Did male scientists
slut-shame a small tropical reptile?
By Ethan Brown, Bay Area
News Group
For as long as humans have
practiced science, men have dominated research. Much of our understanding of
the world has been filtered through their beliefs. For UC Berkeley
post-doctoral researcher Ambika Kamath, that’s a problem.
The behavioral ecologist
studies Anolis sagrei, the brown anole, a small lizard native to the Caribbean
and introduced in Florida. For years, it was widely believed that this reptile
was territorial, and that females would mate only with the male whose area they
occupied. When women scientists first found evidence that might not be the
case, their conclusions were dismissed, their findings deemed exceptions, and
their papers rejected, Kamath says.
But Kamath, through
observation, DNA analysis, mathematical modeling and “feminist science,”
determined that the lady lizards were actually, so to speak, pretty hot to
trot, despite male researchers’ inability to recognize — or even look for —
behavior she says conflicted with closely held male beliefs about female sexual
behavior. Those biases, which go back to Charles Darwin and beyond, continue to
influence how science is done, and the conclusions that are reached, she says.
This news organization sat
down with Kamath in her lab to talk about how her practice of feminist science
turned accepted knowledge on its head, and why a diversity of perspectives is
important to scientific inquiry. Her answers have been edited for length and
clarity.
Q: If feminist science is
science through a feminist lens, what have been the traditional lenses in
science?
A: They end up being lenses
of whatever culture or demographic is dominant. Currently, the dominant global
scientific tradition is one that has largely been white, largely been male,
largely been people who are rich. Those are the people who have practiced a lot
of the science on which a lot of what mainstream science today is built.
Q: What have been the
effects of that traditional approach on our understanding?
A: Very often when you study
an animal population it’s (considered) OK to just study the males and not study
the females. The lizards that I worked on, Anolis lizards, for the longest time
things that we stated as generalities about the species or the genus were
things that were known only in males and no one thought twice about that. Most
practitioners of biology were men. Another aspect of this that is very dominant
in research into the evolution of animal behavior is importing stereotypes of
males and females from the human world and projecting those onto the animals
that we study. A long-standing one, that was famously formalized by Darwin, was
this notion that females are coy and passive in sexual interactions and males
are not.
Q: Are there risks to
practicing feminist science, in the way that it’s perceived or received?
A: I don’t think it serves
scientists well to pretend that the scientific process is perfect or
infallible. None of this should be interpreted as challenging the scientific
process in and of itself. There’s a huge difference between broadening science
to include a marginalized perspective that goes against the status quo, versus
preserving the already powerful voice that seeks to marginalize. We’re doing
better science if we’re asking questions from different perspectives as opposed
to just one. And we’re doing better science if we think about the ways in which
who we are influences the questions we ask. That’s the beauty of science, it’s
these incremental steps toward something that is hopefully true.
Q: Why wasn’t it understood
that female anoles could be promiscuous?
A: In Anolis lizards the
long-standing paradigm for their social organization was one of territoriality
— females would just mate with the one male in whose territory they lived.
These sorts of inferences about mating patterns from behavioral descriptions
were true of animals across the board. In the ’90s or so people started to be
able to use genetic methods to infer actual mating patterns using the same
methods that people use for paternity tests. They started to find that much
much more often than was expected based on those behavioral descriptions,
females were mating with multiple males. We saw this hugely in birds. It’s been
described in the literature very often as ‘adultery’ — that’s a very clear
example of the ways in which we take non-neutral terminology of how we talk
about ourselves and import it onto animals.
Q: What criticism do you get
for practicing feminist science?
A: There are people that say
… we would have figured this out without making a fuss. People really object to
the fuss. People also think that it’s incredibly disrespectful to the work of
previous scientists to question it in this fashion. Once I was giving a seminar
and someone said, ‘You’re supposed to stand on the shoulders of giants, you
can’t kick them in the ankles.’ Very graciously, another senior academic said,
‘Well, what if those giants are standing in three feet of mud?’
Q: Is there a risk that if
you’re applying a feminist lens that you’re going to miss something in the same
way male scientists did?
A: What we’re looking for is
as many lenses as possible. Science is not the work of single lone geniuses.
Sure there are geniuses. But their perspective is still one perspective. When
you’re non-mainstream in terms of the questions that you’re asking, you’re
automatically going to get more people saying, ‘Oh, you have an agenda.’ And
because you’ve got people saying, ‘Oh, you have an agenda,’ you have to do that
much more work to hold yourself to a higher standard.
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