Why should you care about animal sex? (w/ Perrin Ireland)
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
There are many podcasts you can turn to for work advice, but on our show, Fixable, we help real people just like you tackle real workplace challenges fast. I'm CEO and bestselling author, Anne Morris. And I'm Harvard Business School professor, Frances Fry. And we are the hosts of the TED podcast, Fixable. Whether you're lacking confidence at your new job, feeling burned out, or struggling to lead your team through a big change, we won't shy away from any problem. We bring our clear thinking, honest opinions, and expertise to solve your toughest workplace issues through practical solutions. Hear new episodes of Fixable every Monday, wherever you get your podcasts.
This is How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. There's a conversation I had several years ago that I have not been able to stop thinking about since. I was interviewing a bonobo expert, which I understand is a totally bizarre sentence to be able to say, but that's just how my life goes. Sometimes I'm talking to a bonobo expert. So I'm talking to this bonobo expert, and she tells me that one of the reasons she thinks bonobos are so important to study is because they are very closely related to humans, and yet they defy so many of our expectations about what is natural and how the wild world supposedly works. Bonobos are matriarchal, and they tend to resolve conflicts with physical touch, grooming, and sex rather than violence and attack.
Now, another one of our relatives, on the other hand, chimpanzees, they are patriarchal, and they're often violent to each other during conflicts. We are closely related to both bonobos and chimpanzees, but for some reason we have decided that what is natural is the chimpanzee method for males to be in charge and for there to be violence and bloodshed. If you think about that for even just a few seconds, you realize that the idea that there is only one natural and that there's a strictly defined way of doing things that does not hold up to scrutiny. That's not how actual nature works. And I think if we want to be better humans, we should both acknowledge that we are animals and sometimes driven by our biology, but also question what exactly the story that we are being told about that biology is, because it is often being used to shame or exclude people for not fitting into dominant cultural narratives.
Today's guest, Perrin Ireland, wants to change all that. She wants to shatter the myths about what is and isn't natural so that maybe we can have a broader view of our own place in the ecosystem and think differently about what actually is natural about ourselves after all. Perrin wrote and illustrated the fantastic new book, Poking the Squid, What We Can Learn from Animal Sex. So today on How to Be a Better Human, we're going to ask that exact question, one that you probably have not asked yourselves before. What can we learn from animal sex? To get us started, we're going to jump right into the deep end with a clip from Perrin's extremely popular online series, Thirsty Science. And this is a clip where Perrin is talking about the rear ends of sea cucumbers.
Today on Thirsty Science, the magical sea cucumber anus. Sea cucumbers use their buttholes, number one, as a second mouth to filter feed on algae. Number two, when they're reproducing and they need more oxygen because they're consuming a lot of energy, they use their butthole to breathe. Number three, as a defense mechanism, they eject these sticky tubules out of their anuses to entangle predators. And number four, sometimes they house a little friend in their butthole, the pearlfish, which for some reason doesn't activate their tubules and has more resistance to kind of their internal poison to invasions than other fish. Pearlfish just kind of hang out inside the sea cucumber butthole.
Have you already learned things that you never thought you would learn? I know that I have, and we have so much more to come. We are just getting started. We're going to be right back with more from Perrin after this quick break.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–17:08
2
What surprising examples open Perrin Ireland’s conversation about animal anatomy?
17:08–29:01
3
How does Perrin Ireland combine art and science to explain animal sex?
29:01–46:25
4
Why does Perrin argue that we should care about animal sex as biodiversity?
46:25–46:27
Speakers
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