288. Bitch: On the Female of the Species (3)
2 (23m 23s):
Well, they're not changing sex, but they do have gonadal fluidity, you know, which, which is surprising because we sort of think as the gonads in mammals as being fixed, you know, but then there was this study a couple of years ago, as I said, that found that in mice, this antagonistic relationship where the creation of a testes requires the suppression of an ovary and vice versa, and that actually continued into adulthood. So, you know, it, it suggests that the system is less stable than we assumed, you know?
1 (23m 57s):
Right. So, but let's just take the definition of, of sex as, as what kind of gametes you produce. So males produce small gametes called sperm females produce large gametes called eggs. And then that tease off the, the theoretical model developed by Trevor's and others that you, you had that whole chapter in your book. That was so interesting that whoever produces the larger gamut has a larger investment in the process. So has to be more cautious, careful, risk averse, choosy, selective, and the organism that produces the sperms they're cheap.
1 (24m 37s):
They can afford to be as promiscuous as they like and not very choosy at all. Now that's kind of a standard evolutionary psych description of human male and females, right. Guys are promiscuous and women are more selective and careful and risk averse and so forth, but, and your, your book doesn't deal with human sexuality like that, but there's so many exceptions in the animal kingdom to that, that it makes me wonder why are we using animal models to predict human behavior or describe human behavior?
2 (25m 9s):
I mean, I don't know. I mean, as again, I'm a zoologist, so I can't speak about how we study humans. But what I would say is is that, you know, the idea that, that females are less promiscuous than males is, is not true of the animal kingdom. And this idea of Anna saga me the anosognosia theory, the difference in size of gay meats, it, it was taught to me as a universal law university and the trouble with this universal law is it simply is not universally true. I mean, there are females where the males are more promiscuous than the, than the females. There's also a hell of a lot of females that are just as promiscuous as the males, in everything from lions to lizards, to lobsters.
2 (25m 53s):
I mean, you know, it's, it's, it's it's and for very good for, and for a number of reasons, whether it's because as Sarah Black Verde showed, when she was studying, land goes back in the 1980s, that, that females mated Multipli with lots of males as a way of manipulating male behavior and confusing paternity males have a tendency to be infanticidal. And, and by mating with lots of different males, the females are less likely to have the males. If they, they they've made recently with the female, they're less likely to kill her, her babies. So, you know, that's one reason, but, but Patricia go RT is, is really the scientists. He's really gone to town on all of this, because you know, this universal law, which we, you know, trippers, as you say, you know, brought to fame, he, he was, he underpinned theory with quite an obscure experiment on fruit flies from the 1940s by a guy called Angus Bateman, which, which is, which is sort of through Darwin stereotypes and empirical lifeline, and, and supposedly proved that females have nothing to gain from multiple mating, whereas males do, right.
2 (27m 6s):
And this is the thing that underpins this whole idea. All right, well, Patricia go Aussie, you know, having observed, you know, done experiments where she found that songbird clutches had multiple fathers and, you know, any number of species where the females had sexual agency and where were soliciting sex with multiple males. And that was their sexual strategy. She decided to go and replicate Bateman study because, you know, Hey ho the basis of good science is replication, right? So she, she, you know, this given the foundational nature of, of Bateman study and the fact that Bateman's paradigm Bateman's gradient, it's called the graph. That is part of his conclusion, which was replicated in Trevor's study is in every single textbook.
2 (27m 51s):
There is, you know, that shows how females have nothing to gain from multiple mating. She, so she repeated Bateman's experiment right down to using the same types of mutant fruit fly that he used and, you know, following his methodology to the letter. And she found she couldn't replicate his results. And then she went back to his original lab notes and dug up his original data and found that, you know, basically he had suffered from a chronic case of confirmation bias. And, you know, he he'd, he'd skewed the results and cut and cut collated the data in a way that it, it, it proved that that males had more to gain than females.
2 (28m 35s):
And in actual fact, he, his experiment didn't show that to, yeah.
1 (28m 40s):
Yeah. I thought that was really interesting, perhaps probably another victim of the replication crisis as we continue to knock down famous experiments. I do wonder how that happened so much. I think probably even someone of Trevor's intellect and depth probably didn't read the original paper. Right. Maybe a secondary source or maybe glanced at the original paper, but didn't dig into the original data. I mean, it's just so time-consuming to do that. Right. So you kind of end up taking, not an argument from authority, but something like so many people accept this. Well, I'm just going to build on it without actually going back and trying to replicate it because who has time to do all that?
2 (29m 20s):
Yeah. I mean, Patty's view is, is that it's so obvious that the data has been skewed without even going to the effort of replicating it. But, you know, I mean, it's just the way that he collated his data. They were actually two graphs and it makes no sense the way he collected the data so that he put to the results of two experiments in one, which is makes the very famous Batemans gradient and then the other four experiments, which, which don't prove that they were sort of hived off in this other one. Do you know what I mean? So if you just, even a cost reread a bit would have made, you know, as a skilled scientist, you know, but so, so Patsy, Patty just can't really believe it, but, you know, when I, I, my, my research team spoke to Oxford university has senior professor.
2 (30m 3s):
I won't say who about, you know, how they teach Bateman's paradigm today and was told that, you know, do you teach Patty's papers alongside, you know, Bateman's paradigm? And, and we were told, no, it's just, they considered it to be ideologically driven, you know? So I just think this is really, this is really punishing, right. Re it really makes me mad because, you know, she's an exemplary scientist, right? Yeah. She was asking these questions because she's a feminist, you know, and she sort of saw that there was an unfairness. And so that, that kind of spurred her questions. She's wearing her ideology out there. You know, it doesn't mean to say that our science isn't good. Do you know what I mean? It doesn't mean that we can't respect the results of what she's done, which has shown that it's flawed.
2 (30m 46s):
You know, you can't, this isn't a universal law that Bateman's paradigm doesn't, isn't, isn't a universal law, you know? So, so I think that's really fascinating, you know, why, why do we hang on to these ideas? You know?
1 (31m 2s):
Yeah. You kind of blew through that theoretical model that counters the gametes size theory that is females would have multiple mating partners or encounters, so that the males who would be infanticidal and kill the offspring of other males, like lions apparently do this. And in order to start fresh. So here, the theory would be, if the males don't know whose offspring those are, they, they are less likely to kill them. Is that it?
2 (31m 38s):
Yeah, that's correct. Yeah. So basically by, by killing, you know, if a male takes on a new territory than the females that are there in that territory that have had babies already, you know, they're going to take time to wean those babies and all the time they're doing that, they're not going to be sexually receptive. So by killing the babies, that means that they forced the females into estrus. But if the females have mated recently with the males that the males, I mean, animals don't associate sex and babies. Right. But, but it's thought that males do remember if they've recently mated with a female. And if they do the general rule, the simple rule for an animal is, Hey, if I've made recently, don't, don't kill the babies, you know, because they could be.
2 (32m 23s):
So, you know, and, and Sarah Black, he came up with this theory in the 1980s. And, and we now know 50 species lions, as you mentioned, langurs, that she was studying, but all sorts of other primates and that we believe, you know, the females may have a strategy for multiple meetings for that reason. But, you know, in the case of songbirds, you know, with Patricia go Aussie has studied, you know, but she, she, she reckons is just a straightforward, don't put all your eggs in one basket. You know, the more males that you make with the greater chance you have of re of genetic possibility, you know, it makes total sense that a female would mate, with multiple males,
1 (33m 1s):
You have that funny line in your book about if, if men are just, just super promiscuous and women are super careful and cautious and risk averse and, and, and not very promiscuous who are, are all the females the guys are having sex with. Right. I mean, if you're going to be some kind of, I forget how you put it, you put it much better than I just did it.
2 (33m 27s):
He used to make my head hurt university. I'd be like, I just don't understand it. But if the males are promiscuous and the females to chase, then, then who's having all the sex. You know what I mean? It just doesn't.
1 (33m 41s):
Yeah. That's, that's really funny. Now the Bateman paper was based on fruit flies. Is that what you said? Why would anybody think? Because all of this is interest to non zoologist, because we want to know why are we the way we are? Okay. Look that animals like that. So that's like us, remember that Morgan Freeman, a narrated Disney documentary about the, the emperor penguins and Antarctica and how they made for life. And they guard the egg, the female guards, the egg, and the males go out and whatever. And I remember whenever that came out and he was mid nineties, you know, the, the, the moral majority and the Christian conservative, oh, yes, this is a great film because it promotes family values and all this stuff is why would penguins have anything to do with humans, much less fruit flies, and even Bonobos and chimps, which, you know, fascinate people, cause they're so closely related.
1 (34m 36s):
But the closest that they're related to is 6 million years. That's a long time to be separated and go down a different evolutionary pathway. And the difference between chimps and Bonobos is pretty substantial and they have a far smaller divergence evolutionary wise, and they're still pretty different. So why would anybody think any of this should reflect about the way human society should be structured or families or the way humans should or shouldn't behave?
