"Send me all the genitals" ft. Dr. Patty Brennan

What do you do when the wildest sentence of your career is "I was sure it was a worm"?

Dr. Patty Brennan is a Colombian-born, Cornell-trained evolutionary biologist, a full Professor of Biological Sciences at Mount Holyoke College, and the world's leading expert on vertebrate genital coevolution. She's been featured in The New York Times, National Geographic, Scientific American, The Guardian, Slate, and NPR — and she's a featured scientist in the upcoming documentary Second Nature, narrated by Elliot Page. Before all of that, she was one of five sisters in Bogotá who became a biologist because she figured out she could scare her sisters off with bugs.

Patty wrote us a line before we ever spoke that could be the tagline of this entire podcast: "The title of your podcast could be the byline for my scientific career." And she wasn't kidding.

This episode is the whole arc — the girl who talked her way onto a research ketch in the Galapagos to scuba dive around the world (and got no further than the Galapagos, and married the American man she was never going to marry, thirty years ago). The moment she and her crew photographed the first live sighting of a whale that had only ever been known from a skull. The pivot to Cornell for marine mammals, the switch to birds, and the day in the Costa Rican rainforest when she thought she'd found a parasite and instead discovered a career. In 2013, Fox News, Sean Hannity, and Sarah Palin came for her NSF-funded research. She hid under her desk for a week — and then wrote back. What happened next was not the plan.

Also: why females across the animal kingdom have weapons nobody was looking at, why 3% of birds have penises and the rest don't, why the full three-dimensional structure of the human clitoris wasn't mapped until the mid-1990s, dolphins as sexual harassers, Elliot Page's production company, and the Harlequin duck — the one duck that is not, in Patty's words, a "rapist duck."

Watch or request a screening of Second Nature:
🎬 secondnaturedocumentary.com

Books Patty mentioned:
📖 Vagina Obscura by Rachel Gross
📖 Bitch by Lucy Cooke
📖 Poking the Squid by Perry Ireland

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