Bitch Quotes

“We are all culturally conditioned to interpret the world within a framework of understanding that’s both deeply ingrained and highly personal.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“A sexist mythology has been baked into biology, and it distorts the way we perceive female animals. In the natural world female form and role varies wildly to encompass a fascinating spectrum of anatomies and behaviours.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“Males are not genetically programmed to aggressively dominate females. Their ability to do so depends on environmental and social factors. The key ingredient for female empowerment is the strength of the sisterhood, from family to friends, to overthrow an oppressive patriarchy and foster a more egalitarian society.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“We need to get away from the binary nature of sex assignment,’ Crews ventured. ‘There’s a continuum, with males at one end and females at the other, and variability is continuous between those two types.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“There is a lot of serendipity in science, You can't find answers if you aren't asking the questions. I think you needed to have a woman to look at this to ask the right questions.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“Natural selection will favour young mothers, who have less stake in the success of the wider group, who aggressively compete for limited resources. This prediction was borne out by the observation that when orca mothers and daughters bred simultaneously, calves born to older mothers were almost twice as likely to die in the first fifteen years of life as those born to the younger mothers.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“Proposed in 1998, it posits that females who step out of the reproductive rat race mid-life and focus their energies on supporting their children (and grandchildren), instead of squeezing out yet more babies, significantly increase their offspring’s chances of survival and, in turn, their own genetic legacy.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“Generations of reproductive biologists assumed females to be sexually monogamous but it is now clear this is wrong,’ Tim Birkhead admitted in his 2000 book Promiscuity.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“Try explaining the need to be passive to a dominant female spotted hyena, and she’ll laugh in your face, after she’s bitten it off. Female animals are just as promiscuous, competitive, aggressive, dominant and dynamic as males.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“Now we were doomed to play second fiddle to the sperm-shooters for all eternity; a feminine footnote to the macho main event.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“A foraging lifestyle makes it much harder for males to restrict females' movements and access to resources, as they are able to source their own. Once females were restricted in their activities and males gained control of high-quality foodstuffs, like meat, females lost agency and became sexual property. Paternity became an issue, as property was inherited, and patriarchy took hold. The evolution of the capacity for language allowed males to consolidate and increase their control over females because it enabled the creation and propagation of ideologies of male dominance/female subordinance and male supremacy/female inferiority.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“Darwin’s theory of sexual selection was incubated in misogyny, so it is little wonder that the female animal came out deformed; as marginalized and misunderstood as a Victorian housewife. What is perhaps more surprising, and damaging, is how tough it has been to wash this sexist stain out of science, and how far it has bled.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“In the sixties and seventies primatology was well and truly hypnotized by showy male dominance systems.This obsession began way back when the science emerged in the 1920s.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“Rather than thinking of the sexes as wholly different biological entities, we should consider them members of the same species, with fluid, complementary differences in certain biological and physiological processes associated with reproduction, but otherwise much the same.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“The hagfish hasn’t changed for some 300 million years and is considered a primitive ancestor of modern fish, suggesting to Rhodes that hermaphroditism could be the ancestral state of not just fish, but all vertebrates.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“Parthenogenesis is a safety net only available for certain species and it is only females that have the power to clone.4 These special females are likely to become increasingly important. If we keep on with our path of war and destruction, the future will be most definitely female: only the bdelloid rotifer will be left standing.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“So females with the ability to switch to cloning and boost population numbers above critical levels may be just what’s needed to save a species from extinction.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“Females that can fall back on the ancient art of cloning might just be what’s needed to help species weather tough times.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“Her ticket to evolutionary old age is ‘kleptogenesis’. She occasionally steals sperm from closely related species, which are used to stimulate but not fertilize her egg. Every once in a millennium, however, she incorporates bits of her stored ‘stolen’ sperm into her genome in order to maintain diversity.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“They can survive several years of desiccation and high blasts of radiation. As far as we know, they are the most radiation resistant creature on the planet, beating even the famously indestructible tardigrade in the hard-nut stakes.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“All told, the bdelloids appear to have adopted a Frankenstein collage of foreign DNA from more than five hundred different other species.Whether that’s through ingestion or not is up for debate, but these pilfered genes provide the bdelloids with much-needed genetic variation in the absence of sex.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“Some scientists think that the bdelloids can extract DNA from their dinner and spruce up their own genome by a process called ‘horizontal gene transfer”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“I can’t help but think about how many of our human leaders would benefit from a paralimbic lobe transplant – to become more like these wise and compassionate matriarchs, with their unfathomable emotions and supportive, socially inclusive society.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“Poop is an absolute gold mine,’ she told me. Scat samples enable her team to monitor not just the orcas’ oestrogen levels, but also their stress and pregnancy hormones.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“hypothesis’ could provide the missing piece of evolutionary motivation for the grandmother hypothesis to work in other menopausal creatures, like us.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“The feminist movement argues that if you behave with unrelated females as if they are your sisters, you can gain power. The bonobos show us that that’s true. It gives us a lot of hope.’ Amen to that.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“At Wilhelma, a zoo in Stuttgart, Germany, for example, two females attacked a male and bit his penis in half (a microsurgeon repaired the damage and the male went on to reproduce).”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“The influential Harvard University anthropologist Richard Wrangham formulated this observation into a much-cited theory that expects the sex that stays in their birth group to always develop the strongest mutual bonds.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“Both male and female subordinates remain trapped in a pre-pubescent state. They don’t even develop adult genitalia. So subordinate sex is ruled out in this eusocial system.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species

“Meerkat culture is tense and homicidal. A study investigating lethal violence in more than one thousand different mammals unmasked the meerkat as the most murderous mammal on the planet – beating even humans to the brutal top spot.”
― Lucy Cooke, Bitch: On the Female of the Species