Thierry Hoquet
Personal Information
Description
Thierry Hoquet is a professor of science history and philosophy at the Faculté de Philosophie, Université de Lyon (Jean-Moulin), France. I am the scientific editor of the website www.cnrs.buffon.fr and a member of the boards of several journals (Critique , Corpus, Bionomina-International Journal for Biological Nomenclature and Terminology). My current research focuses on three different topics: (1) eighteenth-century natural history (mostly Buffon and Linnaeus) (2) Darwin and the history of Darwinism, with a special interest in the question of variations (3) the history of the concept of sex in biology, especially with regard to the history of the concept of sexual selection As a historian and a philosopher of science, I was primarily interested in the great books in science and how major texts shaped our understanding of nature. Working on the concept of sex, my interest in gender issues is now growing, and I am especially interested in the paradoxical figure of the “feminist biologist,” with a dual commitment to both feminist theory and biological research. Female researchers like Sarah B. Hrdy, Patricia Gowaty, Marlene Zuk, and Joan Roughgarden are good examples of this research tradition.
Books
Challenging Popular Myths of Sex, Gender and Biology
This edited volume challenges popular notions of sex, gender and biology and features international, trans-disciplinary research. The book begins with an exploration of supposedly ‘natural’ sexual differences, then looks at research in evolutionary biology and examines topics such as gender stereotypes in humans. The first chapters explore important questions: What are the fundamental sex differences? How do genes and hormones influence an individual’s sex? Subsequent chapters concern topics including: sex stereotypes in the field of sexual conflict, how the focus on genes in evolutionary biology disregards other means of inheritance, and the development of Darwin's theory of sex differences. The last three chapters look at humans, discussing: an interdisciplinary approach to the evolution of sex differences in body height, biological versus social constructive perspectives on the gendering of voices and nature-culture arguments in the current political debate on paternity leave in Norway.