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Ambika Kamath and Melina Packer, "Feminism in the Wild: How Human Biases Shape Our Understanding of Animal Behavior" (MIT Press, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the New Books Network Animal Studies Channel. My name is Kyle Johansen, and I'm a host on this channel. Today, I'm very happy to be interviewing Dr. Ambaka Kamath and Dr. Molina Packer. Ambika is currently a writer, but she's trained as an evolutionary biologist and was an academic until 2023. Molina is assistant professor of Race, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Wisconsin Lacrosse on Ho Chunk Nation Land. And today we'll be discussing their book, Feminism in the How Human Biases Shape Our Understanding of Animal Behavior. This book was published in 2025 by the MIT Press. Welcome to the podcast.
- [01:46]
C
Thank you. Thank you.
- [01:48]
B
Yeah, thanks so much for being here. Well, so before we talk about the book, I was hoping that you would each tell us a bit about yourselves, such as where you're from, what topics you work on, and just anything else you think listeners might want to know about you.
- [01:59]
D
Sure, I can start. I currently live in Oakland, California. I do not work in academia anymore. You described me as writer, but that's a very optimistic. Well, that doesn't feel true of my life any longer. I currently work as a researcher at a nonprofit that supports labor and community organizing, especially in areas where green manufacturing projects are being developed in the US And So that's what I do now. I haven't really written much since Feminism in the Wild, but hopefully I will write more again someday.
- [02:31]
B
Okay, neat. Oh, and for everyone who couldn't tell that was Anvika talking. Neat. How about, how about you, Melina?
- [02:39]
C
Hi. Yes, thank you for having us. So I grew up on the East Coast, New Jersey and Rhode island, but I lived in California for about a decade before moving to the Midwest, Wisconsin, for my current job, as you said. I'm at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse in the Department of Race, Gender and Sexuality Studies. My research interests include critical feminist science studies, animal studies and environmental justice.
- [03:06]
B
Okay, well, yeah, neat. I guess, I guess, I guess I'll move on to my. My first official kind of real question, why. Why did the two of you decide to write this book?
- [03:20]
D
So the genesis of this book really for me began in my work in graduate school where I was studying the social interactions and movement behavior of lizards. And I was working at the time on Anolis lizards, which are a model system in evolutionary ecology and sort of were increasingly model systems in behavioral ecology as well and were known sort of conventionally to exhibit territorial behavior. And the work that I did with these lizards, and I think we might go into it in a little bit more detail at some point later in this conversation, really started to push at this question of why was this conventional wisdom such like why did people, why did scientists believe so strongly that territoriality was a good description of these animals behaviors? And it seemed to me from the work I did in graduate school, which was both sort of empirical and historical, looking at past work on Enola's territoriality, that the answer was not just about the science, but also about how we come to believe things, how we as people, as human beings come to hold certain ideas, how those ideas are influenced by other people's ideas in the field. And so I wasn't looking for answers within what scientists usually think of as the domain of science. And then subsequent work on the evolution of same sex sexual behavior led me to similar questions about, of like how is it that who we are as people affects the science that we do. And this led me pretty sort of organically through conversations and collaborations to the field of feminist science studies. Melina and I met at a working group at the University of California, Berkeley called Queer Ecologies, Feminist Biologies, where we started having this dialogue between scientists, biologists, especially those setting animal behavior and evolution with people such as Melina in the field of feminist science studies. Throughout that whole process, my understanding of the Core tenets of the field of animal behavior started to become more and more shaky because I started to see more and more how much those core tenets were influenced by dominant social and cultural ideas. Soon after that, I started a faculty job at the University of Colorado, where I was tasked with teaching animal behavior. And at that point, it struck me that I didn't really know how to teach this field anymore, given how much shakiness there was around the fundamentals of the field and their relationship with social and political and cultural narratives in our societies. And so I felt the strong need that we needed instead of overhauling piecemeal so, like focusing one paper on territoriality or focusing on one paper in same sex sexual behavior, that there was a need. What was missing in the field was this comprehensive examination of the field as a whole, in this asking, holding, this question of how human perspectives shape our study of animal behavior. And so that led pretty naturally to first overhauling the syllabus of the class that we taught, and then from there writing a book that dealt with the field as a whole.
- [07:03]
B
Okay, do you have anything to add, Melina?
- [07:06]
C
Yeah, sure. I mean, I can tell a little bit about my own trajectory. Ambika really nicely explained how we connected at UC Berkeley, but I'll say a bit about how I got there. Right. So I had started out with a master's in public policy, and I was focusing on food systems and like the democratic potential of what are called food Policy councils. This research inspired me to pursue a PhD in environmental science policy and management at UC Berkeley, where again is where Ambika and I met. She was doing a postdoc there in California. My food systems focus turned toward the race, class and gender politics of an uneven exposure to pesticides, given the particulars of industrial agriculture in California. And at the same time, I was also taking a deep dive myself into feminist science studies, which reveals how human social and cultural biases become embedded into the sciences. Right. Contrary to the widely held belief that science is somehow neutral or objective. So I ended up writing a dissertation which morphed into my first book, Toxic Sexual Politics, which argues that the scientific field of toxicology is fundamentally racist, sexist, and classist, and therefore cannot or will not, at least not as currently taught and practiced, protect people in places from hazardous toxic exposures. But in the process of writing this book, I realized that nearly everything toxicologists think they know about toxic chemicals comes from exposure experiments conducted on non human animals. And my feminist science studies training helped me see that toxicologists were making all kinds of problematic assumptions about animal and in turn, human behavior as they were assessing the supposed effects of toxic chemical exposures. So that's where my interest kind of turned, to critical animal studies.
- [09:11]
B
Okay, well, yeah, thanks for your. For your responses. It's neat that the two of you collaborated to write this book. I mean, it's an unusual. It strikes me, it seems to me, to be a fairly unusual collaboration. I know that the two of you met and it wasn't just sort of random or whatever. Like, the two of you have spent a lot of time together and talking to each other and whatnot. But you're. And it. And I guess for someone who didn't know a whole lot about your fields, it might look like a natural collaboration. I mean, one of you is a. Is a scientist trained in evolutionary biology. The other one is someone who does work in, who is a science studies scholar, specifically a feminist science study scholar. And so it might look like it would be relatively natural for a scientist to work with a science studies scholar. But my impression is that it's not at all normal for this to happen. These collaborations are, like, incredibly rare. My impression is that scientists are kind of like. They tend to be. Kind of have a certain amount of antipathy towards science studies scholarship, maybe. Am I right about this? Like, are the two of you intellectually kind of a very unusual pair?
- [10:21]
D
That is a great question. Sort of, yes. I think we are pretty rare, and these sorts of collaborations are rare. And there's a whole suite of reasons why. I think the antipathy you mention is definitely one of them. And it's interesting to think about where that comes from, because I think the core thing to think about in these sorts of collaborations is that what we think of in these different fields as strong evidence and strong argumentation are very different. And so it takes a lot of. And especially scientists sort of enculturated into thinking that our mode of evidence seeking and our mode of argumentation is superior to everybody else's. So it's a lot of, like, chipping away at scientific hubris to be able to understand and appreciate the perspectives that come from fields in the humanities and social sciences and appreciate that they bring ways of seeing the world that we simply do not have access to as within the scientific way of seeing the world. My undergrad was at a liberal arts institution. I was interested in history and English and other humanities fields. But also my advisor would not sign my card if I took only science classes. My, like, course enrollment card, which was a great thing for me. And so I like to believe That I came in with maybe a little bit less of that hubris than many of my science colleagues. But we've also worked with several other. It's not just the two of us in this sort of collaboration. There are a number of biologists as well as a number of feminist science studies scholars who are increasingly interested in these kinds of collaborations to actually. With the goal of actually changing the way that science happens. And we've struggled through a lot of these biodynamics between the fields and between us as individuals as a result. And I'm so curious to hear what Melina has to think about this as well.
- [12:35]
B
Yeah, yeah, Melina.
- [12:37]
D
Yeah, thank you.
- [12:38]
C
That is a great observation and question. I agree. I also agree that it's fairly rare for these kinds of collaborations. Obviously, there's lots of. I mean, feminist science studies scholarship is about science. Right. So there's a lot of this sort of outsider looking in. But increasingly we're starting to see more of these more direct, engaged, collaborative efforts. Like Ambika said, we're not the only two doing this, of course. And I'm seeing more and more of it in my field. And I think a lot of it has to do with sort of generational shifts, right. In, you know, the next generation of academics and scholars that. The ways that while we still have a lot of work to do, there is more diversity in scholars and scholarship now. And so the strongest pushback I get from scientists, and of course I still get it, tends to be from kind of the older guard, you know, and folks, you know, peers, in terms of cohorts like Ambika and I, you see, I. I'm seeing less of that pushback. It's. It's. Is not gone, but I'm seeing more and more collaborative work, which is exciting.
- [13:46]
B
Okay, so progress is happening. Social progress, I guess.
- [13:50]
D
I think so.
- [13:51]
B
Yeah. Like. Right. Okay. Okay.
- [13:54]
C
Neat.
- [13:54]
B
Well, look, so this book, Feminism in the Wild Feminism, is obviously relevant to it, but you're. But the take on feminism that you have in the book, your conception of feminism is notably quite broad. Like, on your view, feminism is about many types of oppression and. And not just patriarchy. So one of the things I was hoping you would explain is, is your conception of feminist. Of feminism to us and why you think a broad conception of feminism is better than a. A narrow one that just looks at patriarchy.
- [14:27]
C
Yeah, this is a great question, too. I'll start. And of course, if Amica wants to add, she's welcome to. But, you know, feminists and everything, I'm going To say here, I've learned from intersectional feminists, right? Black feminists, queer feminists, socialist feminists, right? Feminist theory and action has to be about more than only patriarchy because we're all affected by more than only patriarchy, right? We're all navigating multiple systems of oppression in distinctly different ways simultaneously. So a white person could call themselves a feminist, but be racist, classist, homophobic or transphobic, as many white feminists were and unfortunately still are. Right? Or a person of color could call themselves anti racist but be sexist or ableist right at the same time. So it's important to us that our book both identified and made every effort to practice intersectional feminism. Or I myself happen to prefer multi dimensional feminism. So without getting too deep into the feminist theory weeds, the reason I like multi dimensional feminism is because intersectional feminism still sort of assumes that there's this thing called gender that's somehow separate from this thing called race. But in fact, and as we discuss in the book, early European and Anglo American scientists constructed categories of gender through their constructed categories of race, right? They defined white men and women against black men and women in particular, as if people categorized as black are somehow fundamentally different from people categorized as white. And these scientists defined black people not just as different, but also as less evolved forms of human. And so dominant social ideas about what makes someone masculine or feminine depend upon dominant social ideas about what makes someone white or black. Right? So you just can't talk about gender without talking about race, and you can't talk about gender and race without talking about class. Right? I could go on. This is why many scholars use the term racial capitalism. Because the transnational system of African enslavement was foundational to the global emergence of capitalism. Right? And then of course, you have that sexuality and ability. So it's complex theoretically, but it's also complex historically and politically and biologically. Right? So as intersectional feminists say, you know, there we can't have single issue social movements because none of us live single issue lives.
- [17:01]
B
Okay. And Ambika, do you have anything to add?
- [17:04]
D
I think the one thing I'll add to Melina's great exposition on this question is that I think one, it's been really interesting to notice how folks have responded to the title of the book. They'll. So if I give a talk about the book or if they've read the book, they come up to me afterwards and be like, oh, I saw the title. And I was like, why do we still need this? Because I thought we'd figured that out in the 70s and the 80s, because in the 70s and 80s there were in fact a lot of women biologists, often white women biologists, who were starting to push back against some of the very anti patriarchal aspects of who were starting to push back against the patriarchal aspects of sort of conventional biological wisdom at the time. And so for people now, they were like, that's old news, right? But one, and to be fair, a lot of progress was made pushing against patriarchal values embedded in biology starting at that time, if not even earlier. But the way I think the broader conception of feminism allows us to tackle many other dimensions of oppressive systems that have been embedded in biology and biological knowledge so far in this sort of holistic, comprehensive way that focusing on any single issue would not allow us to do.
- [18:38]
B
Okay, right. I kind of.
- [18:40]
C
So.
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B
Well, I guess one of the things I was wondering about when I was thinking about feminism and, and how it should be understood was just, sorry. I mean, so I understand that there are many kinds of oppression and they're all very, very closely related to each other.
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A
And.
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B
One might even think that they're so closely related to each other that they're kind of hard to conceptually distinguish. I mean, we do conventionally distinguish them by having different names for them, but if you need to sort of understand all the other ones in order to understand the one you're talking about, it's almost like the differences between them become extremely superficial or something like that. So I mean, one of the questions I sort of had in my mind was like, could you have just used a different word than feminism when writing the book? Like, would it have been, wait, could you have used some word other than feminism that targets a different kind of oppression? Would the book have been the same if you had said, this is anti capitalism in the wild, or this is anti ableism in the wild or something like that? And I feel like the book would have felt rather different if you'd used a different word. Is the choice to use the word feminism? Is it. Is that kind of sociological choice? I mean, you're both, you're both women and you both identify as feminists, and one of you in particular is a feminist science studies scholar. So you have a history sort of thinking about feminism and doing. Looking at feminist literature and whatnot. Is it more that like history and sociology that makes the word feminism the most appropriate rather than some other word? I mean, because actually it. One could have used a generic term like anti oppression in the wild or something like that. Is feminism like, uniquely Appropriate because of who the authors are, is that. I don't know if that question makes sense.
- [20:30]
C
Yeah, I think I understand what you're asking. It's another great question. Thank you. So for me, you know, it's. It was a very intentional choice. Right. Of course I identify as a feminist and I do feminist science studies scholarship. Right. But reason I do that and the reason I identify in such a way is because for me, feminism has always been about. Well, perhaps not always. Right. There's different kinds of feminism, but the feminism I subscribe to has always been about tackling these multiple interlocking systems of oppression simultaneously. Because you can't just fix one. Right. In ways that I think it's fair to say that anti racist efforts or anti capitalist efforts have not. Right. There's a, you know, feminism, feminist movement is certainly flawed and there are certainly problematic figures who identify as feminists. But I think feminist theory in action has long had this tradition of being reflexive, being self critical. And so I wanted to bring that genealogy to this project. And I don't know if those other social movements have always had that same kind of commitment to intersectionality.
- [21:47]
B
Okay, that's interesting. Ambika, do you have anything to add?
- [21:51]
D
I guess what I'll add sort of builds on this idea that for better or for worse, and probably mostly for worse, as the domain of science has expanded out of being purely that of upper class straight white men, some of the first people to come into that were probably upper class straight white women. Right. So the history, if we're thinking about, okay, how do we meet the reader, where they're at in terms of helping them to see the effects of who we are as people on the science that we do. The access point of anti patriarchy is, is a relatively straightforward one. And so you'll notice in the book, that's one of the earlier chapters in the book. And we build from there into what I think of as like harder to grok aspects of multidimensional oppressive systems. Right. Like we get to the effects of race and racism and ableism and even capitalism later in the book. We don't start there because I think it would shift the audience that we were able to engage with rather than if starting with the anti patriarchal, sort of more narrowly defined feminists. So it's also sort of in terms of thinking about the audience of this book and wanting to have it be accessible to as many people as possible. We think of feminism as an entry point that will allow us to reach a broader swath of people than if we had chosen other, just based on the history of what biological knowledge generation has been like.
- [23:46]
B
So, yeah, okay, great. Yeah, thanks for your answers. Those are helpful. Okay. So your book argues that oppressive conceptual frameworks influence the way scientists understand animal behavior. And it also argues that when these frameworks influence animal behavior science, they reinforce or further entrench themselves. I was hoping you would explain these claims and provide some illustrative examples.
- [24:10]
D
Sure. So I think the example I'm going to use is the one that I started with in my career, which was that of lizard territorial behavior and the general notion that who we are as people affects the science that we do. We like to think, when we learn about the scientific method in school, we like to think of it as this very blank slate. I, as a scientist, come to some data. I am able somehow to observe it perfectly and neutrally and objectively and then fit it into, sort of use that data to test certain theories. And then if the data do not support the theory, I like very, very cleanly cut myself off and move on to a different theory, modify my hypothesis or whatever. And the reality of doing science is very, very different from that. And so especially when we're watching animal behavior, if you've spent any time watching animal behavior, you'll know that you're thinking about what's going on as you're watching it. You're trying to make sense of it.
- [25:19]
C
Right.
- [25:20]
D
And you have some ideas that you've come into it with. And yes, sometimes the data fit those, sometimes they don't. But the process of actually. And then you have, of course, these measurements that you've decided to take, and you want them to be as repeatable as possible. But there's so many decisions that go in even to deciding which animals you're going to watch, where you're going to watch them, how, what the conditions are, what data you're going to collect. And all of those decisions are being influenced by your preconceived notions, by the theories you're bringing, by the history of all of those theories and so on. So with Anola's territoriality. So basically the idea of territoriality is just that it's the exclusive. It's that individual animals have areas that they. That are sort of their areas exclusively, and they engage in aggressive interactions with other individuals to keep them out of that area. And often it's within a sex. So, like, males prevent other males from entering their territories, females prevent other females from entering their territories, and so on, and that these areas tend to be fixed and stable. It's sort of like property ownership, right? Like I buy a house, it's my house. Similarly, an animal decides or fights for or obtains somehow a territory and then it's that animal's territory. And I'm not making that analogy lightly. That in and of itself is a result of thinking through with the feminist science studies scholar Ashton Wessner, what work is territoriality doing? But that's later sort of what work is it doing in terms of furthering dominant cultural or political narratives? And the idea of property ownership was one of them. But anyway, so that's the theory of, that's sort of how the framework of territoriality has been used to understand the space use and social interactions of many, many animals. And when I started watching Anolus lizards in detail initially, I was trying to sort of study territoriality in a much less well known, much more poorly studied lizard species in India. And I found that those lizards were not behaving in what I thought of as territorial ways at all, even though I expected them to for a variety of reasons. They were moving all over the place. They were not staying in the same area. They were interacting with all kinds of individuals, ones who are close by and ones who are further away. And so my PhD advisor was like, well, if you want to study questions of territoriology, you should come and study them in anoles, because we know they're territorial, right? And so I started doing that and I started seeing similarly anomalous behavior in annules as well. Individuals were moving all over the place, not necessarily on a day to day basis, but sometimes they'd stay in one place for a week or two and then move hundreds of meters away and interact with lizards who you wouldn't otherwise have thought they would interact with. And all of this was sort of juxtaposed onto previous existing data that suggested that females actually mate with multiple males. Under the framework of territoriality, you don't expect females to mate with multiple males because the thought of territoriality is that a male is a male's territory encloses multiple female territories and he is maintaining exclusive mating access to them by fighting with any other males that try and come close by. And so this data that had previously existed from other researchers on female multiple mating, most of it in fact, had remained unpublished. And if talking to the authors of those data sets, the people who had collected those data and why that data had remained unpublished, they had all faced pushback from senior scientists, reviewers, editors of journals saying, this doesn't make sense, given what we know about annulus Lizards. And I don't agree with your framing. So all of those data sets had sat unpublished. And so there was enough pieces of data that to me at least suggested that territoriality didn't quite. There's a good reason to say that territorial reality doesn't quite fit what these lizards are actually doing. And so I did empirical work that basically asked, what if we set aside the whole question of territoriality, we don't make a strong claim as to whether or not these animals are territorial. We just look at their movement, we look at their social interactions, what can we say about them? And so that was one piece of work. But I also was interested in where this idea actually came from. Like, how is it that we had decided that Anolus lizards were territorial? And so for that I looked at basically every paper that had been published before 2016 on Anolus territoriality. The first one was in 1933. So it was a reasonably contained period of time, about 100 and something papers. And what you could see with that historical sort of progression was that the very first claims of territoriality in Anolus lizards, the data supporting that were not convincing, not compelling. And more importantly, at no point had anyone sort of, were there sort of major efforts in the published literature to contrast territoriality with any other explanation, any other hypothesis for why these animals, like, for how these animals social lives and movement patterns were structured, right? And so, and then this is where it gets, this is, I'm addressing now the part of your question which asks, like, how does an idea get reinforced or further entrenched with territoriality? It's really interesting because once you have decided that an animal species is territorial, the way you will design your studies to examine their behavior in and of itself is going to be influenced by territoriality. So if you think an animal is territorial with relatively, with say a territory size of 10 meters, right, and they're reasonably dense, it is reasonable in a behavioral study with maybe not a giant sample size to have a study area of, by like 50 meters by 50 meters, because then you'll get within that. If say 10 meters territory diameter is maximum, you'll get a reasonable number of individual territories within that 50 by 50 square. But if your animals are moving hundreds of meters, right, or even 100 meters, anything over 50 and you and your, but your site is 50 by 50, you will not detect that movement because your animal is most likely moving out of your field site. And you just won't know where it's gone. You'll be like, okay, that dude disappeared. Not sure, maybe it got eaten by a snake. It's just sort of the nature of the data collection. Similarly, if you think that territories are stable over time and the animals stay in the same territory over the whole breeding season, you don't actually have to sample, like don't have to collect data for the whole breeding season. You can say, I'm going to pick one month within the breeding season, get really good data for that one month and assume that that is representative of the whole season. But if your animals are moving through time at a sort of slower pace, right, every three to four weeks, say there's on average, there is relocation, then you're going to miss that. And so the decision. And that in those ways you end up being more likely to conclude your data set will show more stability both spatially and temporally than is real because you assumed that same thing going in. And so you end up in this positive feedback loop. And then of course, there are other cultural ways that the thing I mentioned about data sets remaining unpublished, I saw that time and time again in that hundred year data set that happened. There were times when we found PhD dissertations that challenged territoriality, but no associated paper or a conference abstract that questioned territoriality, but no associated paper. Right. And so there are all of these. I strongly advocate this sort of deep dive into the history of one question because it's so revealing of this human influence on the human perspective influence on the science that we do. We have other examples that we can go into, but I realized that one took a little bit of time, so maybe I'll pause.
- [34:25]
B
Okay. But it's a fascinating example. Melina, do you have anything to add?
- [34:30]
C
No, that was great. And like she said we could go on, but I think that was very thorough.
- [34:36]
B
Right, okay. Yeah, thanks. Well, yeah, I should move on to my next official question really soon, but I think I should maybe mention that part of what I was sort of thinking about when I wrote the question I asked was that, I mean, one of the things your book argues is that so animal behavior scientists have various prejudices and they use those prejudices to understand themselves and other human beings. And then they sort of, you know, they project those prejudices onto animals and use theoretical frameworks that assume those prejudices. And one kind of, I guess, entrenchment that happens here is when animal behavior scientists see construct, I guess, scientific frameworks and experiments that just project their prejudices onto animals and then understand animal behavior that way, it then reinforces the idea that humans are that way. So I think part was, I I think part of the idea in the book was that animal behavior scientists think that the way we understand animals will in turn affect, or they implicitly think that maybe the way we understand animals will also affect the way we understand ourselves. So there's something at stake here. Like if we, using the example of territoriality, if we see animals as being territorial and everyone thinks that that in turn reinforces certain thoughts that we have about ourselves, thoughts about say maybe private property and the naturalness of being in a system, the supposed naturalness of being in a system where private property exists. Um, am I, am I right about that? That seems like me, like a super important idea in the book.
- [36:11]
D
Yes. I couldn't have put it better.
- [36:13]
B
Okay, Melina, do you have anything to, to say or, or should I move on?
- [36:18]
C
I mean, absolutely, I agree. And we. There's property and territory. There's of course a lot we can say about the ways that scientists naturalize unequal social relations, particularly in terms of gender and race and sexuality, ability. So yeah, of course that's the problem, right. That, you know, well intentioned or not, or consciously or not, you know, all people cannot help but perceive things through their own, through their own social locations and historical locations. And so as much as we might try to be objective and neutral, we can't ever fully be objective and neutral, you know?
- [36:58]
B
Okay. Okay. And I'm sure we'll, we'll talk more about that later on because some, some of the questions prompt that kind of thought. Okay, so your book discusses a number of intersecting paradigms within animal behavior science. But it became clear, I think, especially around the last chapter, that the overarching paradigm is biological determinism, that the other, the other paradigms are kind of in different ways fit within biological determinism. And so I was hoping you would explain what biological determinism is and that you would also give us some examples of it. And I was also hoping that you would explain why biological determinism is really problematic.
- [37:33]
D
Yeah, so first of all, I'm really interested that that was your takeaway as the overarching paradigm. I think I kind of agree. I think it's definitely a key paradigm that we tackle. But there are others too, that sort of the optimality paradigm being the other one, that really, I think the two of them lock together to explain a lot of the problems and challenges of animal behavior as a whole at the moment. But biological determinism is basically the idea that traits expressed by organisms are somehow locked into their biology and specifically locked into their genes. So the assumption of biological determinism that genes or possibly other dimensions of biology are determining what an organism looks like, what its physiology is like, how it behaves, and so on. That's the assumption behind claims like, oh, it's in your genes or in this animal's genes to be aggressive or dull or diabetic or whatever. Right? And you can see even just from those examples that there's stakes there, right? Having a certain behavioral interaction with another organism and being like, I couldn't help it, I'm anthropomorphizing here for an animal, or maybe it's a person saying this, I couldn't help it. That's just how it is. It's my biology is very different than thinking more critically about where those behaviors may come from or where a certain health condition may come from. And that, of course, shapes what we can do about it also. So biological determinism is sort of obviously societally problematic when applied to humans, because if biology or genes are the core explanation for something, then there isn't much we can do about it. And that cuts us off from thinking about creative solutions to inequities and injustices that might be pervasive in society for reasons that have to do with how power is distributed and how resources are distributed. Those get attributed to biology instead. Right? Like if we think that, say, for example, the real reason that you're diabetic is because of your biology, for example, then we're not going to think very hard about how to solve the problem of food deserts and the lack of fresh vegetables and meat in poorer areas where people are instead of forced by price and convenience to eat the highly sort of processed foods that we know can contribute to conditions like diabetes. And I think Melina might go in more to talking about those societal dimensions. But even from a scientific perspective, biological determinism is often unsatisfying as an explanation. And my favorite example of this is the case of looking at sexual selection in these birds called landstaled mannequins, which are these remarkable Central American birds in which males are dramatically colored and battened in red and blue and black, and they do these dancing displays in pairs or groups of males. And the behavioral ecologist Emily Duvall has spent over 25 years trying to understand sexual selection in these birds. And most of this time she spent testing traditional theories of sexual selection, which are rooted in the idea that female choice of males is a genetic leader. Demonstrate that's sort of a baseline assumption for how those theories work. And for 25 years, Dr. Duvall did not see results that supported those traditional theories. And she looked everywhere, Believe me, she turned almost all of the stones, leaving no stone undone. And finally through all of this, she started thinking. She became more and more convinced that it was worth looking elsewhere outside of these traditional theories. And a couple years ago published, along with several other behavioral ecologist and theoretical biologist colleagues, this really elegant theory that does explain the variation that she's seen over these 25 years in this remarkable data set on both male and female mannequin behavior and morphology. And what she. And the core assumption of that model has nothing to do with biological determinism for female choice and instead posits that females are learning how to choose mates by observing other females. And so insisting on biological determinism has like, and this is, and Dr. Duvall and colleagues theory is one that doesn't apply just to mannequins. It's one that could apply quite broadly across animals, where in many other species, the traditional theories of sexual selection have been sort of not that powerful at explaining behavior, behavior or morphological variation. And so insisting on biological determinism now for decades in this realm, has cut us off from exploring both more interesting theories and potentially more realistic and more explanatorily powerful theories for why natural variation is the way that it is.
- [43:00]
B
Okay, thanks. Do you have anything to add, Melina?
- [43:03]
C
Sure. I mean, that was really well put. I'll just add sort of the classic what immediately comes to mind with this biological determinism question is the claim that we often hear even today that, oh, boys will be boys. Right? And as you know, Ambika alluded to, when we reduce a particular behavior to biology or genes, and in the case of boys will be boys, it's often reduced to hormones, right? To testosterone. Basically. It's making an excuse for bad behavior and unequal social relations more broadly. Right? It's using the boys will be boys excuse. And of course, I'm talking about people here, right? And as opposed to other animals. But that justifies men's power over women or men's violence against women or men's violence, period. Right? Against anybody by reducing their behavior to testosterone. When of course, behavior is far more complicated and far more socially produced than that. Right? Testosterone doesn't cause aggression, even biologically speaking. I mean, even in the, you know, non human animal world, it's never that simple. And anyway, you know, females have testosterone too, Right. It also really limits what it means to be a man or a woman or masculine or feminine or trans or gender non conforming. Right. Our biologies simply do not determine or otherwise program and limit who we are and how we behave. And again, this is just as true of humans as it is of other animals. There are infinite ways not only to be male or female or something in between. There, there are also infinite ways that an individual organism might express or demonstrate aggression or fear or pleasure or humor. Right. In any case, of course, both scientists and humanists have made very strong arguments for discarding the overly reductive concept of binary sex, for that matter. But, yeah, there's. Not only can you not reduce a behavior to genetic programming or to DNA structure. Right. Or to a hormone, but it's, you can't even necessarily call a particular behavior aggression, or even if a human or non human animal is feeling aggressive, they might demonstrate that differently. Right. So it's, it's certainly overly reductive and ends up justifying a lot of injustice.
- [45:37]
B
Okay, Right, thanks. So in my remaining questions, I often use the word biological determinism. And I just want to say I think that you should feel free to answer remaining questions in a way that rejects my judgment that biological determinism was the main paradigm. So if you want to, like, play, play with your response, like, answer in a kind of a flexible way that you're, you're, that's more than welcome. But I mean, I'm going to just say the questions the way I'd initially intended still, which, so in this case, biological determinism, I mean, you, you, you, you noted that it's a highly problematic paradigm, but you also argue that sociologically speaking, it's, it's a very resilient one. So I was hoping that you would explain why anomalous data. So scientific data that biological determinism struggles to explain is unlikely on its own to lead to a paradigm shift.
- [46:34]
D
Yeah. So this idea of paradigm shifts is sort of traceable directly to the philosopher Thomas Kuhn, who came up with this notion, and he really did a great job in his landmark paper of explaining how anomalous data on its own does not lead to shifts in the way that science is practiced in theory. That's how science is supposed to work, where we see data that doesn't fit with a preconceived hypothesis or theory, and then we change the hypothesis of theory and test that one, test that alteration. But what Kuhn observed about how science actually works, and he saw that in reality, scientists often will close in on particular ways of explaining things. Like a field will close in, and then scientists become very, very skilled at fitting any data that they see. From their data collection and research into that particular way of explaining things. And a really great example of this from animal behavior actually is optimality thinking in general and optimality optimal foraging theory in particular. So just to sort of exemplify, there's a famed and very popular animal behavior textbook that says something like, essentially, if the predictions of an optimality model are wrong, we change that specific model, but that doesn't mean that the optimality approach is wrong. And so essentially there is nothing, no result that could prompt a researcher to question that paradigm of optimality in the first place. Right. We're stuck within the framework of optimality. The field as a whole has decided that optimality is the right way of thinking about foraging behavior. And so you make these little tweaks to your models within that framework of optimality, but there is no data that would actually cause you to change and move away from that overarching framework. And Kuhn thought of these commitments to particular explanations as sort of arbitrary. He didn't really have an explanation for when and why you might see either an entrenchment of a dominant explanation or a shift away from it. But this is where feminist science studies sees things very differently because it recognizes that power structures in human society can favor certain ways of seeing things over others. And so there's a great quote from the feminist science studies scholar, I believe, and philosopher Helen Langeno, who said the feminist scientific revolution will come about not because empirical anomalies accumulate and throw the current paradigm into crisis, which is sort of more what Kuhn thought happened, but because changes in social values and relationships require a different way of knowing the natural world.
- [49:28]
B
Okay, thanks. Do you have anything to add, Melina?
- [49:31]
C
Yeah, I love that Helen Longino quote as well. I mean, I think biological determinism is this sort of zombie like idea that never wants to die. Because admitting, you know, confronting, acknowledging that male violence, to continue as my previous example, cannot be reduced to testosterone specifically, or even biologically, more biology more generally, but is rather an outcome of unequal social relations. And injustice means confronting power. Right? And confronting power asymmetries and social injustices is not something that the powerful want the disempowered to do.
- [50:10]
B
Right. Okay. Yeah, thanks. Okay, so your book argues that members of oppressed groups have perspectives that are particularly helpful for challenging the biological determinist paradigm. And I suppose the other paradigms you discussed too. I was hoping you would explain the value of marginalized perspectives and that you would give us some illustrative examples.
- [50:30]
C
Yeah, I could start on this one. Another great Question. Thank you. So, you know, we talk in a book, the book about this. It's sort of technically the terms often called standpoint theory and feminist standpoint theory. But basically this theory points out that. And it's sort of obvious when you think about it, right, that like, people who are oppressed by a given system are therefore in the best position to critique that system. Right. Precisely because of their subjugated position within it. You know, it's those experiencing the marginalization and the oppression who both fundamentally understand what's wrong with the system that's producing that marginalization and oppression because of their lived experiences of those injustices and harms. Right. In terms of the biological, challenging biological determinism specifically, I think. I mean, again, you know, when, when it comes to feminism and particularly feminist science studies, as, as Amica pointed out, you know, the initial critiques and even among biologists themselves were from predominantly white women who were pushing back against these patriarchal things that were being argued as somehow unavoidable and inevitable and just, you know, boys will be boys, men are from Mars, women are from Venus kind of nonsense. Right. And so it was only because they were women scientists who had their particular social experiences being socialized as women in a patriarchal society that they could see, like, hey, wait a minute, there's something wrong here. Like, there's nothing natural about this. Right. But they wouldn't have necessarily noticed that if they hadn't experienced the marginalization themselves. Right. And it's, you know, it's not as if every single early scientist was like overtly and proudly and explicitly sexist. Right. I think, I'm sure they thought, I mean, many of them probably were or are, but I think many of them thought, oh no, this is, you know, I'm just observing here, I'm just observing how a scorpion courtship, for example. Right. And of course, that observation of scorpion courtship is all wrapped up in like, you know, dominant human ideologies of patriarchy. Right. And so only someone who does not benefit in the same way from the patriarchy is going to notice, like, wait a minute, this is, this is a problem.
- [53:04]
B
Okay, thanks. Do you have anything to say in addition? Ambika? Okay, so your book argues that biological determinism should be replaced with a paradigm that sees animal behavior as both contingent and co constituted. I was hoping that you would explain contingency and co constitution and also why you think they're promising concepts. And I was also hoping that you would just give us some examples of how these concepts apply to animal behavior science.
- [53:32]
D
Absolutely. I'M coming around now, as I think about this, to your idea that actually biological determinism is the overarching paradigm, because there's a way in which even adaptationist thinking or optimality thinking is deterministic, right? This idea that we know how things are going to play out because this one, animals behave optimally. And that is true. And so contingency and co constitution both challenge this idea of determinism because they say, hey, it's not that simple to know how things are going to play out. Causation is not that simple in the natural world or in the human world. And so in terms of, by analogy to the social sciences and humanities, it's essentially trying to shift animal behavior away from this fealty to economic deterministic thinking to a more historical, not unpredictable. But that being unpredictable doesn't mean you can't think about it, doesn't mean you can't have an analysis. It just shifts the shape of what that analysis looks like. So to define contingency, we borrowed from the historian William Sewell, who basically described it thus. The idea of contingency is that events unfold through time and actions have consequences. And once an action has been taken, you can't reverse it, but the consequences can be modified by subsequent actions. So essentially, time moves forward, stuff happens. And this unfolding of actions is contingent. That means that every act is part of a sequence of actions and its effects are profoundly dependent upon when it happens. So everything depends on things that came before, which is a very historical way of thinking about the world. And so essentially the argument is that evolutionary processes and biological processes are at their heart, historical processes. And so we should analyze them thus. And co constitution is something we've actually talked about already in the feminist science studies context, or even in the context of when we were defining feminism, is that you can't really separate one dimension of a process or of an organism, of a concept from its other dimensions, that you have to understand them together. And in feminist science studies, we often think about this as the relationship, the inseparability of any facet of nature from how and when we come to know about that facet of nature and what we come to know about it. So as we observe nature, we are changing, and the nature we observe is changing. We're constantly co constituted. But this idea of becoming together, of like always and continuously forming one another, also applies to interactions between organisms and their environments. And this is an idea that's very dominant these days in the idea, in the sort of concepts of niche construction. But that can be traced back to the Marxist biologists Richard Levens and Richard Lewontin, who have said that the organism and the environment are not actually separately determined. Just as there is no organism without an environment, so there is no environment without an organism. So there's multiple different routes here. But there's this idea of inseparability that you can't think of. You can't separate out genes from environment, from anything else that shapes how the biology of an organism becomes what it is. And so thinking about examples gets really interesting because these are not really frameworks that people very often, biologists very often apply explicitly. So we have to do some legwork to see the connections between contingency and co constitution and examples in nature. But the example we talked about before of the social development of female choice in mannequins, female mate choice is a good example because you can think about how that. So according to the model proposed by Dr. Duvall and colleagues, that pushes back against genetic determinism of female choice, the female, who is a female, is learning from other females how to choose a mate. And so she's watching other females as that female interacts with males, right? That's going to depend on which female she happens to learn from, which males they happen to encounter and watch. And what does all of that depend on? That depends on the density of birds in that area, depends on how they're moving through that space. It depends on food availability. It depends on light and other visual conditions in the places that these males happen to be. There is so much entanglement between the trait itself that we're thinking about female choice and factors that are both external to the animals themselves and also that are not determined or even not determinable and certainly not coded in any genes, right? So it starts to really show both the utility of contingency and these dependencies and co constitution and those dependencies on shaping traits. And really the upshot that we have to wrap our heads around and this can be a difficult thing to do, is that there is no true cause. We really have to commit to true multi causality and over determination that any one thing can be explained by many, many, many things. And that the truest cause is not genetics especially, but there is no truest cause. And that truest cause is definitely not genetics. And also that causes operate in multiple levels of organization, not just the genes. And traditionally I think most biologists will hear this and say like, oh, you're constructing a straw man. Of course, we all believe that everything matters and that is true. But you'll see if you start paying attention that there's a secret commitment or maybe an implicit commitment to being like, yeah, everything matters, but the genes are really the most important thing, which is still a commitment to genetic determinism. So that shift away from determinism towards contingency and co constitution requires us forcing ourselves or practicing over and over again to, to commit and recommit to multicausality.
- [60:20]
B
Okay, thanks. Melina, do you have anything to add?
- [60:23]
C
That was really beautifully explained. Thank you, Umika. The only thing I want to add is I was thinking of this as you were talking that, you know, I wonder if there's not only this. For sure, I agree. There's this commitment to genes and you know, science study scholars have written about this. There's this famous book called the Century of the Gene, for example, and sort of the, the social and cultural and historical preconditions for, for creating this scientific commitment. Right. But I wonder too if part of it is also just that because it is so complex, because it does become impossible to disentangle what causes what, or because you can't even talk about, you know, to return to our earlier discussion, right. Gender and race do not exist as separate things, right? They, they themselves are co constituted. So it almost gets to a point where it's like, how do we talk about anything? Like how do we study or explain anything? It's almost like the English language or, you know, Western epistemology and ontology doesn't allow us to really describe and understand the infinite complexity of the world and our experiences moving through it. So I just, I'm wondering, you know, just kind of a thinking out loud now, like, is that desire or impulse to reduce, to categorize, to separate, to design these chains of causality? Is that because otherwise it's just this like mess that we can't possibly navigate. I don't know.
- [61:57]
D
Yeah, that's totally. I agree with everything that Melina just said and I think that's one of the feat. That's feedback that I get or like a question that I get so often when I'm talking to scientists about this work is like, okay, I agree with everything you're saying, but what do I do now? How do I do things differently? And that's where it's the question. That's a big question. It's a great question. And we have some ideas, of course, but ultimately it prompts everybody to be thinking more about like, yes, what would it look like if we were not committed to these little, these like simple, relatively simple piecemeal explanations that are, that are necessarily reductive, but just studies that hold all of that complexity. And the truth is we don't have examples of how to do it. We don't know yet how to do it. Right. But that should be exciting to scientists rather than. I mean, it can be scary too. Of course, that's fine. But like, it's also exciting because the work of when you know the answer already, kind of like when you know it's like, oh, the answer is inner genes. Animals are going to behave optimally and there's a gene for all the things. It's sort of. Thomas Kuhn described this as sort of like puzzle solving. Right. It's not the same as building new ways of seeing the world and testing those out. And so hopefully the work, yeah, it gets more difficult, but also gets more interesting and more satisfying to do. That's the hope, at least.
- [63:32]
B
Okay, thanks. We have so little time left, really. But I do feel like I need to say like this. The chapter where you discuss contingency and co. Constitution and the idea of bringing in a new paradigm, that was probably the most exciting chapter for a lot of animal study scholars, I think, because it made it, it opened up the possibility or the thought that it makes a lot of sense to see animals as agents, as beings who aren't just being moved about by external forces, but who are deciding themselves how to behave, that they're exercising something like freedom. This idea is something that animal studies scholars care a lot about. They think that the idea that the rejection of the idea that animals have freedom is a kind of prejudice that a lot of people have grounded in human supremacism. This idea, I think, really came out in that, in this chapter. And I just wanted to say put that out there because I, I think that's something that listeners are going to be really interested in. I, I should move on very soon. But do you either of you want to say anything in response to what I just said?
- [64:40]
C
Thank you for that feedback and observation. I. It makes me so happy to hear actually that there is this whole group of thinkers and actors in the human world who are insisting upon animal agency. Right. Because that in and of itself, you know, speaking of like shattering paradigms and confronting power. Right. If you accept and acknowledge that animals have agency and they're not just. Not only sort of.
- [65:16]
D
Batted about by.
- [65:18]
C
External conditions, but also not programmed by their genes. Right. Then you have to confront all the kinds of violence that humans have enacted upon animals. Right. Whether it's destroying their habitat or incarcerating them in industrial agriculture systems. Right. So again, it gets at these really fundamental questions of power and struggle that I think are really important to confront.
- [65:50]
B
Yeah, thanks. Anything to add, Ambeka?
- [65:53]
D
No, I think thank you for identifying agency as that missing piece because it does underlie a lot of the new paradigm and also just sort of the. It's a crucial component of contingency for show as well as co constitution. So it is again, a key idea.
- [66:10]
B
Okay, thanks. Well, look, I've taken up a lot of your time. I'd like to thank each of you again for joining us to talk about your book, Feminism in the How Human Biases Shape Our Understanding of Animal Behavior. Just to remind everyone, this book was published in 2025 by the MIT Press. The only other question I have for you is whether you're currently working on any projects and if so, what are you working on?
- [66:31]
D
I am not working on any writing projects at the moment. I have. I'm working on growing a baby which will hopefully come into the world in a few months.
- [66:41]
B
Congratulations.
- [66:42]
D
Thank you. And so I have lots of thoughts coming from that whole experience. It's been a strangely complicated pregnancy and I had a mystery illness. I still don't have a diagnosis for about two months of it. And so lots of thoughts on like systems and medical systems and the body as a system. And although we don't know about it, that feels very connected to many of the questions in feminism in the wild. So hopefully I'll write about all of that someday, but not anytime soon.
- [67:08]
B
Yeah. Okay, cool. How about you, Melina?
- [67:12]
C
Thank you for asking. I mean, I sort of hint at this in the. Towards the end of the book, but I've been working about a. I've been working on, excuse me, a third book project about the gender, race and class and also ecological and technological politics of hunting dogs. So more specifically English pointers. And my pointer Pepper is featured in the book. You know, and this is a breed of dogs that unlike most dog breeds today, are actually several hundred years old. Western European hunters have bred and trained pointers since the 14th century to point upland birds like grouse, quail and pheasant. And I'm interested in how specific humans sociocultural ideologies and practices of artificial selection and hunting cultures. Right. Have shaped the material. Right. Biologies of these particular animals and hence their so called natural behaviors. Right. Speaking of contingency and co constitution, there are things that English pointers do that humans claim is bred and you know, is just their genes. But of course those particular genes only exist because of the people who are artificially selecting for those genes. Right. So, yeah, it's. It's tentatively titled bread in captivity. 200 years of gender, Race, and Gundogs.
- [68:34]
B
Okay, neat. Best of luck with. With this book project. That sounds awesome.
- [68:39]
C
Thank you.
- [68:40]
B
Okay, great. Well, thanks again for. For joining us, and I hope you both have a great day.
- [68:45]
C
Thank you so much.