In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Richard Prum about sex, gender, and biology. They talk about why sex and gender are sometimes controversial, defining sex, and sex as history. They discuss the materialist-feminist framework, gender as an extended phenotype, gender performativity, genes and chromosomes, Wolffian and Müllerian ducts, the role of hormones, the future of gender, and many more topics.
Richard Prum is an Evolutionary Ornithologist at Yale University. His research interests are avian biology, behavioral evolution, sexual selection, and mate choice. He has been a main contributor to the theropod dinosaur origins of birds and the evolution of avian plumage coloration. He is the Curator of Ornithology and Head Curator of Vertebrate Zoology at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. Previously, he was the Chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale. He is the author of, The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us, and his latest book, Performance All the Way Down: Genes, Development, and Sexual Difference. You can find his scholarly publications here.
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