Swans Are Usually White

Although a single black swan can falsify the statement “All swans are white”, “Swans are usually white” remains true even if 5% of all swans are black. As Nicholas A. Christakis rightly observes in Blueprint (2020), “the existence of variation does not mean that there is not a central tendency in our species.” After I realized this, and fully thought through its implications, it became clear to me that much of the scholarship in the Humanities and the Social Sciences is not just wrong but fundamentally confused. Finding rare exceptions, or even rather common exceptions, does not necessarily (or even usually) mean that your findings mean that we need to redefine normal. For instance, you are not “decentering heteronormativity” when you publish a study of sexual minorities; you’re merely demonstrating that human sexuality, like most things human, is subject to some degree of variance. Likewise, you are not necessarily (or even usually) disproving all of our prevailing theories concerning social organization when you publish a study of some random group of humans on a remote island who live in a novel and interesting way. A small but significant number of humans are born without legs every year, and yet we still describe Homo sapiens as a bipedal primate. Likewise, the existence of a small but significant number of delightfully interesting human beings with chromosomal anomalies need not alter our general statements about the species. Demonstrating that some of us do not conform to our standard notions of “female” and “male” does not necessarily negate the usefulness of these categories any more than the discovery of a black swan in Australia negates the statement “Swans are usually white”.