious about and i interestingly enough i haven't seen intersex persons mentioned as part of that conversation and they are relevant but perhaps first we should discuss what intersex is and how it differs from trans persons so an intersex person biologically speaking medically speaking cannot be clearly defined as a man or a woman a transgendered person has a gender identity that differs from their physical or given gender their biological gender although gosh trans is tough to talk about because all those words there's they're loaded and they're they're imprecise for the discussion it may not be accurate to say that a neurologically an identity gender is non-biological for example but just just forgive me i'm doing my best with a new topic that the language hasn't quite landed on but here's an easy way to simplify intersex versus transsexual or transgendered intersexed persons are often given surgery they do not want as children transsexual persons or transgendered persons are often denied surgery that they do want okay so an intersex person for example may look exactly like a woman may have breasts may have a vagina may have all the exterior features of a woman but may chromosomally be xy and instead of ovaries may have testicles okay that is one example of a possible intersexed person and there are many many variations effectively internally or externally there is some difficulty in deriving where a person is male or female they may have a clitoris but no vaginal opening for example which looks an awful lot like a male with micro penis although missing testicles and there's a great number of these potential biological options and here's why gender is complicated biologically gender binaries don't exist in nature the whole male female thing is a social construct it's socio-linguistic it's not biological in nature effectively sex male female sex is an adaptation in vertebrates for evolutionary advantages we scramble our dna by having sex we increase our mutation rate it helps us compete against microbes because microbe generations are so much faster than ours it's fair to say that a male a male vertebrate is a specialized kind of female and to say that i would say look at clownfish where a dominant female clownfish becomes male and that's how clownfish make more clownfish so it takes an incredibly orchestrated experience between your genes and your development and especially the release of hormones at particular moments to shape an embryo towards either sex and then that happens again later with secondary sex characteristics and so you can have and i'm not talking about people taking hormones i'm talking about with no medical intervention people whose secondary and primary sex characters don't don't match or are mixed or whose genitals contain features of both genders or really not much of either gender and typically intersex people have been medically corrected to look more like one gender or the other and often it turns out in time that the doctor's choice that was recommended to the family that the family went with did not match the person's actual gender identity so someone was raised as a girl and they figure out their mail it turns out they had their testicles removed right because they were internal testicles and they looked externally female now i know a lot of people are listening to this and your mind is blown but here's the thing this is relatively common there's many types of intersex conditions there are a lot of babies born this way and i'm going to include links in the show notes on ask sciencemac.com so you can check my data yourself but this was at the heart of what started to change my mind on the issue of marriage equality and sexual orientation because sexual orientation is based on a lattice that assumes two biological genders and what we find in science in biology is gender is actually a spectrum now don't get me wrong an overwhelming majority of people fall towards one of the far ends of the spectrum but even among people who are obviously male or obviously female let's be honest some of us are more masculine biologically or more feminine biologically does that make us less of a man or a woman and that's the point the binary fails so transgendered persons and intersex people in some way cross what we as a society and a culture have decided are lines that are impossible to cross but we can only do that by ignoring physical evidence and this has theological implications someone who has an x and a y chromosome and testicles where ovary should be but biologically appears to be female are they a lesbian if they're attracted to women what about someone else who was raised as a boy in the same condition but it turns out has ovaries and no vaginal opening how do you say whether they are gay or whether they're straight it's not clear what their gender is to begin with intersexed persons are not freaks they're not broken they're just people they were made by the same process that traditionally male and traditionally female people were the same is true of transgendered persons we have to accept that if we believe there is a god and that this god is involved in creation and that this god created us that this god also created intersex persons so when i look at genesis where they were created male and female i see a reflection of ancient people in the same way that i see a firmament in the heavens or a six day creation an ancient understanding of science still poetic still beautiful and still having much to teach us but also unaware of many things we know now this is why i'm affirming of people who have differing sexual orientations this is why i'm affirming of transgendered persons because they want what i want they want to love someone else to reflect the beauty of creation in a relationship and i would not deny that of anyone and i don't believe that god would either [Music] [Applause] hi science mike my name is mary i'm so grateful for your program and the topics that you cover i'm wondering if you can speak to the issue of raising children given your own experience as a person of faith who deeply appreciates science and your own story i'm wondering if you can suggest to those of us who are raising kids now the sorts of maybe knowledge and skills that you think are worthwhile for us to be passing on to them it seems like in the areas of education and parenting um even christian education at churches everything is up in the air the old ways of doing things even the former curricula that have been used in schools and sunday schools are being questioned what do you think is worthwhile for children as they're developing to hear about from adults and to see modeled by adults thanks a lot appreciate your time take care i got two great kids i mean they're like my favorite people to be around i'd take the company of my wife and my daughters over anyone any day of the week we have such good times together we're friends all of us we enjoy each other and that's because i don't know kids are a mystery that they come out of the womb and they're their own person already and i think one of the mistakes people make and i and there's some science i've heard that back this up is they try to make their child into someone and we're tour guides parents we're just tour gods modern parenting over corrects for some problems with parenting in prior generations so whereas maybe previous generations could have been at times too detached or excessively disciplinarian we overcompensate by becoming helicopter parents and not disciplining our kids at all so let's talk about the super loose roughly science-based science mic approach to parenting and here's the other thing i only know it works on my kids my data set is two kids and i know enough kids to know that absolutely nothing works for all children other than this i'm going to give you one piece of universal advice the most important thing for any child is to know that they are loved unconditionally by their parents science backs me up a hundred percent there is not much more damaging neurologically and psychologically to a child than to wonder if their parent loves them or approves of them your love and your approval of your children is unconditional kick shame to the curb shame-based parenting is damaging and ineffective it is vital to build trust with children how do you build trust with children the same way you do with everyone else you answer questions honestly age appropriate there's that component too right you know your three-year-old's not going to get a screed on democracy but you can tell them who the president is right that's what i mean by age-appropriate apologize when you're wrong to your kids science has shown that's that's really really really beneficial kids are more confident when their parents are willing to admit mistakes set boundaries boundaries actually are important but also explain them and be open to questions consistency with children is vital say what you're going to do and do what you say that's really incredible kids don't deal well with ambiguity so consistency is vital that includes in discipline if i tell my kids listen if you don't stop whatever the thing is they shouldn't be doing i'm gonna have consequence x then i have to follow through which also means to be reasonable in the consequences you dictate uh i haven't spanked my kids in years and in the very beginning i wish i would have done the very little that i did um but still the consistency in discipline is vital and so when i when i say discipline i mean a teachable corrective moment not you know a belt uh or a spanking or whatever i want to be clear about that reading i think is vital you want to teach kids to teach themselves so you want your kids to catch you reading and you want to read together as a family i've got two avid readers i think that helps children develop into their own what fascinates me is to see how my children's taste and reading differ from each other and different from me and my wife we spend more time uh reading than watching television in our home a lot more um but whatever you do in approaching parenting and whatever we teach our kids i think with young children you want to model your faith if faith is important to you uh with not much ambiguity but as they grow it's okay to talk about what you believe and what others believe and why we believe this i think it's important to set kids up for a world that is multicultural and multiracial and the fabric they're actually going to weave their tapestry onto in life okay i think that's vital but whatever you do give yourself grace there's no such thing as a perfect parent people freak out way too much about being the best possible parent just love your kids and do your best when you mess up admit it all the stress goes away take care of yourself get rest if you're married or in a relationship then invest as much energy in that as you do in the kids when they're little i get it if you don't take care of them they die but as kids get older they get more independent and that balance of energy needs to go right back into taking care of yourself and investing in your relationship with your partner and that will make your children happier i think and we over complicate it i think some of the best parenting i see anthropologically happens in more primitive societies where children are just part of life they're not doted over or obsessed about they're free to explore and grow really interesting from a science perspective is the degree to which very safe playgrounds haven't actually uh reduced playground injuries we've created a generation of kids that don't know how to fall and don't know how to explore and that you know a lot of the paranoia we have about child safety and children being unwatched you know going around neighborhoods on bicycles and stuff uh you know their kidnapping's just not a statistically significant event it's it's much ado about nothing so as your kids grow give them freedom trust them and build mutual trust and create opportunities for open discussion my kids can ask me anything anytime and they're going to get an honest answer anything anytime and they will get an honest answer and they never get shamed or rebuked for a question and in this age that's vital when my kids run across something online that confuses them i want them to come ask me about it i don't want to uh what are you looking at what do you know let's talk about it let's get it up in the open let's not use shame in parenting and that's it i think model being a healthy balanced person and your children will do the same you know find the things in life that light you up and pursue them uh oh one other thing uh and this is this is also backed by data the more time you can sit around tables sharing meals together the healthier your relationship with your children will be the more successful they will be and actually the greater uh the chance that you will have a success in your marriage as well or your your major relationship that matters as well a little rambly there sorry about that no notes on this episode i'm just going with every other answer as i think about it that's that's how i approach parenting i tell you what i'm going to ask you listeners you've got kids what do you know about it come to ask sciencemike.com episode 21 uh drop some comments for this question i'm heck i always like to learn more about parenting it is the most difficult most rewarding thing i know that a couple can do [Music] hey science mike my name is kat i actually just listened to your most recent podcast and my husband zach had sent in a question unbeknownst to me and i'm i'm really glad that he did um so just a quick recap he and i experienced um we came up through the high school ministry of our church we've been at for you know 13 years and continued to serve and um there just there was definitely some issues there at the end with manipulation and and leaders having too much um power and authority that went unchecked and uh and unfortunately we got hurt in the process and uh kind of rebuilding from the ground up what we believe and what we were um you know taught and you know was that taught by somebody who was in a good place at the time and um and worth listening to or do we need to start over and um anyway so something that has constantly been coming up for me is a women's role in the church and in leadership and i'm just curious if uh if science supports um the traditional role of women that we've been taught kind of the more meek and better suited for support support roles and you know motherhood and and things like that versus um uh roles you know higher up roles in the church and i just loved your response of you know the the way to to kind of get around the patriarchal system of you know if the current church is just to go to a church with that's led by a female pastor and i had to pull over i just laughed so hard so uh so thanks for that um but yeah anyway so i'm just curious if uh if science supports um that uh you know that that idea of women kind of taking more of a support role and um and then also you know where you see scripture playing into that as well i mean that's it's obviously a huge thing that's debated in the church is you know where where is a woman's place and should they have a defined place and i just i can't get past that you know when uh when christ died and when you know when he came back and it was it was women it was women that found him and that ushered the gospel into the world to you know they were the first ones to tell everybody and and started this amazing this amazing adventure of the gospel that that we all you know subscribe to now so um so i just can't get past that like what and what an amazing responsibility and that he would ask women to do that and it's such uh such a beautiful beautiful thing and i love women in leadership and i'm you know i'm just i'm not satisfied with uh with the current um description of women's role in in the church so yeah so just curious what your thoughts are and thanks so much i i really appreciate um what you do and uh it's just brought a lot a lot of healing for for my family so thanks so much bye-bye well kat i'm glad you uh sent a message in i'm glad we had to follow up after what zach sent in and i hope you guys are finding more supportive community i had a question a few episodes back and i'll link in the notes on ask clientsmike.com to it someone asked me the sign saw about the differences between men and women and and that kind of got into a discussion of complementarianism this world view that because of the way the scriptures are written men and women have different roles it is a theological position but as i mentioned in that episode it is not a scientific one it's just it's not there now studies of men and women are hard to do because how do you separate culture you can do cross-cultural studies and that's helpful but a lot you know for example if you were to study scientifically or women as effective leaders you would have to acknowledge in that study that there's tremendous social pressure on women as they develop as they grow against becoming leaders or for example why are there so many male people in science technology engineering and math well because young girls who are good at math are only encouraged to be good at math to a point at which point they're suddenly discouraged from pursuing those skills by social pressure and even by their teachers that said there's just not there there's no science to say that women can't do anything that men can there's a few things men can do that women can't men can what they can ejaculate and produce sperm that's a that's a man only gig growing a full beard gonna be much easier for a man growing taller than six feet statistically much more likely for a man to be able to do it and in general men are going to have an advantage at building muscle mass at a given size biologically so they're going to be a little bit stronger neurologically speaking men are a little bit better as a group at 3d spatial perception that's pretty much it none of those things are especially relevant to modern society either women can do everything men can do i love having two daughters and going to a church with a pastor named betsy and an associate pastor named sterling which by the way both of them are two of the best preachers that have ever heard in my life sterling can bring the fire like any male pastor i've ever heard and betsy's messages are both thoughtful and empathetic and moving every single week i go to a church where there's not only a female pastor but there's women all over in leadership but what i like about my church is it's uh it's not some order of the priestess it's not a place where men are minimized it's a place where men and women are equal partners in ministry and in life it's egalitarian and i think that's the healthiest way for a church to be so no i don't think science supports traditional gender roles now scripture i think some scripture some of the authors of scripture would be against women in church leadership i think others would be more for it scripture did not have a single author people wrote the bible now there are some people who say that god inspired directly all of those people and that's a very common belief in the church is one that i don't hold i'm not a biblical inerrantist i read the bible as the accounts of people who love and serve god but they are human accounts which offers me frankly tremendous freedom on issues like women leading in the church or marriage equality or the age of the universe and darwinian evolution because i'm not trying to force everything through you know what two thousand to five thousand year-old world view now when i listen to your answer and you say you're not satisfied with the way things are and you do point accurately to the fact that the first people to witness the resurrection were women you've got to do something about that feeling you've got to ask yourself are you a reformer is is the the call on your life to continue to exist in religious institutions which are in some ways anti-feminine which is an odd position to be in because statistically in these times women are much more likely to keep their faith than men are statistically speaking atheism especially strong atheism is a very masculine phenomenon are you the kind of person that wants to shake up the establishment and open the doors if you are that's fine that's a noble calling or are you the kind of person who maybe is getting ready to find a community where you will be welcomed as you are in the fullness of your humanity to serve and follow god there are a lot of churches in this country that fully accept women it was one of the strongest calling points for me that's when i walked into that church the first time and a woman gave the sermon as a dad of two daughters one of the last things that happened at the baptist church i was attending was my daughter and i were talking and she was talking about what she wanted to do when she grew up and i told her she could do anything she wanted to do and she said well dad i could never be a pastor and that's when i knew it was time for us to find another place to worship is because i don't want my daughter growing up in a culture where she believes she's in some way inferior to or subordinate to someone else just because they're a man and it sounds to me like you may be finding that same place so whether you decide to stay and reform or go and find a place where you can grow i wish you well [Music] well there we have another episode of ask science mike and uh let's do a little bit of housekeeping let's talk about some important things one for the next two episodes uh in addition this one this is 21 to 22 and 23 there will not be a patron poll on patreon i'll be picking the questions for those shows because my schedule these next two weeks is cuckoo for coco puffs but it's actually exciting uh next week the week that the monday the show comes out will be my last week full time in my job transitioning to a consulting role there because the work that i'm doing the science mic thing the liturgist thing and there's more announcements coming on this front but i'm taking it full time this is going to be my main gig i'm going to go from recording this show at night half asleep to recording it during the day spending more time working on the questions more times developing you know format changes and special episodes things like that so for all of you who help make the show possible by giving financially i just i'm begging you for two weeks of patience while i keep the show going but don't do a lot of the little extras now what i'm going to make up for on the other side of that is much more involvement on my patreon page so if you've been thinking about giving to the show helping make it possible there has never been a better time you can go to ask sciencemic.com click on the patreon link as little as a dollar a month really makes a difference for the show some people give more and there's different rewards for that you can get access to the show early you can pick the questions except for the next two weeks you can even guarantee your own question gets on the program i really appreciate all of you who do that also another reason i can't do polls is because uh belong is coming from atlanta now if you've been thinking about going to belong and didn't think you'd be able to get in we have had a couple of people who because of scheduling reasons had to cancel their ticket so we have a few seats available if you go to the liturgist.com slash belong june 15th and 16th in atlanta we're doing belong and we would love to see you michael gunger is going to be there amina brown is going to be there pastor betsy my pastor is going to be there laney donahue is going to be there it's going to be an incredible event talking about how do we create a church culture where everyone belongs including you also in july i'm going to be at the wild goose festival the liturgists will be there as well we're doing our lost and found liturgy and i'm going to give a talk on the science of peacekeeping that i'm really looking forward to and i have a ton of events coming up so if you go to mikemcarg.com events or go to ask sciencemike.com and click on events you can see things i've got going on at least the ones that are publicly available and there's more in the pipeline so uh keep an eye out there we do need your questions to keep the show alive so you can submit those on ask sciencemic.com you can record a voice question type in a text question that's how the show happens no questions no show so all of you guys that have keep those coming in i really really appreciate it of course our show is produced by the wonderful greg nordin who he does this as a ministry to people greg and i were talking and it means so much to him to help facilitate these conversations because he loves that people who feel like no one thought like them or they felt alone suddenly feel like they found the community through the show so i appreciate greg and all his time hayley hyde helped me with the pre-production i want to thank her for that as well and of course as always big bear jeb botiford for doing the uh theme song and recording and all that stuff got links to all those guys as well as resources for every single question in the history of the show on ask science mike dot it's a really exciting time i'm on this threshold where i've gone from graduating high school and working and getting a paycheck every single day since to now taking a leap into the unknown and following this work that seems to mean so much to people but it's terrifying guys it really is but i love it i love this program i love talking to you all i love meeting you at events i love running into people who listen to the program and i love hearing your experiences so let's keep the party going and i will see you next week [Music]