Dear Readers: So, a good friend recently asked me for my thoughts about a piece recently published in “Scientific American“: Males Aren’t Larger Than Females in Most Mammalian Species: A new study corrects a biased assumption promoted by Charles Darwin 150 years ago and repeated ever since.

As my analysis of this article goes deep into the science-weeds, I am publishing it at Temple of Mut today.

The piece was written by Rachel Nuwer, whose educational background is in environmental science and journalism. We’ll be returning to her background in a bit, but I would like to examine the article itself before I do.

Friends from Legal Insurrection may recall I refer to Scientific American as the Bud Light of scientific journals. That particular article stemmed from the magazine’s editor using an example of a bird that has 2 distinct genders based on 4 chromosomes to argue the avian’s existence supported “non-binary” gender identities. She was heavily critiqued for the example by an exceptional evolutionary biologist.