Laura Nuño de la Rosa

Postdoc (Juan de la Cierva-Incorporación Fellowship)
Complutense University of Madrid (Spain)

Graduate in Humanities (Universidad de Alicante), Master in Biophysics (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) and PhD in Philosophy of Biology (Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Institut d’Histoire et de la Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques, Paris 1-Sorbonne). I have held research contracts at the KLI (Vienna), the UPV-EHU, and the UCM, where I am currently an assistant professor. I combines my research with teaching at undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral levels.

I further joined the KLI Institute (Klosterneuburg, Austria) as a post-doc fellow. Between 2015 and 2018, I held a Juan de la Cierva fellowship at the IAS-Research group, at the University of the Basque Country. In 2018 I joined the Department of Logic and Theoretical Philosophy at the Complutense University of Madrid, first as a UCM postdoc fellow, and since April 2019 as a Juan de la Cierva-Incorporación fellow. My current interests combine research on the recent history of evolutionary biology with the study of epistemological and ontological issues in contemporary biology, as well as the social implications of biosciences, including synthetic biology, theories of reproduction, and the current science of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2019 I received the Julián Marías award for being the best researcher in the Humanities in the Community of Madrid under 40 years of age.

Together with Cristina Villegas and Vanessa Triviño, we publish a weekly educational podcast about the philosophy of science (in Spanish), you can download the episodes in Ivoox.

Gender biases and the feminist perspective in evolutionary studies of female reproduction and sexuality

Since the decade of the 1980s, the feminist turn has revolutionized philosophical studies of the biology of female sexuality, revealing gender biases in biological research and advancing alternative explanatory models. This talk will inquire into how the feminist perspective has impacted current evolutionary research on female reproduction and sexual pleasure. My talk will focus on two central case studies in the representation and explanation of female sexuality, namely the origin of pregnancy, and the evolutionary mystery of the female orgasm. I will argue that both the characterization of pregnancy as an evolutionary conflict and the evolutionary speculations on the reproductive role of the female orgasm reflect gender biases in the social expectations of how biology should behave. Recent research in the field of evolutionary developmental biology provides alternative narratives for the evolution of female sexuality and reproduction. On the one hand, these studies emphasize the active, integrated role of females in the origin and evolution of pregnancy. On the other hand, research on the evolutionary origin of the female orgasm tends to individuate female pleasure as a trait decoupled from reproduction. I will conclude that both lines of research met in delineating female sexuality and reproduction as an autonomous evolutionary domain, with major anthropological and social implications for our understanding of the female bodies.

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