Biology Is Right-Wing? This Leftist Scientist Begs to Differ - Gary Clark (#23)
Dr Gary Clark is a paleoanthropologist and evolutionary biologist who has spent years working with Aboriginal communities in Australia's Western Desert. Identifying politically with the left, he argues that rejecting biological sex is not a progressive achievement but an empirical failure. His case—drawn from four million years of fossil evidence and cross-cultural anthropology—arrives at a moment when European universities and institutions are under pressure to define sex out of existence.
Gary Clark's credentials are unusual even within a field that prizes fieldwork. A paleoanthropologist and evolutionary biologist, he has spent extended periods living alongside Aboriginal peoples in Australia's Western Desert, gaining a cross-cultural perspective that few laboratory scientists can claim. It is from this vantage point—one that combines fossil anatomy, primatology, and direct observation of how non-Western societies organise around sex—that he enters the current debate about gender ideology in universities. Clark's central challenge to the dominant academic view is that postmodern gender theory, far from dismantling Western cultural assumptions, actually imposes them. Many Indigenous and traditional societies, he argues, have their own well-established frameworks for understanding male and female roles—frameworks grounded in biological reality rather than abstract theory. When Western academics arrive claiming to deconstruct sex, they frequently overwrite those local understandings with a particular strand of Anglo-American academic philosophy. For European institutions engaged with questions of cultural sensitivity and decolonisation, this is a pointed irony worth sitting with. The scientific evidence Clark draws on is not recent or contested. Sexual dimorphism—the measurable anatomical differences between male and female members of a species—is documented across millions of years of the human fossil record. Australopithecene remains, studied long before the current culture wars, show the same patterns visible in living populations today. Clark's paleoanthropological work grounds the sex-difference debate in data that precedes any political agenda by geological timescales. This matters for European clinicians and researchers who find themselves pressured to treat sex as a social construct: the fossils predate the theory by several million years. Clark is also a serious reader of Carl Jung, and his book Carl Jung and the Evolutionary Sciences attempts to recover Jung's grounding in biology from what he sees as postmodern distortions of Jungian thought. He is critical of the tendency within some contemporary Jungian and psychotherapeutic circles to embrace gender ideology uncritically. This is a thread that will interest European psychotherapists, particularly in countries like Germany and the Netherlands where Jungian practice has deep institutional roots and where the question of how to work with gender-distressed patients is a live professional debate. Perhaps the episode's sharpest observation is political rather than scientific: that major universities now treat biology itself as ideologically suspect, a right-wing intrusion into what should be a purely social conversation about identity. Clark, who comes from the political left, finds this both intellectually dishonest and politically self-defeating. Across Europe—where the Karolinska Institute, the French Académie de Médecine, and a growing number of Nordic health authorities have begun to reassert the primacy of biological sex in clinical decision-making—his argument carries particular urgency. The scientific consensus he is defending is not a conservative novelty; it is what medicine looked like before a decade of ideological pressure reshaped its language. For European listeners trying to make sense of why evidence-based gender medicine has been so difficult to defend in public, this conversation offers a useful frame: when an institution labels biology right-wing, it has already chosen ideology over inquiry. Clark's career—spanning fossils, fieldwork, and Jungian psychology—is a reminder that the evidence was always there, waiting for the argument to catch up.
