Instant Genius - How biology got females wrong, with Lucy Cooke

Episode Date: February 28, 2022

Zoologist Lucy Cooke explains how biologists often overlook the female animal when it comes understanding the sexes in the natural world. She dispels some of the most stubborn myths that surround the female of the species and reveals what happened when a robot grouse went looking for love. Once you’ve mastered the basics with Instant Genius, dive deeper with Instant Genius Extra, where you’ll find longer, richer discussions about the most exciting ideas in the world of science and technology. Only available on Apple Podcasts. Produced by the team behind BBC Science Focus Magazine. Visit our website: sciencefocus.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit name audio.com to learn more. From BBC Science Focus, this is Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. I'm Daniel Bennett, the magazine's editor, and today we're talking about the female animal. Well, specifically, we're exploring how the biological sciences can get it wrong when it comes to understanding the sexes. I'm joined by Lucy Cook, a zoologist, author and broadcaster, whose new book is called Bitch, a revolutionary guide to sex, evolution and the female animal. She also now has a show called Political Animals that's airing on Radio 4, and it's available on BBC Sounds now. Here's Lucy kicking things off by explaining why.

What biology has in the past gotten wrong about the two sexes? Yeah, the book's basically about how female animals have been marginalized and misunderstood by the scientific patriarchy. And really there's a, you know, the revolution that's taken place in the last few decades in terms of us redefining what it means to be female and also the forces that shape evolution in the process. So, you know, I guess, you know, as I was a student of zoology, myself when I was taught by Richard Dawkins, how females were bit part players in the evolutionary

story, really, and it was males, it was the males where all the action lay. And in particular, there was one sort of universal law that was really drummed into me at university, which is that males will always be promiscuous and females will be choosy and chaste. And that's because sperm are cheap and plentiful and males produce gazillions of the things. And, and females, you know, we just produce a small amount of, you know, finite amount of energetically expensive eggs. So, you know, we sort of drew the short straw in the lottery of life because, you know, but by investing our genetic legacy in these few small eggs, as opposed to millions of mobile sperm, we would sort of doom to play second fiddle to

the sperm shooters for all eternity. That's what I was taught. And this is a sort of universe law in zoology that prescribes the sex roles of males and females. And, you know, this, this, it's always just really bothered me, you know, because I was thinking, first of all, if males are promiscuous but females are chased, who are all the males mating with? You know, if it doesn't make any, it just like, the logic in my head would just like really hurt, just going, oh, is it just a few strumpets that are having sex with lots of males or? Or how does that even work? You know, so, you know, this universal law, you know, alienated me as a woman and befuddled me as a scientist.

You know, I just really understand how it worked out. But that is, that, that's one of the kind of very entrenched paradigms of zoology is that, is, is, is, is this anisogamy theory, this idea that, that because females produce a few, nutrient-rich eggs and males produce loads of mobile sperm that somehow that means that males will always want to mate with lots of females. And females have nothing to gain by multiple mating, that they are, you know, they're wired to be choosy and chase. And, you know, this is true to a certain extent. But it doesn't explain, for example, the licentious promiscuity of the lioness who mates hundreds of times during her mistress with multiple males. It doesn't explain that, does it? You know, and, you know, this, you know, and, and actually it turns out that females, polyandry is

commonplace in the animal kingdom. And, you know, and there are, and there are multiple reasons for that, namely that the fundamental one is don't put all your eggs in one basket, you know, if you've got, if you're, you know, if you're seeking multiple fathers for your, for your eggs, then you're increasing the likelihood of genetic compatibility. So it makes sense. And then of course there's also females like the lioness or any number of primates where the females mate multiply in order to avoid infanticide

because males of many species are prone to killing babies. Yeah, exactly, killing young. And they do so to force the females into eestress early and then they can mate with her. and then they don't have to sort of sit around and wait while some other males genes are raised before they get a go. So females mate multiply and promiscuously with lots of males in order to confuse paternity. And that theory was established in the 1980s by the anthropologist Sarah Blahferredi. And she had to kick and scream and jump up and down.

And, you know, it was a long time before she was taken seriously with that theory, which is now an accepted part of modern zoological thinking. we now understand that that's true. So that's just sort of one example. And the sort of knock-on of that is that it implies that females are, because they have nothing to gain from multiple mating, that they vary less than males and they're less variable. And this is the really pernicious part of this universal law,

because that's what implies that males are. are driving the bus of change and that it's male, males are more variable than females. So evolution acts more on males and females. They're essentially more involved. And of course, that's complete rubbish. But that is still something that raises its head routinely, that males are more variable than females. And the males have more to gain from multiple mating than females. You know, I mean, these are, and, you know, the scientists that I interviewed for my book, who have fought so hard to try and address this, you know, this fraudulent universal law,

are aghast at how much it sticks in the public realm. And the only reason that they can come up with is is that the patriarchy like that story. So this was biological blind spot, so to speak. It goes pretty far back. In fact, some of the blame lands right at the feet of Darwin, doesn't it? Well, you know, I hate to say so, but yes. I mean, I studied evolutionary biology, and Darwin was my hero. You know, he still is my hero. Even though I've written this book,

Darwin is still my hero. He is a genius. He's responsible for one of the greatest theories in science. You know, I mean, his theory of evolution by natural selection is a brilliant theory. But it was, but the problem is, you know, the thing is, and I think this was the thing that really shocked me when I started investigating the book is that even geniuses like Darwin can't escape the shackles of cultural bias. They can't, you know, they, they, they, you know, he was a, he was a man of his time, you know, and that time was the Victorian era. And in the Victorian era, females were lesser individuals in society. They were submissive, you know, they were, you know, meant to be chased and support their husbands and they weren't even capable of appreciating art. They had no

agency whatsoever. And so this misogynistic culture became entwined with Darwin's science, which I was really shocked by. I mean, if someone who's as big a genius and as good and meticulous a scientist as Darwin can have his work polluted by cultural bias, that's pretty hardcore, isn't it? I mean, it doesn't speak well for the rest of us, you know, because, and I think that's what I was just shocked by was the idea that science was so vulnerable to this. And also, it could take so long to redress that balance. God, I mean, the feminist revolution, you know, the second great wave in the 1970s, that's 50 years ago now, but yet these ideas are still clogging up the science of evolutionary biology. And I imagine there might, you know, there could be

someone listening to this who might think, oh, what do you mean science can be sex? Because science is just, you know, it just observes truth. So how can that be sexist? But there's a really great example early on in the book about Jays and observing the behaviour of Jays. I wonder if you could just sort of share that study with us and what they overlooked. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing about cultural bias is it just, you know, as I say, it made Darwin view the world through a Victorian pinhole camera.

It just meant that he looked at things with a certain perspective. And that continues. And other great scientists have, because he said that females behaved in this way, and males behaved in this way, it meant that all the scientists that followed in his wake suffered from confirmation bias because Darwin said so. So, you know, of course that's what they're going to look for. So, yeah, a really great example is a study that happened in the 20th century, anyway, involving Pinyon Js.

and it was two ornithologists who've written, they're like the world expert in Piny and Jays. They've written a whole book on Piny and Jays, and they are brilliant and meticulous scientists. And they, Piny and Jays are sort of social birds, and they realize that there must be some sort of like dominance network that controls the bird's social behavior, otherwise they'd be chaos. So this pair of American ornithologists went looking for the,

alpha male. Dominance network must be governed by an alpha male. And, you know, this took some ingenuity because it wasn't really very apparent which, which of the males was the alpha male. So they tried to sort of incite territorial behaviour by setting out tasty treats and trying to get the males to fight over something. Yeah, they made some particularly good food for them. So they were Yeah, some oily mealworms or something, which sounded completely revolting. Yeah, exactly. But if your opinion, Jay, that's exactly what you want. Anyway, they did this and still, they couldn't get the males to fight. So they had to base their sort of, their dominance network on what amounted to dirty looks, which, you know, if you're a bird and you've got no facial expression, it's pretty hard to gauge.

Do you know what I mean? So they'd be like, yeah, you know, that, that male gave that male a dirty look. Yeah, it was a dirty look, you know, so, and they meticulously recorded. all of these aggressive, in inverted commas, interactions between these males. So they couldn't find any actual fighting. No fighting whatsoever, no fighting at all. But they recorded all of these dirty looks in their data. And then they tried to work out statistically who was the dominant male. It was just a mess.

They couldn't really find one. And it just didn't really add up. Meanwhile, there had been some extremely aggressive behaviour amongst the people. opinion jays. There had been individuals that had attacked each other mid-flight and fallen to the ground and a mass of flapping wings and jabbing pecks at each other. But these were not considered to be part of the dominance network because the individuals involved were all females. And so it's all there in their meticulously recorded data, all of these interactions, but they were completely disregarded. And instead, they wrote off the, what was described as

testy behaviour of the females as being an avian version of premenstrual syndrome, which I think they decided to call pre-breeding syndrome, which was their sort of, you know, all those, those females and their naughty hormones, they're messy hormones, you know, just sparring with each other. And so they completely missed the point that females have a key role in the dominance network of Pinyon Jays, but they just couldn't see it, even though the data, they're beautifully, beautifully recorded data was there in front of them, they were blind to it. And that's why this sort of misogynistic bias is important to be flushed out, because it just, it colours the way that we see the natural world.

So I just want to kind of talk along some of the books, you know, really beautifully divided into different chapters where you explore a different, perhaps, way that we've started to re, you know, see the, the, the natural kingdom anew now that we're starting to take a closer look at what the female of the species does. And one of them that I think most people would probably be familiar with is of mating rituals. We've all seen the Attenborough documentaries. They tend to take centre stage. And particularly the one that you seem to have a lot of fun with. And I definitely enjoyed was the grouse and their, well, the sack slapping. So it's interesting because I said,

suppose from one perspective we probably saw these as the males like you say being you know having their variety and showing off and being sort of floundering posy fellows but actually it's it's the females to a degree that are driving this process is that right yeah so i mean darwin was absolutely right sexual selection is driven by male competition and female choice and that still goes but but it's it turns out you know he he was a pains to sort of you know, because the idea that female choice gave females a certain amount of agency in that they were shaping the evolution of the male, that actually went down a bomb in Victorian England,

and Darwin was ridiculed for that idea, actually. It turns out, he's right, female choice does shape the evolution of males. It does. But it's not just a question, and this is the one that you always get right. Like, I mean, on the BBC series The Mating Game that was on recently, I ended up screaming at the television set, literally, because it's like, oh God, guys, you know, really, you're not up to speed with how things have changed, you know, but it's all these stories of daring do and swashbuckling, look, here's the males and they're brightly coloured feathers or their anglers and their horns and they're fighting over the female.

And then they win, that's the thing, they win the female, right, by being the most beautiful or by being the most brutal and aggressive and dominant. Well, this brilliant researcher, Gail Patricelli, in the US, who studied sage grouse for years and years and years. And also, Bowerbirds are another one, obviously, the Bowerbirds make these sort of incredible males, make these sort of ludicrous sort of Salvador Dali-esque kind of creations in order to attract the female. Sage grouse, similarly absurd. I mean, I went into the mountains of Northern California, and there are a few courtship rituals that are more bizarre than the sage grouse struts.

I mean, they literally, they inflate this sort of, throat sack and then slap the sack together and it makes these doink, doink, doink sounds. And I mean, they're like strutting around and basically body popping. And it's like, and it, and they look so serious. And it honestly, it's hilarious. I absolutely loved it. It was just completely. And meanwhile, the females are just like round, but just pecking away, looking a bit desultry and bored. Apparently not paying any attention to the males at all as they're like frantically kind of going for it with the slap, slap, slap, doing, doing, doing, point. you know, it seems like all of your Victorian stereotypes come to life.

You know, the males are competing with each other. The females are completely passive. They're paying, they're paying no attention. So Gail, in an attempt to try and sort of decode all this, she did an absolutely brilliant thing. She built a robot female sage grouse. She got like a dead sage grouse and stuffed it. And then using a pair of spanks and some robot stuff that she got off the internet,

She built this robot, and then she drives the robot sage grouse into the let, and then observes what happens, right? Which is, you know, just absolutely genius. And anyway, so she does all this. And what she manages to figure out with the sage grouse and also with the bowbirds is that it's not just a question of being the most fabulous or dominant of males, that males have to, the female is giving signals as well. well. And if the male doesn't effectively listen to the female and respond by adjusting his

display according to the female's lead, then he doesn't win the female at all. You know, so, yeah, I think that's a very positive message, isn't it really, is that it's not just about being the most dominant cock in the room. It's about, it's about listening to the female and seeing, you know, and that's the way that you're going to get to, you know, get to mate with her. So, so yeah, What she sort of basically uncovered is that it's just a lot more nuanced than you'd think. And the females, rather than being passive, have a very active role. It's a two-player game. You know, it's just very rarely presented, you know, I hadn't heard of, because you mentioned the Bowerbird.

I've seen those as well on numerous documentaries. And you always hear about the male and everything. And the bird just goes, yeah, it's good. That's pretty good. But there's obviously a lot more to it that we, again, we're sort of, it's a bit of a blind spot, I suppose. these brilliant scientists that you feature been kind of shining light on. And that brings me actually to another, something you've already touched on a little bit, but I'd love to expand on.

And that's this idea that female sexuality and animal kingdom always leans towards chastity while the males are just there to spread their sperm and kill and fight and whatever. But you spent some time with the scientist and with some, is it Langus? Is that how you pronounce it? Langus, yes. Yeah, yeah. Which prove that, again, that kind of having, coming into it with that mindset means you often miss the bigger picture or perhaps the more detailed picture.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, this idea that females are wired for chastity and males are wired for promiscuity is really deeply ingrained in sexual selection and evolutionary thinking. And it's not true. It's just not true. females have sexual strategies themselves, and more often than not, those strategies will involve with mating with multiple males.

It's just that for a long time, that was just ignored. You know, it was completely ignored. In fact, a brilliant story about how this was uncovered. Another one that highlights this sort of lingering, how lingering bias can obscure biological truth is Patricia Goetty's story, who she's this sort of amazing feminist firebrand, of us.

One of the most intelligent scientists I've ever met. She's just absolutely incredible. She was studying, it was Eastern Blue Jays, actually. She was the first person to look at a clutch of eggs and use DNA fingerprinting to see how many, you know, whether they all had one father. So we always think of songbirds as being monogamous, you know, you see the male and the female,

they make the nest together and they tend to the eggs and everything. And what she discovered was that a clutch of eggs routinely had more than one father. The only way to explain that is that the female, whose nest it is, is mating multiply. When she revealed this at an ornithological conference in the 1980s, she was told by a very senior establishment figure male that, well, obviously that's because the females are being raped, because there's no way that the females would be actively soliciting male males, because, as we all know, females have nothing to gain from multiple mating. It's males that do that.

And she was like, yeah, but just with songbirds, they can't actually, that rap's impossible because they don't have a penis. They have males and females both have a cloaca, which is a whole that the male has to balance precariously on the females back. They have to both avert their section of their cloaca. So it's what's called a cloacal kiss. So it meets. And there's this transformers.

sperm and eggs. If the female's not into it, she can call a halt to it at any time because the whole thing is so difficult to balancing it. This is not an easy thing to pull off. So the idea that males are raping females is absurd, but that's what was thought. And it took another scientist putting radio trackers on hooded warblers, in fact. And she found that the hooded warblers were indeed going outside of their territory and soliciting sex at dawn and having sex behind their partners back. And so that's how they were multiple males, fathering an nest. And that's now accepted that I think it's something like 90% of songbirds are socially monogamous, but not sexually monogamous. You know, and that makes good sense. Patricia Goetty says, you know, why would you put all your

eggs in one basket? So that's like one reason. It's a strategy. The females are not passive recipients of males spreading their seed far and wide. They've got their own. strategy and that also involves multiple mating. And then similarly with the Languars that you mentioned, that strategy, females, Sarah Blafferde, she was studying the Languars and she went to study infanticide in Languas and then she found out that the females were actually, males often kill baby Languars when they take over a troop. And she found, to her surprise, that females were soliciting males for sex from outside the group. And, you know, she said, you know, from her in the late 1970s, early 1980s, she didn't make any sense to it because there was no explanation

for that whatsoever because that had never been recorded. But actually, it turns out it's a strategy and by mating with multiple males, it confuses paternity and infanticide is less common. And so these were all sort of struggles to have accepted. And because of this sort of persistent, idea that females, because Darwin said that females are chased. It's so fascinating because when you hear people, when you hear biologists talk about evolution and natural selection, it always has such a sharp edge. Evolution determines everything because it's what is the best strategy or what is the best adaptation. But then it seems like there's these blind spots where, but when it comes to females, oh no, you know, strategies

and selection and doesn't apply anymore because you were of this certain nature that we've, you know, culturally decided. And so I think it's, the examples are so fascinating. And that brings me to one more, which I think is perhaps one of the most sort of pervasive ones, I suppose, in a way. And that's, that's due with motherhood. It's probably, you know, I could,

I could probably imagine I thought that in the past that it's sort of, that motherhood and kind of caring is this sort of female attribute, that all females have some sort of tug of gravity that they must selflessly mothering. But that's just not always the case. is it? No. I mean, the thing to remember is that females vary enormously in their propensity for anything. And motherhood is an example. I agree. I think it's something that certainly can be rather unhelpful to human females, the idea that we're all meant to be natural mothers and

this maternal gift that we're given to nurture that's instinctive in all of us. And really, you know, modern research is showing that there is no such thing as a maternal instinct. There's a parental instinct that exists in all of us, but there's no, there isn't something specific as a maternal instinct. Now, that's not to say that some females aren't going to be more wired for nurturing than others. The same with males. Some males are going to be more naturally wired for nurturing than others. Do you know what I mean? There's going to be variation within that. But the idea that females are uniquely endowed from birth with some natural and maternal instinct is unlikely. Because it turns out, and this is very recent research, that there's basically there's a nurturing switch in the brain.

It was found first in frogs and now it's been found in mice by Catherine Doolack at Harvard. And she just, that's such a massive discovery. It's only last year. She won this huge science prize as a result. of that discovery. And basically, you know, she said it's literally like a switch that you flip. And, you know, like, so you have with mice, you know, your average mouse, be it male or female, if it stumbles across babies, it'll just kill them and maybe even eat them. But females, obviously, don't do that when they've given birth with their babies. And males can also be

encouraged to start nurturing rather than killing. If you, you're not even, you. If you, you're you buzz this bit of their brain, which is basically this sort of galanin neuron hub. And it's exactly the same in males and females. If you switch this hub on, the mice start nurturing, be they male or female. And if you switch it off, they'll attack. So it's Catherine Dulac's belief that this is the sort of, this is the central hub for parenting. And it's exactly the same in males and females. Now, of course, in mammals, you have an extra females give birth and nurse their young. And that also involves releasing oxytocin. And that will soup up the parenting response so that it gives it like an extra boost to it.

It doesn't, it isn't what triggers the parenting gallon hub. But it can amplify it, right? So that's why, you know, you can get a sort of certainly the act of giving birth and nursing. floods a female with oxytocin, which is the bonding hormone, and similarly with the young, and so that they end up bonding very tightly with each other. But in addition to that, there's this Galin and Hub, which Catherine Gillac doesn't know what triggers it. I mean, God, it'd be amazing to find out what it is. She thinks it'll be a complex set of environmental, both internal and external cues that will be the thing that switches it. But, I mean, how brilliant is that?

Males and females, both have it in them to be nurturing. I mean, like, lovely. I think It's a great message. I mean, I didn't, you know, a lot of the things I found out in this, I just delighted me. I was just like, oh, this is so great for humanity to know this. Do you know what I mean? There's a lot of men I know out there who'll be like, oh, thank God, you know. I'm not recognized at last.

That was Lucy Cook explaining how we're coming to understand biological sexes in completely new ways. If you'd like to hear Lucy and I dig a little deeper into our understanding of the sexes, Check out Instant Genius Extra, a bonus podcast available via subscription on Apple's podcast app. Alternatively, do check out Lucy's new book, Bitch, a revolutionary guide to sex, evolution, and the female animal, which is published by Penguin Random House in the UK and goes on sale on Thursday. Thank you for listening. The Instant Genius podcast is brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine, which you can find on sale now in supermarkets and news agents,

well as on your preferred app store. Alternatively, do come find us online at sciencefocus.com. See you next time. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist focal, Name creates high-end audio systems, combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended.

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