Biology Is Right-Wing? This Leftist Scientist Begs to Differ - Gary Clark (#23)
Evolutionary biologist Gary Clark spent years living with Aboriginal peoples in Australia before turning his scientific eye on the gender debate. In this episode, he uses four million years of fossil evidence to argue that biological sex is not a Western imposition but a universal human reality. As Irish universities face similar pressures to those Clark describes in Australia, and as Irish schools navigate gender identity guidance without a strong evidence base behind it, his perspective offers something rare: a left-leaning scientist willing to say that denying biological sex is not progressive — it is anti-scientific.
Gary Clark is a paleoanthropologist and evolutionary biologist whose career spans fossil anatomy, primatology, and cross-cultural fieldwork. Having spent years living and working alongside Aboriginal peoples in Australia's Western Desert, he brings a rare combination of scientific depth and lived anthropological experience to one of the most contested debates of our time. His book on Carl Jung and the evolutionary sciences positions him at an unusual intersection — rigorous empirical science and depth psychology — and it is from that vantage point that he joins Stella, Mia and Bret in this conversation. Clark walks through what four million years of human evolution actually tells us about sex differences. Studying sexual dimorphism in ancient fossils — the measurable physical distinctions between male and female specimens of our distant ancestors — he finds consistent, structural patterns that no amount of social theorising erases. These are not cultural constructs. They are anatomical realities inscribed in bone, stretching back long before any Western civilisation existed to impose them on anybody. That point is central to his argument. Postmodern theorists who claim to be deconstructing Western ideas are, Clark contends, projecting them. Every known human society organises itself around the reality of biological sex. The notion that sex is merely assigned, performed, or socially constructed is not a liberating universal insight — it is a very particular, very recent idea originating in a handful of Western philosophy departments. Far from dissolving power structures, it ends up colonising other ways of knowing with a new ideological framework dressed up as critique. The episode also takes on the labelling of biology as politically right-wing. Clark, who describes his own political outlook as left-leaning, finds this development in academia deeply troubling. When universities treat empirical science about sex as suspect — something requiring political qualification before it can be taught — they are not being progressive. They are abandoning the commitment to evidence that made genuine social reform possible in the first place. This is a point Stella returns to repeatedly in her psychotherapy work: ideology and clinical reality are not the same thing, and confusing them causes harm. For Irish listeners, this episode carries particular weight. Ireland has moved quickly on gender recognition and gender-affirming healthcare pathways, often ahead of any thorough public examination of the evidence base. Irish secondary schools now navigate gender identity guidance in an environment where teachers and parents who raise honest questions can find themselves with little institutional support. Irish universities are not insulated from the academic pressures Clark describes unfolding in Australia. Hearing a scientist of his standing describe how that process accelerates and what it costs offers a useful and sobering parallel. What Clark ultimately argues — and what runs through Stella's therapeutic perspective — is that taking biological reality seriously is not a retreat from compassion. A properly grounded Jungian psychology holds embodiment at its centre. Any therapeutic culture that cannot acknowledge the body, or that frames biological sex as an ideological imposition to be overcome, is poorly equipped to help young people who are genuinely struggling. Science and meaning-making are not natural enemies. But pulling them apart, as current academic fashion demands, comes at a cost to both.
