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It is absolutely a privilege and a pleasure to introduce our special guest for the day. She's a zoologist, an intrepid explorer, and a lover of sloths, as many of you will know from having seen her TED Talk. She's here to talk to us about how we've been getting females all wrong, as detailed in her amazing new book entitled Bitch. Yes, that's right. I personally can't recommend this book highly enough.

If you ever wanted to know about the weird, wild stuff going on in the animal world, this, this, I'm gonna pick it up again, is the book for you. Here to share some of that with you, it is my great pleasure to introduce my friend, Lucy Cook. Please take it away, Lucy.

Hello there, hello everyone All over the world. Sorry, my dog is literally on cue, just started barking at the door. So I do apologise. Hopefully he will stop. Yes, there we go.

Well, I'm here to talk to you today about female animals because being female has never been more scrutinised or politicised. So what can the rest of the animal kingdom teach us about what it means to be female? Well, today I'm going to introduce you to 3 females that force us to reconsider traditional binary expectations of bodies, brains, biology, and behavior. And we'll start with the bonobo. Now, Humans share almost 90% of our DNA with this lesser known great ape.

The same as we do with chimpanzees. But bonobos have equal claim to be our closest relative. But it's always chimpanzees that are used as the model for human ancestry. Chimp and bonobo society couldn't be more different, however, where chimps are patriarchal and warlike. Bonobos are matriarchal and peaceful.

The female or the male bonobo is bigger than the female, as is the case with chimpanzees. But this physical dominance doesn't translate as power because the females have formed an incredibly strong sisterhood, which usurps the male power. Now, this sisterhood is established and maintained by sex. In particular, sex that's referred to in scientific circles as genitogenital rubbing. And this GG rubbing prevents females who would otherwise probably be competitive with 1 another over resources to instead form strong alliances.

And in that way, these alliances allow them to dominate males. So you could say that the bonobo female has evolved to overthrow the patriarchy through ecstatic same-sex frottage, which is of course 1 way of doing it. But Bonobos are just 1 of the many females that defy the deterministic sex roles laid out by Charles Darwin in his theory of sexual selection in

1871.

Females, as Darwin saw it, were passive, coy and submissive, whereas males were active, ardent, competitive and the dominant drivers of evolutionary change. Now, these Victorian sexual stereotypes have hung about in the scientific realm for far longer than they should thanks to Darwin's reputation. But females like the bonobo are teaching us that sex roles aren't actually fixed as Darwin saw them, instead they're plastic and they're shaped by the peculiar interaction of genes and the environment. Bonobos teach us that sexuality is also flexible. All bonobos are considered to be bisexual.

And bodies also can be flexible. A great example of that is the garden mole, because the female mole's gonads are described as ovotestes. So they are part ovarian tissue, but part testicular tissue. Now, during the short breeding season, the ovarian side produces eggs, as you would expect, but outside of the breeding season, the testicular tissue swells and pumps out lots of testosterone which makes the female mole extremely efficient at digging and and very aggressive when it comes to guarding her worm larder and her pups. So this gonadal fluidity is something of anomaly, and was considered something of anomaly when it was discovered in mammals for whom sex is thought of as being a static binary that's established during embryonic development because the embryonic foetus starts out as sexually neutral And the pathway to being male or being female to developing ovaries or developing testes was long thought to have been triggered by basically an on-off switch, which in the case of humans is the presence or absence of the SRY gene.

But the idea that sexual determination is an either or situation and that these 2 pathways to being either an ovary or a testes, a linear and distinct is woefully simplistic, we now understand. The sex determination system really owes more to anarchy than it does to order, because these 2 pathways, becoming a testes or, or for the gonad to become either a testes or an ovary are neither linear nor distinct. They're actually completely enmeshed. And what's more, they're governed by basically the same

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sex determining genes which are scattered throughout the genome. Now these androgynous set of sex-determining genes have the ability to create either an ovary or a testes, but which depends on a complex system of intergene negotiation. And of this system, mutual antagonism is also a critical feature. So some genes will be actively creating a testes, but at the same time, they're also actively suppressing an ovary. Now this antagonism continues into adulthood.

There was a recent study on mice that found that in adult mice, the existence of testicular cells required the active suppression of ovarian cells. And this was very shocking to the scientific community to discover the instability of this system. I mean, you know, sexual determination is pretty fundamental for sexually reproducing animals, so you sort of would expect the system to be a little bit less leaky, as it were. Well, no, actually, because the mole helps us understand why this systemic plasticity is in fact an evolutionary winner. Because when geneticists came to decode the mole genome just a couple of years ago, they found that the female's gonadal fluidity was the result of just 2 mutations of the regulation of 2 of the sex determining genes.

So such mutations might be considered a pathology in some animals, humans included, but if the mole didn't have them, then it wouldn't have been able to adapt to its life underground. So this makes us realize variation is the grit that drives evolution forward. And the antagonistic nature of the sex determination system with its ongoing battle for primacy between the male and female pathways may seem dangerously unstable, but viewed another way, its ability to create novel variation for natural selection to act upon could be considered a great advantage. So other more ancestral vertebrates show even greater sexual plasticity due to this antagonistic system, and no more so than those that are actually able to switch sex during their lifetime. Now, these sequential hermaphrodites are common in the vast blue deserts of the ocean where it's handy if you can change your sex to complement whatever member of the opposite, whatever member of your species you actually bump into.

And there are about 500 species of fish that have the ability to change sex. Some do it as often as several times a day, but the most famous is the anemone fish, the star of Finding Nemo. Now these fish live in anemones, and there's generally a dominant female and her male partner, and often a couple of undeveloped prepubescent, let's say, they're not sexually developed males. And what happens is if you take the dominant female out of the situation, if she's nabbed by a barracuda, say, then the male will transition into becoming the female. And 1 of the immature males will will go through sexual maturity and become her mate, which means, of course, that a biologically accurate version of Finding Nemo, which saw little Nemo lose his mother and then go on a massive adventure before being reunited with his father at the end of the film, would have seen Nemo's father transition into his mother and then start having sex with him, which would have been a slightly less family-friendly film.

But what's really fascinating about anemone fish is when you study that change, because what happens is, as soon as the female dominant female is taken out of the situation, the male anemone fish starts to be recognised as a female by other fish and behaves as a female, but it takes up to a year for his gonads to make the change from testes to ovaries. So what that suggests is that sex is not a unitary phenomenon and that biological sex or gonadal sex, sexuality, sexed behaviour and sexual identity are all independently regulated in this fish and perhaps other vertebrates. We've been conditioned by Darwin to think of biological sex as a static binary with strict gendered outcomes. But the females we've met today teaches that sex is highly complex. And it's a highly complex set of traits whose plasticity creates the extraordinary variety that we see in nature.

And it's my belief that the time has come to ditch the sort of damaging and frankly deluded binary expectations because in nature, the female experience exists on a genderless continuum and it refuses to conform to archaic stereotypes. And our appreciation of this fact can only really enrich our understanding of the natural world and empathy for 1 another as humans. Thank you. Woo. I'm

standing in for the whole other audience, who I'm sure are wildly applauding.

You're doing a great job, David. I'm just really thrilled that Kobe has now gone to sleep beside me, because that could have got really, really tricky.

It is not an official Zoom meeting until there's a pet or a child. So now this is a thing.

Yeah, exactly.

So crazy stuff about the clownfish and bonobos and everything else. But From reading your book, there's 1 particular story that stood out to me. Tell us about how you stole a lion's girlfriend.

Yes, okay. Yeah, so this was the sort of the beginning of my journey for questioning the stereotypes that I was taught at university. So I studied zoology at Oxford. My tutor was Richard Dawkins, who some of you probably have heard of. And he taught me these Darwinian stereotypes that females were passive, coy and monogamous, and males were the promiscuous ones that had all the fun, basically.

And I had no question to... I had no reason to question what I was taught, other than the fact that it didn't really appeal to me as an egg-making student of evolution. But... And then it cut to about 20 years later, and I was making a series about animal communication in the Serengeti, and we were trying to start a conversation with a lion, which is actually possible. So all you need is a little speaker and the sound of a lion's roar.

Which, by the way, the sound of a lion's roar is nothing like the kind of majestic roar of the MGM movies. That's actually a tiger, apparently. The real lion, yeah, they faked it. So, because the lion doesn't sound enough like a lion, but they used a different sound. But anyway, a real lion's roar sounds more like, ooh, ooh.

It's more like the sound that Boris Johnson would make looking for cheese at midnight. You know, something. Anyway, so I thought it just seemed the most ludicrous thing to be doing. We got our little speaker out, and, you know, we played this, ooh, ooh, noise. And sure enough, in the background, we heard, ooh, ooh.

And then for about 5 minutes, we played audio ping-pong with these lions. And eventually, 3 lions emerged from the gloom, 2 males and a female. And when the males realized that there was nothing there that looked or smelt like a rival lion, they went off. But the female lay in front of the Jeep and legs akimbo and pinned us to the spot for 2 whole hours. And I was like, I said to Dr.

Seifert, the German lion specialist who I was with, I was like, what's going on? And he's like, oh, she wants to mate with us. And I was like, well, isn't she mating with 1 of those other males that she was with? He's like, oh yeah, yeah, don't you know the female lion is, she massively promiscuous and will mate over a hundred times with multiple males during her fertility period. And I was like, whoa, that's not what I was taught at university.

And I was, And that sort of like started me thinking. And I was like, oh, I wonder whether what I was taught, you know, this sort of building blocks of the evolutionary, you know, the sexual selection paradigm are actually true. And I discovered that in the years since I went to university, which was quite some time ago, it was the late 1980s, early 90s, but since then a revolution has happened in our understanding of what it means to be female. And that's what my book is about. It's about this revolution and really sort of trying to bring to light that the pioneering scientists, some of most of whom are female, but not all.

There's plenty of male feminist scientists doing amazing work that whose work is in the book, but how and why it's taken so long for us to understand really what it means to be female.

So that suggests, and members please get your question in the Q&A, this is your chance. You can ask about clownfish, you can ask about bonobos, You can ask about your favorite animal, and Lucy may answer.

I should ask. I should explain, actually, why the female is so promiscuous. You were probably going to ask me anyway, David. But the thing is, we now know why the female lioness is promiscuous. It's thanks to the work of Sarah Blaffer-Hurdy, who in the 1980s was studying langur monkeys, and she noticed that the female langurs were also soliciting sex from males outside the group.

And she was really the first scientist who, rather than sort of dismissing this awkward anomaly as exactly that, thought, well, this is interesting, I'm going to investigate this. And what she found was that she'd actually gone to India to study infanticide in langurs, And she found that this promiscuity and the infanticide were actually linked. And the thing is, is that, you know, male langurs are infanticidal, they'll kill females' babies. And Sarah realized that they do this because if a male comes in and takes over a group, then he doesn't want to waste his energy raising other males' offspring. And by killing the babies, it means the females stop lactating.

And so they're forced into their fertility period again. And so they're ready to mate with him and have his offspring. But the female counter strategy to this is to mate with all the males in the area. And that way, when a male takes over a group, if he's recently mated with the female, he's unlikely to kill the babies because they may be his. So it's paternity confusion.

So, and in some cases, in some primates, I mean, females are having, you know, female chimpanzees, for example, have been documented having sex 50 to 60 times a day with many, many males. I mean, it's positively exhausting, the idea of it. But if you're a human, you might be called all sorts of derogatory names for that behavior, but actually in the animal kingdom, it's just about being assiduously maternal, as Sarah Blaffer-Hurdy points out.

Right, right. So all of this suggests, as you pointed out with your story from Richard Dawkins, that our thinking is somewhat tainted, perhaps. So to what extent is our thinking about evolution in general, tainted by these Victorian biases?

Well, that's a very good question. And I think that the thing is that when Darwin came to come up with his theory of sexual selection, it was 20 years after natural selection. And he realized that natural selection couldn't explain everything that we see in nature, right? So he was bothered particularly by the peacock's tail. Like why would something so gaudy and flamboyant, how could that have been shaped by the utilitarian survival force of natural selection?

Because that tail surely makes it harder for the bird to fly, harder for it to hide from predators. You know, it doesn't help with survival, right? And he realized that actually there was a second evolutionary force. And that was, it wasn't just the quest for survival, it was about the quest for sex. And so he, in his theory of sexual selection, he looks to define the differences between the sexes as he saw them.

Now, Darwin was a meticulous and brilliant scientist, and his theory of evolution by natural selection is brilliant and I think probably untated by these biases as such. But sexual selection, because it dealt with the nature of males and females, it was much more vulnerable to cultural bias. And so he sort of infused his ideas with the cultural thinking of the time in which women didn't have an awful lot of standing. So It's little wonder really that the female of the species came out marginalized and misunderstood like a Victorian housewife. But then because Darwin had said it, it then hung around in the scientific realm for over a century.

And people who were studying the differences between the sexes or sexual behavior, they just saw what fitted Darwin's paradigm, or worse, just completely ignored females because the idea was that they, it was only males where the action was. Females are just a sort of feminine footnote to the macho main event. So it took a long time for, and really it took this sort of pioneering group of American female zoologists and evolutionary biologists and anthropologists to challenge these stereotypes starting in the 1980s. But this sexist stain has bled a long way and we're still dealing with that today. You know, it's proving very stubborn to wash out.

You know, just even in the language that's used in textbooks today is all males are active and they do things and females are passive, males act and females react, you know, and it's just It's not considered an even playing field at all, even today. So there's still much work to be done.

Yeah, I can imagine. The work is ongoing, as the saying goes. TED member Gordon wants to know what you think the biggest current mysteries are about sex in the animal kingdom?

Well, I tell you what, so I set out on this quest to write this book to sort of investigate sexist bias, basically, that had its roots in Victorian misogynistic culture. And what I didn't expect was that I didn't have other types of bias. So geographic bias and also heteronormative bias. So, you know, we have this assumption that families are, you know, it consists of a male and a female, right? That's, you know, and you know, in many cases that's right, but it isn't always the case.

And that heteronormative bias can trip us up. So a good example of this is on the island of Hawaii, I went to go and investigate an albatross colony that there is there. And these albatross have been studied for over 50 years and sort of meticulously documented by the University of Hawaii, you know, staff and zoologists. And there'd always been this anomaly that some nests had 2 eggs. Now, this is a sort of, it's a complete impossibility for a female albatross to lay 2 eggs.

Albatross are 1 of those birds that does sort of practice the serial monogamy and you need, you generally need 2 albatross in order to raise a chick and a female can only lay 1 egg at a time and it takes 6 months of tag teaming in order for the chick to fledge. So these 2 eggs were an anomaly and for years there were all sorts of strange explanations as to why there'd be 2 eggs. Anyway eventually about 5 years ago Lindsay Young who's been studying the albatross there thought well I wonder if anybody's checked to see that the albatross couples, which are identical, males and females are identical, are actually males and females. And so she went round and took feather tests from every nest and did the DNA on it. And to her complete shock, she found that a third of the couples were female-female couples.

So what's happening there is that this particular colony is a relatively new 1. And with albatrosses, it's often the females that will disperse from their natal area. And the males will remain the same. It's the females that are the pioneers. And these pioneering females, you know, starting a new colony, there's a shortage of males.

So they're making the best of a tricky situation and they are basically using other albatross husbands as sperm donors and then shacking up with another female in order to raise the chicks. So both females will lay an egg, and then what happens is just 1 generally survives and the other doesn't, because they can't physically raise 2. So, you know, What's fascinating about this and sort of incredibly charming is that some of these females, you know, will make mate with a, you know, will partner with a female 1 season and then the next season they might meet a male and then they might partner with him from there on in. But some of these female partnerships just work, right? So I met this couple that have been together 17 years.

They've had 8 chicks together and 3 grandchicks and their relationship just works. And their bond is clearly incredibly strong after every, you know, 6 months. Um, Albatross spends 6 months as solo artists out on the wing, feeding themselves up, but they, you know, when these 2 reunite, they do all the same hilarious dances and, and do the grooming and the nuzzling that creates all the bird oxytocin that keeps that bond really strong. So, but yeah, so they have this sort of, you know, very strong bond and they do all the same things as male and female couples would and are actually amongst the most successful. So what that shows us is that, again, like the bonobos, it shows us the sort of flexible nature of sexuality and just the flexible nature of sex behaviour, which shouldn't be surprising because flexibility and variation have to exist in order for evolution to happen.

But yet we had this idea that somehow sex was exempt from that and sexual traits were sort of fixed and not as flexible and plastic.

Yeah, that is a very heartwarming story. And

I really recommend I recommend visiting as well. It's in Oahu on the North Shore.

And it's

it couldn't be in a more beautiful spot if it tried. You know, it's really fabulous. So I was I was delighted to go and investigate, I have

to say. I bet, I bet, I bet. That couple has a sweet spot for their homestead. Yeah. So TED member Agata, if I'm saying that correctly, wants to know, You mentioned the clownfish and other fish that change sex.

Do their sexual selection strategies change as the sex of the animal changes?

Yeah, I'm sure they do. Yeah, they definitely will, because they'll need to complement 1 another. So, yeah, I mean, it's the strategies that there'll be different between different fish, you know, according to whether, you know, what the environments that they live in, you know, as in different species that go through different, different sequential hermaphrodites and, and, and, and different, you know, there'll be individual differences as well. So, so yeah, absolutely. That will, the whole, the whole lot will be affected.

The whole thing changes. So TED member Tara wants to know, do these sex behaviors of the various animals correlate or have any link to lifespan or even the endurance of a species as a whole?

That is a really brilliant question, and well done, because I haven't... Nobody has spotted that and asked me that yet, and I've been on tour talking about this book for a while, So I'm very impressed. Yes, it really does, actually. And Patricia Goarty, who is 1 of these sort of pioneering feminist biologists, who's torn down a lot of these stereotypes, she actually thinks that that has a lot to do with it. So so really what she thinks drives, you know, so the sort of traditional idea is, is that females are chaste and choosy and males are promiscuous.

And that's like that's how it stands. Well, she thinks that it's not, you know, biological sex isn't a crystal ball, it isn't that, but it's the environment, but it's also encounter rate. And so that is like, you know, if you live a long time and you're going to encounter a lot of the opposite sex, you can probably be choosier. But if you're not gonna live for very long, you're probably gonna have a strategy that requires mating indiscriminately with whatever you come across. So brilliant question.

Patricia Goharty would give you 5 stars for that. And she's hard to please.

Well, so we've been talking a lot about sex, but there is another way that animals do things. It's called parthenogenesis. Can you explain what that is and why it might be important to the endurance of a species?

So, yeah, so Parthenogenesis is basically cloning, and there are a whole heap of animals, mostly microscopic spineless wonders that are capable of reproducing just by cloning. But there are also a whole bunch of vertebrates that are able to clone themselves too. I was kind of shocked by this because I sort of thought, oh, it's just something that, you know, aphids do, for example, which they do pretty spectacularly, by the way. But but when I was in Hawaii, actually, to justify the air miles, I didn't didn't just investigate 1 animal because there were 2 because there was a there's a there's a there's a lizard. Sorry, a gecko in Hawaii called the morning gecko, not morning as in day and night morning, but morning as in sad.

Although it didn't seem particularly sad to me. It seemed like it was gonna be grinning from ear to ear because this species of gecko is all female. So the ability to clone yourself is only females have that ability because females produce eggs and eggs are nutrient rich and they can they, you know, a sperm can't do that. Can't there are no males that are able to clone themselves. And these geckos have been, have sort of, you know, cloning yourself is a great way of colonizing quickly, because if you're able to do that, it's twice as effective as having 2 sexes that need to meet and combine.

You know, you can you doubly productive. And so this is sort of being called the the the paradox of sex, which is considered the queen of all questions. Like, why does sex exist? You know?

And why does it?

Well, we were the traditional answer has been that sex exists because it creates variation, right? And variation allows us to adapt to a new environment, but it also stops the buildup of harmful mutations that occur during copying mistakes that occur down the line. So it has 2 jobs. And if you don't have sex, then you can suffer from something that sounds awful as mutational meltdown is what it's called in the scientific realm. So these all-female species, I mean, this particular gecko, there are no males in existence.

It evolved from a sexually reproducing species, but has become to be a species where there are only females. Oh my God. It's like a

science fiction movie.

I know, I know. And they're enormously successful, but they're also what John Maynard Smith has referred to as evolutionary scoundrels, because you sort of think that species that are able to clone themselves without the advantages of the variation and the cutting out of the deleterious mutations, then they're thought to only have an evolutionary shelf life of 100, 000 generations before either disease gets them or they have mutational meltdown. Well, some of these all-female lineages have lived a lot longer. And actually, the mourning gecko has been going for, they think, longer than 100, 000 generations. But the real queen of the cloning lifestyle is a funny little relative of the flatworm called the Deloitte rotifer.

Now, I mean, you might think you've gone through some dry patches yourself, David, but the Deloitte Rutherford hasn't had sex for 80 million years. I mean, she's still going strong. So she's found a way of defying this sort of, you know, this need for sex, which sort of throws into question the whole question of sex, you know? And by the way, I should add just 1 other little titbit that I found out while researching this book, which is obvious, but it hadn't occurred to me, is that The original sex must have been female because it produced eggs and sperm came along later. So when God created female in her own image, that's what she did.

So yeah, it hadn't occurred to me, but there's quite a lot of evidence for that. So, yeah, these females that are able to clone themselves are sort of going back to their evolutionary roots.

So there was a point when there were no males, And that leads right into TED member Rick's question, which is, could you explain why some think that males will disappear in the future?

That's a great question. Yeah, so that's all. That's a woman called Jenny Graves, who I interviewed for the book, and she's fantastic. She's in her 80s and she studied sexual determination in pretty much every animal from platypus to nematode worms. I mean, she knows everything.

She's the 1 who told me all about the garden mole. So she's she's she's she explained when she was telling me that sex determination was governed by the same 60 genes, I actually had to speak to her 3 times because I found it so unbelievable. But anyway, she's also part of the team that found the SRY gene on the Y chromosome. And she's the person who has said that. So the Y chromosome is basically a runt of a chromosome.

So it's... Sorry to say it, but it's sort of withering. And she worked out that that's why it's got this sort of, it's slightly different to look at to the others. It's a sort of stunted thing. It doesn't actually look like a Y.

It's just when it's paired with the longer X chromosome that it looks like a Y. That's 1 of those mistakes that just happens to be a coincidence that it looks like a Y, but essentially the Y is small and then the X is longer and then when they're paired they look like a Y. But because it's shrinking at an appreciable rate, she was able to calculate how long it was before it would disappear completely. And I can't remember what her estimation was, but it was like several, let's say 4 million years or something like that. And this really upset, She said it really upset a lot of male evolutionary biologists who were hugely affronted at the idea that their sex might go extinct.

But of course, as she points out, sex is brilliant at reinventing itself. And of course, evolution would find another way to create males. So for example, there is a spiny rat in Japan, which has already lost its Y chromosome, but yet the males are still produced by a different, they basically have a different trigger for these pathways. And that's what's, and I think that that's a really sort of fascinating thing to think about, which is that, you know, we sort of think of, I think there's this idea that evolution is a quest for perfection, and it's this struggle for survival. Humans are at the top, we're the most perfect, and then it's just a struggle for survival leads to perfection.

Well, it doesn't at all. Evolution is basically a series of botched jobs, and it just botches what's going to work in this moment, And then these botched jobs layer up. And that's how you end up with the anarchy of sex determination. You know, that's how you end up with this crazy, unfathomable system, which persists because it's so leaky and produce so much variation.

Yeah. Plus, with the way things are going now, I think 4 million years would be a pretty good run for us.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there's going to be other things that are going to get you first. Yeah.

So this actually, to take a step back, TED member Gordon wants to know, is there a biological distinction between sex and gender?

Well, that's another really good question. It's something that I tackle right at the front of the book because there's much discussion these days about the conflation of sex and gender, which in humans, we shouldn't do. We should consider those as distinct. But gender, we don't consider that animals have gender. So in my book, when I talk about females, I'm just talking about biological sex, because gender is a, you know, social psychological construct and it's the preserve of humans.

So, biological sex is traditionally defined by whether the gonads produce eggs or sperm. So, you know, and because there are eggs, there are only 2 types of sex cell. That gives the illusion of sex being a binary because there's just sperm and there's eggs. But then the thing that makes that complex is that the expression of sex is anything but a binary. It's an entire spectrum.

I mean, even if you're just looking at the level of the gonads, you know, in animals that are not, and disregard all of the many species which can switch sex. And you look at sort of, you know, binary, binary creatures like amphibians, for example. So common frogs that I find in my garden, which I adore so much. Common frogs have genetic sex determination. So XX is a female and XY is a male, but they also have environmental sex determination.

So you often get this with reptiles and amphibians and some fish, which is that there's an environmental trigger, very famously with turtles, females that are incubated over a certain... Sorry, it's eggs that are incubated over a certain temperature become females and below a certain temperature, they become males. So in the case of frogs, they have genetic sex determination, but they also have environmental sex determination. We don't know what that trigger is, but what happens is that the scientists studying them have discovered that the little metamorphs that are hopping out of the pond, they are, in some cases, this environmental determination overrides the genetics. So you end up with XX males and XY females.

And then of course, their gonads are just a mishmash of eggs and sperm. And so, you know, and then you have like creatures like barnacles, which interestingly, Darwin was fascinated by and wrote 2 amazing monographs on barnacles, which, I mean, they don't sound like the most exciting reads, but they are, they're beautifully illustrated, and they really give an insight into his genius as a scientist, because he gets something right. I mean, He recognizes that, because you have everything with barnacles from hermaphrodites through to separate sexes and everything in between. And he recognized that in barnacles, you can see that evolution from hermaphrodite creatures, which can have sex with themselves and any other hermaphrodite through to separate sexes. So the expression of sex, even in the gonads, but in all behaviors, is much more of a continuum, really, than this sort of neat binary that culturally we are tied to.

Right, and I think in the book you talked about, again, the clownfish who, at certain points in their life, may be gonadally female, let's say, and mentally, or brain-based male. That's gotta be kind of a crazy situation for them.

Yeah, I mean, but that's a bit like, I mean, that, I mean, as I said, we don't talk about gender amongst animals, but that's sort of gender, isn't it, really? I mean, It's a sort of basis of gender, isn't it? The fish thinks it's a female and is behaving like a female, is recognized as a female, but its biological sex is male, you know? So it's gonads are male. So, you know, it's not gender, but it's a bit like that.

Do you know what I mean? So it's easy to see how even in this fish, the 2 things can be independently regulated.

Yeah, and that seems to say more about the scientists trying to label the fish than the fish themselves.

Absolutely, and I think the thing about sort of a lot of this, particularly this sort of heteronormative bias that I wasn't expecting to uncover so much is really coming to the fore now because of the diversity that we see in science. And obviously, you know, it was the arrival of female academics in the 1980s that overthrew through a lot of these Victorian sexist stereotypes. And now it's, you know, people being able to be honest and open and ask questions that they're interested in, that are inspired by their own sexuality and gender. Then that's going to help us sort of understand the full rainbow of the animal kingdom. And I think that these are really exciting times.

And all we can hope for is more diversity, not just of genders and sexualities, but cultures, because different cultures view things in different ways. You know, This diversity means that we get different questions and rigorously interrogate questions from different perspectives.

Exactly. So TED member, Kale, wants to sort of turn that point around on you. Have you ever been blindsided by your own implicit or other biases in your own research? And how do you try to prevent that?

Well, Absolutely. I mean, this idea of, I'm straight, I'm a straight woman, and I was unaware of my own, that I view the world through these heteronormative goggles, but of course I do. So that's where my thinking is rooted. Do you know what I mean? So I view the animal kingdom from my standpoint.

And I think what really did sort of, you know, and I was taught at university, you know, that biological sex is a strict binary. And, you know, and it was a friend of mine questioning me in a late night conversation. We were arguing actually. And I thought to myself, God, you know, actually I'm biased, you know, like, and that really, It really blew my mind and it shouldn't because of course, we're all biased. We all are conditioned to view the world through our own particular viewpoint.

And I think that we... But it blew my mind to realize that Zoology could be so vulnerable to it. I mean, I'm not surprised any longer, and I can see it's a big problem, but it really did surprise me. And yes, I am having to actively think about what my biases are and be honest about them and to think about whether what I'm looking for, I'm just seeing what I want to see that fits the paradigm that lives in my head.

Yeah. Now, of course, everyone's, well, maybe not everyone's, but some people's favorite animal is the human. You are a zoologist. I know humans are not your expertise, but several folks in the chat, you won't be surprised to hear, are asking about us. Yeah.

Agatha and Ramon, has studying animal sexuality made you rethink anything about the way humans approach things or, you know, we find same-sex couples in nature and polygamy and sex change and all these other things, but humans are culturally constrained. Does any of this teach us anything about human sexuality?

Well, I mean, So I'm not an expert in humans because humans are so incredibly complex. And 1 anthropologist referred to humans as bio cultural x apes, which I think is a brilliant phrase, actually, because the impact of culture on our biology as humans is just enormous. You know, we are, as a species, we are distinct in that way. So it's very hard, and you have to be, and I'm always a bit wary about drawing comparisons from the animal kingdom with humans because there are certain male, mostly evolutionary psychologists out there who've written popular best-selling books and have millions of views on YouTube because they trot out these sort of Darwinian stereotypes. But, you know, and they'll say, oh, because, you know, lions are like this, therefore humans are like this.

And, you know, and it all follows through, not really taking into account, you know, the sort of uniqueness of our species, or also the fact that those stereotypes were born out of a misogynistic system. But, you know, there are places in the book where I draw comparisons with humans. And mostly I'll say, you know, what my intention is, is just to show the extraordinary diversity of sex, sexuality and the expression of sex in nature. And to sort of prove that these sort of, these old sexist stereotypes of female passivity and male activity are completely redundant. But I do think though that also because we have so much discussion at the moment about sex and gender, and it's something that culturally we're really grappling with.

I do think that when you understand variation from the perspective of the animal kingdom, And you can see creatures like the mole and how that variation has benefited them. When you view human variation from within the whole of the animal kingdom, you see that it's all normal. If we didn't have variation, we would cease to evolve. So we should embrace it and welcome it, you know, rather than being afraid of it.

Thank goodness for that. So 1 of the things that does make humans unique, though, in the animal kingdom is menopause. Yes. Tell me about Granny and the orcas.

Yes, so this was, you know, as a woman of a certain age, I was especially keen to check out this story. So, orcas are basically souped up dolphins. They're the biggest member of the cetacean family. And they're fantastically, like their squeaky cousins, they're fantastically clever. And they live in social family groups, right?

And It was always assumed that these groups were male dominant. The males were the leaders, of course, because they're bigger. But it turns out that the leaders of, well, certainly the Southern resident orcas, which have been studied for decades off the coast of Washington State. The leaders are not only female, they're the post-menopausal grannies. So it turns out menopause is extremely rare in the animal kingdom, which shouldn't come as much of a surprise because if the point of life is to reproduce, once you stop reproducing, you can sort of shuffle off now.

There's not much, natural selection's got much, you know, there's not much use for you now. And so the only animals that we thought went through menopause were humans. We thought women were basically menopausal freaks. And there was all sorts of sort of dispiriting ideas as to why human females went through the menopause. And as it turns out, the orcas help us understand that it's, we, orcas also, you know, go through this, as do, there's actually 4 species of toothed whale that all go through the menopause.

But in the case of orcas, the females are the basic, the wise old leaders that pass the culture down. And by investing their energy in their existing offspring and by ceasing to compete with their daughters halfway through their life, they have a better return in the end on their genetic investment. So, you know, they're the wise old lady whales that keep their hunting clan alive. And also, the amazing thing about orca societies is it's hugely inclusive as well. So when I was in, there's 1 group in pod in Washington State where there's an individual that has scoliosis.

So you can actually see it's got a sort of a wiggly fin and you might expect this individual not to have survived, but the matriarch shares food with it and it swims along and orcas are just these amazing, they've got these extraordinary 7 kilo brains that are a magnet for superlatives and they have this actual lobe in their brain, the Paralympic lobe we don't have, only dolphins and orcas have it. And where it sits in the brain, it suggests that they process emotions in a way that we can't actually comprehend. And they have this sort of amazing unity and social inclusion. So I have to say, I found the story of these wise old lady matriarchs and their inclusive society incredibly inspiring.

Indeed. Well, we could keep talking about animals, I think, for hours and hours, and there are still more questions. I apologize to the members whose questions we didn't get to. But I have 1 final question for you before we wrap up. What surprised you most about your research?

Ooh, well, IIIIII, what surprised me most was the discovery or the realisation, I suppose, that, that males and females are more alike than we are different. We're made of the same genes, the same bodies, the same brains, the same behaviours. And Darwin sort of drove a wedge between the sexes by focusing on our differences. But perhaps what we should do instead is think about our similarities and maybe we'd all get along a lot better as a result.

Well, that's a lovely thought. And I hope we can achieve that. I hope people can pull through like that. I want to thank the members for such engaging and thoughtful questions, including the 1 that Lucy had never heard before. And if this conversation, you know, piqued your interest, you can check out Lucy's book.

Might remember it, bitch, at the link

in the chat. You might want the British edition.

Oh, well, there you go.

It's exactly the same book, different cover.

Yeah, interesting. You can also find it at the link in the chat or your local library or bookstore. Lucy, I'm sure this book tour is keeping you busy, but what's next for you?

Well, so it'll be no surprise that I'm sort of turning my gaze to the male of the species, because I feel like these sexual stereotypes, they do males a disservice as much as they do females and the idea that all males are meant to be some competitive, aggressive alpha male, it just isn't the case in nature. So I think my next book's going to be about how science got males wrong and I might call it cock and bull, might.

I love it. Thank you for tackling that subject as a male. And thank you for joining us today.

My pleasure. It's been absolutely wonderful. I loved all the questions. Thank you so much for having me.