Threshold · Auricle Productions

Threshold Conversations | Feminism in the Wild with Ambika Kamath and Melina Packer

February 17, 2026·30 min·2 clips

How a 1950s fruit fly experiment, riddled with errors, still shapes misconceptions about animal mating behavior today.

1. Threshold Conversations features a discussion of the book Feminism in the Wild, with host Amy Martin interviewing co-authors Ambika Kamath, a behavioral ecologist and evolutionary biologist, and Melina Packer, a scholar of race, gender, and sexuality. 2. Ambika Kamath studies anolis lizards at the intersection of ecology and feminist science studies; Melina Packer is a toxicology and social science researcher who met Kamath at UC Berkeley; both are identified by name and field in the episode. 3. The episode's core thesis is that human cultural biases — particularly around gender and sexuality — have systematically distorted biological science by treating exceptions in European migratory species or controlled lab conditions as universal natural laws. 4. Amy Martin opens with the common belief that only male songbirds sing, and traces the error to the geographic bias of early ornithology: European researchers studied mostly migratory species where males do sing more, then generalized those findings to all 5,000+ songbird species. 5. Ambika describes her PhD research on anolis lizard territoriality, in which she found approximately 80% of females mating with more than one male — a result incompatible with the dominant model of males using territories for exclusive mating access. 6. She was met with pushback at conferences and describes being yelled at for a sustained five minutes by a senior researcher who had invited her to lunch under the pretense of scientific interest. 7. Her PhD advisor Jonathan Losos, described as having 'written the book on anolis ecology and evolution,' was supportive of her challenge to the status quo, and Ambika credits that support as essential to the work getting traction. 8. Melina describes parallel work on toxicology narratives about 'chemicals turning frogs gay,' which she argues conflated a valid environmental concern with homophobic framing, erasing the scientific reality that same-sex behavior and ambiguous sexual physiology are normal in frogs irrespective of chemical pollution. 9. Bateman's principles — drawn from a 1950 paper by botanist A.J. Bateman using fruit flies — hold that males are evolutionarily driven to mate with as many females as possible, while females are inherently coy and selective; the guests explain that Bateman's own first graph showed no such sex difference and was simply ignored. 10. Theoretical evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers found Bateman's paper in the 1970s and built a mathematically sophisticated theory on the flawed data; it was only when Patti Gowaty replicated and deconstructed Bateman's experiments that every methodological flaw was documented. 11. Melina argues that Bateman's principles persisted not because of evidence but because they naturalized male promiscuity and female passivity in ways that benefit men in power — framing social hierarchies as biological givens removes the obligation to change them. 12. Examples of female multiple-mating in the wild cited in the episode include lionesses (shown on the book's cover), birds previously described as engaging in 'extra pair copulation,' baboons, chimpanzees, fish, insects, and reptiles that store sperm from multiple males. 13. The book uses the analogy of Tinder — swiping one option at a time with yes/no — to explain why female multiple-mating is a rational default rather than an anomaly once the Victorian-ball assumption of simultaneous mate comparison is removed. 14. Biologist Valerius Geist's written account of studying bighorn sheep is quoted at length: unable to record homosexual behavior in rams, he coined the term 'aggressosexual behavior,' and later described it as 'emotionally beyond me' to call the rams' society homosexual. 15. Both guests note that Geist's willingness to reflect publicly on his own bias and eventually 'call a spade a spade' is actually rarer than it should be in biology, and that half the field engaging in that level of honesty would substantially change the discipline. 16. The guests explicitly state that the case for accepting same-sex behavior should not rest on naturalistic justification — 'even if there were no same-sex behavior in the wild, it would still be okay for people' — as importing nature-based authority for human behavior is itself the problem they are critiquing. 17. Amy Martin's interview style is conversational and personal; she shares her own experience of not knowing female songbirds sing and her anxiety about whether critiquing scientific bias gives ammunition to science deniers. 18. The guests address the science-denial concern directly: acknowledging subjectivity strengthens science by building trust, whereas the claim of pure objectivity both misrepresents the process and cuts off the ability to inquire into its own biases. 19. Listeners interested in feminist philosophy of science, the sociology of knowledge, animal behavior, or the political dimensions of evolutionary biology will find substantive material in this conversation. 20. Listeners who want applied conservation science, wildlife biology field reports, or data-driven ecology without the science-studies framing will find this episode's focus on epistemology and bias too removed from empirical results.

As heard by us

A smart biology conversation about female birdsong, mating behavior, and the human assumptions science can mistake for nature.

Threshold opens with a tidy correction to a familiar nature fact: female songbirds sing too, especially in many tropical and less migratory species.

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Why you'd press play

If you want to hear a bird fact get turned inside out by evidence and bias, start here.

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