Biology Is Right-Wing? This Leftist Scientist Begs to Differ - Gary Clark (#23)
24 July 2025
With Gary Clark
Global
Paleoanthropologist Gary Clark brings four million years of evolutionary evidence to bear on gender-identity ideology, arguing from fossil anatomy, primatology and cross-cultural fieldwork that biological sex is not a political position but a scientific fact. His perspective reinforces the Cass Review's central finding: that clinical and institutional practice had outrun the evidence base, and that ideology had, at points, displaced rigorous science.
The Cass Review's final report was unambiguous on one point: the evidence base underpinning gender-identity ideology in clinical settings was thin, contested and, in places, ideologically shaped rather than scientifically grounded. Gary Clark, a paleoanthropologist and evolutionary biologist, approaches the same problem from a different direction entirely — not through clinical trials or systematic reviews, but through four million years of fossil anatomy, primatology and sustained fieldwork with Aboriginal communities in Australia's Western Desert. His conclusion is the same: denying biological sex is not a progressive scientific position, it is an anti-scientific one. Clark has spent decades studying sexual dimorphism — the measurable anatomical differences between male and female members of a species — in early hominin fossils, including australopithecines. Those differences are not subtle. They are legible in bone structure across millions of years of the archaeological record. When he turns from fossils to living human societies, he finds the same pattern: every culture he has encountered, including those most remote from Western academic influence, organises social life around the biological reality of sexual difference. The post-modern claim that sex-based roles are purely Western constructs is not, in his assessment, supported by the cross-cultural evidence. There is a particular irony Clark identifies in contemporary gender theory that the episode explores in some depth. Advocates who describe themselves as deconstructing Western, colonial frameworks are, he argues, doing the opposite: they are projecting distinctly Western post-modern assumptions onto cultures that never shared them. This matters beyond the academic seminar room. The Cass Review noted that gender-identity frameworks had been adopted within NHS and educational institutions without adequate scrutiny of their underlying premises. Clark's anthropological data offers one explanation for why that scrutiny was resisted: the ideology had acquired a moral authority that made questioning it professionally and reputationally costly. That chilling effect on biological science is a theme Clark returns to repeatedly. He describes watching universities classify basic evolutionary biology as ideologically right-wing — a charge he regards as intellectually incoherent. UK academics studying sex differences have encountered similar pressures, and the downstream consequence is precisely what the Cass Review documented: a published literature in gender medicine distorted by advocacy, with findings that could not withstand independent replication or systematic review. Clark is also the author of a book examining Carl Jung through the lens of evolutionary science, and the episode touches on Jungian ideas about myth, archetype and meaning. His argument is that Jungian psychology is most coherent when grounded in biological reality, not dissolved into culturally relative narrative. For clinicians, the practical implication aligns with Cass's recommendation: young people experiencing gender distress deserve careful, curiosity-led psychological assessment, not the rapid affirmation of a fixed identity unsupported by evidence. With NHS England having restricted puberty blockers and begun redesigning its gender services on the basis of the Cass findings, the scientific grounding of these debates is no longer merely academic. Clark's contribution is to remind those debates that evolutionary biology — one of the most robustly evidenced disciplines in science — has always had a clear and consistent account of biological sex, one that was never seriously challenged until it became ideologically inconvenient.
