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Bitch
- On the Female of the Species
- Narrated by: Lucy Cooke
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
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Publisher's summary
A fierce, funny, and revolutionary look at the queens of the animal kingdom
Studying zoology made Lucy Cooke feel like a sad freak. Not because she loved spiders or would root around in animal feces: All her friends shared the same curious kinks. The problem was her sex. Being female meant she was, by nature, a loser.
Since Charles Darwin, evolutionary biologists have been convinced that the males of the animal kingdom are the interesting ones—dominating and promiscuous, while females are dull, passive, and devoted.
In Bitch, Cooke tells a new story. Whether investigating same-sex female albatross couples that raise chicks, murderous mother meerkats, or the titanic battle of the sexes waged by ducks, Cooke shows us a new evolutionary biology, one where females can be as dynamic as any male. This isn‘t your grandfather’s evolutionary biology. It’s more inclusive, truer to life, and, simply, more fun.
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Critic reviews
“Lucy Cooke blows two centuries of sexist myths right out of biology. Prepare to learn a lot—and laugh out loud. A beautifully written, very funny, and deeply important book.” (Alice Roberts, author of Evolution)
“Fun, informative and revolutionary all at once, Bitch should be required reading in school. After reading, this book one will never look at an orca, an albatross, or a human the same way again. And the world will be better for it.” (Agustin Fuentes, professor of anthropology at Princeton University and author of The Creative Spark)
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The Most Perfect Thing
- By: Tim Birkhead
- Narrated by: Gareth Armstrong
- Length: 7 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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How are eggs of different shapes made, and why are they the shapes they are? When does the shell of an egg harden? Why do some eggs contain two yolks? How are the colours and patterns of eggshells created, and why do they vary? And which end of an egg is laid first - the blunt end or the pointy end?
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Great book about eggs!!
- By Timothy on 03-24-21
By: Tim Birkhead
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Our Inner Ape
- A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are
- By: Frans de Waal
- Narrated by: Alan Sklar
- Length: 10 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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We have long attributed man's violent, aggressive, competitive nature to his animal ancestry. But what if we are just as given to cooperation, empathy, and morality by virtue of our genes? What if our behavior actually makes us apes? What kind of apes are we?
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I loved this book
- By Ruth on 06-22-07
By: Frans de Waal
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The Creative Spark
- How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional
- By: Agustín Fuentes
- Narrated by: Agustín Fuentes
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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In the tradition of Jared Diamond's million-copy-selling classic Guns, Germs, and Steel, a bold new synthesis of paleontology, archaeology, genetics, and anthropology that overturns misconceptions about race, war and peace, and human nature itself, answering an age-old question: What made humans so exceptional among all the species on Earth? Creativity. It is the secret of what makes humans special, hiding in plain sight.
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What's new?
- By Mark on 05-02-17
By: Agustín Fuentes
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This Is Your Brain on Parasites
- How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society
- By: Kathleen McAuliffe
- Narrated by: Nicol Zanzarella
- Length: 8 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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A riveting investigation of the myriad ways that parasites control how other creatures - including humans - think, feel, and act. These tiny organisms can live only inside another animal, and, as McAuliffe reveals, they have many evolutionary motives for manipulating their host's behavior. Far more often than appreciated, these puppeteers orchestrate the interplay between predator and prey.
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Entertaining but questionable studies
- By mdkoci on 01-02-17
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What a Fish Knows
- The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins
- By: Jonathan Balcombe
- Narrated by: Graham Winton
- Length: 8 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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An underwater exploration that overturns myths about fishes and reveals their complex lives, from tool use to social behavior. There are more than 30,000 species of fish - more than all mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians combined. But for all their breathtaking diversity and beauty, we rarely consider how fish think, feel, and behave.
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Title misled me
- By Margaret Weidemann on 08-12-17
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Genesis
- The Deep Origin of Societies
- By: Edward O. Wilson
- Narrated by: Jonathan Hogan
- Length: 3 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Asserting that religious creeds and philosophical questions can be reduced to purely genetic and evolutionary components, and that the human body and mind have a physical base obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry, Genesis demonstrates that the only way for us to fully understand human behavior is to study the evolutionary histories of nonhuman species. Of these, Wilson demonstrates that at least 17 - among them the African naked mole rat and the sponge-dwelling shrimp - have been found to have advanced societies based on altruism and cooperation.
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Simply awful
- By Mike A Klotz on 02-07-20
By: Edward O. Wilson
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Blueprint
- The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society
- By: Nicholas A. Christakis
- Narrated by: Nicholas A. Christakis
- Length: 14 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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For too long, scientists have focused on the dark side of our biological heritage: our capacity for aggression, cruelty, prejudice, and self-interest. But natural selection has given us a suite of beneficial social features, including our capacity for love, friendship, cooperation, and learning. Beneath all our inventions - our tools, farms, machines, cities, nations - we carry with us innate proclivities to make a good society.
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Many interesting thoughts
- By Jonas Blomberg Ghini on 06-01-19
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The Thing with Feathers
- The Surprising Lives of Birds and What They Reveal About Being Human
- By: Noah Strycker
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 8 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Birds are highly intelligent animals, yet their intelligence is dramatically different from our own and has been little understood. As we learn more about the secrets of bird life, we are unlocking fascinating insights into memory, relationships, game theory, and the nature of intelligence itself. The Thing with Feathers explores the astonishing homing abilities of pigeons, the good deeds of fairy-wrens, the influential flocking abilities of starlings, the deft artistry of bowerbirds, the extraordinary memories of nutcrackers, and other mysteries.
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Interesting book, terrible reader
- By MGM123 on 03-16-18
By: Noah Strycker
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The Ancestor's Tale
- A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
- By: Richard Dawkins
- Narrated by: Richard Dawkins, Lalla Ward
- Length: 8 hrs and 55 mins
- Abridged
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In The Ancestor's Tale, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins offers a masterwork: an exhilarating reverse tour through evolution, from present-day humans back to the microbial beginnings of life four billion years ago. Throughout the journey, Dawkins spins entertaining, insightful stories and sheds light on topics such as speciation, sexual selection, and extinction. The Ancestor's Tale is at once an essential education in evolutionary theory and riveting in its telling.
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Please do an unabridged version!
- By MovieExpertise on 09-29-16
By: Richard Dawkins
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Sex in the Sea
- Our Intimate Connection with Kinky Crustaceans, Sex-Changing Fish, Romantic Lobsters and Other Salty Erotica of the Deep
- By: Marah J. Hardt
- Narrated by: Carla Mercer-Meyer
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Forget the Kama Sutra. When it comes to inventive sex acts, just look to the sea. There we find the elaborate mating rituals of armored lobsters; giant right whales engaging in a lively threesome while holding their breath; full-moon sex parties of groupers; and daily mating blitzes by blueheaded wrasse. Deep-sea squid perform inverted 69s while hermaphrodite sea slugs link up in giant sex loops.
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How to laugh while learning/ learn while laughing
- By Miamigrrl on 07-27-16
By: Marah J. Hardt
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The Bonobo and the Atheist
- By: Frans de Waal
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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In this lively and illuminating discussion of his landmark research, esteemed primatologist Frans de Waal argues that human morality is not imposed from above but instead comes from within. Moral behavior does not begin and end with religion but is in fact a product of evolution. For many years, de Waal has observed chimpanzees soothe distressed neighbors and bonobos share their food. Now he delivers fascinating fresh evidence for the seeds of ethical behavior in primate societies that further cements the case for the biological origins of human fairness.
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Great research on apes, bad research on humans
- By Christian Bonnell on 07-18-14
By: Frans de Waal
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Why Evolution Is True
- By: Jerry A. Coyne
- Narrated by: Victor Bevine
- Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Why evolution is more than just a theory: it is a fact. In all the current highly publicized debates about creationism and its descendant "intelligent design", there is an element of the controversy that is rarely mentioned: the evidence, the empirical truth of evolution by natural selection.
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As great as everyone says it is
- By Joseph on 12-01-10
By: Jerry A. Coyne
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Cannibalism
- By: Bill Schutt
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Eating one's own kind is a completely natural behavior in thousands of species, including humans. Throughout history we have engaged in cannibalism for reasons related to famine, burial rites, and medicine. Cannibalism has also been used as a form of terrorism and as the ultimate expression of filial piety. With unexpected wit and a wealth of knowledge, Bill Schutt takes us on a tour of the field, exploring exciting new avenues of research and investigating questions like why so many fish eat their offspring and some amphibians consume their mothers' skin.
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Ruined it at the end
- By Kimberly Ames on 12-07-17
By: Bill Schutt
What listeners say about Bitch
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Coleman Martin
- 07-16-22
Interesting for a scientist and an informed lay reader alike
First know that this is cheeky, irreverent and even sometimes salacious book. This style will draw some readers in and simultaneously turn some readers, particularly of more traditional scholarly cloth away from the continent. Regardless, the continent here is pure gold using evidence from the evolutionarily biology of female animals to challenge assumptions that are baked into the science we grew up learning. The author is not shy about the sociological ramifications of her content Which may at times come off as a bit preachy but the evidence presented allows the reader to make their own conclusions. I predict this book will make the reading list of many college seminar classes.
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- Nancy K. Merbitz
- 05-15-23
Hope this is read widely
Great details. Among many vital topics, she makes a compelling case for the diverse forms of sexuality and gender. I hope that feminists can read this, to understand that science is distinct from scientists, and that to show the biological roots of much behavior is not to argue against feminism.
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- Tee
- 10-30-23
An Absolute Winner
A fantastic and enthralling roller coaster of discovery. This books does what I think any good book should do, which is leave you wanting to learn and discover more. The narration is perfect, the writing is witty and engaging, and some of the facts are downright jaw-dropping. I was excited to share certain passages with friends and family, regardless of their interest on the subject. I’ll be giving this a second listen for sure.
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- Jess
- 03-10-24
I wish everyone could read this book
I wish everyone could read this book and have a better understanding that being female doesn't fit into one small little box.
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- MEA
- 12-27-22
Far beyond what I was expecting
A fascinating exploration into gender in general, not just females of the species. Helps me better understand contemporary sex and gender discussions via the biological and evolutionary perspective provided here. And reinforces how humans are, simply, animals. I don’t think this needed to be as long as it was. All of the examples are interesting but the book could have used tighter editing.
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- Ani
- 01-29-23
Provocative, well written, and salacious!!!
A phenomenal book that is well organized into clear themes. As scientists we have to write subdued ‘unbiased’ papers. Cooke blasts away at this puritan notion by using colorful language without any unscientific overstatements. As a non-binary scientist in microbial ecology research I found it very fun and refreshing to have all of this research summarized in one place. Hopefully she can write another book with similar tone on the origins of sex to include some non-animal examples that also shatter the ideas around culturally derived gender and sex roles. This may have been the most fun science book I have ever listened to!
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- Amazon Customer
- 02-16-23
Absolutely Incredible
A fantastic first into the biological truth of the spectrum of gender and the biological fallacies of Victorian ideals that have lead our collective scientific biases for the last 200 years. This is a must read!
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- Laura M. Sutton Aeling
- 04-09-23
Sooo entertaining - sooo important
Just. Wow. This is one of those rare, life-changing books that all should read or listen to. It gently and humorously holds a magnifying glass to the natural world all around us. It kindly and clearly disabuses us of our fraught and limited world views - all while simply telling a series of animal biographies. If you believe in God, your faith will be enlarged and filled again with wonder. If you don’t or aren’t sure, your world view will be layered with glorious detail, and an deeper appreciation for your home planet.
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- Joanna Rico
- 10-23-24
Fascinating
I learned a lot and this book gave me much to think about, also enjoyed the narration by the author. Highly recommend to anyone at all interested in animals.
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- Alyssa
- 07-30-22
Best Biology Book I've Ever Read! Fun Read!
Jaw dropping surprises, hilarious creatures, creepy crawlers, and sex too! This is the most exciting nonfiction I've read! But Lucy Cooke is definitely a qualified zoologist who has done all her research, though she's the most amusing biology writer I've ever read.
She really turns a lot of concepts we thought we knew on their heads, but it's only because she looks more closely at the evidence and tries to limit confirmation bias.
Feel like, as a female, you're only expected to produce and care for kids, hide behind males, and be helpless in your fate? Finally, a biologist who kicks those assumptions in the nuts!
Feel like, as a male, you're expected to be the strongest, bravest, wealthiest, guy who hides his emotions and distances himself from kids? Finally, a biologist who cultivates the variety in males.
And everyone in between.
I'm a huge fan of hers, just because of this book. I'm going to read all her old books now, and look forward to her book on males. I have a list of people I'm going to recommend this book to, as well!!
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