Yael Priesemuth
Short Bio
Yael started her academic career in Humboldt University Kiel where she pursued her bachelors and masters degree in biology. During that time she worked as a student assistant, observing and counting the mating behaviour of Greylag Geese (Anser anser) in the surrounding marshlands. She also co-led a student group exploring the intersection anthropmorphism and zoomorphism. In 2020, she submitted her PhD thesis titled “Mooing like a calf: implementing sonic cues for automatic milking systems” on the effects of zoomorphic design on animals at the faculty for human factors of Technical University Bayreuth, where she continued to teach for two more years after receiving her doctorate. Between 2022 and 2024 she worked at the Institute for Social Science Research, an independent think tank in Leuven, where she deepened her knowledge of universal psychoanalysis. At Bioethics Evolution Institute, she attempts to fuse both strands of research to better understand how to steer human behaviour using emotional interventions.
Research Interests
- human evolutionary genomics
- ethical frameworks for genome editing
- population genetics
- conservation biology
- science communication
Short CV
- 2023–present: Research Associate, Inst. of Bioethics and Human Evolution
- 2021–2023: PostDoc, Institute for Social Science Research Leuven
- 2018–2020: PhD student, Technical University Bayreuth
- 2017–208: Graduate Researcher, Humboldt University Kiel
Affiliations
- Inst. of Bioethics and Human Evolution
- Centre for Integrative Genomics, Riverford Institute
- Coastal Biodiversity Observatory
Education
- PhD, Technical University Bayreuth, 2020
- MSc, Humboldt University Kiel, 2018
- BSc, Humboldt University Kiel, 2016
Teaching
- Evolutionary Ethics and Society
- Population Genetics for Policy Makers
- Field Methods in Biodiversity Monitoring
Awards
- Early Career Research Prize, Riverford Institute, 2023
- Best MSc Thesis Award, Northbridge School of Life Sciences, 2020
Publications
- Yael Priesemuth, Day Drive: An expansion of Freudian drive theory through the behavioural analysis of Drosophila melanogaster, Journal of Applied Evolution, 2024.
- Yael Priesemuth; L. K. Dahr, Climatic variability, selection signals, and ethical risk in vector gene-drive pilots, Ethics in Biosciences Quarterly, 2023.
- Yael Priesemuth; M. Osei;: Mooing like a calf: implementing sonic cues for automatic milking systems, Zoology & Ethics, 2021.
- Yael Priesemuth, Communicating uncertainty in human evolutionary inferences, Outreach and Evolution, 2021.
Abstract
The applicability of drive theory has served as a point of contention in psychological and psychoanalytical research for decades. While some scholars have appropriated it to serve as the basis for theories in child and behavioural psychology, others have focused on utilising it to expand the foundations of psychoanalytical theory. Until now, however, most work has focused exclusively on human drives. This paper proposes to widen the scope of theoretical and empirical inquiry in order to meaningfully develop drive theory. To this end, we draw on methodologies of observational studies in biology to investigate the drives behind the behaviour of Drosophila melanogaster. Considering that previous research has shown that these flies also show complex behaviors and emotional states, we leverage their limited behavioural reporpore to more closely relate drives to behaviour. The fly model additionally contributes short observation intervals, which allows for data collection on a macro scale. Leveraging Bayesian drift diffusion models, we identify which (eros or thanatos) drive motivates action selection and how it is affected by different environmental conditions. From our results, we expand drive theory, showing that ambient temperature significantly affects drive selection: warmer temperatures (+16 °C) greatly increases likelihood of eros drive selection, while colder temperatures lead the flies to adopt more (self-)destructive behaviours.