Instant Genius - Exploring Darwin’s ideas through a queer lens

Episode Date: August 2, 2026

When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in the mid-nineteenth century, his theory of evolution by natural selection turned many of the scientific ideas of the day on their heads. The influence of the book was so profound that scientists are still studying its many implications to this day. And it turns out that, if we look closely enough, we find that investigating queerness in nature frequently played a central role in Darwin’s research and thinking. In this episode, we’re joined by historian and author Dr Ross Brooks to talk about his latest book, Darwin and the Queer Origins of Life – A History of Sex and Science. He shares some of the fascinating discoveries he made from poring over the many notebooks kept by Darwin, tells us how Darwin himself frequently proclaimed that all men and women are hermaphrodites, and makes a passionate case for the need for more queer perspectives and inclusivity in science. Take your curiosity further with a subscription to BBC Science Focus magazine. Every issue is packed with fascinating insights into the science behind everyday life, the latest breakthroughs and expert analysis, delivered straight to your door. Plus, save an extra £5 when you subscribe using the code SF5OFF, (minimum spend £20, see full terms and conditions on our website). https://www.ourmediashop.com/bbc-science-focus-magazine-pod30 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From the producers of Super Troopers and Super Troopers 2 comes, you guessed it. Broken Lizard and their rowdy patrol squad returned to the scene of the crime. In Super Troopers 3, the mustaches are thicker, the maple syrup stickier, and the pranks crazier than ever. Buckle up for the funniest comedy of the summer. Super Troopers 3, only in theaters Friday. Get tickets now. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized master class in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today.

I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus. When Charles Darwin published on The Origin of Species in the mid-19th century, his theory of evolution by natural selection turned many of the scientific ideas of the day on their heads. The influence of the book was so profound that scientists are still studying its many implications to this day. And it turns out, if we look closely enough, we find that investigating queerness in nature frequently played a central role in Darwin's research and thinking. In this episode, we're joined by historian and author Dr Ross Brooks to talk about his latest book, Darwin and the Queer Origins of Life, a history of sex and science. He's shared.

There's some of the fascinating discoveries he made from pouring over the many notebooks kept by Darwin, tells us how Darwin himself frequently proclaimed that all men and women are hemaphrodites and makes a passionate case for the need for more queer perspectives and inclusivity in science. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you very much indeed. I'm hugely excited to be here and I'm so impressed always that you include historical perspectives on the subjects you discuss. That's very impressive. Oh, thanks so much. So with that in mind, today we're talking about your latest book, Darwin and the Queer Origins of Life, A History of Sex and Science. So I think let's kick off

by looking at that title. So typically, when we think of key figures in queer history, we'll think of various different people, but we won't immediately think of Charles Darwin. So how did you come on this as a topic? It's very interesting that when we think about queer history, queer life and culture, just how little science generally is discussed and raised and talked about, yet alone Darwin. And there's very good reasons for that that I've experienced in my life as well, which is that science has very often been weaponised against. LGBTQ plus people, from the most invasive procedures, medical procedures that have been done

historically and still continue very much in the world, in various parts of the world today. So science is missing, and certainly if you go to an LGBTQ plus themed bookshop, for example, there will be a big bookcase on science fiction, but actually very, very few titles actually broached science. But this is changing very much so. Certainly you've recently had on your podcast Alfredo Carpinetti who looks at physics from a queer perspective. Now even five, 10 years ago, I wouldn't have been able to fit that in my head. I wouldn't have known any queer physicists and different approaches that they now take. And biology, the life sciences is just, you know, it's a very difficult history to broach.

Darwin's name is often used against queer people as kind of a gateway of and resurrected almost ghost-like as the arbiter of what should be considered normal and abnormal sexuality. So really, there is a long history of Darwin and evolutionary theory excluding queer people and queernessness. And discovering that that is

very much not the case has been a long journey. Yeah, so I think as somebody researches this field, I think you're probably the best person to ask. And a lot of people won't know the answer to this question. So where did the term queer come to describe what it does now? Well, there's lots of inputs into that. And certainly there's a very recent book which I would recommend people want to find out about that, which is Matt Cook's making queer history.

And the inputs, certainly one should include the historical use through the Victorian era of queer meaning odd or uncanny or unusual. And there's a couple of instances of this being used in my book where that meaning is then applied to sexual phenomena. That's really very interesting. But in terms of queer, of course, I well remember. I'm in my 50s. I well remember the word being used against queer people as an insult. and lots of people my age, you know, have not embraced the kind of the new meanings that's the reclamation of the word to refer to, you know, a host.

I mean, it's such a useful development that it's so non-specific. And so, you know, one can point to certain queer theorists and what have you. And again, like there's some great works now. We have queer ducks and other animals, which is a book for young people by Elliot Schreffer. You know, the word, just that that usefulness, of this linguistic usefulness is now being applied in all manner of context within the life sciences and to describe kind of non-reproductive sexual behaviours, intersexualities, transformations of sex in non-human animals and humans. So it's very useful, but of course the issue of language,

one doesn't want to lose sight of the earlier terms that were used. Certainly as a historian, one comes across in the Victorian era, all manner of terms. like immorality and evil. So one, it's a balancing act. And my approach is, my book is absolutely packed out with quotes from Darwin. I'm not reading into anything here. It's very much Darwin and other naturalists who are approaching sex-related subjects, the Georgian and Victorian eras, very much in their own words.

So that gives the sense of their words and terminology, like I say, often very derogatory being used. And it's important, you know, to reflect that linguistic usage. accurately. But then there is my authorial voice talking to a queer literate audience today, hopefully offering some guidance about what's going on with these Victorian naturalists and how they're trying to conceptualise and often reaching for new kinds of ways of explaining a whole array of queer creatures and queer phenomena in nature. Yeah, so we'll dig into that a little deeper in a minute.

But I think probably some people, when they see their title, like Darwin in the queer origins of life. I think, well, you know, was Darwin queer? So, you know, what do we know about Darwin's own sexuality, you know, before we get into some of the other details? Darwin is absolutely unassailable as a straight, white, middle class, upper-class, gentleman. And there's no indication whatsoever. This is not about Darwin's personal life. He had a long and very happy marriage, which wasn't uncomplicated because he married his cousin, which was legal at the time. And that concerned him, but there was no concerns around his sexuality or gender identity. And certainly in his early notebooks from the 1830s, he makes some very interesting comments about his thoughts, particularly leading up to his wedding nights.

He gets quite graphic with his thoughts about maintaining erections and things. So he has, you know, those kind of worries and anxieties that, you know, everyone does when they're a young man on the cusp of their first relationship. But no, this is not about Darwin's sexuality himself. Now, that said, it's very interesting researching this book about how he was surrounded by other men for whom you can't say the same thing, who didn't have relationships with women, and who often maintained very close, intimate friendships with other men. And this includes his older brother, Erasmus Darwin, as well. And this isn't just me.

Historians have been saying for a long time that he's been, certainly, we wouldn't label him as heterosexual. So, okay, what are we going to call that? He never had any serious relationships with women whatsoever. His sisters called him an old woman. And, you know, there's terminology around it that was used at the time. But it's very interesting that met several figures I've identified in my book around him. So Darwin wasn't naive. He wasn't unaware of the existence of queer people.

Of course he wasn't. And he read very, very widely. But in terms of classifying or how we might talk about men and women who preferred romances with people of their own sex to the Victorian age, that the existence of queer people really caused Darwin anxiety in terms of his theories. That's where the queerness comes in and how he's going to relate all the observations that he has about intersexualities and transformations of sex in the natural world. Of course Darwin's thing is that there are animal human continuities, and it's very much on his mind that if he's going to make the case that evolution has produced all manner of intersexualities and transformations of sex and other queer phenomena in nature, by his very own logic, Victorian evolutionary theory logic, this extends to humans too. And that's where the problem for Darwin comes in. Yeah.

So again, let's put that to one side for a second, because you mentioned something really interesting there. One of the key sources that you draw from in the book is Darwin's own notebooks. So that's fascinating. You know, how rich a resource were they? Oh, they changed the course of my research. They were a huge surprise.

Historians previously have discussed the notebooks, and they've generally expressed disappointment with them. So just to give them a bit of context, as is well known, Darwin travels around the world on a ship for five years. He seems to hate every single minute of it, and he comes up with no good ideas. So he comes back around 1838 and starts actually hanging out with his queer older brother, and it's in this environment that he really starts to have this profusion of ideas, which he jots down in a series of notebooks. So we're talking late 1830s, early 1840s.

And just this mass of extraordinary breadth and depth of thinking often expressed in single words or broken sentences. So they're very structure of these notebooks, I would say that it is queer. And as I say, historians previously have looked at these books and expressed disappointment because there's no great eureka moments. There's no, oh, wow, here's my idea of natural selection, for example. get that. It's much more of a stream of consciousness. And certainly with Darwin's other major theory of evolutionary change, sexual selection, there's very, very little, a few kind of themes that you might want to pick out and look at. But that's very much a late burner for Darwin.

But when I've decided to look at Darwin, with a queer historian's eye, of course, I mean, I want to read everything that he's ever written. So I get my hands on these notebooks, which thank goodness have been transcribed because his handwriting is awful. So there's now a nice, a very neat and tidy volume you can buy. So that was useful. But again, approaching without too much expectations and just being absolutely gobsmacked by what I was reading because there is so much that hadn't been identified previously that has to do with Darwin's fascination.

He's got many interests that he's following through at this time. There's lots about geology. But really, one of the main ones is his ideas about the evolution of apparently separate sexes from a dual-sexed animal progenitor. And this interest really lasted him for many, many years, certainly precedes his interest in sexual selection by a considerable amount. And others have circled this subject about how did species with apparently separate sexes, evolve and John Hunter in the 1780s briefly wonders if that an ancient intersex animal had split into two, which is a very simple way of thinking about it with if it's got, I don't know, genitals and female genital structures at one end of its body and male genital structures at the

other end, he just envisaged a simple split and that's perhaps how separate sexes evolved. Darwin has a very, very different view about this, which is extraordinary. And it's expressed on numerous occasions in his notebooks, which is that all animals retain an essential intersexuality. And actually the development of male characteristics or female characteristics is simply a matter of the differential development from structures which exist in an essential, and he talks about the latent state, creating the appearance of maillness or femaleness. but he absolutely insists he calls it a wonderful relation going through all nature

that all animals have the capability, the essential capability of expressing both male and female characteristics of their species. And just to add that this has been maintained, as the fundamental understanding of sexual biology for almost 200 years. Now, the biologists will still talk in the same way about by potential rudiments or the essential ability of our bodies to express sexual characteristics that we tend to call opposite or different or we will gender these characteristics. And Darwin is very, very clear.

He looks at an array of wonderful creatures, which was a discovery for me. It was the first time in some cases I'd have heard of these creatures of mouth brooding, male parenting, and male animals vomiting up their children. and I mean, my eyes were, I'd never come across these kind of animals before. And the phenomenon of individual birds changing sex through the course of their lifetime, Darwin was fascinated by this, and he wrote so much about it. And so it's from these creatures and all sorts of other things as well, are the effects of castration in male animals he writes about.

And he freely, at this time, in the privacy of his notebooks, extends this to humans. and he is very clear. He says it several times, every man and woman is hermaphrodite. That's his words. And so my eyes are popping up my head reading all this.

I mean, this was so unexpected. And I can't think of any better word than queer and queer reasoning. And I think I say in my book that I think these books, these notebooks of Darwin's among the queerest sexological texts of the Victorian era.

Absolutely packed full of these wonderful queer creatures. From the producers of Super Troopers and Super Troopers 2 comes, you guessed it. Broken Lizard and their rowdy patrol squad returned to the scene of the crime. In Super Troopers 3, the mustaches are thicker, the maple syrup stickier, and the pranks crazier than ever. Buckle up for the funniest comedy of the summer. Super Troopers 3, only in theaters Friday. Get tickets now. You mentioned a couple of them there. Do you have any particular favourites of these animals?

I often ask that, and I always get a different answer, because there are. And like I say, it was a revelation to me. Certainly being, you know, when I was growing up, I mean, things are better now. We have more inclusive natural history, television programmes. There's terrific books. Like I said, I've mentioned Elliot Shreffer's Queer Ducks and other animals. There's also a little gay natural history by Josh Luke Davis.

He's a fantastic science communicator that's published by the Natural History Museum. And we had nothing like that. Nothing, you know, growing up gay in the 70s and 80s, there was no inkling that any kind of, you know, what we've now called queerness, queer behaviours, existed among non-human animals. And reading Darwin's Notebooks, it was just a revelation. There's a lot around male parenting. I've mentioned mouth brooding, but there's also bubble nesting as well,

male animals building bubble nests. I love this one. It's just a remarkable behaviour where they nurture and look after young. And the female plays very little role in that. But there's others as well. I also learned from Darwin about a really important phenomenon, which again, it's so little about it.

I'd love to you to have an episode of Instant Genius where you discuss current thinking about some sex-limited polymorphism, which is the kind of the sciencey term for a single sex having multiple forms. I mean, I had no idea that some species, many species, including humans actually, have stable genetic variations of asex. It can be males or females. Now, Darwin writes a lot about this in plants. Certainly, today scientists will use the term heterostole.

often. Darwin always used the word polymorphism, which was a word that was used previously in chemistry, actually. He lifted it from chemistry to describe an elemental compound that can exist in different forms. So he lifts that word to describe plants that have kind of different forms. He looks at one in particular, purple loose strife, which has three different flower types or morphs. And now all of these are hermaphrodite. They have both male and female structures. But they come in three different lengths, short, medium and long. And through painstaken experiments, I mean, this really is Darwin at his best, when he's looking and trying to work out the reasons for this.

And he showed that the successful pollination depended on the transfer of pollen between the different morphs, thus ensuring cross-vertilisation. Now, it's actually another naturalist, the other famous Victorian naturalist, Alfred Russell Wallace, who extends this then to animals, particularly he discovers different female morphs in lots of the species of swallowtail butterflies. Now this is in his explorations of what's now in Tunisia. And we have some fantastic colour plates of these species as well, where there's one male and three or four different kinds of female from that species.

And so Wallace describes these in great detail as well. And like I say, you get some lovely pictures. It's in the proceedings of the Linian Society. And this is hugely important, I think, this concept of sex-limited polymorphism. Because Darwin, I mean, you can quote Darwin as saying things. Certainly he writes to Wallace. And there's a phrase that he, this is February 1866. And he writes to Wallace.

And he's talking about heredity, which is extremely important for Darwin. because prevailing views at the time had blended inheritance, that characters from a mother and the father would be blended in the offspring. Now, if that's the case, there can be no selection, no natural selection, no sexual selection, because any variation, any characteristic that arises in a species, would just be blended out. Now, Darwin is painfully aware of this limitation

to his early theories of natural selection and sexual selection. And so he starts thinking about partying, articulate inheritance. Pretty much at the same time as Gregor Mendel is actually crossing his peas elsewhere, but there's no connection between these two theorists of heredity. But Darwin starts to think about inheritance in terms of small particles, he calls them gemmules, and how they might create kind of a stable way for a variation to pass through generations without being blended out. And he writes to Wallace in February 1866, and that, that talking about this and they're talking about this kind of particulate form of inheritance at a very

abstract level. And Darwin writes to Wallace, something of this kind, I think, should occur at first with your butterflies and the three forms of lithrum. That's the purple loose strif, I previously mentioned. Though these cases are in appearance so wonderful, I do not know that they are really more so than every female in the world producing distinct male and female offspring. Now just to unpack that, because that final line has actually been used in quite recent times by theorists who want to argue that Darwin believed that sex was just a simple binary. And that final line, every female in the world producing distinct male and female offspring. Has been quoted very recently, as that's Darwin's view. But what about those butterflies? And what about that purple loose strife?

Darwin is arguing that particulate inheritance can form introsex, so within sex and intersex characteristics, as well as differences between sexes. So it's really worth, you know, just delving into these phenomena, which are still quite alien to many people like sex limited polymorphism, because they are really historically important and they just give a nuance to this history. and just show that Darwin was actually, his ideas about sex were far more dynamic, and he viewed sex as being far more fluid and capable of being intermixed and transforming. You know, it's all there with Darwin, especially in his notebooks and through his botanical studies, and again with his, he had a long period where he studied all the different sexes of barnacles, and there are many, many different kinds of sexual arrangements that barnacles have. And this is what occupied Darwin through a huge proportion of his life.

And it is all about how, you know, apparently separate sexes actually have a much more dynamic, essential dynamics going on, which produce all these other wonderful phenomena, which Darwin is absolutely fascinated about. And Wallace is fascinated about. And so many others are at this time. And so discovering this, you know, it's been a revelation. It really has. And that's what I want to just share as positively as I can. because, you know, I know from experience that people will read this book and not know about these characters, these naturalists, these, and the wonderful queer creatures that they discussed, and phenomena like sex limited polymorphism, which, like I say, I'd love to have, I'd love to have the instant genius podcast on how a biologist today think about sex limited polymorphism, particularly, you know, the degree to which humans experience this. I don't know that. I have a head foot of questions about this.

noted. So you sort of mentioned there that sadly certain members of the human race, although I use that term a bit loosely, weaponise some of, like pick out some quotes from Darwin and weaponise them. And something that you mentioned earlier that I'd like to explore is the terming that some people do is always been going on for, you know, hundreds of years, of same-sex relationships as unnatural. So, I mean, to be honest, that would make me laugh if it wasn't such a viral viewpoint to take. But, you know, what do we see in Darwin's writing about this? You're absolutely right.

It would be funny if it wasn't so horrible. And, you know, the degree to which, you know, modern science has actively tried to prevent knowledge of same-sex sexual behaviours and other non-reproductive sexual behaviours in the natural world. It is extremely difficult part of this history, and it makes me very difficult reading. My own experience of this, actually, talking of great books to read that are available now, one in 1999 was Biological Exuberance by Bruce Bagamil. And that was a revelation. That was the first time that many people of my generation even had any concept,

any knowledge, any exposure to the idea that animals, non-human animals, engaged in same-sex sexual behaviours. But at the same time, Bagamil's book is actually, is effectively an encyclopedia of over 200 years' worth of studies. And this is just the most frustrating situation. It's not something that has been recently discovered. And certainly in some of my early journal articles that I wrote on these subjects, you know, I traced, I went back even further than Bagelmere,

I got right back to Aristotle and the classical world. Naturalists have been observing and recording observations of same-sex sexual behaviours for millennia. How that then translates into the idea that such behaviours are unnatural, that word, just repeated over and over again for so many people again of my generation, and another one against nature as well. Yes, medieval theology and its legacies have a lot to do with that. but also I think especially with Darwin it's because his

his thing his main argument is about animal human continuity he immediately comes up he makes very very little mention of same-sex sexual behaviours sometimes it comes up for him and other naturalists in terms of I previously mentioned the phenomenon of avian sex reversal

I don't like the word reversal but transformation and individual bird transforming sex during its lifetime will often come with a transformation of sexual behaviours as well. That's the arena where it sometimes gets discussed and where Darwin sometimes discusses it. But for Darwin, it's the human problem. It's the one species that he has an absolute mental block with when it comes to sexual phenomena. And by acknowledging same-sex sexual behaviours in animals, I mean, pretty much by the internal logic, his own theory has to then relate to humans. So he just does not go down this route at all. He maintains very conventional views about human courtship and marriage between a man and a woman.

And that's the tragedy of Darwin. On the one hand, he's looking at all these amazing queer creatures and queer phenomena in nature. But on the other hand, there is no way from his own privileged position as a white upper-middle-class gentleman, that he's ever going to extend that to humans. So that's why we get so little from him, when in fact, if you look around that the broader literature, particularly from France, where there seems to be a more open attitude, the German-speaking regions as well, there's a lot more there than you get in the English and the British and American as well literature. So it's just this influx of this kind of cultural, draconian, ideas about human gender and human sex that come to dominate and which prevent Darwin and

most other naturalists from extending their ideas about the fluidity of sex and intersexualities and transformations of sex and sex-limited polymorphism to humans. So it's the human problem. Always, always with Darwin, it's the problem of the species that he simply would never put under the same intense scrutiny as he put the whole of the rest of the natural world. So let's look forward a bit and it sort of open the question up. So obviously for the last 30 minutes or so, we've been talking about viewing science through a queer lens. And sort of unfortunately as a concept, this is still met with, I mean quite openly at times with resistance. So what are your hopes for the future?

you know, what would you like to see? I mean, the last 10 years, things have changed. I've already mentioned a few books, and we can also point a few nature documentaries. I was in one called Queer Planet, which was a couple of years ago. Yeah, there's a more recent one called Second Nature, narrated by the brilliant Elliot Page. So things are happening, which are absolutely fantastic. You now have lots of books and a few natural history films and other materials which take this queer perspective. And I welcome that and I think it's absolutely necessary.

It's long overdue that that process is now happening. And hopefully to get back to how we began our conversation, that life sciences and science more generally becomes more integrated into queer life and culture. I think that's absolutely to be welcomed. Yes, not with rose-coloured spectacles, but actually viewing many of the issues that naturalists look at and the wonderful creatures that they study. They're just interesting and, you know, they have their place in queer thought and life and culture.

But really, my hope is that a more integrated approach emerges. Yes, it's very important that we make up for the omissions and the deceptions of the through the 20th century and that are still with us at the moment. But, yeah, it would be great if David Atterbury made more programmes in which, you know, all manner, not just cis-heterosexual, not just queer, but actually just embracing the full repertoire of bodies, sexual bodies, sexual characteristics in the natural world, because nobody yet has actually taken that holistic, that comprehensive approach. So hopefully that's my hope for the future, and that biology, education, science, communication will just embrace queer. perspectives and all other perspectives and just reflect the realities of sexual biology and sexual

life that are just so wondrous and diverse and interesting. Thank you for listening to this episode of Vincent Genius brought you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Dr Ross Brooks. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out his book, Darwin and the Queer of life, a history of sex and science. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to see our guests and hosts in person, then why not check out our YouTube channel at Science Focus.

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