I am interested in interactions among feminist theory, evolutionary theory, and the philosophy of biology. The majority of my work revolves around the explanations that different biological disciplines offer for the evolution of sexual reproduction. I argue that biological accounts of the evolution of sex represent a healthy plurality of explanations for a single, albeit complicated process. This explanatory pluralism has both ontological and epistemological roots – it is a result of both the way the world is and the way that we come to have knowledge of the world.

My interest in explanatory pluralism and sex has spawned several other great projects. If there is a multiplicity of explanations for a phenomenon, questions about the relationships among those explanations naturally arise. Objectivity is a central value that we use to assess and compare scientific explanations. So, how do we assess the objectivity of different explanations for the evolution of sex when those explanations arise out of different epistemological contexts? Feminist philosophers of science provide a rich body of literature surrounding the problem of objectivity, focusing our attention on the situatedness of knowledge claims and the actual practice of science. I draw on this work to understand the multiplicity of explanations for sex and, reciprocally, use the evolution of sex to develop a social theory of scientific objectivity.

Historically, the sciences have offered a distorted picture of the biology of sex and gender. As more women enter the sciences, more women gain positions of political power and as social norms change, many of these distortions are beginning to be corrected. I am interested in what these cases can tell us about the practice of science and the development of scientific methods.