Things got extra-busy at GSW last week, and I skipped a couple of days. Sorry about that. We finish up this Saturday, and once August rolls around I’ll be back to posting new content on Mondays, as well as the remaining VSI episodes, which may roll into September.
Original Website Blurb from 2011
I’ve been wanting to do this show for almost a year. It was one of the first ones I thought of, and not because Kay Holekamp is a friend of mine. I’ve still never met her in person. It was because of another Berkeley dude, a stress biologist named Robert Sapolsky, who looked stressed out, with his crazy hair and crazy beard. He came to Rochester when I was in grad school and told us a bunch of crazy stories about Africa, which sounded totally made up. Dominant females with “penises”? Cubs born with teeth, fighting to the death underground? It sounded more like the Thunderdome (two cubs enter; one cub leaves) than the way mammals normally act. Killing your close relatives, who share your genes, is normally about the dumbest thing you can do.
So 15 years later the story is a bit less sensational but makes much more sense from an evolutionary standpoint. The second cub is like the second egg in a raptor nest -- just an insurance policy in case something happens to the first one most years, and a bonus in a really good year when there's lots of food.
I took the hyena "giggle" from a paper about the Berkeley colony run by Dr. Holekamp's old boss, which, as she mentioned, is being shut down because hyenas were not a good model species for female penises in humans. This is exactly the kind of research that the haters love to pick on, 1) because it didn't work, and 2) because it allows them to trivialize a phenomenon that makes them uncomfortable. But that's science; if we knew it would work, there'd be no point in doing it. And guess what? Everyone starts out with the tissues for both male and female organs; they are normally sculpted away by cell suicide genes (at least that's my naive, brain-scientist understanding). Gender is not a binary variable, a 0 or a 1. There's a lot of in-between territory that most of us don't like to think about (except in terms of rumor, scandal or urban legend).
VSI Episode 32