As an ethical naturalist and fallibilist, the truth value of moral claims about 'what harms persons, other animals and ecosystems' is discernible, ergo preventable or reducible. — 180 Proof

Why is the truth about what causes harm a moral claim? I don't believe that atheists have ever started a society from scratch without the influence of prior human religions, dogmas and supernatural beliefs etc.

Christians fought against slavery and as mentioned elsewhere David Hume religious skeptic funded a slave venture. Humans from all walks of life and belief systems exhibit extremely diverse contradictory behaviour. We end up with cherry picking again to claim whose system of beliefs is the least corrupt.

The point is however that vocal atheists have spent a lot of time trying to pick apart religion (mainly Christianity as opposed to Islam and Hinduism) but don't make the same demands of lots of other aspects of life that could be said to warrant equal scrutiny which appears to me like selective skepticism.

We were "justifying social norms" many millennia — 180 Proof

Yes but now we have science which is being highly successful but does not justify social norms.

So we have society based on something similar to a religion that can't be validated without using premises that have been used to attack religion.

That is on reason I am a moral nihilist myself. I can't see any truth value in moral claims like wise many other "ought" claims and lots of societal values. But people who called themselves atheist had a chance to create societies on their principles such as communists regimes sans gods. Did it succeed?

The point I am making is that atheists do make claims and do actions caused by their atheism.

I think the problem of doing away way with gods is then that you have to justify norms without reference to gods.

Belief in gods has been used to justify a lot of social norms including the family and the justice system and even the notion of physical laws.

When atheists get involved in the business of creating society their atheism does effect their other beliefs and values.

I think Atheism would be praiseworthy if it was simple lack of belief. It would amount to awaiting evidence to alter ones beliefs.

But instead we Have Books like "The God Delusion" and The Dechristianization of France during the French Revolution

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dechristianization_of_France_during_the_French_Revolution

It is clear that atheism has not just left people in a simple state of unbelief but produced other motives in people.

I think agnosticism seems a great stance to takle because it is being cautious and saying I don't know. (South Park did a spoof of Fundamentalist agnostics)

Extremes on all sides of these debates cause fear and anger so lets avoid extremes and brutal dichotomies and exchanging slurs.

Richard Dawkins has time and time again, stated during interviews/lectures/debates etc that any emulation of Darwinian rules within human society, is vile. — universeness

But he wrote a book could the Selfish Gene and in it he specifically tried to put the worst interpretation on altruism because he was determined to make altruism ultimately self serving and for the good of the Gene and found self sacrifice problematic and puzzling.

He clearly has wanted people to accept his model of evolution and the negative ideas found in his books regardless of what else he has said. People do make contradictory claims. He is like the Bible. But his theoretical ideas are different then his ventures into pop psychology and pop philosophy.

The problem is that a theory that has a notion of survival of the fittest, selection, fitness, competition, hierarchies, selfishness etc built in to explain biological success has innate negative connotations.

It means they are saying that anything going against these trends is undermining biological viability or success and health which is exactly what Darwin himself said in a quote I cited.

I meant to post this in general discussion but it somehow ended up here there is a similar thread called "Belief formation" that I successfully started in General Discussion. There might be some way of merging the contents.

This is the first dictionary definition I found of belief. Strangely...

"An acceptance that something exists or is true, especially one without proof.
"his belief in extraterrestrial life"
something one accepts as true or real; a firmly held opinion.
"we're prepared to fight for our beliefs"

Well, we'd need to decide how we want it run. — Bradskii

Based on personal subjective preferences

But I'm going to put that down to a personal belief. — Bradskii

Which is the deciding factor in belief formation, it seems, not evidence. One's prior beliefs leading to ones future beliefs.

The evidence can guide but might not decide.

But as this forum shows we fight it out for the predominance of our beliefs hoping someone will back down.

There is also the Natural selection arguments for and against belief validity which relates to the other debate. Would we chose to have beliefs that are not advantageous? Some people do come to self eliminating beliefs. Survival of the fittest belief or survival of the most accurate belief?

I was a good runner back in the day. My son is better. My daughter not as good. If foxes were chasing the three of us, my daughter and her slightly slower genes would be removed from the gene pool. — Bradskii

But the question is how did you come to have the trait of being a good runner? How can something be selected for if it does into already exist.

Rubbish computers won't survive Better computers but that basic facts that beneficial things survival doesn't explain their origins
which seems to solely rely on emergent properties (like proteins) and then random genetic mutations creating further impressive properties to be favoured .

To labor the point if I developed the ability to breathe under water and survived a massive flood that would explain why I survived not how I got the trait and on top of that as a homosexual I then have to find a nice young lady to impregnate with by great trait.

Now that is abject nonsense. Value is a human construct. — Bradskii

Did you forget my quote from Darwin himself earlier and if not how does it not invoke value and how do terms like "advantageous" and "fittest" not invoke value judgments?

"Withsavages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; (...) Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."

On this picture Darwin was assuming that intervening to help the weak was damaging to evolutionary processes. And that you could judge which traits could be deemed advantageous. But there are several other quotes from prominents in the field along this vein including eugenics sentiment.

So how does someone make an accurate assessment of fitness? Either it simply the ability to survive by whatever means including assistance to the poor and sick or a value judgement on why something continues to exist. We could all "aid" natural selection by randomly killing each other and seeing who gets selected by deciding which interventions we deem most valuable to the theory at hand.

We have the notion of Spandrels where we have to decide whether a trait is there because it is beneficial or just coming along for the ride. Including things like I mentioned trying to give homosexuality an evolutionary explanation in terms of fitness and selecting a gay persons supposedly evolutionarily useful traits by making value judgements. Sickle cell trait is now described as advantageous because it protects against malaria whilst also it reduces life span and potential causing all sorts of horrible health problems.
In comparison claiming the heart pumps blood around the body does not appear to claim any value judgments just observations.

Here is my criticism of natural selection

I don't see what the relevance of the "selection" process is for explaining an organisms traits.

For example there are two rabbits being chased by a fox.

The faster one survives and goes on to have lots of offspring.
That story does not explain why the surviving rabbit was able to run faster. It explains why it survived which is a trivial observation.

But is seems what needs to happen is for the long legs to evolve somehow by genetic mutation alone , already exist and then be selected which means the key process is the beneficial mutation and why that happened.
The capacity for legs to evolve would require preexisting emergent properties available in biochemistry which would not be explained by evolution it self.

For example how would a polar bear survive in the North pole if it did not already have lots of body fat and White fur etc. It is not going to be competing against green and red and thin bears.

On the not unreasonable assumption that the evidence is acceptable, then I'm struggling to think of one that can't. — Bradskii

How we should run a country.

What I should have for tea.

Whether there should be a death penalty.

Just a shot in the dark here...but how about evidence — Bradskii

How many issues can be resolved by evidence?

I would agree with you if we could agree on our interpretation of the evidence.

What happens is people who oppose a current paradigm are attacked and or censored and a new position is is only adopted in the face of heavy protest.

Kuhn talked about paradigm shifts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift#Original_usage

"According to Max Planck, "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

It would be great if evidence had the power to induce in us new solidly factual beliefs that we were also willing to quickly adapt at a moments notice when faced with opposing evidence but its not necessarily a trait of human psychology.

Is your standard of truth what gives the results you want? — T Clark

Is your standard of truth divorced from morality or ethics?

If something is a fact it is a fact. If something inspires bad behaviour I would want to know what mechanism caused that behaviour. I do believe science has an ethical dimension. We don't randomly shoot babies to see what the results will be or as Frankie Boyle put it see how many pastilles it takes to choke a Kestrel. We have proven we can split the atom but at the cost of the survival of life. It is a question of what the questions we ask, might imply or be how they'd be enacted socially.

All that aside Natural selection and survival of the fittest is more value laden than most scientific theories just like theories about Intelligence quotients, Gender ideology, Sex differences and people Like Dennett and Dawkins have made it become tied heavily to atheism and antitheism like Galton etc tied it to eugenics and social Darwinism and class divides.

But what has it got to do with our future decisions? As I say you can't get an ought from an is.... but you may induce depression in someone by belittling their status and belief values to prove our evolutionary status. I had this experience when I spent years battling anxiety and depression and arguing on atheist forums looking for a more hopeful prognosis on existence.

And by the way, you can't imagine infinity. You have a brain that has evolved to calculate the arc of a thrown rock. — Bradskii

I thought Calculus involved infinities?

We can imagine infinity because we can always imagine a larger number than the previous large one we created. We can imagine going into space hitting a brick wall and imagining what is behind it (I had this thought at around 7yrs old)
We can imagine dividing things until they get smaller and smaller ad infinitum so we ended up with the theory of atoms (a surprisingly long time ago with Democritus). We can imagine a time before the hypothesised big bang. And so on.

As child in a religious household I also wondered that if God created the earth a few thousands years ago what was happening in the time before then?
And what was he doing in the infinite past before he decided randomly to create us. Why did he decide to create us at a random time.

But According to Dawkins I am just a giant lumbering gene machine and according to a lot of science adjacent theorists I also am a mechanism with no freewill who is not responsible for my own thoughts.

In reality I am just an agnostic skeptic.

And the galactic amount of evidence for that process means that evolution in one sense is a fact. — Bradskii

Everything is classed as evidence for evolution.

Some things are seen as puzzling to evolution such as exclusive homosexuality since it is an evolutionary dead end for genes ( I can say that for certain as an antinatalist gay man) which then leads to theories to explain it. Anything a gay person does has to be interpreted through an evolutionary lens to see which of our behaviours are seen to be advantageous.
Are we the worker bees of the species. Are we the generous uncle or aunty who looks after our nieces and Nephews? Are our Mothers fecund?

I am more skeptical of scientific theories about the past and our past and deciding what ramifications they have.

This is not a winning argument. There are plenty of examples of the evil performed in the name of religion, ethnicity, nationality, and just about any other organized differences between people. — T Clark

That is not the argument. The argument is concerning the the harm of rejecting evolution versus the harm of accepting evolution and it being interpreted in a destructive way or as an ideology.

A theory that inspires some atrocities should surely be treated with some caution? On the other hand evolution skeptics have been harassed and told they are dangerous, should not work in certain jobs, medicine or are ignorant. Dawkins compared evolution denial to Holocaust denial.

This is like the free will arguments. If we have no free will we can't do anything about it so why bother trying to get us to believe it? If I start to believe I have a fish ancestors how is that supposed to make me act?
There is no reason for me to change any of my behaviour that I can see because of evolution. The motivation that has been manifested is to use the theory to manipulate ideology and societies not just to place the theory unvarnished on the table. To try and undermine religious belief and shore up atheism.

And on that topic even if evolution comprehensively explains life on earth we are just a tiny planet in a vast even infinite universe so we are still faced with profound mysteries.

When you add energy to a system, you decrease it's entropy. It happens all the time. The sun and the heat inside the planet adds energy to the Earth's surface allowing the continued operation of physical and biological processes. — T Clark

When you shine sunlight on a broken cup it does not rebuild itself. Plants have mechanisms to utilise the sunlight, the sunlight itself is not reducing the entropy but the preexisting plant mechanisms.

As I have said life/abiogenesis has to start from scratch from non life simplicity.

What I mentioned was the statistical explanation for entropy which would prevent useful structures spontaneously creating and recreating. Order from total disorder.

Other planets have the sun shining on them and no life.

We somehow have an array of very precise parameters that allow life on this planet and unknown properties that allow consciousness. I don't see how consciousness fits into the other picture of nature as a thermodynamic or mechanistic and making us a genetic production line.

Well, you have your choice. You can accept the universe as it is, and our insignificant position within it. — Bradskii

I don't see our position as insignificant.

The universe apparently doesn't know it exists

but we do because of our individual consciousness that allows to imagine concepts such as infinity and allows us to see and experience a huge range of phenomena.

As with Descartes Cogito ergo sum I can only be certain that I exist. Everything else is filtered through individual consciousness.

But you seem to have highlighted the theories need to denigrate the human position. Evolution does not explain consciousness which is the only reason we care or know anything
and it hasn't reduced that to brute mechanism so i see a lot of room for skepticism and value outside of brute reductionism.

It shouldn't be our concern to persuade people to our beliefs.

Because our beliefs could be wrong, and in fact, likely are, in at least several respects. — Manuel

I somewhat agree with this. I believe we can present all manner of arguments and evidence for why we believe something. There can be a battle between opposing beliefs that needs resolving.

People argue we now have a cancel culture where some beliefs are are offensive and need reeducating or censoring. But to what extent do we permit complete free expression and safeguard against harmful content and ideas or risk censoring sensible ideas?

My feeling is that some beliefs are reasonable and need to be held firmly for ones own mental stability.

As in 'because it's true then we ought to ensure we understand it properly and not reimagine it to serve racist tendencies'? — Bradskii

Understand it in what sense?
As a history of our origins up to this date?
As something that should guide future human development?

There is a limit to the scope of validating (or falsifying) explanations of things that happened before we existed or developed modern technology. It becomes narrative that then quickly becomes and became ideological.

Is The theory make us stop believing in gods? Is it supposed to make us become physicalist/materialist naturalists? Are we supposed to reevaluate the status and value of humans and other animals?

I should point out that survival of the fittest means the survival of those best fitted to their environment. And they will not necessarily be the strongest or fastest. And natural selection simply means that our offspring are not clones. I don't see anything harmful about either of those. — Bradskii

Well it has been accused of either being a banal tautology (ie anything that survives is fit) or a dangerous prognosis and value judgement (we should weed out the unfit to improve a species) That powered Social Darwinism.

Darwin Himself said in the descent of man:

"With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."

His Son Leonard:

“Of all the problems which will have to be faced in the future, in my opinion, the most difficult will be those concerning the treatment of the inferior races of mankind.”
― Leonard Darwin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism

"The Committee of Union and Progress in the Ottoman Empire adopted Social Darwinist ideology. Belief that there was a life-or-death conflict between Turks and other ethnicities motivated them to carry out genocides and ethnic cleansing campaigns against the Armenians. Social Darwinism enabled them to view extermination of entire population groups and the murder of women and children as a necessary and justified course of action"

Here is some Polemics From Richard Dawkins Describing us as Gene machines and Robots:

"Now they swarm in huge colonies, safeinside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control.

They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.”

And a Dawkins quote on his apparent general philosophy"

“The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the populationuntil the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”

So yes he has a charming prognosis for us that we should be eager to embrace.

Here is an academic article on The Nazi beliefs on Evolution.

https://www.csustan.edu/sites/default/files/History/Faculty/Weikart/Darwinism-in-Nazi-Racial-Thought.pdf

"Historians disagree about whether Nazis embraced Darwinian evolution.By examining Hitler’s ideology, the official biology curriculum, the writings of Nazi anthropologists, and Nazi periodicals, we find that Nazi racial theorists did indeed embrace human and racial evolution. They not only taught that humans had evolved from primates, but they believed the Aryan or Nordic race had evolved to a higher level than other races because of the harsh climatic conditions that influenced natural selection. They also claimed that Darwinism underpinned specific elements of Nazi racial ideology, including racial inequality, the necessity of the racial struggle for existence, and collectivism."

(I myself mentioned their euthanasia propaganda films early like Alles Leben is Kampf (All life is struggle and Das Erbe The Inheritance)

"In his writings and speeches Hitler regularly invoked Darwinian concepts, such as evolution Entwicklung), higher evolution (Höherentwicklung), struggle for existence (Existenzkampf or Daseinskampf ), struggle for life (Lebenskampf ), and selection (Auslese). In a 1937 speech he not only expressed belief in human evolution, but also endorsed Haeckel’s theory that each organism in its embryological development repeats earlier stages of evolutionary history. "
........

People like Darwin and Dennett (The Universal Acid proponent) have strongly advocated that evolution should change how we view life and ourselves. They apparently are un aware of the is - ought barrier that Hitler et al crossed. If evolution is true should we respond in anyway are we obliged to?

Which suggests an unfortunate propensity in the human mind.

Who is going to be making the requests of you.

Usually the most common request I face is "can you spare some change"

Giving away my change would probably be funding a substance abuse problem.

I wish I was in a situation where I was given more opportunities that I could fulfil.

I suppose.

I wasn't responding to the opening post in this thread because it was somewhat confusing but I defend the right to raise questions about evolution, its scope, falsifiability coherency, applicability and impact and so on.

People like Dawkins and Dennett did a fair bit to make discussions of this issue toxic and become a religion versus atheism schism and to push for nihilist implications of evolution.

I think it can be argued that believing in concepts like survival of the fittest, natural selection and animal hierarchies etc has been more harmful than not believing them.

This is an elegantly presented video of the influence of racism on Science and thought.

The Robert N. Oerter article you linked to misrepresents the problem.

The system involved in evolution is the individual organism (and to some extent it's immediate surroundings) but not the whole of the earth.

Of course if I smash a cup and glue it back together it is not going to effect a calculation of entropy of the whole earth as a system.

He is defining a system in an unrealistic way that bears no relation to the behaviour of an individual complex organism and its tendency to decay and become more disordered in its immediate surroundings.

But the second law explains why when I drop and break a cup it doesn't immediately leap back up and reconfigure itself because that is a statistically implausible array of matter.

Also we are supposed to be starting from a time on earth when no life existed.
How currently existing organisms combat entropy now they exist does not explain how they got started from an allegedly simpler state with a few chemicals in a primordial inanimate soup.

It would be unfair to label blame on science or technology. I don't think it makes sense to do so at any rate. — Shawn

John B Watson went from pioneering Behaviourism with B F Skinner to using behaviourist techniques in advertising. We are bombarded with advertising and life style aspirational pressures.

The problem I see is in generating desires including dissatisfaction towards a model of infinite growth on a planet of finite size.

A lot of economists are no longer preoccupied with Keynes in saying that in the long run we are all dead. — Shawn

According to this:
"The median long run across the 23 papers is 32 years, with a median of 26.5 for micro and 34 for macro. So both fields pass the Keynes test; on average. But the distribution is impressive. In micro, studies range from a 3-year long run to a 350-year long run. In macro, studies range from 9 years to 10,000 years."

https://blogs.worldbank.org/impactevaluations/how-long-long-run

However around me I see what seems to be a very short term orientated society.

In the light of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics. Current species replicate inbuilt complexity. We have massive diversity and interdependencies on earth apparently derived from the first RNA molecule in a primeval soup.

Thermodynamics is just one variable or constant in the equation. There are also the forces of nature (strong, weak, EM, and gravity). — punos

What we see in organisms is incredibly useful order and is any of it predictable?

It seems like there is so much going on upon earth from conscious minds to DNA to eco systems and society that no single (reductionist) model would suffice to explain it and may be inexplicable by law based models.

I am a gay a man (an evolutionary genetic dead end I suppose) apparently serving no biological purpose. Evolution has not only to create the two sexes male and female and keep their reproductive biology compatible but also instill a sexual desire between the two sexes which has bypassed me.

There is so much that can go wrong but does it matter are we progressing? Is that a biological idea?

Jeffrey Skilling was inspired by Richard Dawkins "The Selfish Gene"

"Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene was Skilling's favorite book and served as the foundation of his managerial philosophy.[45][46] Skilling held, by his own interpretation, a Darwinian view of what makes the world work. He believed that money and fear were the only things that motivated people"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Skilling#Philosophy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal

We had Social Darwinism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism

I think we should be cautious about theories that have had or may have seriously negative consequences. I don't think science and it theories is just unbiased and not without moral import.

The Nazis produced "Das Erbe"

"The plot was written by Walter Lüddeke.[5] The basic message, that only the strong and healthy are victorious, is demonstrated by fighting stag beetles commented on by a "professor"

Along with "Alles Leben ist Kampf" and "Erbebank" and more to justify involuntary Euthansia and eventually The Holocaust..

Economists treat most people as rational agents, — Shawn

Can you expand on this? Are they using a model or rationality taken from psychology or philosophy?

Some people say science and technology has been destructive in its progress because it has allowed us to suddenly over exploit the environment to cater to peoples short term desires which is not sustainable in the long term.

For example there was a huge upsurge in the usage of plastics which has led to pollution and microplastics in the ocean.

Is the model of rationality one that only considers individuals short term goals and selfishness or does it encompass the idea of humans having long term goals and not needing instant gratification.

I have fallen victim to my own need for instant gratification and demand for variety. But using a golden rule analysis I can see that my behaviour multiplied by everyone is likely unsustainable.

I found this on Wikipedia:

"Many economic theories reject utilitarianism and rational agency, especially those that might be considered heterodox.

For example, Thorstein Veblen, known as the father of institutional economics, rejects the notion of hedonistic calculus and pure rationality saying: "The hedonistic conception of man is that of a lightning calculator of pleasures and pains who oscillates like a homogeneous globule of desire of happiness under the impulse of stimuli that shift him about the area, but leave him intact.""

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_agent#Criticisms

I get the feeling economics relies on treating people like objects and like they are dispensable and interchangeable and that we need to have children to create a steady flow of workers.

I am not sure that people and their psychology should be manipulated like chess pieces.

Here in the UK Politicians prefer to listen to economists over psychologists even when there policies repeatedly fail and psychologists have suggested they will based on their evidence data about human behaviour.

Unless we are physicists then our understanding of the second law of thermodynamics will come from popular explantions of it.

The academic discussion of thermodynamics is highly complex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics#Various_statements_of_the_law

But it is portrayed to the general public frequently as a tendency to disorder including the eventual heat death of the university.

The degrees of freedom model is fairly easy to understands because know from breaking something like a vase or using a jigsaw puzzle breaking things up is much easier than reassembling them. So what force would make things usefully assemble and combat the destructive forces of nature?

Intelligent human volition is a prime example of the speed at which intelligent volitional activity can make long term meaningful useful change without waiting on chance.

Such as a human picking up a log and placing it in a stream to cross the stream without waiting for the log to randomly fall there and current examples such as the dense reasoning and design that goes into computers to make them so efficient.

I have not seen a satisfactory answer concerning the conflict between evolution and the second law of thermodynamics.

There is no plausible explanation of why things should get more complex over time.

For example you break an egg and it never just rearranges itself to a whole egg again.

One explanation for this is that something like an egg is made up of a huge number of atoms and they are statistically highly unlikely to return to exactly the same arrangement as before because there are so many degrees of freedom for possible states they could be in.

Things don't tend to spontaneously arrange themselves into useful formations.

Did I post this here or has it been moved here?

I believe the majority of claims in evolution are unfalsifiable and unobservable.

And I believe in irreducible complexity such as with sexual reproduction.

A lot of the reason for creating an evolutionary narrative appears to be for ideological reasons when whether or not we used to be bipedal fish is irrelevant to our daily lives.

It is less irrelevant to peoples beliefs systems though.

Does it matter whether or not you believe in evolution?

Arent you arguing that there is such a thing as masculine and feminine behavior — Joshs

Yes but that they only occur in the sex being described. Any behaviour exhibited by men is male behaviour.
Behaviour permed by both sexes could be described as neutral or unisex, including like eating, sleeping, fidgeting etc.

I don't know much about dogs but I assumed there sex would have to be discovered based on genitalia.

If you believe this, then dont you accept the possibility of intermediate forms of biologically-formed gender — Joshs

Intersex conditions I know tend to occur in either males or females. For example Klinefelter syndrome only occurs in males. Turner Syndrome only occurs in Females. Androgen insensitivity syndrome occurs in males.

But regardless I don't see that as part of a spectrum because they can often lead to infertility.

A spectrum to me would be where more than a combination of an egg and sperm or male and female could produce a new human.

A spectrum of gender to me is meaningless because everyone is different and we exhibit a huge range of behaviours which don't belong to either sex or any named gender identity. It actually dilutes human diversity to creating stereotypes and unnecessary flags.