[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: Welcome to The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. It's good to have you with us today. All this week, we're bringing you some of our favorite conversations from 2022, and we're starting in the wild.

Narrator: Males will kill cubs that aren't their own. Even meeting its own father for the first time is risky, but thankfully the mother is there for protection.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Oh, I hate to throw a monkey wrench into the works, but all this dogma about killer male animals and protective female animals is only part of the picture. It's time we stop pigeonholing the females of the animal kingdom into these old-fashioned, outdated, and overall wrong-headed ideas about animal behavior. Don't just take it from me. You need to hear the actual scientific facts straight from the horse's mouth. Here to set the record straight is Lucy Cooke, zoologist, and author of the book titled--

Announcer: Today's episode of The Takeaway contains discussions of biology and physiology from across the animal kingdom, and contains language that some audiences may find inappropriate for young listeners.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Okay, disclaimer made. Lucy Cooke is author of the book--

Lucy Cooke: Bitch: On the Female of the Species.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I started by asking why she chose that title.

Lucy Cooke: It's the word for some female animals, so that's appropriate in that way. Also, it's a derogatory term for females, isn't it? It's a swear word. In many of the females that are featured in my book, their behavior might cause derogatory names to be called of them, but in actual fact, in most cases, they're actually just being insidiously maternal. I guess in some ways, I'm trying to reclaim the word.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Beneath the cover is a truly fascinating text. Lucy makes very clear that what you learned in biology class about male and female animals, well, that might not have been exactly true.

Lucy Cooke: The idea that females are wired for chastity and males are wired for promiscuity goes all the way back to Darwin, as do many of these stereotypes. Darwin was an extraordinary scientist, and his theory of evolution by natural selection is one of the greatest theories there is in science, but he was also a man of his time. When he came to look at the differences that he perceived between the sexes, he branded the female of the species in the shape of a Victorian housewife because that was what was seemly at the time.

Quite frankly, I think the man had withstood enough controversy in one lifetime for having proposed the theory of evolution. He'd really upset the church. He probably didn't want to ruffle feathers too much by giving females too much agency either. Because Darwin said it, these ideas hung around for a very long time, and scientists that followed in his wake suffered from a chronic case of confirmation bias, or they just thought that females weren't interesting.

It's taken a revolution in the last few decades really to redefine the female of the species. One of the key findings, one of the early findings was about female sexual behavior, and this idea that the females are just seeking chastity. It turns out that females are just as sexually strategic as males, and that strategy very often includes mating with multiple males. That might be if you're a lioness because you want to confuse paternity. It might be because you're a songbird because you want to ensure the best genes for your offspring.

Pretty much in every case where we've now found that females are mating with multiple males routinely, it's because they're being good mothers, and they're wanting the best for their offspring.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Maybe talk a little bit about those promiscuous songbirds who somehow managed to continue to have a clutch of fertilized eggs even after their male partners had had vasectomies given to them by the scientists.

Lucy Cooke: Yes. This was one of the first inklings that female songbirds were promiscuous. Female songbirds or songbirds, they nest near houses. We all see a male sing his heart out and attract a female, and then together they build a nest, and they seem to be the very picture of monogamy. That's us projecting our ideas onto them. The first inkling that the females were maybe not as monogamous as it seemed was in this experiment where-- it was about pest control actually. There was a bunch of birds that were given vasectomies and yet the females still managed to have fertilized eggs. That suggested that they were mating with males that weren't expected.

It was actually a scientist by the name of Patricia Gowaty, who's just extraordinary, amazing. One of the really fantastic trailblazing scientists that I interviewed for the book. She's now in her 70s and has had an extraordinary career of debunking many of these perceived myths. She thought to herself, "Mm-hmm, I don't think that songbirds are as monogamous as they seem." She was the first person in the early 1980s to use DNA fingerprinting and do DNA test on a clutch of eggs. Sure enough, she found that a clutch of eggs had several fathers.

Now, her study subject was the eastern bluebird, star of Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah. It was never going to go down particularly well if she's calling her a Jezebel. Even Patricia Gowaty was shocked by how her data was received by the academic establishment, who basically turned round to her and said, "Well, the only way that can be possible is if the birds were raped." She's like, "Well, hang on a second here, but that's actually physically impossible because in order for the female to be impregnated, the male has to balance precariously on her back. They have cloacas, males don't have penises, and so they have to line up these cloacas, these holes, and the transfer of sperm happens very quickly, but if the female is not interested at any stage, she can just fly off."

It actually then took for birds to have radio trackers attached to them to prove that the females were actually flying outside of their territory and soliciting sex with other partners. This story is very typical of the fight that the scientists who are overturning these old stereotypes have had to face in order to have their data accepted.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I think we cannot go any further without talking about the sage-grouse-

Lucy Cooke: [laughs] Yes.

Melissa Harris-Perry: -and the fembot sage-grouse. I must say even though you told us at the beginning of the text not to anthropomorphize, I did absolutely underline and then take a photo of, and then share with my husband that the study clearly showed that the male who was most flocked around by the female sage-grouses wasn't just the one that puffed up the most, but the one who knew how to listen and respond to the cues of the female. I got to say I know we're not supposed to anthropomorphize, but the idea that the sage-grouse is a story about not just being the big guy on campus but the best listener really made me very happy.

Lucy Cooke: I'm pleased to hear it because it made me happy, too, when I discovered it. Sage-grouse are just extraordinary birds. They have the most hilarious courtship in the animal kingdom, I think. It's just absolutely ludicrous. The males have got this inflatable throat sac. They gulp down loads of air, and then they inflate it. There's these two kind of like fleshy sacs that pop forth. They look a bit like shop dummy breasts. Do you know what I mean? These weird nippleless bosoms that pop forth, and then they slap them together and they make this doink, doink, doink sound. They're sort of beatboxing and flapping their sacs together in this ridiculous dance to get the female's attention.

What makes it more hilarious is the females look like they really couldn't be interested whatsoever. They're just desultorily pecking at the ground. The poor guys are there flapping their sacs and beatboxing as best as they could to be noticed. The received wisdom was the flashiest guy wins. Gail Patricelli, who's at UC Davis, she managed to break into this black box by the most ingenious way. She created her own fembot. She created a robot sage-grouse out of a taxidermy kit, a robot she bought online, and a pair of Spanx. Don't ask me exactly for the recipe. I can't tell you.

Melissa Harris-Perry: [chuckles] I love the Spanx part of it.

Lucy Cooke: I know. Exactly. They've got many uses [laughs] apparently, but anyway. She found that basically in the case of the sage-grouse and also bowerbirds, which she's also discovered, that the male, it's not just about being the flashiest, loudest male. It's also about there's a dialogue going on. If the male doesn't respond to and listen to the cues that the female's giving him, he's just going to frighten her off. She's not going to go for it. It's heartening, isn't it, to hear that for sage-grouse and humans alike, it's important to have a lover that's not just the flashiest guy in the room but that the successful one is the one that actually listens.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Of course, not all the stories you tell are edifying or even titillating in some of the ways that we've talked about. You tell the story of social hierarchy among baboons. Stories of infanticide in multiple parts of the particularly mammal kingdom. If you've watched Meerkat Manor then you know about this, but if you haven't, the meerkats, they're not the nicest moms and grandmoms that you ever met. Maybe walk us through one or two of those as well.

Lucy Cooke: Yes. I think there's this idea, isn't there, that males are wired for competition and females aren't, but in the animal kingdom, we're now discovering females are just as competitive as males, and they can be really, really brutal with that as well. You mentioned the meerkat. That's a great example because meerkats, everybody knows them as these lovable, cute, fluffy little creatures, but actually, a recent survey of a thousand mammals found that the meerkat is actually the most murderous mammal on the planet. It's actually the female of the species that's the murderous one.

Basically, meerkat society is predicated on extreme competition between females who will readily kill each other's babies if given them the chance, because they just want to be the only one that breeds. You have a dominant female who suppresses that by preventing any of the females from breeding. If they do, she'll kill their babies and evicts them from the den. Then they're allowed to come back on the condition they'll wet nurse their murderous mothers' babies instead. It's normally your sister or your mother that's likely to be your competitor in this case.

You find that in many, many, many mammal systems, females also inhabit their own hierarchy. TV shows love to show us the dominance fights of males. Red stags fighting each other with their giant horns, or chimpanzees fighting one another for dominance, but females also inhabit their own hierarchy. Interestingly, often these hierarchies, you mentioned baboons, they are more stable than the male hierarchies because they follow the female line, and they have a huge amount of power. In many primates, there may be an alpha male and there may be male tussles over dominance, but the females are actually the ones that are leading the group movements because they are the core of the group.

It's really important where you are in that hierarchy because Jeanne Altmann founded this incredibly longstanding study on baboons, and she found that female baboons that are lucky enough to be born into the upper classes, they are far more reproductively successful than those that are in the lower echelons because they get first digs at food. They have a protection racket for their young. Those that are born into the lower classes, the females are much more likely to lose their infants. Even in some primate species, the female mothers will also suffer from postnatal depression. Some of the similarities are really extraordinary actually, but the impact of class on motherhood in primates is really interesting.

[music]

Melissa Harris-Perry: I know you want more stories from Lucy Cooke. Well, we have to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

[music]

We've been talking with Lucy Cooke about the animal kingdom and all that we thought we knew about the behavior of females and males in the wild. New scientific discoveries show that female animals are not solely passive, docile, selfless creatures, but painting a new picture of the ladies of nature has been a tough task within scientific communities.

Lucy Cooke: The authority gap has a lot to do with it. Female scientists will complain vociferously about not being taken as seriously and having to work twice as hard to have their data accepted. Not all of the revelations in my book are being found by female scientists by any means. Men could be feminist scientists just as much as females can. It is extraordinary that it is taking so long for what we now understand to be true to become common knowledge.

That's why I felt the book was so important to write because I kept coming across things that amazed even me. I realized that even my own cultural bias was that I made assumptions about how patriarchy must be the norm in the animal kingdom. One has these ideas. My book hopefully is about overturning those and bringing new research to the forefront, and to dispel these old myths once and for all.

Melissa Harris-Perry: In her book, Lucy offers many examples from nature where non-human animals change sex and move across what we would call in humans gender norms. I asked her whether there's something we can learn from that.

Lucy Cooke: My book looks at two forms of bias really. The first was sexist bias, and that originated in the Victorian era. The second is really heteronormative bias that I think we're only really beginning to grapple with now and realize that we've viewed the animal kingdom through these heteronormative goggles for so long. First of all, I should say that we don't think of animals as having gender. Gender is a human construct. When I talk about females in the book, I'm talking about biological sex, which is traditionally defined by what gonads you have, whether your gonads produce sperm or eggs, meaning, sperm you're a male, eggs you're a female.

Putting an animal in one of those two binary boxes becomes extremely difficult. You'll have all sorts of mixtures, which becomes very, very difficult. Most evident, of course, are in the animals that routinely change sex, and which there are many. In particular, fish. There are about 500 species of fish that change sex. Sometimes some of them as much as several times a day, which is amazing. One that's been studied really heavily is the anemonefish from Finding Nemo. We're all familiar with the clownfish or anemonefish.

Justin Rhodes, who studies anemonefish in Ohio, he's found that what happens is in an anemone, you have a monogamous male and female generally, and then you have a couple of immature males. What will happen is if the female's dominant, and if she's removed and she gets eaten or dies or whatever, then the male that was her partner will transition into being a female, and one of the immature males will mature and become her sexual partner, which by the way would make the biologically accurate version of Finding Nemo a very different film, and which--

Melissa Harris-Perry: Yes, very different.

Lucy Cooke: Little Nemo loses his mom and then goes on a big adventure and is reunited with his dad at the end of the film would be very different. What's interesting about this is we have this transition from male to female that happens in the fish. Justin has found that it happens first in the brain. The fish changes its behavior almost immediately and starts behaving like a female, and is actually perceived as a female by other fish. The gonads take up to a year to catch up, so biological sex is male but the behavior is female. A female is not just an egg and a male is not just a sperm. There's a whole lot more going on there.

Sex, sexuality, sex behavior, and sexual identity, these can all be independent of one another, or certainly in the animal kingdom in some of the animals that have been studied so far. That's what we found.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What for you is the big at-stake takeaway from all of these extraordinary diverse stories that's so challenging, I think, what our main received wisdom is? What do you want people to walk away with after engaging your book?

Lucy Cooke: The thing that astounded me the most was this discovery that males and females are really more alike than they are different. Sex itself and its attributes are incredibly plastic. They bend according to evolution's whim. You have female moles that have ovotestes. Their gonads are half ovary, half testes because that's what suits them for their life underground. You have female albatross that will hook up with another female in order to raise the chicks because there are no males about, and they have a full loving relationship. You have females that are aggressive. You have females that are dominant. You have this extraordinary plasticity.

The fact that we're basically made from the same genes, same bodies, and same brains, I think that should make us have a lot more empathy for one another. To see variation for what it is, is that it's a necessary part of evolution, and if we don't have variation, we won't evolve.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You have a little prediction about the Y chromosome going on here?

Lucy Cooke: [chuckles] Yes. Evolution is a series of botched jobs. It just makes the best situation in that moment. The differentiation of the sexes is a great example of that because we think of genetically a female's XX and a male's XY. That actually these are two separate linear parts, but they're not. They're completely enmeshed. The Y chromosome itself, you'd think all the genes for being a male were on the Y. They're not. They're scattered all over the genome. The most astonishing thing to me was that the genes that make a female and make a male, they're actually the same 60 genes. They're all in this meshed-up thing. That's how you end up with all this glorious variation.

The Y chromosome itself is shrinking, and it's got a shelf life. [laughs] In theory, males who depend on a Y chromosome could cease to exist, but the thing about sex is that it will constantly reinvent itself. There'll be another botched job. The platypus, for example, has five Xs and five Ys. There's a spiny rat in Japan that has already lost its Y chromosome but has found another way of differentiating the sexes.

As you say, it's not this perfect system. Other than the trigger that starts off this process towards being a male or a female, the genes that actually do that job, they're the same. They're the same. We're made of the same genes. We have the same brains, the same bodies. I think that was an extraordinary thing to discover, which I didn't think was going to be the conclusion of my book.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Well, I just want to know what year is it that the boys are going away though? Because I did find that interesting. [laughs]

Lucy Cooke: I didn't know I was going to be asked that question and I don't know the answer.

Melissa Harris-Perry: No, I know. It's like 45 million years or something. It's perfectly fine.

Lucy Cooke: Is it 45? Okay, I'm so sorry.

Melissa Harris-Perry: [laughs] Lucy Cooke, zoologist and author of Bitch: On the Female of the Species. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Lucy Cooke: Thank you so much for such great questions. It was really fun. Thank you.

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.