Biology Is Right-Wing? This Leftist Scientist Begs to Differ - Gary Clark (#23)
24 July 2025
With Gary Clark
Global
Paleoanthropologist Dr Gary Clark argues that biological sex is not a political opinion but a scientific fact inscribed in fossil records across four million years of human evolution. In conversation with the Beyond Gender hosts, he challenges the growing academic consensus that accepting biological reality is a right-wing position, drawing on cross-cultural fieldwork and decades of evidence from sexual dimorphism in ancient human ancestors.
Dr Gary Clark arrives at this conversation with an unusual combination of credentials: decades studying australopithecine fossils and sexual dimorphism in ancient human remains, alongside years of fieldwork living among Aboriginal communities in Australia's Western Desert. That double grounding — laboratory science and direct cross-cultural experience — gives his argument a weight that is difficult to dismiss. His central claim is straightforward: every human society ever studied, across every continent and era, has organised itself around the biological distinction between male and female. This is not a Western construct. It is a species-wide pattern. The episode takes aim at a position now common inside universities — that treating biological sex as real and consequential is somehow a conservative or reactionary stance. Clark, who describes himself as a man of the left, finds this inversion troubling. He watched gender ideology spread through Australian academia not as a grassroots intellectual movement but as an imported theoretical framework that displaced empirical inquiry. The irony he identifies is sharp: postmodern theorists who claim to be deconstructing Western categories are, in his reading, actually imposing a distinctly Western abstraction onto cultures that have always understood sex as a biological given. Much of the conversation concerns what the fossil record and primatology can and cannot tell us. Sexual dimorphism — differences in body size, bone density, and anatomy between males and females — is measurable in specimens millions of years old. Clark explains that these differences are not artefacts of social conditioning and cannot be wished away by theoretical frameworks developed in humanities departments. When institutions begin treating this body of evidence as politically suspect, the damage is not merely academic. Decisions affecting real people — in medicine, in safeguarding, in sport — rest on whether policymakers are willing to engage honestly with the biology. Clark is also the author of a book examining Carl Jung and the evolutionary sciences, and part of the episode explores how Jungian ideas about archetype and the psyche became detached from their biological grounding by later theorists. He argues that Jung's framework, properly understood, depended on recognising sex as a biological reality that shapes the psyche — and that postmodern adaptations stripped that foundation away, leaving a psychology untethered from the science that gave it credibility. For Irish audiences, the conversation resonates because the same pressures Clark describes in Australian universities are visible here. Irish third-level institutions have adopted similar frameworks in gender studies and in professional training for health and social care workers. The HSE's clinical guidance and the policies of Irish gender services operate in an environment shaped partly by these academic currents. When a scientist of Clark's standing argues that the rejection of biological sex is anti-scientific rather than progressive, it is a challenge that policymakers, clinicians, and educators in Ireland cannot reasonably set aside. The episode does not resolve every question, nor does Clark claim it should. What he offers is a reminder that the evidence accumulated by paleoanthropology, primatology, and evolutionary biology did not emerge from a political agenda — and that discarding it in the name of inclusion carries costs that fall hardest on those least equipped to bear them.
