Biology Is Right-Wing? This Leftist Scientist Begs to Differ - Gary Clark (#23)
24 July 2025
With Gary Clark
culture-and-ideology
When a paleoanthropologist who spent years living with Aboriginal communities turns his lens on gender ideology, two things collide: four million years of evolutionary evidence and the institutional decision to treat that evidence as politically suspect. Dr. Gary Clark explains why calling biology right-wing is not a political stance but a scientific failure — and what it costs us when universities decide a field's conclusions are ideologically contaminated.
Dr. Gary Clark has spent his career at an unusual intersection: paleoanthropology, primatology, and extended fieldwork among Aboriginal peoples in Australia's Western Desert. His research on sexual dimorphism in ancient fossils places him inside one of the most empirically demanding areas of human evolutionary science. He is also the author of a study connecting Carl Jung to the evolutionary sciences, which means he takes both biological evidence and psychological meaning seriously — a combination that makes him a distinctive voice in debates that tend to flatten one or the other. The provocation at the centre of this conversation is blunt: many universities now treat the acceptance of biological sex differences as a right-wing political position. Clark, who situates himself politically on the left, finds this categorisation scientifically incoherent. Sexual dimorphism is visible across the fossil record, across primate species, and across every human society ever studied. The question of whether male and female bodies differ in systematic, evolutionarily significant ways is not a culture-war question. It is one of the most thoroughly documented facts in the life sciences. What this episode traces is less a scientific dispute than an institutional one. Clark watched Australian universities progressively narrow the space for research into sex-based biological differences — not because the evidence weakened but because the institutional climate changed. This is a familiar pattern in the broader story of how gender ideology spreads: it does not defeat opposing arguments so much as it reclassifies them as impermissible. The result is a research environment in which the direction of a finding, rather than its methodology, determines whether it can be stated aloud. Clark's fieldwork gives him a specific rejoinder to one of gender theory's most common moves: the claim that binary sex is a Western colonial construct. His years in Aboriginal communities in the Western Desert provide direct evidence of how societies with entirely different cosmologies, kinship structures, and material lives still organise themselves around the biological reality of male and female. The theorists who frame sex as a Western imposition are, in Clark's analysis, doing something ironic — projecting a distinctly Western academic framework onto peoples whose lived reality refutes the premise. His work on Jung adds a layer that extends beyond the immediate debate. Clark argues that post-modern theorists have appropriated Jung while quietly removing the biological grounding that made his account of the psyche coherent. Jung understood recurring human patterns as rooted in an evolved, embodied nature, not as cultural constructs available for theoretical revision. The broader implication running through this episode is that when institutions decide a scientific field's conclusions are politically contaminated, the damage is not limited to one discipline. It erodes the norms that make honest inquiry possible at all — and that cost falls on everyone, regardless of where they sit on the political spectrum.
