288. Bitch: On the Female of the Species (1)
288. Lucy Cooke — Bitch: On the Female of the Species
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1 (2m 20s):
All right. Here's the episode. My guest today is Lucy cook with the provocative title and cover bitch on the female of the species, Lucy, what a great title and cover. Very provocative. Thanks for coming on.
2 (2m 47s):
Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, no, I'm, I'm really pleased with the, the, the, the, the, both the book and that the, the, the cover on the title. I think they look great. You know,
1 (2m 56s):
I have noticed in the publishing world, the trend toward single word titles, like Mary roaches books, or, you know, like ghost and, and gulp and, you know, single word titles. I like that. My next book is just called conspiracy. That's it just conspiracy. All right. I like that trend. All right. I'm going to start off with what
2 (3m 15s):
Makes it a lot.
1 (3m 16s):
Yeah, I think that's
2 (3m 17s):
The, it makes it a lot easier.
1 (3m 18s):
I think that's the idea. So let me give you a proper introduction here. Lucy cook is the author of the truth about animals, which was shortlisted for the Royal society prize and the New York times bestselling book, a little book of slot. She is a national geographic Explorer, a Ted talker, and an award-winning documentary filmmaker with a master's degree in zoology, from Oxford university, where she even took a course from the mighty Richard Dawkins, which you open your book talking about. And then she lives in Hastings England. I'm talking to her, she's in Seattle for eight town hall, a book event tonight. So that's cool. All right, I'm going to start off. Since you start off with Darwin in your opening chapter, I'm going to start off with a story about Darwin.
1 (3m 60s):
After the origin of species was published. He, his book was debated at the British association for the advancement of science and 1861. And his friend Henry faucet came back who attended the conference, Darwin wasn't there and said, the critic said your book is too theoretical, and you should have just let the facts speak for yourself. Now we have all this in letters in Darwin wrote back to Henry faucet quote, about 30 years ago, there was much talk that geologists are only to observe and not theorize. And I well remember someone saying that at this rate, a man might as well go into a gravel pit and count the pebbles and describe the colors, how odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view, if it is to be of any service, I call that Darwin's dictum.
1 (4m 50s):
So what is your book for or against?
2 (4m 54s):
Well, I mean, it's, I'm, I'm four because I, but I'm putting forward a different view to, to Darwin. I mean, Darwin, he's my hero. He's my academic hero. I, you know, I studied evolution. It's been my favorite subjects ever since I was tiny, you know, Darwin of course, there's, it was a brilliant and particular scientist, but, you know, what's really fascinating to me is someone who is brilliant, even as Darwin is not immune to the cultural pollution. You know, his ideas were not shaped by, by the time of which they were formed. And, you know, I was really shocked by that. I'll be honest. I, you know, I was aware, you know, obviously I've started researching this book.
2 (5m 35s):
I, I knew that there was a story in there, but I was surprised at the extent to which how vulnerable zoology is to cultural pollution. So, yeah, it's been fascinating for me to discover, you know, and I, and I think, you know, if Darwin's, you know, vulnerable, then Hey, we all are.
1 (5m 54s):
Yeah, exactly. Right. You also mentioned Steve golden, your book. He, he described this as the cloven hooves print a theory and you can't get around it. That footprint is on everything. The data never just speak for themselves and, you know, reading your book. And this is on the heels of my reading, Naomi arrestee's book on gender bias in science, the, the, the book is called, well, you know, what is it, why science or w w why we respect? No. Why should we trust science? That's it. So she has these chapter after chapter, these inane theories about, you know, why women can't go to Harvard. Well, it's because of their uterus and the blood. And the, I dunno what I mean. And they had data. I mean, they published data in peer review journals.
1 (6m 36s):
And then when you read it now, it's like, this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. How could this ever pass, pass peer review? Right. So, but it does. So talk to us a little bit about some of the gender bias in the 19th and into the 20th century about sexual selection and females of different species and, and how that's changed.
2 (6m 55s):
Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, Darwin, Darwin Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, as you know, one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of all times an extraordinary piece of work, but he knew that natural selection didn't explain everything that we see in nature. And he was bothered by extravagant traits like the horns of the stag or the peacock's tail, which, you know, was so extravagant and unwieldy that they, they didn't seem to sort of, you serve any purpose in the kind of utilitarian quest for survival. You know, they, they were too flamboyant, too extravagant. So he came up with this idea of sexual selection, which is that there was another four sort of driving evolution, and it wasn't just survival.
2 (7m 37s):
It was the quest for sex. And, and he called that sexual selection. And he wrote about it in the descent of man, which is published in 1971. And in that book, he basically, he looked to define the differences between the sexes and, and, and as, as he saw it, and he thought that sexual selection was, was, was driven by male competition and female choice. Now, male competition, you know, his, his fellows autologist didn't have any problems sort of accepting the idea that males competing one another, you know, Mike drive evolution, but female choice less.
2 (8m 20s):
So, you know, because the idea that females, I mean, so Darwin did give females agency by the way, you know, because he was, but albeit he was sort of it's financially, cause he's really sort of, he's at pains to, for the females to be passive, but she's also active at the same time and that she's choosing. So, you know, it's still sort of male competition. And the winning male is, is, gets to make the female stroke is chosen by the female. I mean, it's this sort of blurry line because the idea that females were choosing went down like a lead balloon in Victoria and England, it was really not popular at all. And of course, you know, he was right ma male competition and female choice do drive sexual selection.
2 (9m 1s):
It's just that what he didn't realize was that female competition, male choice, and a whole host of other forces that are, you know, down to female agency and that females are basically just as active drivers of evolution as males, but it's just that, you know, Darwin couldn't see it that way because he was a Victorian man. And so he branded the female of the species in the shape of a Victorian housewife. And then because Darwin said it, all of the scientists that followed in his wake for decades, if not centuries just suffered from a chronic case of confirmation bias. And they, they only saw fitted Darwin's paradigm and, and or worse, they just didn't study females.
2 (9m 41s):
And then that data gap becomes a piece of knowledge on its own. You know, people, females are not seen as competitive or aggressive because there's no data to support that because they've never been studied. So, you know, it just became a self fulfilling prophecy really until a bunch of amazing female scientists came along and started rewriting the rule book. So starting in the 1980s, really. Thanks. Thanks. Sort of feminism. Yeah.
1 (10m 9s):
Yeah. I think that's right. I, I had met Sarah Blaffer Hrdy at several HBS conferences, human behavior and evolutionary decided conferences. I, you know, to me, she's a legend in the, in the field, but that, that took a long time to come, oh, really a century. Right. Because Darwin died in 82, 18 82. Right. So it was really 1980s before this paradigm. Yeah. It's hard to know what we're stuck in. Right. You know, a century from now, people like you will write books about what those crazy 21st, early 21st century people believed about whatever gender, sex, race, and whatnot. It's just hard to know what the culture bias is.
1 (10m 49s):
You do the best you can. And I think you'd probably agree. There is a reality to be discovered a kind of a universal reality. That's out there. You know, we can never know it, perfectly science is a good tool, but it's certainly not perfect. And that's the problem figuring out what those biases are.
2 (11m 8s):
Absolutely. I mean, I was genuinely shocked, you know, that, that science was, you know, just like a say so vulnerable. I just, I wasn't expecting it. You know, I really wasn't. And you know, what's fascinating to me is how slow it is to, to change. You know, when you look at that, you mentioned, you know, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, I mean, she's an absolute heroine of mine. I mean, she was the first person I reached out to when I was writing this book. She's one of the pioneering scientists who, who, who, who battled tuh, tuh, tuh, tuh, tuh to fight these stereotypes with data and logic. But, you know, she started publishing in the early 19, late 1970s, early 1980s.
