This paper critiques core tenets of feminist studies through the lens of evolutionary psychology, arguing that many claims – such as those c
Abstract
This paper critiques core tenets of feminist studies through the lens of evolutionary psychology, arguing that many claims – such as those concerning patriarchy, social constructionism, fat studies, rape, ecofeminism, and lived experience – lack empirical support and are shaped more by ideology than science. It begins by reassessing the feminist concept of patriarchy, traditionally seen as a deliberate male power structure, and instead proposes it as an emergent outcome of evolutionary pressures around reproduction and resource allocation. The paper then critiques fat studies, which often dismiss biological and medical consensus on obesity in favor of social constructionist views. Drawing on evolutionary psychology, the analysis highlights that human preferences for certain body types are not arbitrary but reflect adaptive traits related to health and fertility. Feminist theories of rape are also examined, particularly the view that rape is solely about power and not sexual motivation. The paper presents an evolutionary perspective that considers rape a maladaptive reproductive strategy, arguing that ignoring sexual motivation oversimplifies a complex issue and limits explanatory accuracy. Overall, the paper contends that feminist studies have increasingly prioritized ideological narratives over empirical inquiry, influenced by Marxist and postmodernist critiques. The article concludes that, rather than serving as a neutral academic discipline, feminist studies now functions predominantly as an advocacy platform – one better suited to political settings – while empirical inquiry into gendered behavior should be pursued within disciplines adhering to stricter methodological standards.
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Studying the nature of women and men through postmodern gobbledygook and the "wisdom" of some of the most mentally ill women to ever exist who didn't know what a p-value is, rather than studying biology and evolution… is no different than studying the nature of the universe through the bible and the "wisdom" of primitive goat herders who didn't know where the sun went at night, rather than studying astronomy and cosmology.
I find it irritating encountering people who argue that dangerous, crime-ridden “bad neighborhoods” (like those found in many large US cities) are simply an inevitable element of large cities, and then, when you point out cities in other countries that don’t have such neighborhoods and such issues, insist that in fact those cities do have “no go” neighborhoods, and just as much crime as any US city, only that it’s being “covered up” by a massive campaign of lies by that nation’s government (you know, ‘Tokyo is no safer than Baltimore; the only difference is that the Japanese government and police are such lying liars who lie to create the false appearance of being safer’-type arguments). It’s a fully unfalsifiable view.
A new Oregon study shows that pediatric gender transitions aren’t as rare as advocates of the “affirming” model assured us.
By: Colin Wright
Published: Jun 25, 2026
For years, we were told not to worry about pediatric gender medicine because it was vanishingly rare. Puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, we were assured, were reserved for a tiny number of carefully assessed children with severe and persistent distress.
But when new data show that these treatments aren’t so rare, the same defenders suddenly change their tune: the numbers are no longer reassuring because they are small; now they are reassuring because they are large. More children receiving medical transition means that a previously hidden population finally feels safe enough to pursue the care it has always needed. Higher cross-sex identity persistence after social transition or administering puberty blockers means the interventions were obviously appropriate.
Any outcome, it seems, can be interpreted as proof that “gender-affirming care” is successful. But this is not how evidence-based medicine is supposed to work. This is how an ideology protects itself from falsification.
The latest example comes from Oregon. As Benjamin Ryan first reported, a new study in Research Connections analyzed insurance claims for 868,740 insured Oregon adolescents ages 8 to 17 from 2016 to 2023. The data cover roughly 80 percent of insured Oregonians. The figures were shocking.
By age 17, roughly one in 240 insured Oregon girls was taking testosterone, and about one in 630 boys was taking estrogen. Across all ages in the study, about 1 percent of insured Oregon youth had a gender-related diagnosis. For girls, the figure was 1.5 percent.
These aren’t nationwide numbers. Oregon is an unusually progressive state with an unusually supportive legal and insurance environment for pediatric gender medicine. But they give us a glimpse of what happens when supporters of child transition receive little to no pushback.
The study’s authors don’t view the numbers as alarming. They still describe medical transition as “rare” and emphasize that access remains “limited” even in Oregon. They suggest that the state’s supportive policy environment likely contributed to greater access, while “structural and systemic barriers” may still be holding treatment rates down.
Whatever the data, they support the affirmative model. If the rates are low, that proves the panic is overblown. If the rates are high, that’s evidence that access is improving. If the rates rise, that means stigma is declining. If they don’t rise enough, that means barriers remain. Heads they win, tails you’re a bigot.
This pattern shows up again and again. Years ago, when critics warned that puberty blockers appeared to function less as a “pause button” and more as the first step on a nearly automatic pathway to cross-sex hormones, defenders insisted that persistence meant the children had been properly selected. But if administering puberty blockers changes the likelihood that a child will persist in rejecting their sex from about 15–20 percent to more than 97 percent, then persistence isn’t proof that the child’s transgender identity was fixed all along—it’s evidence that the intervention made permanent what would have been ephemeral.
Kenneth Zucker, one of the world’s leading experts on childhood gender dysphoria, has warned that even social transition is not a neutral act. Changing a child’s name, pronouns, clothing, and social identity is a psychosocial intervention. It may reduce distress in the short term, but it also seems to increase the likelihood that a child’s cross-sex identity persists into adolescence, when puberty blockers and hormones are put on the table.
That possibility should haunt the field. Instead, it is dismissed.
Consider a new Canadian study, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health and shared by pediatric psychiatrist and gender medicine proponent Jack Turban on social media. Researchers examined 445 adolescents referred to gender clinics. After a median follow-up of 2.4 years, 97.1 percent still identified as transgender or nonbinary, and only 1.1 percent of those who started cross-sex hormones stopped taking them. The study presents this as reassuring evidence that adolescent transgender identity is extremely stable, and that concerns about regret and potential detransition are overblown.
The same logic appeared in response to the Oregon data. Trans activist Ari Drennen said on X that it “should not be shocking” that 0.4 percent of 17-year-old girls in Oregon are chemically transitioning. But it is shocking. If one in 240 girls aged 17 in a state were receiving any other powerful intervention for a new psychiatric diagnosis that permanently deepened their voice, caused them to grow beards, altered their sexual function, and affected their fertility, no serious person would shrug and say, “Sounds about right.”
At some point, defenders of pediatric gender medicine must answer several simple questions: What result would make you reconsider? Would it be one in 100 girls on testosterone? What about one in 50? What rate of regret or detransition is too high? Would you accept that as evidence that suicidality and mental health don’t improve after treatment? How many systematic evidence reviews must conclude that the evidence of benefit is extremely weak while the risk of serious harm is significant?
We should have insisted on answers long ago, before we ever started performing this medical experiment on children—not after the results come in, when activists have had ample time to devise explanations about why the latest horrific finding is actually wonderful news.
Falsifiability is a basic principle of science. No claim that can be supported by every possible outcome has any business being called scientific or “evidence-based.”
Recent research found that damage to specific brain networks, primarily in the right hemisphere, is linked to higher levels of religious fun
By: Eric W. Dolan
Published: Sept 20, 2024
A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that specific networks in the brain, when damaged, may influence the likelihood of developing religious fundamentalism. By analyzing patients with focal brain lesions, researchers found that damage to a particular network of brain regions—mainly in the right hemisphere—was associated with higher levels of fundamentalist beliefs. This finding provides new insight into the potential neural basis of religious fundamentalism, which has long been studied in psychology but less so in neuroscience.
Religious fundamentalism is a way of thinking and behaving characterized by a rigid adherence to religious doctrines that are seen as absolute and inerrant. It’s been linked to various cognitive traits such as authoritarianism, resistance to doubt, and a lower complexity of thought. While much of the research on religious fundamentalism has focused on social and environmental factors like family upbringing and cultural influence, there has been growing interest in the role of biology. Some studies have suggested that genetic factors or brain function may influence religiosity, but until now, very little research has looked at specific brain networks that could underlie fundamentalist thinking.
The researchers behind this study wanted to address a critical gap in understanding how brain lesions might affect religious beliefs, particularly fundamentalism. Prior research suggested that damage to the prefrontal cortex could increase fundamentalist attitudes, but this work was limited to small sample sizes and focused only on one part of the brain. The authors of the study hypothesized that instead of a single brain region being responsible, religious fundamentalism might arise from damage to a distributed network of connected brain regions.
“My primary interest is and has been mystical experience. But in the process researching the cognitive neuroscience of mystical experience, I came across brain network associations with religious fundamentalism,” study corresponding author Michael Ferguson, an instructor in neurology at Harvard Medical School and director of Neurospirituality Research at the Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics.
To explore whether damage to specific brain networks could influence the likelihood of holding religious fundamentalist beliefs, the researchers used a method called lesion network mapping, which helps identify how different regions of the brain are connected and how damage to one area might disrupt related brain functions. The study involved two large groups of patients with focal brain damage, giving the researchers a unique opportunity to analyze how different types of brain lesions might be linked to religious beliefs.
The first group consisted of 106 male Vietnam War veterans who had sustained traumatic brain injuries during combat. These men, aged between 53 and 75 at the time of brain imaging, were part of a long-term study conducted at the National Institutes of Health. The second group included 84 patients from rural Iowa who had experienced brain injuries from various causes, such as strokes, surgical resections, or traumatic head injuries. This second group was more diverse in terms of gender and had a broader range of injury causes.
Both groups completed a scale designed to measure religious fundamentalism, which asked participants to respond to statements reflecting rigid and inerrant religious beliefs, such as the view that there is only one true religion or that certain religious teachings are absolutely correct and unchangeable.
For each participant, the researchers mapped the precise locations of their brain lesions using advanced imaging techniques like computerized tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). These scans were then analyzed using lesion network mapping to see how damage to certain brain areas was connected to changes in religious fundamentalism scores. The researchers also compared the brain lesion data to a larger database of lesions associated with various neuropsychiatric and behavioral conditions, which helped them understand how the brain regions linked to religious fundamentalism overlap with those involved in other psychological traits.
The researchers found that damage to certain areas of the brain, particularly in the right hemisphere, was associated with higher scores on the religious fundamentalism scale. Specifically, lesions affecting the right superior orbital frontal cortex, right middle frontal gyrus, right inferior parietal lobe, and the left cerebellum were linked to increased religious fundamentalism. In contrast, damage to regions such as the left paracentral lobule and the right cerebellum was associated with lower scores on the fundamentalism scale.
“The strength and reproducibility of the signal between psychological self-report measures of religious fundamentalism and the functional networks we identified in the brain surprised me,” Ferguson told PsyPost. “It increases confidence in the results.”
Interestingly, the researchers noted that the brain regions identified in this study are part of a broader network connected to cognitive functions like reasoning, belief formation, and moral decision-making. These areas are also associated with conditions like pathological confabulation—a disorder where individuals create false memories or beliefs without the intent to deceive. Confabulation is often linked to cognitive rigidity and difficulty in revising beliefs, characteristics that are also found in individuals with high levels of religious fundamentalism.
The researchers also found a spatial overlap between brain lesions associated with criminal behavior and this fundamentalism network, which aligns with previous research suggesting that extreme religious beliefs may be linked to hostility and aggression toward outgroups.
“It’s sobering, but one of the takeaway findings is the shared neuroanatomy between religious fundamentalism, confabulations, and criminal behavior,” Ferguson said. “It refocuses important questions about how and why these aspects of human behavior may be observed to relate to each other.”
The researchers emphasize that damage to this brain network does not guarantee that a person will develop fundamentalist beliefs, nor does it imply that individuals with strong religious convictions have brain damage. Instead, the findings point to the possibility that certain brain networks influence how people process beliefs and how flexible or rigid their thinking becomes, especially in the context of religion.
“A major caveat is that these results do not indicate that people with strong religious beliefs confabulate or that individuals high in religious fundamentalism commit crimes,” Ferguson explained. “Rather, our data may help us understand the style of cognitive or emotional processing that increase or decrease the probability of holding fundamentalism attitudes.”
The authors suggest that future research should explore how this brain network influences religious fundamentalism in more diverse populations, including people from non-Christian religious traditions or from different cultural backgrounds. It would also be valuable to study patients both before and after brain injuries to better understand how changes in the brain might affect religious beliefs over time. Additionally, research could investigate how this brain network relates to other types of belief systems, such as political ideologies or moral convictions, to see if similar patterns of cognitive rigidity or reduced skepticism emerge in these contexts.
“The personal beliefs of the authors span a broad continuum from adherents of religious faiths through agnosticism to atheism,” Ferguson noted. “We approach the weighty subject matter of this research as earnest seekers of scientific data and encourage readers to receive our results in the spirit of open-minded empirical inquiry driven by scientific curiosity and without prejudice or malice to any group or faith.”
The study, “A neural network for religious fundamentalism derived from patients with brain lesions,” was authored by Michael A. Ferguson, Erik W. Asp, Isaiah Kletenik , Daniel Tranel, Aaron D. Boes, Jenae M. Nelson, Frederic L. W. V. J. Schaper, Shan Siddiqi, Joseph I. Turner, J. Seth Anderson, Jared A. Nielsen, James R. Bateman, Jordan Grafman, and Michael D. Fox.
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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative
Significance
Religious fundamentalism is a global and enduring phenomenon. Measuring religious fundamentalism following focal brain damage may lend insight into its neural basis. We use lesion network mapping, a technique that uses connectivity data to identify functional brain networks, to analyze two large, independent datasets of brain lesion patients. We found a network of brain regions that, when damaged, are linked to higher religious fundamentalism. This functional network was lateralized to the right hemisphere and overlaps with the locations of brain lesions associated with specific neuropsychiatric and behavioral conditions. Our findings shed light on neuroanatomy that may influence the emergence of religious fundamentalism, offering implications for understanding the relationship between brain networks and fundamentalist behavior.
Abstract
Religious fundamentalism, characterized by rigid adherence to a set of beliefs putatively revealing inerrant truths, is ubiquitous across cultures and has a global impact on society. Understanding the psychological and neurobiological processes producing religious fundamentalism may inform a variety of scientific, sociological, and cultural questions. Research indicates that brain damage can alter religious fundamentalism. However, the precise brain regions involved with these changes remain unknown. Here, we analyzed brain lesions associated with varying levels of religious fundamentalism in two large datasets from independent laboratories. Lesions associated with greater fundamentalism were connected to a specific brain network with nodes in the right orbitofrontal, dorsolateral prefrontal, and inferior parietal lobe. This fundamentalism network was strongly right hemisphere lateralized and highly reproducible across the independent datasets (r = 0.82) with cross-validations between datasets. To explore the relationship of this network to lesions previously studied by our group, we tested for similarities to twenty-one lesion-associated conditions. Lesions associated with confabulation and criminal behavior showed a similar connectivity pattern as lesions associated with greater fundamentalism. Moreover, lesions associated with poststroke pain showed a similar connectivity pattern as lesions associated with lower fundamentalism. These findings are consistent with the current understanding of hemispheric specializations for reasoning and lend insight into previously observed epidemiological associations with fundamentalism, such as cognitive rigidity and outgroup hostility.
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Two of the authors of the above paper also published the following:
Over 80% of the global population consider themselves religious, with even more identifying
as spiritual, but the neural substrates of spiri
Abstract
Background
Over 80% of the global population consider themselves religious, with even more identifying as spiritual, but the neural substrates of spirituality and religiosity remain unresolved.
Methods
In two independent brain lesion datasets (N1 = 88; N2 = 105), we applied lesion network mapping to test whether lesion locations associated with spiritual and religious belief map to a specific human brain circuit.
Results
We found that brain lesions associated with self-reported spirituality map to a brain circuit centered on the periaqueductal gray. Intersection of lesion locations with this same circuit aligned with self-reported religiosity in an independent dataset and previous reports of lesions associated with hyper-religiosity. Lesion locations causing delusions and alien limb syndrome also intersected this circuit.
Conclusions
These findings suggest that spirituality and religiosity map to a common brain circuit centered on the periaqueductal gray, a brainstem region previously implicated in fear conditioning, pain modulation, and altruistic behavior.
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For reference, I previously posted about a similar study from 2017:
Beliefs profoundly affect people's lives, but their cognitive and neural pathways are poorly understood. Although previous research has iden
Abstract
Beliefs profoundly affect people's lives, but their cognitive and neural pathways are poorly understood. Although previous research has identified the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) as critical to representing religious beliefs, the means by which vmPFC enables religious belief is uncertain. We hypothesized that the vmPFC represents diverse religious beliefs and that a vmPFC lesion would be associated with religious fundamentalism, or the narrowing of religious beliefs. To test this prediction, we assessed religious adherence with a widely-used religious fundamentalism scale in a large sample of 119 patients with penetrating traumatic brain injury (pTBI). If the vmPFC is crucial to modulating diverse personal religious beliefs, we predicted that pTBI patients with lesions to the vmPFC would exhibit greater fundamentalism, and that this would be modulated by cognitive flexibility and trait openness. Instead, we found that participants with dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) lesions have fundamentalist beliefs similar to patients with vmPFC lesions and that the effect of a dlPFC lesion on fundamentalism was significantly mediated by decreased cognitive flexibility and openness. These findings indicate that cognitive flexibility and openness are necessary for flexible and adaptive religious commitment, and that such diversity of religious thought is dependent on dlPFC functionality.
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It should be noted that fundamentalism is not exclusive to (traditional) religions.
“… fundamentalism, properly understood, is not about religion. It is about the inability to seriously entertain the possibility that one might be wrong. In individuals such fundamentalism is natural and, within reason, desirable. But when it becomes the foundation for an intellectual system, it is inherently a threat to freedom of thought.”
-- Jonathan Rauch, “Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought”
Flat Earth, anti-vax and wokery (modern feminism, "anti-racism," "gender identity" ideology, fat activism, etc) are all fundamentalist in nature. There is no evidence you can present to disabuse them of the tenets of their faith.
This phenomenon creates a problem for society in dealing with fundamentalist and false beliefs, especially when they have attained cultural dominance and institutional power. And particularly when they're held to be inerrant and absolute, and those who hold them regard dissent as heresy, and those who follow available evidence as evil heretics.
A good test for this is to look at the reaction when the belief is questioned; is the questioner regarded as factually wrong or morally suspect?
