YouSaid · the spoken record

Lucy Cooke

lines on the record: 33
first: 2022-03-23
most recent: 2022-03-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“really if you're if you're well it's and that's a very depressing thing but um as part of the research i found out about the bonobos which are the equally closest relatives and and they have a very harmonious society that's very peaceful they don't fight with their neighbors at dinner time at mealtime”
2022-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Animal Queendom: Rethinking Zoology, with Lucy Cooke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I very much notice how these ideas permeate popular culture now. We just take it for read that these ideas that sort of originated with Darwin of these sex role differences are very much alive and kicking in human culture. And I spend a lot of my time now saying that that's not the case. But I think, you know, I think there was one example that I found, I mean, certainly at the moment, let's just take where we are at the moment and we just caught and this is a terrific war. It's so bad. It feels like we're being destroyed by the patriarchy, doesn't it? This is a sort of like terrifying man and it's this sort of awful war and that harks back to we're told that humans are closest cousins the chimpanzees, you know, they're also patriarchal and warlike. And somehow this is sort of burnt into our DNA that we have to follow this system. And that's a very depressing thing.”
2022-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Animal Queendom: Rethinking Zoology, with Lucy Cooke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is the impressive, it's really amazing. But also, what's fascinating about this is that it also goes back to that thing that we were talking about at the very beginning, this idea of Bateman's paradigm, which suggests that there's not very much variation in females. And if you think about the top, I spoke to Tim Clutton Brock, amazing legendary zoologist who studied sexual selection in many different species, including red deer. And he said the most sort of prolific stag that he ever documented, only ever sired around twenty five babies. Whereas this is a female that's mothered nine hundred. It's a huge amount of variation. So again, just doesn't fit the model.”
2022-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Animal Queendom: Rethinking Zoology, with Lucy Cooke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Her reproductive, she can put all of her energy into reproducing. She can have litters of up to 27 have been recorded at a time, which is really astonishing for a mammal. And there was one female that in 24 years she had over 900 pups, which is an extraordinary...”
2022-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Animal Queendom: Rethinking Zoology, with Lucy Cooke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Queen Mary College in London who's written most widely on this or published most widely on naked molecs and he's got a breeding number of breeding colonies and an incredibly hot cupboard on the top floor of Queen Mary College. He thinks it's through constant low level bullying. The female basically she's not like a social insect queen who just lies around in the royal chamber and pumps out eggs. In this case the queen is on this relentless royal tour where she's walking round the colony and just shoving her subjects or biting them just low level aggression the whole time and it's this aggression that suppresses their reproduction. They think the hormone prolactans involved in it and their ongoing experiments to get to the bottom of that. It's not an enviable existence necessarily but remarkably effective and as a result you see”
2022-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Animal Queendom: Rethinking Zoology, with Lucy Cooke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There will only be one breeding queen, and she will have won that title through fighting other females and become the brooding queen. She chooses two or three male mates, and then the rest of the colony will never breed ninety nine point nine percent of the colony will never breed their job is to support her royal reproductiveness basically. So to look after the babies, to dig for tubers, to clean, you know, they have various different roles. Unlike the social insects where the roles tend to be fixed with the naked moral rats, they tend to switch around the jobs that they do, but they will never breed because their reproduction is suppressed. They don't even go through puberty. And this is just incredible. So basically we don't know exactly why that is, but Chris Falks is the scientist.”
2022-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Animal Queendom: Rethinking Zoology, with Lucy Cooke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Genetically it's not the same system that there's haploid and diploid individuals. So it's not genetically the same as the social insects, but the structure of the society is the same. So you have naked moral rats of these extraordinary looking creatures and they've completely bald pink with these ever-growing teeth. And they live in colonies of up to 300 underground, probably never see the light of day and they dig for tubers and they can only live by living as a group because tubers are hard to find. So you've got to have lots of naked mole rats gnawing away all day long in order to find the tubers. And the way that their society is the most extreme version of what's called cooperative breeding. And so much so that it's considered to be a eusocial system the same as you find in the social insects. And so you in a colony of”
2022-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Animal Queendom: Rethinking Zoology, with Lucy Cooke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is where I feel out of my depth because I'm not an anthropologist, so I sort of feel uncomfortable about drawing because I'm so critical of evolutionary psychologists. I just, I'm loath to fall into that trap myself. So, I'm not going to answer that. I'm sorry, Helen. But yes, I agree. It would seem that, you know, as”
2022-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Animal Queendom: Rethinking Zoology, with Lucy Cooke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Story they're telling is O the males are fighting and then they're mating with lots of females and no mention that the females involved are actually strategically mating with multiple males. Females are just not given that agency which is really frustrating”
2022-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Animal Queendom: Rethinking Zoology, with Lucy Cooke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they found that yes, indeed, females were actively soliciting sex from their neighbors. Now, to Patricia Goarti, this makes complete sense. Why put all your eggs in one basket and mating with multiple males gives you greater genetic diversity? That's going to be a good thing. Then there are other reasons why females would do that. But that sort of sparked what's been called a polyandry revolution and that we now understand that there are many species where the females have a strategy of mating multiply. But still, I think this idea that males are promiscuous and females are chaste is something that is really, really persistent in popular culture as well. I mean, I watched, I don't know whether you watched recently the mating game that was on BBC was the sort of big Atinborough before last. And I just screaming at the TV the whole time. And, you know, this species that I've written about in my book.”
2022-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Animal Queendom: Rethinking Zoology, with Lucy Cooke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be thou more like the Dunnock, you know, because this male and female leading this sort of lovely monogamous domesticity, well, in the 1980s, Patricia Goarty again, who is the first ones to do it, because she's amazing, she thought she'd use this brand new technology of DNA fingerprinting in order to see who the fathers were on a clutch of eggs. And she found that a clutch of eggs had multiple fathers. And so the female was obviously mating with several different males. And this rocked the world of ornithology. But when she presented her information, her data at a conference, she was told by the ornithological establishment that the females must have been raped because that was the only explanation, of course, the females couldn't possibly have been soliciting sex. So then it took several other ornithologists to put radio trackers on female songbirds and track them over many seasons to make sure that their data was a hundred.”
2022-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Animal Queendom: Rethinking Zoology, with Lucy Cooke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The idea of female chastity is something that is really a kind of Victorian invention, and females are being coy, but in many species we now know females are actively soliciting sex. And they're being just as strategic in their sexual behavior as males are. So if you say the male strategy is to have sex with as many females as possible, well, in many cases, I'm not saying all, but in many cases that we now understand, the female strategy is also to mate with multiple males for a number of reasons for example with songbirds for a long time songbirds you see a male and a female they build a nest together and they raise the chicks and they appear to be the very epitome of monogamy in fact i think there was there was one great quote from a from a sort of victorian reverend who has also wrote this ornithology book who encouraged his flock to be”
2022-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Animal Queendom: Rethinking Zoology, with Lucy Cooke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Traditionally, we think of not having penises. So both male and female have this multi purpose hull called the cloacca. And the penises is stored inside the cloaca and then lymph fluid is pumped into it. And in the case of the duck, it sort of shoots out at 75 miles now like a”
2022-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Animal Queendom: Rethinking Zoology, with Lucy Cooke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, for centuries, zoologists or taxonomists in particular have been very aware of the huge diversity of penis structure. And it's something that some species you can only tell them apart by their penises that they have like spines or curly whirly or all sorts of accoutrements that make them really identifiable. They're clearly something that's heavily selected upon. But it seems that no one's ever looked inside females to see what's going on there. They just assume that females are these passive tubes. There was a lock and key theory which is the idea that it was a fit that was going on. But Patricia Brannan, she looked in particular ducks, a ducks very famously have these very long penises, in some cases the Argentinian lake duck. It's actually, I think it's almost a third longer than the body when it's fully extended. And it lives inside the Cloacca. There's obviously birds and”
2022-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Animal Queendom: Rethinking Zoology, with Lucy Cooke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As the hyenas and lemurs, but they do dominate the males. And he was kind of like, I don't understand what isn't wrong with the males. They're having lots of sex. They're living in a nice, peaceful society. You know, what's not to like, you know, but yeah, you're right. It's like a comfort blanket, I feel, for a lot of men, this idea that they are intrinsically dominant and that's the nice story that they want to perpetuate.”
2022-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Animal Queendom: Rethinking Zoology, with Lucy Cooke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have to say, I spoke with Franz DeVal about this, who's a brilliant primatologist, and also very liberal thinker. He studied bonobos for years, so, you know, which are they're a matriarchal society. Again, they're female dominant. That was contested for a long time. But he said in his experience as a man who's put these, he said it's never female scientists who are resistant to these ideas. It's always male. And he told me this story about He was giving a lecture once about the bonobos and there was a German scientist, very senior scientist in the audience who sort of put his hand up at the end and said, what's wrong with the Ismails? You know, it was like horrified by this idea that these males were being dominated by these, in the case of the bonobos, it's a female sisterhood that have overthrown the patriarchy by ecstasic same-sex frottage. So slightly, they're not as sort of aggressively dominant.”
2022-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Animal Queendom: Rethinking Zoology, with Lucy Cooke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“over males. But interestingly, in a lot of cases, that is unacceptable or is unaccepted and the female dominance gets contested and then gets caught up in semantics of, oh no, it's not female dominance, it's female feeding priority or the males are still in charge. It's still like something that's really hard for it to be accepted, even in zoological circles.”
2022-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Animal Queendom: Rethinking Zoology, with Lucy Cooke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely not. I mean, you know, tell a female hyena that she needs to be passive and submissive and she'll laugh in your face after she's bitten it off. I mean, she's a formidable beast. In wild populations, they are almost always, there's a female in charge. It very occasionally the son of the previous highest matriarch also has very high status, but generally females are in charge. Again, it's not that unusual. I mean, amongst lemurs, I went to Madagascar of the hundred and eleven species of lemur, ninety percent of those are female dominant, and they're like the hyena, they are aggressively dominant in a kind of female version of the patriarchal dominance. You know, they're aggressive. In the cases of lemurs, I saw females beating up males who dared take their sunbathing spot or didn't let them eat first, you know. So they're very much aggressively dominant.”
2022-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Animal Queendom: Rethinking Zoology, with Lucy Cooke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly famous for its bone crushing bite. It's not something I might just take a guess and go fifty fifty I'll just guess on that one.”
2022-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Animal Queendom: Rethinking Zoology, with Lucy Cooke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Closes up at various times of the year. And she has to give birth Gives them this sort of what appears to look like male genitalia. In fact, they look so similar that there was a paper written in the 1970s that said the only way to tell a male and female apart was by, I quote, palpation of the scrotum, which, you know, seems a sort of a...”
2022-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Animal Queendom: Rethinking Zoology, with Lucy Cooke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lots of the females in my book Blow Apart standard binary expectations and then the hyena is a great example because if you have a male hyena and a female hyena in front of you good luck with trying to tell them apart because it's incredibly difficult. The females are actually bigger and more aggressive than males not always but often and they're dominant and they have what appears to be male genitalia. They have an eight inch it's referred to as a pseudopenis and it just really annoys me that terminology. I'm calling it a superclitoris now because I just think even the terminology for these things is annoying. So yeah, she has an eight inch superclitoris and what looked like testicles, very testicles and they're actually where her labia have fused. She doesn't have an external vagina at all. In fact she's the only mammal who'd permanently doesn't have a vagina. There are others that were explained.”
2022-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Animal Queendom: Rethinking Zoology, with Lucy Cooke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something like sort of eight experiments, and that's only the results of two of them. The six other six experiments produce a very different graph that show that females do benefit, but those results were ignored. There was no sense in just pooling those ones. Plus he also neglected dealing with mutant fruit flies, right? With things, awful horrible names like no eyes and bristlehead and tiny head. And, you know, he himself admitted that some of these could be deathly these mutations if they were doubled up. And of course the double mutations were part of the experiment, but he didn't take that into effect. So the results were just completely skewed. And the papers that she's written on this, my researcher spoke to a very senior professor at Oxford in the course of the research for this book to find out if Goarti's papers were taught when they teach Baker's paradigm because, you know, they should at least be part of the argument. And she was told.”
2022-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Animal Queendom: Rethinking Zoology, with Lucy Cooke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anyway, so Patricia, Goartie, she spent basically 10 years taking a forensic scalpel to Bateman study. And as she'll say, she knows Bateman's study better than anybody else. And actually, she replicated, she went to the bother of finding exactly the same strains of fruit fly that Bateman used and replicating his methodology. She's even dug up his original lab notes in order to decide for his own data. And she just found any number of flaws, both in his methodology and the way that he collated his results, and just scream confirmation by us. You know, she says she doesn't like to be mean about it because he's dead now, but he didn't do a good job. He just set out to substantiate what Darwin had said, and he did a very good job of that. But, you know, for example, he pulled the result. So that famous graph that's replicated everywhere.”
2022-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Animal Queendom: Rethinking Zoology, with Lucy Cooke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did it as a joke, but that's like that's unbelievable. I didn't know that that's where Seminole came from. I think it is.”
2022-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Animal Queendom: Rethinking Zoology, with Lucy Cooke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, they did. That's the thing. People don't know about it. This is the absolutely astonishing thing that one of many that I found out, but I just really made me angry, actually, really angry because Patricia Goarti is an extraordinary scientist. Her science is brilliant. But she is a feminist, right? She's very open about that. So she is, her science is ideologically driven, but that doesn't mean to say that her science is anything less than perfect. So she decided because she'd done a number of experiments previously with animal behavior and she could see with her own eyes that Bateman's paradigm, this graph just didn't apply to the animal kingdom as she understood it. So she thought, well, what am I going to do? I'm just going to replicate that experiment. As you say, replication is the basis. You know, let's just check if this incredibly important seminal experiment actually is correct.”
2022-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Animal Queendom: Rethinking Zoology, with Lucy Cooke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That males are promiscuous and drive sexual selection, that male promiscuity and competitiveness drive sexual selection and males are more susceptible to sexual selection and females aren't. They just aren't affected by it so much. And that's why Dawkins writes about it in the selfish gene. Obviously that came out in the 1970s. And then that's where the sort of the trajectory of this thing comes from. And has been challenged really since the sort of since I'd say the late 70s and early 80s has been increasingly challenged by a wave of scientists, many of whom are female, but not all, and not all those challenges have been accepted. It strikes me as slightly strange.”
2022-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Animal Queendom: Rethinking Zoology, with Lucy Cooke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so he did this experiment where he bred lots of different fruit flies with different mutations. And then because they had these different mutations, he was able to infer who had mated with whom. And he then produced this graph from his results, which basically, in inverted commas, proves that males have everything to gain from mating with multiple females and females have nothing to gain. And this graph is the stuff of legends. I mean, it appears in every single textbook on evolutionary biology. I mean, Bateman's paper is, I believe, the most cited paper in sexual selection. Because it was exhumed in the 1970s by Robert Trivers, who used it as the key piece of evidence for his theory of parental investment, which really bolstered the sort of the modern wave of this idea.”
2022-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Animal Queendom: Rethinking Zoology, with Lucy Cooke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Funnily enough, I did trace it all the way back to Aristotle, actually, who's the first person to describe females as passive and males as active. And then Darwin sort of ran with that a bit more. And what it comes down to is this disparity between our sex cells is that females produce a limited amount of large energy expensive eggs and males produce lots of mobile sperm. And Darwin actually, he had a sense that this was the reason behind the disparity between the sexes, but he couldn't actually prove it. It was only later. It was actually in the 1940s. It was a chap called Angus.”
2022-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Animal Queendom: Rethinking Zoology, with Lucy Cooke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Biology. It's my favourite subject. It's my religion. But I was shocked at actually rereading how culturally biased the work is, you know, and that really struck me that my God, if someone who's as brilliant as Darwin and as meticulous and careful as a scientist, that even he can be swayed by the opinions of the time, then that means that we all have to really look at our how cultural bias influences us.”
2022-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Animal Queendom: Rethinking Zoology, with Lucy Cooke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he goes into sort of fantastic detail of, you know, substantiating his argument, which the dissenter man, there's a lot of it that's actually about humans, as you can tell from the title, The Descent of Man, which is something that I don't go into because I think it's really problematic to draw massive conclusions from the animal kingdom with regards to humans. It's only in some cases that I do. But he really uses this idea of sexual selection in the descent of man to justify the differences that he sees that are within Victorian society between the sexes. And he actually concludes that man has become superior to woman as a result of the force of sexual selection. And it's quite shocking to read the book because not only is it clearly sexist, but also it's deeply racist in paces as well. I mean, so I found it, you know, in Darwin's a massive hero of mine I studied evolution.”
2022-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Animal Queendom: Rethinking Zoology, with Lucy Cooke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's a very good read, you know, actually. So I reread The Descent of Man and selection in relation to sex, which is the book that outlines his theory of sexual selection. He hints at it on the origin of species, but he actually really goes to town with it in the descent of man.”
2022-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Animal Queendom: Rethinking Zoology, with Lucy Cooke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's fantastic that you brought that up, Helen, because it is really important to remember this, that in animals, most scientists would agree that animals don't have gender and that gender is a social, psychological, human construct. And so when we talk about male or female in the animal kingdom, scientists are talking about sex and sex refers to what gametes are produced, whether they are eggs or sperm.”
2022-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Animal Queendom: Rethinking Zoology, with Lucy Cooke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I studied zoology at university and was always pretty dispirited by the message that was given, which was that females were, in the words of Richard Dawkins, my tutor, fundamentally exploited, you know, across the animal kingdom as a result of making eggs instead of making sperm. We were the feminine footnote to the Macho Main event, and I found it depressing and dispiriting, and it also just didn't make any sense to me on a fundamental level. I just was like, well, if all the males are promiscuous and the females are all chase, who the hell are all the males having sex with anyway? How does that work out? So I guess it's something that's troubled me for a long time, and sexual selection was my favourite subject at university, so in a way this is my sort of update of what I learnt back then.”
2022-03-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Animal Queendom: Rethinking Zoology, with Lucy Cooke · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT