Diana Fleischman

Diana Santos Fleischman (born April 22, 1981) is an American evolutionary psychologist. Her field of research includes the study of disgust, human sexuality, eugenics, and hormones and behaviour. She also has an interest in natalism, effective altruism, animal welfare, and feminism.

Early life and education

Fleischman was born in São Paulo, Brazil. Her father's family is of German-Jewish descent, and she attended both Catholic church and synagogue. Fleischman grew up in Georgia and was not taught about evolution in the public school system there. She was passionate about evolution from an early age, earning the nickname "monkey girl" from classmates at age 12.

Her undergraduate degree is from Oglethorpe University, and she also spent a year at the London School of Economics as an undergraduate. She was awarded her PhD in 2009 from the University of Texas at Austin, where her advisor was David Buss, and went on to do a postdoc at UNC Chapel Hill.

Career

Fleischman was a lecturer in the department of psychology at the University of Portsmouth from 2011 to 2020. She currently works at the University of New Mexico. One of her findings covered in the press is that disgust inhibits sexual arousal in women more than fear. In addition to academic publications and lectures, she also gives public lectures and writes articles for laypeople.

Fleischman is the host of the ''Aporia Magazine'' podcast.

In August 2020, she started a blog at ''Psychology Today'' called ''How to Train Your Boyfriend'', the same title as a book she is writing.

Views

Meat consumption

Fleischman argued in 2017 that eating beef likely involves less animal suffering than eating chicken, as about 200 chicken need to be killed to produce the same amount of meat as a cow. She also called cultured meat "our best hope of preventing animal suffering in the future".

Eugenics

In 2021, she co-authored the paper ''Can 'eugenics' be defended?'', which argued that the scientific debate around genetic enhancement was polarized and concluded that "just as enhancement isn't a unified category that we can simply judge as morally good or bad, so too with genetic enhancement or eugenics". Fleischman wrote an essay in 2023 titled ''You're Probably a Eugenicist'', arguing that Dor Yeshorim's goal of reducing the rate of Tay-Sachs disease and cystic fibrosis in Jewish families could be described as eugenicist and that "Gay men and lesbian women in the US often use gamete donors from egg and sperm banks to have kids in a process that is transparently eugenic ... Organisations that recruit egg and sperm donors don't just recruit for fertility, they also screen for mental and physical health, height, education and criminal history – because that's what their clients want and expect."

She has been described as pronatalist, notably saying, "I encourage people who are responsible and smart and conscientious to have children, because they're going to make the future better." She attended the Natal Conference in 2023, where she argued that people with mental illness are statistically likely to marry other mentally ill people and pass those genes along to their children, suggesting that some children are biologically better than others.

Personal life

Fleischman is a member of Giving What We Can, a community of people who have pledged to donate 10% of their income to the world's most effective charitable organisations.

On November 29, 2019, she married fellow American evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller. The couple had earlier appeared together in an interview advocating for polyamory. They have two children, one born in 2022 and the other in 2023.

Publications

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References

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Fleischman, Diana
1981 births
Living people
American people of German-Jewish descent
American evolutionary biologists
Evolutionary psychologists
Oglethorpe University alumni
University of Texas at Austin College of Liberal Arts alumni
Health professionals from São Paulo
American women evolutionary biologists
Academics of the University of Portsmouth