Biology Is Right-Wing? This Leftist Scientist Begs to Differ - Gary Clark (#23)
24 July 2025
With Gary Clark
Global
Evolutionary biologist and paleoanthropologist Gary Clark draws on fossil evidence of sexual dimorphism spanning four million years of human evolution, as well as cross-cultural fieldwork with Aboriginal communities, to argue that biological sex is a scientific reality — not a Western construct. The episode examines how Anglophone universities have come to treat evolutionary biology as ideologically suspect, and what this means for the institutions and courts that must weigh biological evidence in sex and gender disputes. Clark also addresses the post-modern distortion of Jungian psychology and the broader consequences of delegitimising the sciences of human nature.
Dr. Gary Clark is a paleoanthropologist and evolutionary biologist who studies human evolution through fossil anatomy and sexual dimorphism, and who has spent extended periods living with Aboriginal communities in Australia's Western Desert. He is also the author of a work examining Carl Jung's relationship to the evolutionary sciences. In this episode he outlines what the deep evolutionary record says about biological sex, and why academia has come to treat that record as politically inconvenient. Clark's scientific case rests on the fossil record. Sexual dimorphism — the measurable physical differences between males and females — is well documented throughout the australopithecine lineage and across the genus Homo, and these are anatomical facts recoverable from ancient bone rather than cultural inference. Clark argues that the contemporary claim that biological sex is a spectrum or a social construction sits in direct contradiction to the palaeontological and comparative anatomical evidence that evolutionary biology has been assembling for over a century. The cross-cultural dimension of his career adds a second layer of evidence. Having observed how Aboriginal communities in the Western Desert organised social life with limited exposure to Western institutions, Clark is positioned to test a central claim of post-modern gender scholarship: that the organisation of human societies around male and female is itself a Western imposition. What he found in the field points in the other direction — sex-based patterns in roles and relationships appear across radically different cultural contexts, consistent with an evolutionary account and difficult to reconcile with a purely social-constructionist one. The episode also addresses the institutional conditions that have made these observations professionally difficult to voice. Clark describes a shift, especially visible in Australian and Anglophone universities, in which evolutionary biology has come to be regarded as ideologically suspect — a discipline whose conclusions about sex are to be quarantined from policy discussion on the grounds that they are right-wing. This matters directly for European contexts, where health authorities, professional bodies, and courts have been called upon to make decisions about sex and gender that depend, at least in part, on how much weight biological evidence is allowed to carry. Clark also examines the post-modern reshaping of Jungian psychology, arguing that Jung's framework was originally grounded in evolutionary and biological thought, and that contemporary readings have stripped that grounding away. His book on Jung and the evolutionary sciences attempts to recover it. More broadly, he contends that when the sciences of human nature are systematically delegitimised, the space they vacate is filled by ideology rather than by improved evidence — a dynamic he considers harmful both to scientific integrity and to the clinical practice that depends on it.
