Elisabeth Lloyd

Elisabeth Anne Lloyd (born September 3, 1956) is an American philosopher of science specializing in the philosophy of biology. She is currently Distinguished Professor of History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine, as well as Adjunct Professor of biology, at Indiana University, Bloomington, affiliated faculty scholar at the Kinsey Institute and Adjunct Faculty at the Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior. Lloyd was born in Morristown, New Jersey, and earned her BA in science and political theory from University of Colorado, Boulder in 1980, summa cum laude. Lloyd studied under Bas van Fraassen at Princeton University for a PhD in philosophy from 1980 to 1984. While a student at Princeton, she spent a year (1983) studying with Richard C. Lewontin at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. She worked as an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at University of California, San Diego, from 1985 to 1988. She then was assistant professor, associate professor, and full professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1988 to 1999, before moving to Indiana University. In 2022, she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Her 2005 book, The Case of the Female Orgasm, was widely discussed and criticized what it portrayed as anti-scientific biases infecting the many proposed adaptive explanations of female orgasm. In 2001, Michigan Law Review published her essay "Science Gone Astray: Evolution and Rape" that criticized Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer's famous work A Natural History of Rape for "glaring flaws in their science."