Threshold Conversations: Ambika Kamath & Melina Packer

[00:00] INTRO

AMY: In songbirds, males are the ones that do the singing — right? The females are quiet, while the males sing to define and defend their territory, and to attract mates. This is what I’ve always been told, and maybe you have too — it’s a really common belief. But as it turns out, it’s wrong. Or at least, very incomplete. Many female songbirds sing, too, especially in species that live in or near the tropics, that don’t tend to migrate as much. So why is this very basic bird fact a surprise? 

Well, the majority of early research on songbirds was focused on migratory populations, where males do tend to be the singers. And that bulk of that research was done by European men, living in cultures that reinforced that idea that females were inherently quieter and more passive. It likely made sense to them that male birds would do the talking, while females did the listening. So even though many of those early naturalists traveled to the tropics, and carefully observed thousands of species of birds, the idea that only males sing still got cemented as a universal truth — as the definition of “normal” songbird behavior. And this is just one of many examples of how we import our human biases and expectations onto the natural world. 

Welcome to Threshold Conversations, I’m Amy Martin, and my guests today have done a deep examination of this phenomenon in their book, Feminism in the Wild. Ambika Kamath is a behavioral ecologist and evolutionary biologist, and Melina Packer studies race, gender and sexuality. I wanted to talk with them about how we all tend to project our hopes and values onto the animals around us — and how we might begin to break out of these conceptual traps. 

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AMY: Ambika Kamath and Melina Packer, thanks for joining me today.

AMBIKA: Thank you.

AMY: Ambika, I wanted to start with you and the anolis lizards — these are kind of your classic lizardy-looking green lizards — and my understanding is that when you started studying them, you noticed pretty early on that the information you had been given about these didn’t match what you were observing in the field. Can you tell us that story?

AMBIKA: As a graduate student, I studied lizards and lizard territoriality. And like with the birds that you mentioned in the introduction, there was a strong sense that many lizards, and in particular the group of lizards I was working with that I called anolis lizards, have these really defined territories and the thought was that males were using these territories to maintain exclusive mating access to the females within.

And so in my work, I had this project that depended on these lizards being territorial and staying in roughly the same place for the whole season.

And they were moving all over the place, way more than you would expect. Like I think in my sample, it was somewhere around 80% of females were mating with more than one male. And so it's like, well, if 80% of your individuals in a society are transgressing social norms that you think they should be following, maybe you've gotten the social norms wrong. Not that all of the animals are doing something incorrect.

AMY: And what was your experience as you were documenting this and processing it in yourself, like, wait a minute, is this anomalous behavior or is this actually the norm? And then trying to communicate that with your scientific community at the time — how did that go for you?

AMBIKA: The people studying anolis lizards in particular were very, very upset with this paper. Like I would get yelled at at conferences occasionally and then as the work got more and more interdisciplinary with feminist science studies, the reaction sort of became more and more extreme. There were people who really started to get it and see how widespread it was, and be really excited about what that means for the future of scientific inquiry and other people who are just entrenched in the status quo approach it with a lot of defensiveness.

So yeah, it was, it was interesting. My PhD advisor, his name is Jonathan Losos. He's written the book on anolis ecology and evolution. And he was extremely excited about this idea that we would be challenging the status quo. And I think that the work wouldn't have gotten anywhere if I hadn't had his enthusiastic support.

AMY: That's so fascinating. It's also like from the outside, just a little bit humorous to think about people shouting at each other at lizard conferences, like, oh my God, we have so many things to be upset about in this world.

AMBIKA: Totally. I once got invited out to lunch by a senior researcher, and I assumed that they were excited about the work and wanted to talk about it. So we spent like 45 minutes, and at the end they just, like, couldn't handle it and just yelled at me for a solid five minutes. I was like, okay, thank you for lunch. But you know, it was exactly that question like, why? Why is it so charged? 

AMY: Yeah, yeah. Well, Melina, when you first heard about this lizard study, maybe as a scholar of these types of things, you were not at all surprised that there was some pushback.

MELINA: Yeah, I was working on my own project on toxicology and sort of the stories that toxicologists tell, particularly in terms of gendered behavior, social expectations for gender roles among animals, and sexual behavior. So there was a lot of talk in both mainstream but also sort of ultra-right conservative media that chemicals in the water are turning frogs gay.

And it was very sort of homophobic and transphobic. And around the same time Ambika and I met at UC Berkeley, I met another postdoc there, Max Lambert, and he had done all this empirical work finding that actually tadpoles change sex all the time, irrespective of chemical exposure. So again, there were these parallel sort of dominant narratives that in this case, one could argue, were much more well intentioned and well-meaning, this valid and genuine concern for chemical pollution that's harming all kinds of life on Earth.

But hey, it's okay to be gay, right, to begin with. And also, like, it's not a new thing for frogs to either have sort of ambiguous genitalia or other kinds of sexual physiologies, and also there’s same sex sexual behavior in the wild across animal species all the time. So again, this narrative that, like the harmful outcome of chemical pollution is gay frogs or intersex frogs, and media journalists were even calling them transgender frogs, which doesn't make any sense at all. Like frogs don't have genders, as far as I know. I mean, maybe frogs have their own cultural ideas around gender, but I would highly doubt that they're the same as our human cultural ideas around gender. 

So I wasn't surprised when I heard about Ambika’s research and experience with the lizard narrative, the territoriality narrative. But it is very exciting to work with scientists who themselves are trying to dismantle these paradigms and see how they're a product of our human, social and cultural constructions. Because feminist science studies scholars have been doing this work for decades, and I think, as Ambika pointed out, there also have always been scientists trying to push back against these dominant narratives.

AMY: Yeah. I also think they are still so deeply entrenched. I shared that story about the songbirds, I mean, that was just like two years ago that I was like, oh, wait, I did not know that female songbirds sing. And I'm certainly no scientist, but I am somebody who pays attention a lot to the natural world and cares about it and everything. And then just, like, whoa. It kind of threw me, you know? I think one of the really interesting parts of the book that you went into in great depth was Bateman's principles. What are Bateman's principles?

AMBIKA: So Bateman's principles are sort of rules of thumb or like general principles about how reproductive success and mating behavior are different between males and females. So Bateman was actually a botanist and he was reading Darwin. And in reading Darwin, he picked up on Darwin's argument around sexual selection and that in general, males are thought to be eager to mate and try to mate with as many females as possible and thus sire as many offspring as possible, so what the males are like programmed to do under natural selection, is just find and mate with as many females as possible.

And in contrast, females are thought to be as coy or selective as possible, choosing the best mates rather than mating with as many mates as possible. And so Bateman set up this experiment with these fruit flies to try and collect data that would prove Darwin's hypothesis.

AMY: So he was trying to take Darwin's hypothesis and collect empirical data via fruit flies that the males, their drive is to mate with as many females as possible. And the females, their kind of inherent drive is to be choosy and selective about which males they mate with.

AMBIKA: And therefore to not mate with that many males. Right? You would expect mating with multiple males would be bad evolutionarily for females.

AMY: And what did he find?

AMBIKA: The first graph with the results of the first four experiments in fact showed that for both males and females, there was an increase between how many mates an individual had and how many babies they had. So not consistent with Darwin's hypothesis. And Bateman simply ignored that first graph, for no apparent reason. In the second of those graphs, he found that it made no difference to female reproductive success whether they mated with 1 or 2 or 3, or however many males.

This is not exactly what the prediction from Darwin's hypothesis would have been, which is that female reproductive success should have declined, but nonetheless Bateman interpreted the results as confirming Darwin's hypothesis of males that are eager to mate and females that are coy and selective.

AMY: And he was working in like the mid-1900s, right? 1950 or something?

AMBIKA: Yeah. The paper was published in 1948. And then in the 70s, a theoretical evolutionary biologist called Robert Trivers found this paper and built a much more sort of mathematically robust theory on the basis of those results. But eventually Patty  Gowaty redid Bateman's experiments and called out every single mistake, some of them unavoidable and some of them quite avoidable. And after that, we really have no excuse for still sticking with Bateman's principles. And yet we do.

AMY: And just to be clear, Patty Gowaty is the name of the scientist who did that research. And I feel like kind of her key point — at least as I understand it, correct me if I'm wrong —  is that females also mate with lots of males, frequently. And not only does that not negatively impact fitness, it can actually benefit fitness. And it’s not just about fruit flies, right? Can you give some examples of that in other animals?

AMBIKA: There's just so many examples. Definitely lionesses is one of them, and that's why we have lionesses on the cover of our book. Birds, which were sort of famously the poster child of monogamous social interactions. Female birds mate with multiple males much more often than anybody anticipated. That was also sort of described as like sneaking, extra-pair copulation. So like, there's a social norm where you're supposed to just be with your partner and then everyone's having affairs on the outside, right? As opposed to like, maybe affairs are not actually stigmatized in the birds, and they're just not monogamous, and we can live with that. Baboons and chimpanzees, fish. Sperm storage, with females mating with multiple males and then storing that sperm, is common in insects, it’s common in reptiles. So it's just, the evidence is everywhere.

AMY: Right. And I like how you said also, it's not like the females can sit there and from some godlike perspective see all the potential males and then be like ‘you with the shiny tail feathers. You're the one.’ They're dealing in a real time context, just like all of us. Like, ‘well, you're the one that's here now, right? You'll have to do.’ 

AMBIKA: Yeah. The analogy we made in the book was, it's less like a Victorian ball where all of the suitable suitors are all laid out in front of you, which is sort of what Bateman's experiment was assuming, he put all of these flies into a single vial, and they all had access to each other at the same time, and in reality, it's more like swiping on tinder, where like, you only have one option at a time and you have to be like, yes or no, yes or no.

And so when you account for that, you end up with female multiple mating being a very sensible default behavior. And the exception becomes females mating with just one male rather than the opposite, which is what we assume.

AMY: Melina, can you speak to that? Because as I was reading this without knowing it was Bateman's principles and not being a scientist — I didn't take a biology class I don't think in college — I definitely thought I knew that males in general are more driven to mate, mate, mate and that females are biologically going to be more conditioned to be choosy and selective. And as much as that has rankled me as a concept, I'm like, well, I guess that's the way nature is. And it's all based on completely incorrect data. It's like, how is this still existing so firmly in society when it seems like it's just been totally proven wrong?

MELINA: You know, I've been similarly vexed. But of course, scientists have always projected the social norms and cultural biases that all of us as humans cannot help but bring to our work. And given that scientists tend to come from more privileged, powerful segments of society, it makes perfect sense that they're projecting the kinds of power disparities they benefit from.

There's a reason that men in power would want to reinforce this idea that it is natural for men to mate with as many females as possible, and that it is natural for women to be coy and passive. Because if you can say something is natural, then you can avoid responsibility for having to fix it or for having to relinquish some of that power.

And I don't think all scientists, certainly not today, are like card carrying misogynists, certainly not. But we can see how over time, these ideas just become sedimented and unquestioned, like it was decades before people looked at Bateman's actual experiment and sort of deconstructed the process and the methods. Nobody had bothered to look into, like, what is even the definition of territoriality and how it's applied to lizards.

They only see what they want to see. They don't find what they're not looking for. So almost innocently, these narratives get sedimented. And I think the pushback against them still, even with data literally proving that it's wrong, like female lizards mate with multiple male lizards, Bateman's principles are incorrect based on Bateman's data. The fact that the data, the empirical data don't dismantle the myths just speaks to how powerful these stories are, because those in power don't want to lose power.

AMY: Yeah, it speaks to the fact that they are myths. Because if it were purely about the data, then all you have to do is look at better data and then — oh, okay, wrong moving forward. But you know, I think it is also one of the things that's almost hilarious to me about this whole Bateman's principle thing is that the whole thing is about fruit flies. So even if his study were correct about fruit flies, to extrapolate from that to all animals, it's bananas.

MELINA: Exactly. I think it's important to add, too, since we've been focusing a lot on heterosexual behaviors or like mating for the sake of producing offspring, that animals have lots of sexual encounters that are either not heterosexual, not male-female, and also not for procreation. So there's that whole other piece of this, like this massive piece of animal behavior and animal sexual behavior that has nothing to do with procreation or offspring. 

AMY: Like the gay sheep. I just had to laugh out loud when you had the quote from the the sheep researcher who was documenting homosexual behavior in all these bighorn sheep, and it's just like, he couldn't take it in, and it was like too much for him. I shouldn't laugh. It's part of a whole system of oppression. But it also seems so ridiculous. Can you tell that story?

MELINA: Yeah. And this is actually something another scientist and author, Eliot Schrefer, writes about in his book Queer Ducks and Other Animals.

AMBIKA: And he in turn has taken the example from Bruce Bagemihl, who really has the sort of definitive compendium of all of the queer behavior that we see in animals. So Bagemihl quotes the biologist Valerius Geist, and he is reflecting on his career studying bighorn sheep. And so he says, ‘I still cringe at the memory of seeing one individual ram mounting this other individual ram repeatedly. Incapable of absorbing this realization at once. I called these actions of the Rams aggressive sexual behavior, for to state that the males had evolved a homosexual society was emotionally beyond me. To conceive of these magnificent beasts as queer. Oh God. Eventually I called a spade a spade and admitted that rams lived in essentially a homosexual society.’ 

And I think it's worth mentioning that Geist is going way beyond so many scientists in reflecting on his biases and acknowledging them.

AMY: Yeah, there's a window into his thinking there that is incredibly helpful. Even if we can wish for it to be different.

AMBIKA: As much as he's sort of become a punching bag for many of us, like, I do want to commend how he approached all of this. Like that's the kind of honesty that if even half of existing biologists engaged with, right, like that kind of reflection, then the field would be very, very different.

MELINA: And I think it's important, at least Ambika and I share this belief that even if there were no same-sex sexual behavior in the wild, it would still be okay for people, right? So I think either way, like, we shouldn't be relying on whatever we observe in the natural world to somehow justify or naturalize human behavior. So I just want to throw that out there.

AMBIKA: Yeah. And that's sort of a tendency that we see very often in queer people who get, I think justifiably, get excited about examples of queer behavior in nature. But then the line becomes, see, science is saying that queer behavior is natural. And what we're saying is like that should not be the marker either way.

AMY: We’ll have more of my conversation with Ambika Kamath and Melina Packer right after this.

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[20:05] BREAK

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AMY: In this world where we have so much misinformation, disinformation, you know, concerted attempts to confuse the public about really important science, when you read something like this and you realize how arbitrary some things that do get cemented as scientific truths can be, there's a part of me that's almost scared to talk about it publicly, because it feels like it gives people an excuse to say like, ‘yeah, see, we can't trust anything.’ And I wonder what you both do with that. Does it mean that we should give up on science altogether?

AMBIKA: Yeah, we grappled a lot with that question as we were writing the book. And that's often a response that we would get from scientists being like, well, if I question the fundamentals of the scientific method, then I'm just giving ammunition to the science deniers. I think I come back to thinking about: what does it take to actually build a respectful and trusting relationship between scientists and non-scientists?

And it seems fairly obvious from what we all know about how we build trusting relationships in our own lives, that denying responsibility for your mistakes does not build trust. And it's not just mistakes, because that suggests that there is a way of doing science that would, like, avoid bias altogether, and that is ignoring the fact that all of us are always going to carry norms and values.

So our best attempt at building a rigorous and honest science is to have the scientific process include this kind of reflection on how we might each of us be bringing norms and values and politics into the work we're doing without realizing it. And that actually will make for stronger science in the long run. By pretending that science is objective, we cut ourselves off from ever inquiring about that.

We would do a much better job of having something closer to what is true if we were to, instead of ignoring the subjectivity, actually engage with it and engage with it honestly and recognizing then that each of us is going to approach problems in different ways, and that we will find the sort of messy thing that approximates the truth somewhere in the middle of all of that.

So everything gets messier. It's going to be much harder to sort of say, this is right and this is wrong. And science has held a lot of authority in the last decades by claiming sort of unique access to this is right and this is wrong. So we would have to give up that authority. But that doesn't mean that the ways in which we study the natural world and make conclusions about it are useless. It just means that that has to be contextualized in this broader setting, and that we might have to give up some of that authority. But what we would gain instead is trust. And that's a better foundation for knowledge building.

AMY: Can you give me an example, either of you, of what that would look like in practice?

AMBIKA: It's like really outlining and questioning your assumptions at the start of any scientific study. Mathematicians are great at outlining assumptions so we know it can be done. We just have to do it. And then when we lay out those assumptions really clearly, then we can ask, oh, where is this assumption coming from, which of these am I making because I'm unquestioningly adopting some societal norm.

And that could be about collective behavior or mating behavior or foraging behavior. You can choose to make different assumptions about how these animals are behaving, and then you'll end up discovering different possibilities for how animals should behave. 

You know, it doesn't have to be all in one person. But if the scientific practice as a whole is sort of cool with us having these conversations about subjectivity and identity and politics, then I think the work will get done.

AMY: Melina, you're nodding along.

MELINA: Yeah, I think Ambika said that all so well and so beautifully. The only thing I would add is, and maybe this is just my kind of ideal world, where this isn't just happening in the biological and natural sciences in isolation. Me and Ambika, we're not the only ones doing this kind of collaborative work. The other day, a colleague of mine said poly-discipline-amorous, which I love. We can work together and we can share our respective training and background and knowledge, even just intellectually, never mind personally and politically right. If we bring all those partial perspectives together, then we're getting closer to the truth.

And I also think it would be revealing and useful to talk about, well, who in particular benefits from this analysis of this data set? How does this analysis of this data set support a given power structure or social relation beyond the animal world? I think those are important questions to ask because that's where these paradigms came from the first place.

AMY:  Yeah. I really loved the idea that owning our biases, being willing to reflect upon and think about our biases isn't like this shaming, like, ‘you’re bad’ kind of thing, but that it's actually a joyful thing because it's like opening up to the idea that I could be missing so much. I need other minds to help me see, to get a closer approximation of the truth. And I love this quote that I feel like kind of spoke to that. You wrote, “Within the realm of animal behavior science, it is possible to tell different stories about what animals are doing and why. Allowing for a multitude of stories rapidly expands the horizons of our scientific imaginations by encouraging us to consider what the prevailing stories might be taking for granted.” And I guess I wondered if we could end with you dreaming a little bit, thinking about ways in which you can imagine this awareness of our biases and our welcoming of conversation and reflection around them could lead to some exciting growth in different scientific fields.

AMBIKA: I think that some of the most challenging arguments, and also equally the most fundamental arguments in at least animal behavior, have been very linked to individualism and capitalism. To me, those feel like the foundational justifications for why hierarchies exist. It's been easiest, I think, to question assumptions aligned with misogyny and the patriarchy, in part because white women came into the sciences decades ago and have had some space and time to raise these questions and have fought very hard to make that space.

It's increasingly okay to bring in perspectives that are queer and sort of from racially oppressed groups, although I think that is still further behind. But building the consciousness, both political and scientific, to challenge the outsized emphasis on individual animals acting efficiently to maximize their reproductive output, their fitness, as well as acting individualistic, I think that's the place where there's the most potential for radical change, challenging that notion that what gives you worth is how much you produce, whether that's your fitness or your work output in a capitalist society. Pushing us into much more interdependent, much less, frantic, stressed out, like produce, produce, produce ways of looking at both the natural world and our own lives.

And so for us, I think that shift from survival of the fittest to survival of the fit-enough, like, you don't have to be the best of the best. You just have to be like, kind of okay, you know, to get along. At least for me personally, that's been very meaningful in terms of how I approach my life and the world as well.

AMY: Did you want to add anything, Melina? 

MELINA: Yeah, I agree with that 100%. And I was going to add, I think another huge, exciting, liberating place for this opening up of our imaginations to go is really dismantling these myths that disability is somehow bad evolutionarily. I mean, we didn't even get into eugenics, but that's a big driver of a lot of sort of core animal behavior theories and evolutionary biology theories to really dismantle some very harmful assumptions, both socially and biologically.

AMY: Well, Melina Packer and Ambika Kamath, thank you both so much for talking with me today. I really, really appreciate your work and the time you spent thinking about it with me.

MELINA: Thank you.

AMBIKA: Thank you.

CREDITS

To learn more about Ambika and Melina’s research, check out their book, Feminism in the Wild. We’ll put a link in the show notes, or you can order it at your favorite bookstore. I want to give a special thanks to Michelle Hall for her work on female birdsong, which I mentioned at the beginning of the episode. I actually interviewed Michelle when I was in Australia reporting for Hark, and I’m going to be sharing an excerpt from that conversation on my Substack, Letters to Earthlings, as a complement to this episode. Look for a link to that and to Michelle’s research in the show notes too.

Threshold Conversations is produced by Sam Moore. Our music is by Todd Sickafoose. I’m executive producer Amy Martin. Thank you for listening, and for considering making a donation to support this show at threshold podcast dot org.