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The Michael Shermer Show, 288. Bitch: On the Female of the Species (4)

288. Bitch: On the Female of the Species (4)

2 (35m 0s):

Yeah. I, I, you know, I agree. I mean, you know, Bateman in his 1940s experiment, you know, he concluded that this could, you know, his, he, he, he, you know, he discovered about how females have nothing to gain by multiple mating. Whereas males do that, you know, th this could be extrapolated across the animal kingdom to humans. I mean, it's, it's ludicrous, you know, it's this, it's the sort of, you know, so I think, you know, that, that's why I sort of, in my become very cautious about making comparisons with humans. I do, in some cases where I anthropologists or primatologists have, you know, the, the, that it's considered to be a viable comparison, you do have to be really careful. And, you know, really what I'm trying to show is just how plastic sex and sexual traits and sexual attributes are, you know, and how, you know, sex, isn't a crystal ball and you can't really predict behavior.

2 (35m 52s):

And even more <inaudible>, you know, you, there's very little that you can predict off the back of whether a creatures produces sperm or eggs and, you know, the environment, life history, and a sprinkling of chunks, basically all, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll work to shape, you know, the behaviors, the set of behaviors that, that males and females. Yeah.

1 (36m 14s):

Yeah. One of the great debates in evolutionary theory is adaptationism versus well spandrels or, or, or non-adaptive characteristics set rise for some other reason that that is no longer apparent. This was the debate. You talk about Wallace in your book. I, you know, I don't know if, you know, I wrote a biography of Alfred Russell Wallace called in Darwin's shadow. This is my doctoral dissertation. And, you know, you talk about how Wallace largely rejected sexual selection. He was a hyper adaptationism. You mentioned his, his big book was called Darwinism. He was a hardcore Darwinist. He felt Darwin didn't even understand Darwin's theory, as far as it could go, at least as far as he thought he would go take it.

1 (36m 58s):

And on a, on a related topic, he, he couldn't see what the adaptive purpose was of having a brain, the size of humans, when really you only need the size of brain, the size of save a Chimp. That's plenty big. And so what's the purpose of having like aesthetic appreciation and mathematical reasoning and logic and all that kind of stuff. Humans are able to do. What's the purpose of that. And he couldn't think of any adaptive purpose, and he wasn't thinking along the lines of, well, it's a by-product of something else it's a spandrel or, or, or whatever. And so therefore he rejected that and he kind of turned to that, well, there's some kind of higher power. It's almost like an intelligent design of argument, although he wasn't religious in any traditional sense and that then fast forward.

1 (37m 42s):

So that's why he and he, and Darwin objected that fast forward to someone like Steve Gould who famously kind of pushed the non adaptiveness of features that we can't just automatically think, well, what's it, you know, what's the purpose of the male nipple? Well, you know, sometimes males do this or that, and you know, it's good for sex. I don't know what, but, you know, it's, you know, and then the Google would say something like, well, it's just a by-product because females have nipples and they need them for, for nursing and, and therefore, and natural selection cannot redesign the entire male body just for that. So they just, it just leaves them hanging. They're useless. Okay. But then you get into trouble by saying, like, what's the purpose of the male organism? Oh, well, it's totally adaptive, you know, to release sperm and so on.

1 (38m 24s):

What's the purpose of a female orgasm? There's no, it's a, by-product, it's not adaptive and so on. And that gets us into the kind of biases you write about.

2 (38m 33s):

Yeah. Stephen J Gold's one of the many, many men who designed, they denied females having basically evolved their own orgasms, you know, like it's just, you know, and, and the, you know, basically, you know, it was, it was, it was thought that, that, that just because we share this, you know, developmental blueprint, which I've talked about, you know, this sort of, you know, start off with this primordial mush that develops into a, that's a, you know, asexual that develops into a male or a female. We have this shed we print. So, you know, female orgasm is, and the female cliteracy is only there because of its homologues of the useless form, a lot of the male, right.

2 (39m 17s):

And this is just such a fantastically naive, and, and could only have been said by a male. I, you know, by the way, I just want to, just to say, I'm not about bashing males in my book, I've got a ton of great male scientists in the book. So it's not all about having a go at male scientists at all, because there's some brilliant, brilliant men doing amazing work out there that would even call themselves feminists scientists as well. So, but in the case of, of the, kind of the group of males that, that, that claimed that females didn't evolve their own orgasms, you know, it, it's pretty, you know, when you, first of all, when you look at the, if anybody bothered, which nobody did for a really long time to look at the morphology of the cliteracy across species, it's clearly, it's clearly, you know, adapted, they, you know, that the morph, the difference in morphology suggests adaptation, right?

2 (40m 6s):

So that's number one. So, so, and, and then number two, you know, I mean, any female telling you this sort of, you know, it, orgasm clearly has a role in pair bonding. You know what I mean? It's you get a rush of oxytocin. It attaches you to the partner that you're having sex with. You know, it's, it's clearly it has a function. It, you know, the function may not be as obvious as, as it is with males, but that doesn't mean to say that it, it can't have an adaptation that it can't have, you know, it it's, it's useless. And, and, and we have males to thank for our orgasm. It's I mean, you know, it's just ridiculous.

1 (40m 44s):

Yeah. It made me wonder when I was reading that part of your book that didn't any of these male scientists have a wives and that they could talk to and say, Hey, honey, I'm thinking about saying that the female orgasm is useless. It doesn't do anything. And then the wife goes up, let me get, let me show you something there. Let me explain something to you. Or maybe it was the case that, that, that society repressed women's expression of their sexuality. And they just could not talk about it.

2 (41m 11s):

Well, I mean, that's certainly the case, isn't it? I think, you know, I mean, I'm, you know, pretty comfortable about talking about these things, but, you know, I'm aware that the, not everybody is as comfortable as me even today in discussing these. Yeah.

1 (41m 23s):

Yeah. Yep. So on your cover, you have a, that's a hyena, right? Yep. So let's use the, I mean, you have dozens and dozens of different species and how they violate this so-called universal law. Just, just use the hyenas, an example of, of how it doesn't fit that perfect model.

2 (41m 43s):

Well, I mean the high end is just, she's just an extraordinary creature. So first of all, female Hine is a dominant to males there actually in, in some populations that they're as much as 10% bigger than males and then much more aggressive. And the society is a matcher line. So the females will, are in charge. And the, the, the, the, the, the, you have to forgive me. I I'm starting to get poorly after being broken too long. My brain, that's the word I'm looking for. This status passes down the female line.

2 (42m 25s):

So for the Cubs inherit their mother's status, right. And what's fascinating about female hyenas is they have this extraordinary, I mean, you can't tell in the wild, you can't tell males and females apart. If you see them, you'll see a hyena, you'll assume it's a male because of it's dangling appendage, but actually males, females have a clitoris that's about eight inches long, and it's shaped and positioned exactly like the penis. And they even have what looks like a pair of, you know, <inaudible> as well. And it's actually where their, their vagina is sealed up and their labor are filled with fatty tissue. And so it's a, it's a fake sclerostin, right?

2 (43m 6s):

It's not a real one. But what that means is that they're the only female mammal that we know of, that doesn't have an external vagina, that they have to give birth through their, through their cliteracy, you know, which is, you know, it's like the equivalent of squeezing a watermelon cantaloupe out of a hosepipe. I mean, it's a really high percentage of first time moms die and, you know, giving birth to their first Cubs and the Cubs suffocate on the way out. So you kind of like evolution, what were you thinking? You know, what, you know, what was the reason because, you know, that's some pretty funky equipment there, but what Christine Dre who's G university has done a ton of work on female dominant species and found that, you know, these, these, these sort of aggressively dominant females, like the hyena, everybody assumed that they were swirling with testosterone, and that was the reason for this behavior, but it would seem to actually what it is is that they'd been exposed to a lot of testosterone in utero as a particular type of testosterone.

2 (44m 11s):

It's a four is the it's called and, and, and basically as the, you know, the steroid path, the sex sero pathway is such that that's testosterone and estrogen and progesterone, they can all switch from one to another, they get converted. So, and the effect of this testosterone is that it means that the Cubs are really, really aggressive. So they come out fighting and the females become really aggressive. And they're able to defend the caucus because well, the, the, the, the, the Cubs, while the George develops, but the offshoot of that is, is that their, their genitalia becomes sort of compromised as it were.

2 (44m 54s):

And it, it, it, you know, it grows in this way that, I mean, I hate using the term masculinized, but that's the time that the scientists refer to as the genocide. So the female doesn't no longer has a, an external vagina. And, and she has this, you know, there was a, there was a paper written in the 1980s actually that says that the only way to tell a male and a female high in a report was by palpation of the scrotum, which, you know, that's the brave move For an article. You know what I mean? I might just hazard a guess, you know what, it's a 50, 50 chance that I write. I'm just going to go with male or female, you know?

2 (45m 35s):

But, so, so, yeah, so they're fascinated, the females are highly promiscuous. They're highly aggressive, they're dominant, they're bigger than the males. They've got, you know, genitalia that looks like males, you know, they they're defying binary stereotypes left right. And center.

1 (45m 50s):

Right, right. Yeah. So let's just, just talk for a minute about that, that adaptive purpose of the female orgasm. I think you mentioned in your book, the, the vaginal contractions in an orgasm acts as a pumper pushes the sperm up the body rather than out, and that is, may have an adaptive purpose of more likely to get pregnant that way. Is there anything to that in, in various animals?


288. Bitch: On the Female of the Species (4)

2 (35m 0s):

Yeah. I, I, you know, I agree. I mean, you know, Bateman in his 1940s experiment, you know, he concluded that this could, you know, his, he, he, he, you know, he discovered about how females have nothing to gain by multiple mating. Whereas males do that, you know, th this could be extrapolated across the animal kingdom to humans. I mean, it's, it's ludicrous, you know, it's this, it's the sort of, you know, so I think, you know, that, that's why I sort of, in my become very cautious about making comparisons with humans. I do, in some cases where I anthropologists or primatologists have, you know, the, the, that it's considered to be a viable comparison, you do have to be really careful. And, you know, really what I'm trying to show is just how plastic sex and sexual traits and sexual attributes are, you know, and how, you know, sex, isn't a crystal ball and you can't really predict behavior.

2 (35m 52s):

And even more <inaudible>, you know, you, there's very little that you can predict off the back of whether a creatures produces sperm or eggs and, you know, the environment, life history, and a sprinkling of chunks, basically all, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll work to shape, you know, the behaviors, the set of behaviors that, that males and females. Yeah.

1 (36m 14s):

Yeah. One of the great debates in evolutionary theory is adaptationism versus well spandrels or, or, or non-adaptive characteristics set rise for some other reason that that is no longer apparent. This was the debate. You talk about Wallace in your book. I, you know, I don't know if, you know, I wrote a biography of Alfred Russell Wallace called in Darwin's shadow. This is my doctoral dissertation. And, you know, you talk about how Wallace largely rejected sexual selection. He was a hyper adaptationism. You mentioned his, his big book was called Darwinism. He was a hardcore Darwinist. He felt Darwin didn't even understand Darwin's theory, as far as it could go, at least as far as he thought he would go take it.

1 (36m 58s):

And on a, on a related topic, he, he couldn't see what the adaptive purpose was of having a brain, the size of humans, when really you only need the size of brain, the size of save a Chimp. That's plenty big. And so what's the purpose of having like aesthetic appreciation and mathematical reasoning and logic and all that kind of stuff. Humans are able to do. What's the purpose of that. And he couldn't think of any adaptive purpose, and he wasn't thinking along the lines of, well, it's a by-product of something else it's a spandrel or, or, or whatever. And so therefore he rejected that and he kind of turned to that, well, there's some kind of higher power. It's almost like an intelligent design of argument, although he wasn't religious in any traditional sense and that then fast forward.

1 (37m 42s):

So that's why he and he, and Darwin objected that fast forward to someone like Steve Gould who famously kind of pushed the non adaptiveness of features that we can't just automatically think, well, what's it, you know, what's the purpose of the male nipple? Well, you know, sometimes males do this or that, and you know, it's good for sex. I don't know what, but, you know, it's, you know, and then the Google would say something like, well, it's just a by-product because females have nipples and they need them for, for nursing and, and therefore, and natural selection cannot redesign the entire male body just for that. So they just, it just leaves them hanging. They're useless. Okay. But then you get into trouble by saying, like, what's the purpose of the male organism? Oh, well, it's totally adaptive, you know, to release sperm and so on.

1 (38m 24s):

What's the purpose of a female orgasm? There's no, it's a, by-product, it's not adaptive and so on. And that gets us into the kind of biases you write about.

2 (38m 33s):

Yeah. Stephen J Gold's one of the many, many men who designed, they denied females having basically evolved their own orgasms, you know, like it's just, you know, and, and the, you know, basically, you know, it was, it was, it was thought that, that, that just because we share this, you know, developmental blueprint, which I've talked about, you know, this sort of, you know, start off with this primordial mush that develops into a, that's a, you know, asexual that develops into a male or a female. We have this shed we print. So, you know, female orgasm is, and the female cliteracy is only there because of its homologues of the useless form, a lot of the male, right.

2 (39m 17s):

And this is just such a fantastically naive, and, and could only have been said by a male. I, you know, by the way, I just want to, just to say, I'm not about bashing males in my book, I've got a ton of great male scientists in the book. So it's not all about having a go at male scientists at all, because there's some brilliant, brilliant men doing amazing work out there that would even call themselves feminists scientists as well. So, but in the case of, of the, kind of the group of males that, that, that claimed that females didn't evolve their own orgasms, you know, it, it's pretty, you know, when you, first of all, when you look at the, if anybody bothered, which nobody did for a really long time to look at the morphology of the cliteracy across species, it's clearly, it's clearly, you know, adapted, they, you know, that the morph, the difference in morphology suggests adaptation, right?

2 (40m 6s):

So that's number one. So, so, and, and then number two, you know, I mean, any female telling you this sort of, you know, it, orgasm clearly has a role in pair bonding. You know what I mean? It's you get a rush of oxytocin. It attaches you to the partner that you're having sex with. You know, it's, it's clearly it has a function. It, you know, the function may not be as obvious as, as it is with males, but that doesn't mean to say that it, it can't have an adaptation that it can't have, you know, it it's, it's useless. And, and, and we have males to thank for our orgasm. It's I mean, you know, it's just ridiculous.

1 (40m 44s):

Yeah. It made me wonder when I was reading that part of your book that didn't any of these male scientists have a wives and that they could talk to and say, Hey, honey, I'm thinking about saying that the female orgasm is useless. It doesn't do anything. And then the wife goes up, let me get, let me show you something there. Let me explain something to you. Or maybe it was the case that, that, that society repressed women's expression of their sexuality. And they just could not talk about it.

2 (41m 11s):

Well, I mean, that's certainly the case, isn't it? I think, you know, I mean, I'm, you know, pretty comfortable about talking about these things, but, you know, I'm aware that the, not everybody is as comfortable as me even today in discussing these. Yeah.

1 (41m 23s):

Yeah. Yep. So on your cover, you have a, that's a hyena, right? Yep. So let's use the, I mean, you have dozens and dozens of different species and how they violate this so-called universal law. Just, just use the hyenas, an example of, of how it doesn't fit that perfect model.

2 (41m 43s):

Well, I mean the high end is just, she's just an extraordinary creature. So first of all, female Hine is a dominant to males there actually in, in some populations that they're as much as 10% bigger than males and then much more aggressive. And the society is a matcher line. So the females will, are in charge. And the, the, the, the, the, the, you have to forgive me. I I'm starting to get poorly after being broken too long. My brain, that's the word I'm looking for. This status passes down the female line.

2 (42m 25s):

So for the Cubs inherit their mother's status, right. And what's fascinating about female hyenas is they have this extraordinary, I mean, you can't tell in the wild, you can't tell males and females apart. If you see them, you'll see a hyena, you'll assume it's a male because of it's dangling appendage, but actually males, females have a clitoris that's about eight inches long, and it's shaped and positioned exactly like the penis. And they even have what looks like a pair of, you know, <inaudible> as well. And it's actually where their, their vagina is sealed up and their labor are filled with fatty tissue. And so it's a, it's a fake sclerostin, right?

2 (43m 6s):

It's not a real one. But what that means is that they're the only female mammal that we know of, that doesn't have an external vagina, that they have to give birth through their, through their cliteracy, you know, which is, you know, it's like the equivalent of squeezing a watermelon cantaloupe out of a hosepipe. I mean, it's a really high percentage of first time moms die and, you know, giving birth to their first Cubs and the Cubs suffocate on the way out. So you kind of like evolution, what were you thinking? You know, what, you know, what was the reason because, you know, that's some pretty funky equipment there, but what Christine Dre who's G university has done a ton of work on female dominant species and found that, you know, these, these, these sort of aggressively dominant females, like the hyena, everybody assumed that they were swirling with testosterone, and that was the reason for this behavior, but it would seem to actually what it is is that they'd been exposed to a lot of testosterone in utero as a particular type of testosterone.

2 (44m 11s):

It's a four is the it's called and, and, and basically as the, you know, the steroid path, the sex sero pathway is such that that's testosterone and estrogen and progesterone, they can all switch from one to another, they get converted. So, and the effect of this testosterone is that it means that the Cubs are really, really aggressive. So they come out fighting and the females become really aggressive. And they're able to defend the caucus because well, the, the, the, the, the Cubs, while the George develops, but the offshoot of that is, is that their, their genitalia becomes sort of compromised as it were.

2 (44m 54s):

And it, it, it, you know, it grows in this way that, I mean, I hate using the term masculinized, but that's the time that the scientists refer to as the genocide. So the female doesn't no longer has a, an external vagina. And, and she has this, you know, there was a, there was a paper written in the 1980s actually that says that the only way to tell a male and a female high in a report was by palpation of the scrotum, which, you know, that's the brave move For an article. You know what I mean? I might just hazard a guess, you know what, it's a 50, 50 chance that I write. I'm just going to go with male or female, you know?

2 (45m 35s):

But, so, so, yeah, so they're fascinated, the females are highly promiscuous. They're highly aggressive, they're dominant, they're bigger than the males. They've got, you know, genitalia that looks like males, you know, they they're defying binary stereotypes left right. And center.

1 (45m 50s):

Right, right. Yeah. So let's just, just talk for a minute about that, that adaptive purpose of the female orgasm. I think you mentioned in your book, the, the vaginal contractions in an orgasm acts as a pumper pushes the sperm up the body rather than out, and that is, may have an adaptive purpose of more likely to get pregnant that way. Is there anything to that in, in various animals?