Science briefs
New books and a challenging study
Before tackling more Big Issues (think the intertwining of race-gender/sex-sexuality in science or the banning of trans althletes from sports participation), I can’t resist a little more reporting on New Science.
First, the books on gender/sex diversity in the non-human biological world keep pouring in. In this post I’ll alert you to three of them (plus a related fourth). Second, I’ll review a new science finding that raises deep questions about what, if anything, separates humans from other animals.
Some Books
Feminism in the wild: How human biases shape our understanding of animal behavior, by Ambika Kamath and Melina Packer, ties in nicely with my last substack on the four sexes of Ruff.1 Kamath and Packer open with the three sexes of salmon—cohoe salmon—to be precise. This salmon species has a sex variant that produces eggs (sex #1), and two that make sperm—a bigger more-errr-assertive Hooknose (sex #2) and a smaller, presumed-to-be-sneakier Jack that fertilizes broods when it can (sex #3). (Remember that these fish do not “have sex”. Instead the female releases a wad of eggs into the sea and the various males try to muscle in and layer on their sperm.) The usual story is that the Hooknose’s size and aggressive attitude attracts females, while the Jack only gets its way by sneak attack. Researchers who hold this stereotyped view often ignore observations on Jacks. The humans who run some fish hatcheries even prevent Jacks from fertilizing stock eggs. That is, having bought into the story that the large aggressive male is really the more “natural”, the human agents offer #2 an evolutionary boost by selecting against #3. Talk about playing G-d!
It turns out however, that if you include all the field observations, you can make the case that female salmon actually prefer the Jacks. So we have two possible stories: females prefer the big, aggressive fish and the smaller, quieter one has to sneak in for a quick lay. OR, the female prefers the smaller, quieter fish and the Hooknoses have evolved their size and power so that they can just overpower the beloved Jack. The truth is that we don’t know which story better reflects the Ms. Salmon’s POV because researchers’ gender stereotypical views have stopped them from making complete observations and entertaining more than one interpretation of the data.
Feminism in the Wild abounds with such examples. In diverse species the males battle each other for territories, tracts of land where they set up shop and optimize mating opportunities. With bluebirds, for example, scientists assumed that having a great territory attracted a female who monogamously devoted herself to raising HIS babies. Before the days of DNA identification, nobody could say otherwise, and the story of male as provider and female as devoted mother was compelling. It’s just that it wasn’t true. Once scientists could identify individual DNA profiles, they discovered—sometimes to the horror of their inner Victorian—that territory or not, females frequently mated with several males. In a bluebird nest those beautiful blue eggs often contained developing half-sibs; pater territorialis provided real estate for babes that he did not genetically father. Although, of course, his nest and food provision is an important—albeit non-genetic—form of fathering.
Kamath and Packer also delve into racial presuppostions in biology, and what I would call capitalist and colonial assumptions woven into evolutionary theory. The linking threads were developed by feminist scholars—a vibrant group of scientists, philosophers and historians who in the 1980s started to examine science itself. It is important to name names, and yes, I was one of this group. So too were Sandra Harding, who, sadly, just recently passed away, Donna Haraway, Ruth Hubbard and Helen Longino. In another recently-published book, Our science, ourselves: How gender, race, and social movements shaped the study of science (2024), science writer Christa Kulian illuminated the history of the East Coast (U.S.) wing of the feminist science studies movement. 2
What did these feminists conclude? The outcome of years of work and argument—like John Lewis’s good trouble, this was good argument— is easy to summarize. Scientists try to understand how the world works. But we come at it with preconceived stories (fancily called frameworks or theories), and we try to fit observations into the existing narrative. Feminist science studies theorists pointed out that stories about aggressive males and passive females were not the only possible ones, and that they not-so-weirdly looked a lot like Victorian era white, middle class gender norms. To improve science, scientists need to look through more than one lens, tell more than one story. Because in the end, better, more complete, narratives result. We can liken a story about aggressive, territorial males to a simple nursery rhyme. But what really goes on in the natural world is more akin to a complex novel. War and Peace, anyone?
In 1999, after about a decade of feminist science writing, historian Londa Schiebinger wrote a book called Has Feminism Changed Science.3 Schiebinger concluded that it did then, and Kamath and Packer make it clear that it does now.
Two other shiny new books pile on the evidence: when scientists become more aware of feminist, queer, gender-minority, non-white, anti-colonialist points of view, they look differently at information that has been there all along; they begin to ask different questions,and collect different kinds of data. In The Sexual Evolution: How 500 Million Years of Sex, Gender, and Mating Shape Modern Relationships (2025)4 Nathan Lents, a professor of biology at the City University of New York, shows how what was once a one-off—a heart-warming story, for example, about two male penguins falling in love and hatching an egg together,5 really is the tip of an iceberg of sexual variety and diversity in the animal world. Similarly, as Princeton University anthropologist Agustín Fuentes explains in Sex is a spectrum: the biological limits of the binary (2025), what was once a belief that intersex babies, and children who express transness at young ages, were medically distressed, has transformed into arguments for normal gender/sex variability.6
Well if the weather ever improves, all these books should make for some fascinating summer reading, keeping people stimulated as they soak up a few rays. But in the mean time, I have on immediate offer something amazing to think about.
Some Science
This finding addresses neither race nor gender, but another Big Question: what is it about humans that makes us think we might be worthy of holding dominion over all the other animals? 7 When I was in college my anthropology professor assigned a book by Kenneth P. Oakley called Man the Toolmaker . It offered the latest 1960s-era skinny about cultural anthropology. Nevermind the “Man” part of it. In those days scientists thought that tool making separated humans from the beasts. But then Jane Goodall watched chimpanzees use sticks to fish termites out of nests, and collect rocks to crack open nuts. Tool making was out. O.K. If not tool making, maybe language would fit the bill. But then whales and dolphins started communicating, elephants sent out low frequency rumbles that traveled underground, and a bonobo named Kanzi used pictograms on a keyboard to communicate with his human friend, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh.8 Language was out. And so the search continued.
In the end I don’t think there is an answer. There is no single trait that sets humans above all other beings. And you don’t have to take my word for. Philosophers and cognitive scientists are lining up behind this viewpoint.9 These days what I find fascinating is not what makes us different from other forms of life, but all the things we have in common. Along these lines, a recent article in Science bowled me over.10
I was leafing through the magazine when this photo (below) grabbed my attention. The caption explained that I was staring at a bystander mouse resuscitating an unconsious mouse friend by prying open the friend’s mouth, pulling on the little guy’s tongue and opening its airways. And said bystander mouse had never even taken EMT! I couldn’t not read the article that explained the photograph.
We’ve all seen heart-rending reels and you tube videos of animals interacting with an injured or dead companion. Usually it is a charismatic species—an elephant or a whale or a primate mother holding onto its dead infant. Are these just random anecdotes, or do animals routinely aid injured companions? And mice? Really?
To study rescue behavior more systemmatically, the authors of the Science article housed young mice communally. They also set up a separate test cage where they could video record rescue events for later analysis. One day they would put a subject mouse in a cage with an anesthetized cagemate; on a different day they offered a choice between the anesthetized cage buddy and an alert playmate. The rescuer most often chose saving its downed buddy over playing with an active friend, an choice made more likely the more familiar the rescuer was with the afflicted mouse.
If a mouse found its roommate from the group home lying, immobile, it groomed and bit it. If that didn’t cause the ailing victim to stir, the rescuer began mouth-biting, tongue pulling and even removed foreign objects from its air passages, all resulting in improved airflow to the lungs. Once the downed mouse revived, the rescuer stopped rescuing. The full article offered more detail and nuance, but that image of tiny little mouse hands prying apart the jaws of its unconscious companion sticks with me.
As is the style, the article’s authors concluded, rather formally and cautiously, “Our findings thus suggest that animals exhibit reviving-like emergency responses and that assisting unresponsive group members may be an innate behavior widely present among social animals. Such behavior likely plays a role in enhancing group cohesion and survival.” But I still can’t get much beyond “Wow! Look at that, a mouse doing mouth-to-mouth rescucitation!” We have more in common than we might think with those fuzzy little creatures who sometimes leave poppy-seed sized turds in our kitchen cabinets.
The Four Sexes
Thirty-two years ago I wrote “The Five Sexes”, a critique of the medical treatments of children born with intersex conditions. Not at all accidentally, the essay also took a hard look at the idea that there are only two biological sexes. That essay has traveled far and in many languages. Many people loved it for opening their eyes to the beautiful compl…
A childrens book, based on these penguin dads living at the Central Park Zoo in New York City is now banned in a lot of schools and library.
Genesis 1:26, New International Version
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
See for example: Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness or Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation.
Wenjian Sun et al., Reviving-like prosocial behavior in response to unconscious or dead conspecifics in rodents. Science387,eadq2677(2025).DOI:10.1126/science.adq2677