Perrin Ireland
speaker
296 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 3 Aug
Perrin Ireland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
How to Be a Better Human · Why should you care about animal sex? (w/ Perrin Ireland) · 3 Aug 2026
podcast
And because I am like that competitive bitch when she was telling me that story, I was like, I'm gonna get out of nursery school in the course of making this book and I'm gonna graduate kindergarten by the time I'm done learning from these animals.
And so I feel so comfortable standing behind how much they teach us about sexual diversity because doing the research to understand what does sex mean blew my mind and I came out of that process so much more humble
about how I would never presume to tell any organism how they should or could or would organize sex inside a body, respond to chromosomes, hormones, manifest genitalia, who they should fuck with when.
It explodes all of those ideas.
And that's natural, I think.
What is very earthly to me about that is...
Marlene Zuck says, and I quote her at some point in the book, people think that biology makes rules, but actually the study of biology demolishes them.
The most simple way I think about it is that sex is composed of many different variables that are in conversation with each other in different combinations, in different bodies.
And I'd start with hyenas, because they're such a good example of, there's this sex that they have, right?
My goal was really to talk about how animals bury their boners, if I may.
Really, what's the verb of sex?
Like, how are they polishing the porpoise?
But the reason that I had difficulty doing that straight up is that I would be in a journal paper and they would be talking about sex as a verb, but they would be talking about the sex of the animal and then what it did as a result of them sexing them in that way, what it meant about the kind of caregiver they would be, what it meant about the way its society was organized, what it meant about the energetic investment that it was putting into making different sex cells.
And it was doing different combinations of those things
in different papers and in many papers, multiple uses in the same paper.
So I think about this little three-letter word being like so tuckered out.
I'm like, sweetie, we really put you to work.
We make you do so much, so much.
How can one little word hold all of that?
There's this kind of like cool kids club in evolutionary biology of a couple of different groups that were co-authoring literature reviews together.
Showing 61–80 of 296 · page 4 of 15
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