Lucy Cooke > Quotes

“Males are not genetically programmed to aggressively dominate females. Their ability to do so depends on environmental and social factors. The key ingredient for female empowerment is the strength of the sisterhood, from family to friends, to overthrow an oppressive patriarchy and foster a more egalitarian society.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“After all, God had created all the animals, and only one—mankind—had lost its innocence.”
― Lucy Cooke, The Truth About Animals: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales from the Wild Side of Wildlife

“We are all culturally conditioned to interpret the world within a framework of understanding that’s both deeply ingrained and highly personal.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“A sexist mythology has been baked into biology, and it distorts the way we perceive female animals. In the natural world female form and role varies wildly to encompass a fascinating spectrum of anatomies and behaviours.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“We need to get away from the binary nature of sex assignment,’ Crews ventured. ‘There’s a continuum, with males at one end and females at the other, and variability is continuous between those two types.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“There is a lot of serendipity in science, You can't find answers if you aren't asking the questions. I think you needed to have a woman to look at this to ask the right questions.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“A foraging lifestyle makes it much harder for males to restrict females' movements and access to resources, as they are able to source their own. Once females were restricted in their activities and males gained control of high-quality foodstuffs, like meat, females lost agency and became sexual property. Paternity became an issue, as property was inherited, and patriarchy took hold. The evolution of the capacity for language allowed males to consolidate and increase their control over females because it enabled the creation and propagation of ideologies of male dominance/female subordinance and male supremacy/female inferiority.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“How can sloths exist when they’re such losers?” As a zoologist and founder of the Sloth Appreciation Society I get asked this question a lot. Sometimes “losers” is further defined—“lazy,” “stupid” and “slow” being perennial favorites. And sometimes the query is paired with the rider—“I thought evolution was all about survival of the fittest”—delivered with an air of bemusement or, worse, a whiff of superior species smugness. Sloths are, in fact, one of natural selection’s quirkiest creations, and fabulously successful to boot. Skulking about the treetops barely quicker than a snail, and being covered in algae, infested with insects and defecating just once a week might not be your idea of aspirational living, but then you’re not trying to survive in the highly competitive”
― Lucy Cooke, The Truth About Animals: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales from the Wild Side of Wildlife

“Generations of reproductive biologists assumed females to be sexually monogamous but it is now clear this is wrong,’ Tim Birkhead admitted in his 2000 book Promiscuity.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“Spotted hyenas are unlike all other mammals in that the females are significantly bigger than the males and much more aggressive.”
― Lucy Cooke, The Truth About Animals: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales from the Wild Side of Wildlife

“Natural selection will favour young mothers, who have less stake in the success of the wider group, who aggressively compete for limited resources. This prediction was borne out by the observation that when orca mothers and daughters bred simultaneously, calves born to older mothers were almost twice as likely to die in the first fifteen years of life as those born to the younger mothers.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“Try explaining the need to be passive to a dominant female spotted hyena, and she’ll laugh in your face, after she’s bitten it off. Female animals are just as promiscuous, competitive, aggressive, dominant and dynamic as males.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“Proposed in 1998, it posits that females who step out of the reproductive rat race mid-life and focus their energies on supporting their children (and grandchildren), instead of squeezing out yet more babies, significantly increase their offspring’s chances of survival and, in turn, their own genetic legacy.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“Now we were doomed to play second fiddle to the sperm-shooters for all eternity; a feminine footnote to the macho main event.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“In the sixties and seventies primatology was well and truly hypnotized by showy male dominance systems.This obsession began way back when the science emerged in the 1920s.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“As a defence against infanticide, Hrdy theorized, females are driven to have sex with invading males. This has the effect of protecting the lives of their babies by confusing paternity.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“Darwin’s theory of sexual selection was incubated in misogyny, so it is little wonder that the female animal came out deformed; as marginalized and misunderstood as a Victorian housewife. What is perhaps more surprising, and damaging, is how tough it has been to wash this sexist stain out of science, and how far it has bled.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“Matriphagy is a thing in spiders. The hatchlings of the desert spider Stegodyphus lineatus rely solely upon their mother to provide them with food and nutrients, which she does by regurgitating her own liquified innards. Eventually the hatchlings become so greedy they start tucking straight into her abdomen. Within 2–3 hours they suck her dry until all that remains is her empty exoskeleton.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“Darwin’s sexual stereotypes may have been psychologically compelling to generations of male scientists, but they’ve been overthrown by an army of sexually assertive warblers, langurs and fruit flies, and the intellectually assertive females studying them.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“The myth of grave robbing persisted all the way into the nineteenth century. The Victorian naturalist Philip Henry Gosse was inspired by the hyena to pen particularly purple prose that owes more to Mary Shelley and the fashion for Victorian Gothic horror than it does to the truth. “In the Place of Tombs, gleam two fiery eyes,” he wrote in 1861, in his massively popular Romance of Natural History, “with bristling mane and grinning teeth, the obscene monster glares at you, and warns you to secure a timely retreat.” Other naturalists of the era showed a tad more restraint, but they still described the hyena as “a most mysterious and awful animal,” “rank and coarse” with “revolting habits.” This creature, they decided, was “adapted to gorge on the grossest animal substances, dead or alive, fresh or corrupted,” and as such was “cordially detested by the natives in all countries.”
― Lucy Cooke, The Truth About Animals: Stoned Sloths, Lovelorn Hippos, and Other Tales from the Wild Side of Wildlife

“We have a history of viewing the rest of the animal kingdom as simply here to service our needs. This selfish standpoint has resulted in many of our most misguided mistakes. In these times of mass extinction, we cannot afford to make many more.”
― Lucy Cooke

“All told, the bdelloids appear to have adopted a Frankenstein collage of foreign DNA from more than five hundred different other species.Whether that’s through ingestion or not is up for debate, but these pilfered genes provide the bdelloids with much-needed genetic variation in the absence of sex.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“Langmore’s discovery was indeed profound. It proved that female song wasn’t some recent evolutionary kink, found only in the tropics. Female songbirds had always sung. What’s changed is that, in some northern temperate regions, in the more recently evolved families of songbird, females have, for some reason, ceased singing. Which is a radically different evolutionary scenario than the framework proposed by Darwin.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“Both male and female subordinates remain trapped in a pre-pubescent state. They don’t even develop adult genitalia. So subordinate sex is ruled out in this eusocial system.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“hypothesis’ could provide the missing piece of evolutionary motivation for the grandmother hypothesis to work in other menopausal creatures, like us.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“I joined Claudio on an expedition in search of one of the country’s most fabulous freaks, the incredibly rare Southern Darwin’s frog, which was discovered by the big beard himself in 1834 on his epic five year Beagle voyage. What makes this frog so extraordinary is that it has eschewed conventional pond-based metamorphosis for something more sci-fi: after mating the male guards the fertilized eggs until they are close to hatching, then gobbles them up. Six weeks later, like a scene out of Alien, he barfs up baby frogs. He is the only male animal other than the seahorse to give birth, albeit through his mouth.”
― Lucy Cooke, The Unexpected Truth About Animals: A Menagerie of the Misunderstood

“the duck’s hidden reproductive anatomy reveals a very different story to the one suggested by their outward behaviour. Female ducks are not passive victims but active agents driving their own evolution, along with that of males.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“At Wilhelma, a zoo in Stuttgart, Germany, for example, two females attacked a male and bit his penis in half (a microsurgeon repaired the damage and the male went on to reproduce).”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“They may even go on to make better mothers. In the same way that oxytocin helps reconfigure a mother’s brain to be more receptive to babies, research suggests it also shapes the gene expression and neural development of offspring. There is evidence in rats that the oxytocin levels experienced by nursing offspring affect their maternal style as adults – those with attentive mothers will go on to make attentive mothers. Variation”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“The influential Harvard University anthropologist Richard Wrangham formulated this observation into a much-cited theory that expects the sex that stays in their birth group to always develop the strongest mutual bonds.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species