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Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution
Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Best Nonfiction (2023)THE REAL ORIGIN OF OUR SPECIES: a myth-busting, eye-opening landmark account of how humans evolved, offering a paradigm shift in our thinking about what the female body is, how it came to be, and how this evolution still shapes all our lives today.
How did the female body drive 200 million years of human evolution?
• Why do women live longer than men?
• Why are women more likely to get Alzheimer’s?
• Why do girls score better at every academic subject than boys until puberty, when suddenly their scores plummet?
• Is sexism useful for evolution?
• And why, seriously why, do women have to sweat through our sheets every night when we hit menopause?
These questions are producing some truly exciting science—and in Eve, with boundless curiosity and sharp wit, Cat Bohannon covers the past 200 million years to explain the specific science behind the development of the female sex: "We need a kind of user's manual for the female mammal. A no-nonsense, hard-hitting, seriously researched (but readable) account of what we are. How female bodies evolved, how they work, what it really means to biologically be a woman. Something that would rewrite the story of womanhood. This book is that story. We have to put the female body in the picture. If we don't, it's not just feminism that's compromised. Modern medicine, neurobiology, paleoanthropology, even evolutionary biology all take a hit when we ignore the fact that half of us have breasts. So it's time we talk about breasts. Breasts, and blood, and fat, and vaginas, and wombs—all of it. How they came to be and how we live with them now, no matter how weird or hilarious the truth is."
Eve is not only a sweeping revision of human history, it's an urgent and necessary corrective for a world that has focused primarily on the male body for far too long. Picking up where Sapiens left off, Eve will completely change what you think you know about evolution and why Homo sapiens has become such a successful and dominant species.
How did the female body drive 200 million years of human evolution?
• Why do women live longer than men?
• Why are women more likely to get Alzheimer’s?
• Why do girls score better at every academic subject than boys until puberty, when suddenly their scores plummet?
• Is sexism useful for evolution?
• And why, seriously why, do women have to sweat through our sheets every night when we hit menopause?
These questions are producing some truly exciting science—and in Eve, with boundless curiosity and sharp wit, Cat Bohannon covers the past 200 million years to explain the specific science behind the development of the female sex: "We need a kind of user's manual for the female mammal. A no-nonsense, hard-hitting, seriously researched (but readable) account of what we are. How female bodies evolved, how they work, what it really means to biologically be a woman. Something that would rewrite the story of womanhood. This book is that story. We have to put the female body in the picture. If we don't, it's not just feminism that's compromised. Modern medicine, neurobiology, paleoanthropology, even evolutionary biology all take a hit when we ignore the fact that half of us have breasts. So it's time we talk about breasts. Breasts, and blood, and fat, and vaginas, and wombs—all of it. How they came to be and how we live with them now, no matter how weird or hilarious the truth is."
Eve is not only a sweeping revision of human history, it's an urgent and necessary corrective for a world that has focused primarily on the male body for far too long. Picking up where Sapiens left off, Eve will completely change what you think you know about evolution and why Homo sapiens has become such a successful and dominant species.
624 pages, Hardcover
First published October 3, 2023
About the author
Cat Bohannon
3 books176 followersResearcher, scholar, writer, freak. Cat completed her PhD in 2022 at Columbia University, where she studied the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Scientific American, Science, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Lapham's Quarterly, The Georgia Review, and on The Story Collider. Eve is her first book and a New York Times bestseller. She lives in the U.S. with her partner and two offspring.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,329 reviews
July 19, 2023
As an adult with significant disabilities, I can recall reaching this stage in my life when I became incredibly frustrated with what I perceived as the weaknesses and limitations of my physical being.
It seemed like everything was going wrong and deeply lamented the loss of feeling "normal."
After a while, I began a deep dive into various aspects of my disabilities. I learned about my body. I learned about spina bifida. I learned about hydrocephalus, amputation, and traumatic brain injury. I learned as much as I could about history and function and biology and the universality of my being.
Over time, I began to realize and accept that my body is pretty amazing.
I thought of this period of my life often while reading Cat Bohannon's remarkable "Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution," a deep dive into what the female body is, how it came to be, and how this evolution still shapes all our lives today.
Bohannon picks up where "Sapiens" left off, covering the past 200 million years to tell the story of what it really means to be a woman in a way that somehow, unfathomably, both incredibly entertaining and stunningly well researched with hundreds, and I mean hundreds, of cited sources along the way. "Eve" is both incredibly satisfying yet also leaves you craving more of Bohannon's curiosity, insight, knowledge, and wit.
"Eve" can be an overwhelming book. It's incredibly academic yet also remarkably accessible in language, style, and structure. Bohannon seemingly understands that to really get her points across she needs to find a way to immerse us in this information without leaving us gasping for our literary breaths. Mission accomplished.
I was in awe of both the intimacy and universality of "Eve" as Bohannon explores a variety of topics in exploring, essentially, what it means to biologically be a woman and that tells the story of womanhood throughout the centuries.
To call "Eve" some sort of feminist manifesto seems inadequate as it's really a manifesto for humanity that places, in ways never done before, women into the picture of medicine, neurobiology, paleoanthropology, and evolutionary biology.
Bohannon writes with candor the history of breasts and vaginas and womb and love and menopause and so much more. It's honestly deliriously awesome. It's informative yet it's far beyond informative because it builds a vision of womanhood that is truly awe-inspiring.
For far too long, the world has told the story of human history through the male body (though perhaps not the disabled male body). With "Eve," Bohannon passionately declares a corrective and beautifully brings to life the power and glory of the female body and how it truly has driven 200 million years of human evolution.
Bohannon's writing here is both profound in its knowledge and poetic in its narrative rhythms. I learned so much throughout "Eve," yet what is equally as profound is how much I actually enjoyed that learning from beginning to end. "Eve" is a revelatory vision of the history of womanhood that celebrates that history with a sense of joy and wonder.
It's not often that I reach the end of a 600-page book and think to myself "Give me more." But, oh yes, "Give me more!"
It seemed like everything was going wrong and deeply lamented the loss of feeling "normal."
After a while, I began a deep dive into various aspects of my disabilities. I learned about my body. I learned about spina bifida. I learned about hydrocephalus, amputation, and traumatic brain injury. I learned as much as I could about history and function and biology and the universality of my being.
Over time, I began to realize and accept that my body is pretty amazing.
I thought of this period of my life often while reading Cat Bohannon's remarkable "Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution," a deep dive into what the female body is, how it came to be, and how this evolution still shapes all our lives today.
Bohannon picks up where "Sapiens" left off, covering the past 200 million years to tell the story of what it really means to be a woman in a way that somehow, unfathomably, both incredibly entertaining and stunningly well researched with hundreds, and I mean hundreds, of cited sources along the way. "Eve" is both incredibly satisfying yet also leaves you craving more of Bohannon's curiosity, insight, knowledge, and wit.
"Eve" can be an overwhelming book. It's incredibly academic yet also remarkably accessible in language, style, and structure. Bohannon seemingly understands that to really get her points across she needs to find a way to immerse us in this information without leaving us gasping for our literary breaths. Mission accomplished.
I was in awe of both the intimacy and universality of "Eve" as Bohannon explores a variety of topics in exploring, essentially, what it means to biologically be a woman and that tells the story of womanhood throughout the centuries.
To call "Eve" some sort of feminist manifesto seems inadequate as it's really a manifesto for humanity that places, in ways never done before, women into the picture of medicine, neurobiology, paleoanthropology, and evolutionary biology.
Bohannon writes with candor the history of breasts and vaginas and womb and love and menopause and so much more. It's honestly deliriously awesome. It's informative yet it's far beyond informative because it builds a vision of womanhood that is truly awe-inspiring.
For far too long, the world has told the story of human history through the male body (though perhaps not the disabled male body). With "Eve," Bohannon passionately declares a corrective and beautifully brings to life the power and glory of the female body and how it truly has driven 200 million years of human evolution.
Bohannon's writing here is both profound in its knowledge and poetic in its narrative rhythms. I learned so much throughout "Eve," yet what is equally as profound is how much I actually enjoyed that learning from beginning to end. "Eve" is a revelatory vision of the history of womanhood that celebrates that history with a sense of joy and wonder.
It's not often that I reach the end of a 600-page book and think to myself "Give me more." But, oh yes, "Give me more!"
November 28, 2023
I am an evolutionary biologist, and my expertise influences my ultimately dim view of this book. The first two or three chapters, focused on paleontology and biology, were largely excellent. She does a great job describing the "tree thinking" she uses to identify her "Eves," the most recent common ancestor with a given trait. I'm not a paleontologist, but these data seem accurately described and contextualized. She does a reasonably good job of distinguishing sex and gender, although I don't think she gave a full description of the myriad ways in which "biological sex" reflects congruence among the distributions of many traits. There are several instances of beautiful descriptive writing in the first couple of chapters.
Beginning early on, however, the author starts making critical misstatements about the way evolution and natural selection work. She perpetuates several commonly held misunderstandings about NS, including repeated reference to "species fitness," which is simply not a real thing. She's not even accurately describing either the fully debunked version of group selection ("for the good of the species"), although I think this is what she is trying to suggest, nor the modern multi-level- selection version of group selection that can work under some very specific conditions that humans don't meet. She's just making up mechanisms of evolution that can't work. Her misunderstanding gets worse and worse throughout the book. At one point, she even asks if evolution might have anticipated the need for a trait. That's just not how evolution works - there is no forward view. The narrative abandons discussion of biology and the "Eves" she originally structured the book around, along with even a rudimentary understanding of how evolution occurs. This profound misunderstanding of how natural selection works then structures the second half of the book, which comprises the evolutionary psychology chapters. These chapters are incomplete, scarce on any data, and in the end, are often completely speculative, in large part because she conflates culture with genetically heritable traits and assumes that (most? all?) traits persist in populations because they are adaptive. Over and over again. The section on sexism, in a chapter that purports to be on love (but includes no mention of our ever-growing understanding of neuroendocrine mechanisms of bonding nor any of the extensive behavioral ecology non-primate literature) is particularly egregious, even going so far as to make specious claims about cause and effect on the basis of complicated behavioral, epidemiological, and political correlations.
I had thought to add this book to a list of books about evolution that my college biology majors could read to broaden their understanding of evolution, but the sheer unscientific nature of the last three chapters precludes that. I came back to add that the more I reflect on this book, the more frustrated I become that this passed review, and the more committed I am to providing excellent scientific education to my students because this is just bad science.
Beginning early on, however, the author starts making critical misstatements about the way evolution and natural selection work. She perpetuates several commonly held misunderstandings about NS, including repeated reference to "species fitness," which is simply not a real thing. She's not even accurately describing either the fully debunked version of group selection ("for the good of the species"), although I think this is what she is trying to suggest, nor the modern multi-level- selection version of group selection that can work under some very specific conditions that humans don't meet. She's just making up mechanisms of evolution that can't work. Her misunderstanding gets worse and worse throughout the book. At one point, she even asks if evolution might have anticipated the need for a trait. That's just not how evolution works - there is no forward view. The narrative abandons discussion of biology and the "Eves" she originally structured the book around, along with even a rudimentary understanding of how evolution occurs. This profound misunderstanding of how natural selection works then structures the second half of the book, which comprises the evolutionary psychology chapters. These chapters are incomplete, scarce on any data, and in the end, are often completely speculative, in large part because she conflates culture with genetically heritable traits and assumes that (most? all?) traits persist in populations because they are adaptive. Over and over again. The section on sexism, in a chapter that purports to be on love (but includes no mention of our ever-growing understanding of neuroendocrine mechanisms of bonding nor any of the extensive behavioral ecology non-primate literature) is particularly egregious, even going so far as to make specious claims about cause and effect on the basis of complicated behavioral, epidemiological, and political correlations.
I had thought to add this book to a list of books about evolution that my college biology majors could read to broaden their understanding of evolution, but the sheer unscientific nature of the last three chapters precludes that. I came back to add that the more I reflect on this book, the more frustrated I become that this passed review, and the more committed I am to providing excellent scientific education to my students because this is just bad science.
December 10, 2023
4.5 Stars
For years my husband has complained about not being able to hear dialogue in movies against the backdrop of the score and his inability to keep up with family conversations in restaurants among the ambient noise (note that we have 2 daughters, so all female). In the past I have shrugged away my irritation and told him to clean the wax out of his ears and suggested a good ENT. Well, it turns out that men's ears don't hear higher frequencies as well as women's and that their hearing loss of the higher frequencies (the range where most women speak) begins at age 25. Apparently this difference evolved as females needed to be able to hear their babies over the sounds in the canopy when they moved about. My husband thanks you, Cat Bohannon, and I have issued my apology.
Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution is an evolutionary and social history through the lens of the female body. The seeds of this book were planted with Bohannon's realization that most medical research was conducted on male subjects so the differences in the female body were not taken into account. Female bodies are not just male bodies with breasts and wide hips; there are fundamental differences.
Some fascinating (to me anyway) things I learned:
Adipose tissue (fat) is an organ. Women's fat and men's fat are different. Each fat deposit in our body has a different function. One example is that the fat in women's hips, thighs, and buttocks is full of long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids like those found in fish oil. At puberty, females begin storing these fats (which we can't obtain enough of from our daily diet) in order to nourish the brain and retinas of a fetus during a pregnancy and breastfeeding.
Most of us know about the immune system benefits that come with breastfeeding. Those babies who are breastfed get an added benefit. While the milk flows out of the nipple there is an upsuck of the baby's saliva. "Depending on what happens to be in baby's spit that day, the mother's breasts will change the particular composition of her milk. Her milk will actually change to include an agent to fight a specific pathogen or to include hormones to soothe a stressed baby.
Pregnant women with malaria are three to four times more likely to suffer from the most severe forms of the disease, and of those who do, 50 percent will die. . . . The entire reason the United States built the CDC [and located it in Atlanta] is that malaria was rampant throughout the American south. Malaria was finally eradicated in the United States in 1951." My footnote (not in the book): In 2023, for the first time since then, there have been 9 reported cases of locally acquired malaria in the U.S.--7 in FL, 2 in TX, and 1 in MD. Climate change?
Why do women live long after they are no longer reproduce and live longer and more healthfully than men? Bohannon posits that "whatever helps female bodies live on may simply benefit male bodies less, and losing more males may not cost primate societies that much. . . . From a scientific perspective, males don't really need to live as long as females to perpetuate the species." As to the why, Bohannon suggests that "Before we could write stuff down, it was especially important to have someone in the group who could remember earlier crises. It's usually not hard to find someone who can remember a difficult thing that happened ten years ago. It's much harder to find someone who remembers a difficult thing that happened forty years ago, or how, precisely, the community managed to find a workaround." This knowledge combined with gynecological and midwifery skills were the evolutionary pressures that selected women to live longer.
Where I feel Bohannon is less sure footed is in her hypothesis over the evolution of sexism. Do read her thoughts and come to your own conclusions.
Bohannon is an excellent writer--clear, engaging, informative, and entertaining. There is so much more than these bits that I have shared, and all of it is fascinating. If the topic interests you, by all means take the plunge and read this book!
Publication 2023
For years my husband has complained about not being able to hear dialogue in movies against the backdrop of the score and his inability to keep up with family conversations in restaurants among the ambient noise (note that we have 2 daughters, so all female). In the past I have shrugged away my irritation and told him to clean the wax out of his ears and suggested a good ENT. Well, it turns out that men's ears don't hear higher frequencies as well as women's and that their hearing loss of the higher frequencies (the range where most women speak) begins at age 25. Apparently this difference evolved as females needed to be able to hear their babies over the sounds in the canopy when they moved about. My husband thanks you, Cat Bohannon, and I have issued my apology.
Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution is an evolutionary and social history through the lens of the female body. The seeds of this book were planted with Bohannon's realization that most medical research was conducted on male subjects so the differences in the female body were not taken into account. Female bodies are not just male bodies with breasts and wide hips; there are fundamental differences.
Some fascinating (to me anyway) things I learned:
Adipose tissue (fat) is an organ. Women's fat and men's fat are different. Each fat deposit in our body has a different function. One example is that the fat in women's hips, thighs, and buttocks is full of long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids like those found in fish oil. At puberty, females begin storing these fats (which we can't obtain enough of from our daily diet) in order to nourish the brain and retinas of a fetus during a pregnancy and breastfeeding.
Most of us know about the immune system benefits that come with breastfeeding. Those babies who are breastfed get an added benefit. While the milk flows out of the nipple there is an upsuck of the baby's saliva. "Depending on what happens to be in baby's spit that day, the mother's breasts will change the particular composition of her milk. Her milk will actually change to include an agent to fight a specific pathogen or to include hormones to soothe a stressed baby.
Pregnant women with malaria are three to four times more likely to suffer from the most severe forms of the disease, and of those who do, 50 percent will die. . . . The entire reason the United States built the CDC [and located it in Atlanta] is that malaria was rampant throughout the American south. Malaria was finally eradicated in the United States in 1951." My footnote (not in the book): In 2023, for the first time since then, there have been 9 reported cases of locally acquired malaria in the U.S.--7 in FL, 2 in TX, and 1 in MD. Climate change?
Why do women live long after they are no longer reproduce and live longer and more healthfully than men? Bohannon posits that "whatever helps female bodies live on may simply benefit male bodies less, and losing more males may not cost primate societies that much. . . . From a scientific perspective, males don't really need to live as long as females to perpetuate the species." As to the why, Bohannon suggests that "Before we could write stuff down, it was especially important to have someone in the group who could remember earlier crises. It's usually not hard to find someone who can remember a difficult thing that happened ten years ago. It's much harder to find someone who remembers a difficult thing that happened forty years ago, or how, precisely, the community managed to find a workaround." This knowledge combined with gynecological and midwifery skills were the evolutionary pressures that selected women to live longer.
Where I feel Bohannon is less sure footed is in her hypothesis over the evolution of sexism. Do read her thoughts and come to your own conclusions.
Bohannon is an excellent writer--clear, engaging, informative, and entertaining. There is so much more than these bits that I have shared, and all of it is fascinating. If the topic interests you, by all means take the plunge and read this book!
Publication 2023
July 10, 2024
tl;dr crowd:
This is an extremely interesting book on human evolution, looking at various traits of modern humans and exploring how they -and we- came to be.
For everyone else, it's time for Sacrilegious Studies. We'll be discussing the biblical creation story.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth (but not hell because no one had pissed him off yet.)
The earth was without form, so he took it in his big hands and shaped it into a ball. This could be fun, God thought, tossing it from hand to hand.
So he created a bunch more planets, seven in fact. He also made Pluto but it was just a little dwarf, an afterthought, not really a planet at all.
It was dark so God said, Let there be light!, and there was light.
God called the light Day and everything dark he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
God was really pleased with himself and all he'd accomplished in just 24 hours, so he went back to Heaven and poured himself a beer.
When he awoke, he looked at Earth and thought, Well, that looks funny - there's no sky! And it's all covered by water!
So, God said, Let there be firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters!
And with that, a blue sky formed that he called Heaven. He then pushed the water aside into one place, making way for dry land.
God thought of how he'd made parts of the Earth look much older than others. 'That'll really screw with geologists some day,' he chuckled. And evening and morning were the second day.
The following day, God looked at the earth and saw how boring it was. All blue and brown and bland. He pulled out some paint samples he'd gotten at Walmart. Green would be a nice addition, he thought. Let there be grass!
God really loved the grass, how pretty it was, and how nice it felt under his bare feet. He decided if a little green was good, a lot would be even better. So he created trees and moss and algae in swimming pools. And evening and morning were the third day.
Remember that on the first day God created light and day and night? Well, the people who wrote the book of Genesis were Bronze Age nomads and didn't realise there couldn't be light or days and nights without a sun. So they had God create the sun and the moon on the fourth day!
He also created stars to make the night sky look pretty and for people to read their horoscopes by.
The next day he made fish and birds and the day after that he made all the land animals except humans. And God saw that it was good and yada yada yada.
The sixth day came along and God realized there was no one to appreciate all his hard work. Maybe the nonhuman animals were praising him but, like most English speakers, he couldn't be bothered to learn another language.
So God created Man in his own image and put him in charge of the Earth and all its inhabitants. He named him Adam and patted him on the head.
Adam was a little lonely since God wasn't always around to talk to. There were a lot of nonhuman animals around, but as we already know.... English speakers.
So Adam said to God, 'Do you have any more tricks up your sleeve? How 'bout making someone I can talk to who knows how to cook and clean?'
God reached inside Adam's chest and pulled out a rib. 'What the hell, God?' Adam screamed. 'That hurt!'
'Well, I need something to make her with, don't I?', God replied. 'I can't just make her out of nothing like I did the Earth and moon and everything else. She's a little more complicated than that.'
God set to work to turn that bone into flesh. All of a sudden, a woman walked up behind them.
'I haven't seen you guys around before,' she said. 'What'cha making there, big dude?'
They jumped in surprise, gawking at this beautiful, sexy, intelligent creature. 'Wh- wh- where did you come from?', God stammered. 'I was just gonna create you!'
The woman started laughing. 'I came from millions of years of evolution, from my mother and grandmothers and great-great grandmothers, all the way back to one-celled organisms. Where did you come from?'
They continued staring until Adam managed to say, 'You're just what I need! You speak English and can keep me company. I hope you can also cook and clean?'
With another laugh, Eve turned on her heel. 'Not for you, buddy. Not for you.'
Adam looked at God and God looked at Adam. Shrugging, God poured them both a beer.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
While some people believe the earth was created 6,000 years ago by a supernatural entity who made humans exactly as we are, scientists know that we descended from other creatures, just like every other animal and plant. We are as much a part of the animal kingdom as cats and dogs and woolly mammoths.
In Eve, author Cat Bohannon tells the story of humanity and how the female body drove evolution (the one with the XY chromosome, though not all women are born with it - gender is part of the brain make-up and doesn't correspond to the same sexual organs in everyone. In other words, sex and gender are two different things).
This is a fascinating book. The author goes through various features and traces their lineage, features such as breasts, pregnancy, tool use, language and voice. She goes back to the earliest known "Eve" for each trait and examines how they have evolved into their current forms in modern humans. As she says, "There’s no one mother of us all. Each system in our body is effectively a different age".
Eve wasn't created from Adam's rib, no more than Adam was created from a handful of dirt.
This is one of my two favorite nonfiction books this year. I made heaps of highlights and couldn't stop thinking about it even when I wasn't reading. It's very well written and witty at times. There are copious notes, which are well worth reading as you go along.
If you enjoy the story of evolution, you should find much to appreciate in this book.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
And as for Adam.....
After sulking for a day over his lostmaid companion, he thought of something to make him feel better. 'Uh, God? You know this rib you took out of me? I was thinking.... maybe you could make it into something else.'
He glanced down, 'I'm looking a little bare, if you know what I mean.'
So God created Adam's penis and the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
This is an extremely interesting book on human evolution, looking at various traits of modern humans and exploring how they -and we- came to be.
For everyone else, it's time for Sacrilegious Studies. We'll be discussing the biblical creation story.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth (but not hell because no one had pissed him off yet.)
The earth was without form, so he took it in his big hands and shaped it into a ball. This could be fun, God thought, tossing it from hand to hand.
So he created a bunch more planets, seven in fact. He also made Pluto but it was just a little dwarf, an afterthought, not really a planet at all.
It was dark so God said, Let there be light!, and there was light.
God called the light Day and everything dark he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
God was really pleased with himself and all he'd accomplished in just 24 hours, so he went back to Heaven and poured himself a beer.
When he awoke, he looked at Earth and thought, Well, that looks funny - there's no sky! And it's all covered by water!
So, God said, Let there be firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters!
And with that, a blue sky formed that he called Heaven. He then pushed the water aside into one place, making way for dry land.
God thought of how he'd made parts of the Earth look much older than others. 'That'll really screw with geologists some day,' he chuckled. And evening and morning were the second day.
The following day, God looked at the earth and saw how boring it was. All blue and brown and bland. He pulled out some paint samples he'd gotten at Walmart. Green would be a nice addition, he thought. Let there be grass!
God really loved the grass, how pretty it was, and how nice it felt under his bare feet. He decided if a little green was good, a lot would be even better. So he created trees and moss and algae in swimming pools. And evening and morning were the third day.
Remember that on the first day God created light and day and night? Well, the people who wrote the book of Genesis were Bronze Age nomads and didn't realise there couldn't be light or days and nights without a sun. So they had God create the sun and the moon on the fourth day!
He also created stars to make the night sky look pretty and for people to read their horoscopes by.
The next day he made fish and birds and the day after that he made all the land animals except humans. And God saw that it was good and yada yada yada.
The sixth day came along and God realized there was no one to appreciate all his hard work. Maybe the nonhuman animals were praising him but, like most English speakers, he couldn't be bothered to learn another language.
So God created Man in his own image and put him in charge of the Earth and all its inhabitants. He named him Adam and patted him on the head.
Adam was a little lonely since God wasn't always around to talk to. There were a lot of nonhuman animals around, but as we already know.... English speakers.
So Adam said to God, 'Do you have any more tricks up your sleeve? How 'bout making someone I can talk to who knows how to cook and clean?'
God reached inside Adam's chest and pulled out a rib. 'What the hell, God?' Adam screamed. 'That hurt!'
'Well, I need something to make her with, don't I?', God replied. 'I can't just make her out of nothing like I did the Earth and moon and everything else. She's a little more complicated than that.'
God set to work to turn that bone into flesh. All of a sudden, a woman walked up behind them.
'I haven't seen you guys around before,' she said. 'What'cha making there, big dude?'
They jumped in surprise, gawking at this beautiful, sexy, intelligent creature. 'Wh- wh- where did you come from?', God stammered. 'I was just gonna create you!'
The woman started laughing. 'I came from millions of years of evolution, from my mother and grandmothers and great-great grandmothers, all the way back to one-celled organisms. Where did you come from?'
They continued staring until Adam managed to say, 'You're just what I need! You speak English and can keep me company. I hope you can also cook and clean?'
With another laugh, Eve turned on her heel. 'Not for you, buddy. Not for you.'
Adam looked at God and God looked at Adam. Shrugging, God poured them both a beer.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
While some people believe the earth was created 6,000 years ago by a supernatural entity who made humans exactly as we are, scientists know that we descended from other creatures, just like every other animal and plant. We are as much a part of the animal kingdom as cats and dogs and woolly mammoths.
In Eve, author Cat Bohannon tells the story of humanity and how the female body drove evolution (the one with the XY chromosome, though not all women are born with it - gender is part of the brain make-up and doesn't correspond to the same sexual organs in everyone. In other words, sex and gender are two different things).
This is a fascinating book. The author goes through various features and traces their lineage, features such as breasts, pregnancy, tool use, language and voice. She goes back to the earliest known "Eve" for each trait and examines how they have evolved into their current forms in modern humans. As she says, "There’s no one mother of us all. Each system in our body is effectively a different age".
Eve wasn't created from Adam's rib, no more than Adam was created from a handful of dirt.
This is one of my two favorite nonfiction books this year. I made heaps of highlights and couldn't stop thinking about it even when I wasn't reading. It's very well written and witty at times. There are copious notes, which are well worth reading as you go along.
If you enjoy the story of evolution, you should find much to appreciate in this book.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
And as for Adam.....
After sulking for a day over his lost
He glanced down, 'I'm looking a little bare, if you know what I mean.'
So God created Adam's penis and the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
July 1, 2024
So many revelations about women's bodies to be found here. I love this book!
Check out my BookTube review on Hello, Bookworm.📚🐛
"Where women are undereducated, entire societies eventually go fallow. If history proves right, neglecting girls' education is a sign of a civilization's decline."
Did you know that the fat on women's butt and thighs is crucial to infant and fetal development? Or that women's bodies outpace men's bodies when it comes to physical endurance? What about the fact that schizophrenia predominantly affects men at a younger age than women? And how about menopause; do you know what evolutionary purpose it serves?
All of that and more is covered in Eve, which proves a fascinating and revelatory book about women's bodies and the crucial role they play in both the existence and survival of the human race.
This book:
- Interrogates how the world’s safety mechanisms and scientific studies are designed to cater to men’s bodies.
- Encourages readers to discard the male lens through which we’ve been conditioned to examine human evolution.
- Reveals that for a society to survive, it must care for its girls and women by ensuring they are well fed, have access to health care and safe means of terminating unwanted or unviable pregnancies, and are educated.
- And whenever possible, Bohannon explores how the topics discussed relate to trans women and non-binary people (this is admittedly a small portion of the book, as more studies must be done for us to have substantial information in this regard).
Highly recommend this book (including the audiobook)!
Check out my BookTube review on Hello, Bookworm.📚🐛
"Where women are undereducated, entire societies eventually go fallow. If history proves right, neglecting girls' education is a sign of a civilization's decline."
Did you know that the fat on women's butt and thighs is crucial to infant and fetal development? Or that women's bodies outpace men's bodies when it comes to physical endurance? What about the fact that schizophrenia predominantly affects men at a younger age than women? And how about menopause; do you know what evolutionary purpose it serves?
All of that and more is covered in Eve, which proves a fascinating and revelatory book about women's bodies and the crucial role they play in both the existence and survival of the human race.
This book:
- Interrogates how the world’s safety mechanisms and scientific studies are designed to cater to men’s bodies.
- Encourages readers to discard the male lens through which we’ve been conditioned to examine human evolution.
- Reveals that for a society to survive, it must care for its girls and women by ensuring they are well fed, have access to health care and safe means of terminating unwanted or unviable pregnancies, and are educated.
- And whenever possible, Bohannon explores how the topics discussed relate to trans women and non-binary people (this is admittedly a small portion of the book, as more studies must be done for us to have substantial information in this regard).
Highly recommend this book (including the audiobook)!
November 2, 2023
DNF at page 54.
I don’t usually log my DNFs, but this has to be said: you cannot write a 600 page book about women’s bodies and how they have uniquely evolved in distinct ways from men only to disregard that and act like sometimes men CAN do these things—like when they don’t identify as men 🤗. That’s not how human biology works, and you should know that!
I don’t usually log my DNFs, but this has to be said: you cannot write a 600 page book about women’s bodies and how they have uniquely evolved in distinct ways from men only to disregard that and act like sometimes men CAN do these things—like when they don’t identify as men 🤗. That’s not how human biology works, and you should know that!
February 27, 2024
A long, chatty, imaginative but sloppy work of popular science by a non-scientist. This one combines a handful of important facts to know about your body and a call to end the exclusion of women from medical testing; with speculation about the role of women and the female body in evolutionary history, which though hypothetical is at least fun to think about, and a useful counter to equally hypothetical male-centered assumptions; and with its own weird assumptions, bad facts and unnecessary personal asides. The pages do turn quickly, but in the end it’s more entertainment (if this is your thing) than education.
But to break it down. First, a few important or cool facts:
- The introduction is probably the most important chapter, calling attention to how much medical research (on humans and even on animals) includes exclusively male subjects… or if females are included, there’s no analysis of sex differences. The problem is that women are not small men. So for instance, prescriptions of pain meds will be inadequate because women’s livers process drugs more quickly. Even heart attacks look different in women—in fact, while women have fewer heart attacks than men, we’re more likely to die of them because they go unrecognized. I hope the introduction will be influential because this is a serious problem.
- It turns out even women’s fat is different. Fat deposits around the body are differently constituted, and women’s hips, butts and thighs store specific fatty acids used to make baby brains and retinas. You can’t get enough just during pregnancy, so your body starts hoarding them in puberty. What if you get a liposuction and then get pregnant? No one knows!
- A mother’s body actually communicates with the baby’s body through nursing. The nipple takes in and analyzes baby saliva, then adjusts the formula of the milk accordingly—for instance, with immune system boosters for a sick child. This communication can also have negative results: for instance, a very stressed mother can transmit that cortisol to the baby.
- Also, women who haven’t given birth and even men can lactate, though usually not much and usually requiring medication (and it doesn’t always work). Yes, there is a culture where men engage in so much childcare they’ve even been known to breastfeed!
Some evolutionary arguments I had doubts about:
- Breasts: why do we have them? You don’t need all that just to feed a baby. Bohannon argues that it’s probably not sexual selection because women have such a wide variety of breast sizes, all of which are functional for nursing. This seems to me like a good argument for why it is sexual selection, because if it’s only aesthetic rather than a survival or reproductive need, there’s more wiggle room.
- Menopause: why do we have it? Turns out, we’re one of only two species that do (the other being orcas); others reproduce till they die, sometimes much older than us. (Chimps and elephants can give birth in their 60s!) Bohannon posits that our bodies were once programmed to die around the time we now have menopause, but having some old people around was good for the community, so our bodies evolved to live longer but somehow women’s reproductive systems got left behind. I’m afraid I don’t follow this one either.
- Rape: how common was it among our ancestors? Bohannon argues not that common, because we don’t have twisty vaginas or spiked penises or cervixes that can be closed off to sperm, which some rape-prone species have evolved to facilitate or fight back against rape. This doesn’t seem very convincing: first because our bodies have indeed evolved mechanisms to protect us from injury during rape (this is why many women experience physiological arousal even though they’re definitely not into it), and second because, as Bohannon herself points out, we already have a much harder time conceiving than most species. A mallard duck’s “trapdoor” vagina means she has only a 2% chance of conceiving from rape, which is a big difference if you’re a species that normally only needs to mate once per cycle, but humans average only a 5% chance of pregnancy from any single encounter, and that’s when you’re young. Plus, Bohannon also argues that humans likely developed gynecology among our earliest tools—thus, evolved to get rid of unwanted pregnancies by intentionally aborting them, rather than our bodies doing it for us like other species. So we do in fact have adaptations to protect us, however imperfect, at least from dying. She also weirdly distinguishes “forcible rape” from “coercion” among chimps, with the former being not that common. I don’t follow that argument at all: “forcible rape” being uncommon among chimps tells us what, exactly, about all rape among humans?
- Brains: I was unimpressed with this chapter all around (except for the bit about how female sex hormones apparently help keep swelling down after a traumatic brain injury, resulting in better recovery, and potentially being developed into medication for everybody—that was cool). Bohannon falls into the trap of assuming that whatever we see around us must be biological rather than cultural, and while she does at least mention that differences among members of the same sex are far greater than differences between group averages, she still spills a lot of ink on those averages. She discusses differences in average test scores without even mentioning (until later) stereotype threat, and how these differences can be culturally programmed: even being reminded of a stereotype before a test alters scores to better fit the stereotype, so what does a lifetime in that cultural stew do to you? (You can read more about it in this excellent book.) She doesn’t consider whether girls’ average math scores might be depressed by a society that stereotypes math as a boy thing; whether young girls might have better verbal skills than boys because caretakers talk to and encourage them more; whether there might be societal reasons that men commit suicide more often than women. Despite the fact that the last has an enormous, 17%-of-the-planet-sized exception: in China women kill themselves more. She doesn’t even mention that.
- Sexism: Bohannon argues that sexism—including internalized sexism—is also hardwired, using as evidence the fact that many women (including apparently herself) are harsher on women than men: for instance, blaming the single woman rather than the married man for an affair. Perhaps because I don’t share her reaction on that point, this argument seems awfully weak, and again, Bohannon overlooks psychological and sociological explanations. Certainly having a common set of rules helps bind a community together, but just assuming your own cultural detritus is written into the genes of all humans is absurd.
Other stuff that was just weird or wrong:
- The bit about how men are faster but women have more endurance, illustrated by the fact that men beat women by 18% in a 5k, 11% in a marathon, but at 195 miles, women outrun men. How many people have ever run 195 miles in a go? Are they representative? Also, at the more common distances are we talking average runners or average winners?
- “There actually aren’t that many female prostitutes at work these days. By the most generous estimates, sex workers constitute only 0.6 percent of the U.S. population.” That’s… actually an enormous number if you ask me. A google search seems to bear it out, with an estimated total of 1-2 million sex workers in the U.S., 20% male and 80% female. So this footnote is perhaps accurate but in fact did more than anything else I’ve seen to convince me that sex work is a serious issue today.
- Then there’s the suggestion that “the latest numbers estimate that as many as 20 percent of humans are homosexual,” also so wildly huge that I went looking. Her citation is to an article I’m unable to access, but which claims nothing so grand in its abstract, instead stating that asking questions about sexuality in a veiled way makes people 65% more likely to report “nonheterosexual identity” and 59% more likely to report “same sex experiences.” The numbers I am able to find show a range of 4-8% by state of Americans identifying as “LGBT,” and the B is doing a lot of work there. Young people are far more likely to report an LGBT identity, but when you look at the breakdown, the increase is entirely in the fact that the numbers identifying as bisexual have shot up (with gays and lesbians holding steady at 3-4%, but 12% now calling themselves bi, thus leading to a spike in LGBT-identified people overall). Sexuality is fluid and often situational, so I’m not surprised a study digging for any indicia of “nonheterosexuality”—thus including people who are even a little bit bi—would hit 20% or even higher. But Bohannon calls all those people “homosexual,” i.e., gay or lesbian, and that’s flat wrong. Also, this statement is in service of the argument that we evolved this way to have extra childless adults to lend a hand in babysitting, which seems unconvincing given that plenty of adults are infertile without being gay, and that attraction as a cultural prerequisite for conception is by no means universal.
- Sadly, sloppiness with facts seems to be a pattern, even just with stuff I’m able to verify: take also the claim that “some say” that the Black Death killing 1/3 of the European population “[is] why Europe went through the Dark Ages, while the Islamic empires managed to flourish.” There is no source for this, presumably because even the most amateur of historians would immediately recognize it for hogwash: the Black Death struck Europe in the 1340’s, already in the late Middle Ages (which historians also no longer call the Dark Ages, but anyway), at which point the Islamic golden age—begun several centuries before—was by most accounts already over.
And I’ve barely scratched the surface. This is a long book, made longer with personal anecdotes and pop culture references and imaginary recreations of ancient life and virtue signaling the author’s trans inclusivity without offering much in the way of science, on how hormones begun at different times of life affect the body, etc. I did find the speculation about evolution relatively interesting, and I hope the author’s points about the absence of women from medical research will help jumpstart some necessary work. But a book that needs this much fact-checking, and full of this much questionable speculation, can’t be taken seriously.
But to break it down. First, a few important or cool facts:
- The introduction is probably the most important chapter, calling attention to how much medical research (on humans and even on animals) includes exclusively male subjects… or if females are included, there’s no analysis of sex differences. The problem is that women are not small men. So for instance, prescriptions of pain meds will be inadequate because women’s livers process drugs more quickly. Even heart attacks look different in women—in fact, while women have fewer heart attacks than men, we’re more likely to die of them because they go unrecognized. I hope the introduction will be influential because this is a serious problem.
- It turns out even women’s fat is different. Fat deposits around the body are differently constituted, and women’s hips, butts and thighs store specific fatty acids used to make baby brains and retinas. You can’t get enough just during pregnancy, so your body starts hoarding them in puberty. What if you get a liposuction and then get pregnant? No one knows!
- A mother’s body actually communicates with the baby’s body through nursing. The nipple takes in and analyzes baby saliva, then adjusts the formula of the milk accordingly—for instance, with immune system boosters for a sick child. This communication can also have negative results: for instance, a very stressed mother can transmit that cortisol to the baby.
- Also, women who haven’t given birth and even men can lactate, though usually not much and usually requiring medication (and it doesn’t always work). Yes, there is a culture where men engage in so much childcare they’ve even been known to breastfeed!
Some evolutionary arguments I had doubts about:
- Breasts: why do we have them? You don’t need all that just to feed a baby. Bohannon argues that it’s probably not sexual selection because women have such a wide variety of breast sizes, all of which are functional for nursing. This seems to me like a good argument for why it is sexual selection, because if it’s only aesthetic rather than a survival or reproductive need, there’s more wiggle room.
- Menopause: why do we have it? Turns out, we’re one of only two species that do (the other being orcas); others reproduce till they die, sometimes much older than us. (Chimps and elephants can give birth in their 60s!) Bohannon posits that our bodies were once programmed to die around the time we now have menopause, but having some old people around was good for the community, so our bodies evolved to live longer but somehow women’s reproductive systems got left behind. I’m afraid I don’t follow this one either.
- Rape: how common was it among our ancestors? Bohannon argues not that common, because we don’t have twisty vaginas or spiked penises or cervixes that can be closed off to sperm, which some rape-prone species have evolved to facilitate or fight back against rape. This doesn’t seem very convincing: first because our bodies have indeed evolved mechanisms to protect us from injury during rape (this is why many women experience physiological arousal even though they’re definitely not into it), and second because, as Bohannon herself points out, we already have a much harder time conceiving than most species. A mallard duck’s “trapdoor” vagina means she has only a 2% chance of conceiving from rape, which is a big difference if you’re a species that normally only needs to mate once per cycle, but humans average only a 5% chance of pregnancy from any single encounter, and that’s when you’re young. Plus, Bohannon also argues that humans likely developed gynecology among our earliest tools—thus, evolved to get rid of unwanted pregnancies by intentionally aborting them, rather than our bodies doing it for us like other species. So we do in fact have adaptations to protect us, however imperfect, at least from dying. She also weirdly distinguishes “forcible rape” from “coercion” among chimps, with the former being not that common. I don’t follow that argument at all: “forcible rape” being uncommon among chimps tells us what, exactly, about all rape among humans?
- Brains: I was unimpressed with this chapter all around (except for the bit about how female sex hormones apparently help keep swelling down after a traumatic brain injury, resulting in better recovery, and potentially being developed into medication for everybody—that was cool). Bohannon falls into the trap of assuming that whatever we see around us must be biological rather than cultural, and while she does at least mention that differences among members of the same sex are far greater than differences between group averages, she still spills a lot of ink on those averages. She discusses differences in average test scores without even mentioning (until later) stereotype threat, and how these differences can be culturally programmed: even being reminded of a stereotype before a test alters scores to better fit the stereotype, so what does a lifetime in that cultural stew do to you? (You can read more about it in this excellent book.) She doesn’t consider whether girls’ average math scores might be depressed by a society that stereotypes math as a boy thing; whether young girls might have better verbal skills than boys because caretakers talk to and encourage them more; whether there might be societal reasons that men commit suicide more often than women. Despite the fact that the last has an enormous, 17%-of-the-planet-sized exception: in China women kill themselves more. She doesn’t even mention that.
- Sexism: Bohannon argues that sexism—including internalized sexism—is also hardwired, using as evidence the fact that many women (including apparently herself) are harsher on women than men: for instance, blaming the single woman rather than the married man for an affair. Perhaps because I don’t share her reaction on that point, this argument seems awfully weak, and again, Bohannon overlooks psychological and sociological explanations. Certainly having a common set of rules helps bind a community together, but just assuming your own cultural detritus is written into the genes of all humans is absurd.
Other stuff that was just weird or wrong:
- The bit about how men are faster but women have more endurance, illustrated by the fact that men beat women by 18% in a 5k, 11% in a marathon, but at 195 miles, women outrun men. How many people have ever run 195 miles in a go? Are they representative? Also, at the more common distances are we talking average runners or average winners?
- “There actually aren’t that many female prostitutes at work these days. By the most generous estimates, sex workers constitute only 0.6 percent of the U.S. population.” That’s… actually an enormous number if you ask me. A google search seems to bear it out, with an estimated total of 1-2 million sex workers in the U.S., 20% male and 80% female. So this footnote is perhaps accurate but in fact did more than anything else I’ve seen to convince me that sex work is a serious issue today.
- Then there’s the suggestion that “the latest numbers estimate that as many as 20 percent of humans are homosexual,” also so wildly huge that I went looking. Her citation is to an article I’m unable to access, but which claims nothing so grand in its abstract, instead stating that asking questions about sexuality in a veiled way makes people 65% more likely to report “nonheterosexual identity” and 59% more likely to report “same sex experiences.” The numbers I am able to find show a range of 4-8% by state of Americans identifying as “LGBT,” and the B is doing a lot of work there. Young people are far more likely to report an LGBT identity, but when you look at the breakdown, the increase is entirely in the fact that the numbers identifying as bisexual have shot up (with gays and lesbians holding steady at 3-4%, but 12% now calling themselves bi, thus leading to a spike in LGBT-identified people overall). Sexuality is fluid and often situational, so I’m not surprised a study digging for any indicia of “nonheterosexuality”—thus including people who are even a little bit bi—would hit 20% or even higher. But Bohannon calls all those people “homosexual,” i.e., gay or lesbian, and that’s flat wrong. Also, this statement is in service of the argument that we evolved this way to have extra childless adults to lend a hand in babysitting, which seems unconvincing given that plenty of adults are infertile without being gay, and that attraction as a cultural prerequisite for conception is by no means universal.
- Sadly, sloppiness with facts seems to be a pattern, even just with stuff I’m able to verify: take also the claim that “some say” that the Black Death killing 1/3 of the European population “[is] why Europe went through the Dark Ages, while the Islamic empires managed to flourish.” There is no source for this, presumably because even the most amateur of historians would immediately recognize it for hogwash: the Black Death struck Europe in the 1340’s, already in the late Middle Ages (which historians also no longer call the Dark Ages, but anyway), at which point the Islamic golden age—begun several centuries before—was by most accounts already over.
And I’ve barely scratched the surface. This is a long book, made longer with personal anecdotes and pop culture references and imaginary recreations of ancient life and virtue signaling the author’s trans inclusivity without offering much in the way of science, on how hormones begun at different times of life affect the body, etc. I did find the speculation about evolution relatively interesting, and I hope the author’s points about the absence of women from medical research will help jumpstart some necessary work. But a book that needs this much fact-checking, and full of this much questionable speculation, can’t be taken seriously.
July 26, 2023
We don’t have one mother; we have many. And to each Eve, her particular Eden: We have the breasts we do because mammals evolved to make milk. We have the wombs we do because we evolved to “hatch” our eggs inside our own bodies. We have the faces we do, and our human sensory perception along with it, because primates evolved to live in trees. Our bipedal legs, our tool use, our fatty brains and chatty mouths and menopausal grandmothers — all of these traits that make us “human” came about at different times in our evolutionary past. In truth, we have billions of Edens, but just a handful of places and times that made our bodies the way they are. These particular Edens are often where we speciated: when our bodies evolved in ways that made us too different from others to be able to breed with them anymore. And if you want to understand women’s bodies, it’s largely these Eves and their Edens you need to think about.
In an often recounted story, a journalist recalled being in an Anthropology class when her female professor held up a picture of an antler with 28 tally marks carved upon it, saying: "This is alleged to be man's first attempt at a calendar." We all looked at the bone in admiration. "Tell me," she continued, "what man needs to know when 28 days have passed? I suspect that this is woman's first attempt at a calendar." In Eve: How the Female Body Drove Human Evolution, author Cat Bohannon (with a Ph.D. from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition) expands on this idea of considering the needs of the female of our species when looking for the catalysts behind the great shifts in our development — from bipedal locomotion to language and tool use — and in a narrative that starts with the first tiny mammal that coexisted with the dinosaurs and traces that story up to today’s reality, Bohannon has assembled a fascinating, comprehensive, and entertaining study of what is usually left out of the story of “us” — all while making a forceful case for why focussing on the history of the female body matters for the future of all of humanity. In a quirky bit of formatting, Bohannon starts each chapter with a glimpse at the “Eve” of a new development — the Eve of lactation is a Morganucodon sweating beads of milk through her fur in an underground den during the Jurassic Period; the Eve of menopause is a grandmother using her experience to serve as an emergency midwife in early Jericho — and I found the format charming. I loved everything about this (even if it did take quite a while to read) and I would unhesitatingly recommend it to any reader. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
It’s not that topflight scientists still think female bodies were made when God pulled a rib from Adam’s side, but the assumption that being sexed is simply a matter of sex organs — that somehow being female is just a minor tweak on a Platonic form — is a bit like that old Bible story. And that story is a lie. As we’ve increasingly learned, female bodies aren’t just male bodies with “extra stuff ” (fat, breasts, uteri). Nor are testicles and ovaries swappable. Being sexed permeates every major feature of our mammalian bodies and the lives we live inside them, for mouse and human alike. When scientists study only the male norm, we’re getting less than half of a complicated picture; all too often, we don’t know what we’re missing by ignoring sex differences, because we’re not asking the question.
I first encountered this idea of the Platonic form (and the Homo sapien female being merely a weaker variation on the male ideal) and its persistent chauvinism affecting medical research in Invisible Women. Relatedly, Bohannon includes in her Introduction recent research into women’s “gluteofemoral” fat (on hips, buttocks, and upper thigh) — ie., the “stubborn” padding that a woman might turn to liposuction to remove — writing that it is composed of unique and essential lipids (accumulated since childhood) that are vital during pregnancy and breastfeeding to build a baby’s brain and eyes. But apparently no one, before the author, ever asked what the ramifications might be when a post-liposuction woman becomes pregnant. When Bohannon later introduces the genesis of breasts and placental wombs and women's heightened sensory perception — each of which development was absolutely essential to evolving our species into what it is today — it’s hard not to think that perhaps the female form is the pinnacle of human evolution, with the stripped-down male contributing some sperm now and then. Bohannon makes a strong case that the first tools were probably gynecological — we were still opportunistic scavengers long after walking upright and growing large brains made human childbirth a risky business, so the first tools were likely not hunting related since we’re here to tell the tale — and she also makes the case that human language (with grammar and syntax that differentiates it from animal communication), however it arose, was passed down, mother to child:
The majority of scientific stories about the evolution of human language fall in line: at each turn, human innovation has been driven by groups of men solving man-problems. One popular tale holds that language happened because we became hunters, forming large parties (of men) who needed to shout complex directions at one another across wide savannas. But wolves are pretty fantastic hunters, do it in groups, come up with surprisingly complex plans for the hunt that depend on members performing diverse roles, and don’t have a lick of language…So the male narrative of the evolution of human language misses the point. Language isn’t like opposable thumbs or flat faces — traits that evolution wrote into our genes. Our capacity for learning and innovating in language is innate, but nevertheless, for the largest gains in intergenerational communication to persist over time, each generation has to pass language on to the next with careful effort, interactive learning, and guided development. Language, in other words, is something that mothers and their babies make together and is dependent on the relationship between them in those first critical three to five years of human life. A long, unbroken chain of mothers and offspring trying to communicate with each other — that’s what’s kept this language thing going from the beginning.
Eve is stuffed with interesting facts — I did not know that openings in a breastfeeding woman’s areola “uptakes” her baby’s saliva to scan for infection and send specific immunity supports, or that a stress hormone is released in women when they hear a baby crying (while the top frequencies of a crying baby are cut off in the male hearing range) or that reducing the number of girls married before they are eighteen by even 10 percent can reduce a country’s maternal mortality by 70 percent — supported by pages of footnotes and citations. I trusted the research. But Bohannon’s main thesis seems to be that, despite nearly dying off a couple of times, our species has been able to thrive and populate the entire planet primarily because we mastered gynecology; learning to have the right number of babies, raised at the right time, according to the resources of their mothers’ community. And while advances in birth control and midwifery did improve maternal outcomes, it was sexism — controlling the bodies of fertile females and controlling who had access to them — that did most of the work. Now that medical advances in birth control, midwifery, and gynecology ought to guarantee maternal outcomes — and this again stresses the need for proper medical research on the female body — Bohannon suggests that it’s past time we released ourselves from the cultural constraints of sexism. (Even in America, maternal death rates are on the rise: a hot combination of racism, sexism, ableism, reduced public support for female health, and the crippling of science-based sex education has finally made it more dangerous for American women to be pregnant than it used to be.)
Now, I’m hardly the sort of person who wants to think of women as simply baby factories. But as a species, let’s say all of us want to get smarter. That’s what it takes to cure cancer. To solve the climate crisis. How do we do that? For a start, we might want to acknowledge that human brains are something that are made primarily out of women’s bodies: first in their wombs, and then from their breast milk, and then from the quality of interactions mothers have with their children. So if you want the best possible chance to make a lot of kids with high IQs, you want healthy women who are fed well, and have been fed well, consistently, for at least two decades before they become pregnant. You want them to have had a rich and well-supported childhood education. And you want them to be well cared for throughout their reproductive lives, with readily available education about nutrition and healthy habits and newborn caretaking. You want them to have community resources available when they get sick and when their kids get sick. And, because STIs have such a proven effect on reproductive health, you want them to have ready access to prophylactics and good sex ed.
So, ultimately, this isn’t simply an objective overview of the science behind “how the female body drove evolution”. But as I agree with Bohannon’s conclusions regarding the need to eliminate the atavistic drive to control female bodies (which is somehow increasing around the world?), I’m still happy to have read this. It’s scholarly and engaging and necessary. This should absolutely be read alongside popular male-focussed histories like Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens; he left out the bits about how the first cities were made possible by wet nurses.
March 14, 2024
My Dream Date with Cat Bohannon
(A fictional event)
LCJ: Very nice to meet you.
CB: (looking sideways) One of the perks of publishing – I have to participate in these ‘win a date with the author’ lunches.
LCJ, pointedly ignoring the ungraciousness of CB’s response: I recently finished your book ‘Eve,’ and thought it was quite an amazing piece of scholarship wrapped up in accessible and engaging language.
CB: Oh? Well, that’s good to hear. Are you an academic or a biologist yourself?
LCJ: No, I’m a budding librarian and book nerd who spends his free time writing book reviews for Goodreads.
CB: (looks away)
LCJ: Which reminds me! I loved this (digs into his briefcase, pulls out the book and flips it to p. 257:
CB: It’s such an unnatural way to communicate, but many of us spend hours and hours every day doing it.
LCJ: Judging by the citations in the book, you’re one of those people. The fact that you wrote this while raising two children and writing a PhD Thesis on the variation of information density in long-form narrative…
CB: How did you know that?
LCJ: Google, and I read your Acknowledgements.
CB: Of course.
LCJ: There’s so many fun, chewy facts in here! (Turns the page to p. 259)
CB, cracking first smile of the afternoon: Men! You guys just��.(shakes head)
LCJ: To be fair, many of these female patients were probably not brainy gorgeous redheads who paid their way through school by modeling.
CB: (looking at watch) Congratulations, you lasted for over two minutes before bringing that up. That may be a new record among the men who’ve read my book.
LCJ: Well, I started life as a “bloodsucking demon fetus,” after all (p.107).
CB: (Laughs) That was, of course, an exaggeration. Sort of. Even if it’s true.
LCJ: Your fellow New Yorker Deena Emera wrote a whole book about the difficulties surrounding the human placenta.
CB: (raising eyebows) So you’re not completely ignorant of biology?
LCJ, in a rare bout of modesty: Not completely
CB: So what do you think of my restatement of human evolution?
LCJ: Your choice of presentation was really good. As I said earlier, you force us to think about things in new ways. I like how you pointed out different body parts went through design freezes at various points in our evolutionary history, so our bladders are hundreds of millions of years old while our brains, in their current form, may only go back 50,000 years or so. That’s really an inspired way to tackle all this. And your proposal that young mothers probably had more to do with the invention of language and tools than Mighty Hunters sounds right to me.
CB: Thanks, but it didn’t answer my question.
LCJ: flips to p. 170: “Our feet are, in many ways, the biological equivalent of duct-taping your car’s bumper back on when you don’t have the money to send it to the body shop.” My wife, who is an ex-jock, is very beautiful – from the ankles on up. But her feet….
CB: (Laughs)
LCJ: Or how about this (flipping to p. 227): The part about the fertilized egg of an armadillo just floating around in the mother’s womb for up to eight months, until she finds a place with ample food and water and good shelter, before it implants itself in the womb? Fascinating.
CB: Isn’t it?
LCJ: Minor point: on p. 386, you mention that vaginal fluid is too acidic for sperm to survive for long – that the pH is too high.
CB: Right.
LCJ: Acidity is pH in the range of 0 to 7. High pH means the fluid is alkaline.
CB: Let’s not nitpick. What about the final, most important couple of chapters?
LCJ: (Sighs)
CB: I see – like most men, you can’t handle…(shakes head) You think I’m some sort of hysterical…
LCJ: Would you like me to treat your hysteria?
CB: Don’t be an asshole.
LCJ: I actually am fully on board with the call to action that comprises that last couple of chapters, and even if I am a male of postmenopausal age that offers no real benefit to society--
CB: That’s not exactly what I said—
LCJ: --I am not against outrage presented in books. I share your outrage.
CB: I’m glad.
LCJ: Just yesterday I learned that around 65,000 rapes have resulted in pregnancies in this country that cannot be aborted due to Roe v. Wade being overturned.
CB: Sickening. In the final chapter, I mentioned
LCJ: Although I completely agree with you, this is where I enjoyed the book less. Because, after eight truly thrilling chapters of science – the study of how things came to be – suddenly the book became prescriptive – how things should be, and what we need to do to achieve that.
CB: And you have a problem with that?
LCJ: I love a good call to action supported by science. But this was packaged and presented as a science book that suddenly had a call to action at the end, which felt a bit sleight-of-hand to me.
CB: Fine. But you liked the book?
LCJ: Liked it, admired it, felt it was important and well-written and I’m very glad I read it.
CB: Thanks for lunch.
LCJ: My pleasure.
(A fictional event)
LCJ: Very nice to meet you.
CB: (looking sideways) One of the perks of publishing – I have to participate in these ‘win a date with the author’ lunches.
LCJ, pointedly ignoring the ungraciousness of CB’s response: I recently finished your book ‘Eve,’ and thought it was quite an amazing piece of scholarship wrapped up in accessible and engaging language.
CB: Oh? Well, that’s good to hear. Are you an academic or a biologist yourself?
LCJ: No, I’m a budding librarian and book nerd who spends his free time writing book reviews for Goodreads.
CB: (looks away)
LCJ: Which reminds me! I loved this (digs into his briefcase, pulls out the book and flips it to p. 257:
Reading itself is a deeply strange activity. You’re asking a human brain to tune out nearly all sensory information from the outside world for a long stretch of time in order to focus on a small area of somewhat obscure black markings on a white background, carefully shifting the eyes across those markings in a given direction. And while the eyes are so carefully focused, the ears are supposed to ignore any sounds in the environment so that the mind, meanwhile, can discern those markings as bits of language and immediately interpret that language without any of the usual clues speakers give: no facial expressions, no hand gestures, no useful variation in pitch…Reading is an extraordinarily difficult thing for the brain to learn how to do.I think that really sums up the appeal of your writing – you bring up things people usually take for granted and force us to really think about them.
CB: It’s such an unnatural way to communicate, but many of us spend hours and hours every day doing it.
LCJ: Judging by the citations in the book, you’re one of those people. The fact that you wrote this while raising two children and writing a PhD Thesis on the variation of information density in long-form narrative…
CB: How did you know that?
LCJ: Google, and I read your Acknowledgements.
CB: Of course.
LCJ: There’s so many fun, chewy facts in here! (Turns the page to p. 259)
As late as the 1920’s, clitoral stimulation was considered the proper treatment for feminine hysteria. That meant doctors—typically male—were obliged to stimulate moody women to orgasm in clinical settings. Hilariously, most of the doctors seemed to find the task boring and tedious, which drove the invention of the electric vibrator….In an odd tying together of my life to your book, I once manufactured some of the electronics used in vibrators – the harder you squeezed, the more intense the vibrations. This was not considered part of our medical product portfolio, you’ll be happy to hear.
CB, cracking first smile of the afternoon: Men! You guys just��.(shakes head)
LCJ: To be fair, many of these female patients were probably not brainy gorgeous redheads who paid their way through school by modeling.
CB: (looking at watch) Congratulations, you lasted for over two minutes before bringing that up. That may be a new record among the men who’ve read my book.
LCJ: Well, I started life as a “bloodsucking demon fetus,” after all (p.107).
CB: (Laughs) That was, of course, an exaggeration. Sort of. Even if it’s true.
LCJ: Your fellow New Yorker Deena Emera wrote a whole book about the difficulties surrounding the human placenta.
CB: (raising eyebows) So you’re not completely ignorant of biology?
LCJ, in a rare bout of modesty: Not completely
CB: So what do you think of my restatement of human evolution?
LCJ: Your choice of presentation was really good. As I said earlier, you force us to think about things in new ways. I like how you pointed out different body parts went through design freezes at various points in our evolutionary history, so our bladders are hundreds of millions of years old while our brains, in their current form, may only go back 50,000 years or so. That’s really an inspired way to tackle all this. And your proposal that young mothers probably had more to do with the invention of language and tools than Mighty Hunters sounds right to me.
CB: Thanks, but it didn’t answer my question.
LCJ: flips to p. 170: “Our feet are, in many ways, the biological equivalent of duct-taping your car’s bumper back on when you don’t have the money to send it to the body shop.” My wife, who is an ex-jock, is very beautiful – from the ankles on up. But her feet….
CB: (Laughs)
LCJ: Or how about this (flipping to p. 227): The part about the fertilized egg of an armadillo just floating around in the mother’s womb for up to eight months, until she finds a place with ample food and water and good shelter, before it implants itself in the womb? Fascinating.
CB: Isn’t it?
LCJ: Minor point: on p. 386, you mention that vaginal fluid is too acidic for sperm to survive for long – that the pH is too high.
CB: Right.
LCJ: Acidity is pH in the range of 0 to 7. High pH means the fluid is alkaline.
CB: Let’s not nitpick. What about the final, most important couple of chapters?
LCJ: (Sighs)
CB: I see – like most men, you can’t handle…(shakes head) You think I’m some sort of hysterical…
LCJ: Would you like me to treat your hysteria?
CB: Don’t be an asshole.
LCJ: I actually am fully on board with the call to action that comprises that last couple of chapters, and even if I am a male of postmenopausal age that offers no real benefit to society--
CB: That’s not exactly what I said—
LCJ: --I am not against outrage presented in books. I share your outrage.
CB: I’m glad.
LCJ: Just yesterday I learned that around 65,000 rapes have resulted in pregnancies in this country that cannot be aborted due to Roe v. Wade being overturned.
CB: Sickening. In the final chapter, I mentioned
It’s not quite accurate to say that loving another person is the the best thing that human beings do. Maybe it’s how we’re able to love our not-sisters in the way we love our sisters. That might be our best thing. The urge to protect others’ children, because most of us have an urge to protect children in general. The’s the best human thing – the way we took “primate” and made it better.And that led to a discussion of how much we would benefit by moving away from sexism and towards more reproductive choice and more male involvement in the duty of child raising.
LCJ: Although I completely agree with you, this is where I enjoyed the book less. Because, after eight truly thrilling chapters of science – the study of how things came to be – suddenly the book became prescriptive – how things should be, and what we need to do to achieve that.
CB: And you have a problem with that?
LCJ: I love a good call to action supported by science. But this was packaged and presented as a science book that suddenly had a call to action at the end, which felt a bit sleight-of-hand to me.
CB: Fine. But you liked the book?
LCJ: Liked it, admired it, felt it was important and well-written and I’m very glad I read it.
CB: Thanks for lunch.
LCJ: My pleasure.
January 19, 2024
I have mixed feelings about this book. The main thing that appeals to me is her underlying premise that the theories about human evolution have largely been theorized by men, who assumed that “human innovation had been driven by groups of men solving man-problems.” So I appreciate her turning of the tables on those chauvinist assumptions. Unfortunately, it seems to me that she falls into the trap of thinking that natural selection has a plan, that evolution has direction or is aiming for something. It just doesn't work that way—we have certain genetics and if those tiny blueprints give us an advantage, our offspring may proliferate more than those of our neighbours (or not).
I had never thought of gynecology as an asset in the human evolution game, but I think she has a point. Females helping others with the labouring process would be a distinct advantage. However behaviours don't fossilize, so it's a largely theoretical argument, as is the chapter on our unusual condition known as menopause. Sure, it's a nice bonus to have wise elders to help with memories of previous solutions to thorny problems, but it's almost certainly an evolutionary accident.
I had never encountered the information on throat sacs in primates before, despite taking several primatology courses in university and volunteering as an education docent in natural history for 17 years. I was intrigued by the idea that the loss of throat sacs would have been an advantage for a primate that had made the switch to an upright posture. It made sense to me: the drainage of sinuses down the throat, resulting in more vocal sac infections, could be selected against. That the loss of vocal sacs would be a step towards the possible development of spoken language is a tempting new idea for me.
Generally, when she deals with actual fossil evidence, I like her conclusions. But all the theoretical speculations, while fun, are just that, speculations. There are entertaining footnotes aplenty and copious endnotes too (where I found some sources for the fascinating throat sac material). There is also a very long bibliography, which I appreciated. As with any “explanation“ of human behaviour, take it all with a very large grain of salt.
I had never thought of gynecology as an asset in the human evolution game, but I think she has a point. Females helping others with the labouring process would be a distinct advantage. However behaviours don't fossilize, so it's a largely theoretical argument, as is the chapter on our unusual condition known as menopause. Sure, it's a nice bonus to have wise elders to help with memories of previous solutions to thorny problems, but it's almost certainly an evolutionary accident.
I had never encountered the information on throat sacs in primates before, despite taking several primatology courses in university and volunteering as an education docent in natural history for 17 years. I was intrigued by the idea that the loss of throat sacs would have been an advantage for a primate that had made the switch to an upright posture. It made sense to me: the drainage of sinuses down the throat, resulting in more vocal sac infections, could be selected against. That the loss of vocal sacs would be a step towards the possible development of spoken language is a tempting new idea for me.
Generally, when she deals with actual fossil evidence, I like her conclusions. But all the theoretical speculations, while fun, are just that, speculations. There are entertaining footnotes aplenty and copious endnotes too (where I found some sources for the fascinating throat sac material). There is also a very long bibliography, which I appreciated. As with any “explanation“ of human behaviour, take it all with a very large grain of salt.
May 21, 2024
5/5 ★'s
This book is phenomenal!!! I truly believe all of us should read it once in our lives. This has given me so much information I always craved, but never knew where to start or how to find it.
Women, you must read this. Like, seriously, get it in your hands or ears right now! But once again, it's information we all need.
I listened to the audio version, and Cat narrated herself, making the feeling of the book perfect. You could hear her sarcasm, or seriousness depending on the situation. But the way she speaks and hands you the info is perfect and digestible.
I recommend to all of my Goodreads friends!
This book is phenomenal!!! I truly believe all of us should read it once in our lives. This has given me so much information I always craved, but never knew where to start or how to find it.
Women, you must read this. Like, seriously, get it in your hands or ears right now! But once again, it's information we all need.
I listened to the audio version, and Cat narrated herself, making the feeling of the book perfect. You could hear her sarcasm, or seriousness depending on the situation. But the way she speaks and hands you the info is perfect and digestible.
I recommend to all of my Goodreads friends!
March 13, 2024
Do you have a favorite book yet for 2023? If not, let me offer you a serious contender.
This book rocked my female world. I don't know what I thought I was getting when I picked up this huge book, but Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution easily exceeded every single one of my expectations.
Bohannon presents the well-researched and timely information in such an engaging manner, I felt like each chapter was another episode in a documentary series devised specifically to educate, fascinate, and astound me.
Are there college courses based on this topic? If not, they could base them on this book, as it presents vital knowledge for any human to understand who we are, what we are capable of, and most importantly, why.
This book rocked my female world. I don't know what I thought I was getting when I picked up this huge book, but Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution easily exceeded every single one of my expectations.
Bohannon presents the well-researched and timely information in such an engaging manner, I felt like each chapter was another episode in a documentary series devised specifically to educate, fascinate, and astound me.
Are there college courses based on this topic? If not, they could base them on this book, as it presents vital knowledge for any human to understand who we are, what we are capable of, and most importantly, why.
October 23, 2023
Eve is a fantastic read for anyone interested in women's history - and by that I mean prehistory, how women evolved. From the first chapter, on a small egg-laying burrowing mammal producing liquid through adapted skin patches for her nurslings, we see how the female body arose and how one small successful step drove another one.
Some chapters are not for the young or tender, but all regard physiology as part of an evolving life and situation, in which the female of the species did her best to produce healthy offspring and train them for life. We see the internal adaptations and the growing brain, the hormones of puberty, motherhood, and the change of life at menopause. Why older women are useful, why the wet nurse was responsible for explosive population growth in early farming towns. Plenty I knew, also plenty I did not know, all of which made perfect sense.
Finally the author looks at how medical science has not been testing anything much on women - for good reasons of course, mostly around childbearing - and many objects were not designed with women in mind. And how today, in some parts of the world, women and girls are 'last to eat, last to be educated' to quote another book I am reading. The shortsightedness of undervaluing the mothers of the next generation is, says the author, borne out by the lack of scientific progress among such cultures. Feeding the girl today gives her the store of nutrients to provide large brains, strong bones and good physique to her sons and daughters. The girl today is the Eve of the next generation.
Science papers are quoted throughout and many books are also referenced, right up to today's discoveries about disease, immunity, brown and white fats, and why women store vitamins from cod liver oil. I enjoyed Eve and hope to read more by this author.
I read an e-ARC from Net Galley. This is an unbiased review.
Some chapters are not for the young or tender, but all regard physiology as part of an evolving life and situation, in which the female of the species did her best to produce healthy offspring and train them for life. We see the internal adaptations and the growing brain, the hormones of puberty, motherhood, and the change of life at menopause. Why older women are useful, why the wet nurse was responsible for explosive population growth in early farming towns. Plenty I knew, also plenty I did not know, all of which made perfect sense.
Finally the author looks at how medical science has not been testing anything much on women - for good reasons of course, mostly around childbearing - and many objects were not designed with women in mind. And how today, in some parts of the world, women and girls are 'last to eat, last to be educated' to quote another book I am reading. The shortsightedness of undervaluing the mothers of the next generation is, says the author, borne out by the lack of scientific progress among such cultures. Feeding the girl today gives her the store of nutrients to provide large brains, strong bones and good physique to her sons and daughters. The girl today is the Eve of the next generation.
Science papers are quoted throughout and many books are also referenced, right up to today's discoveries about disease, immunity, brown and white fats, and why women store vitamins from cod liver oil. I enjoyed Eve and hope to read more by this author.
I read an e-ARC from Net Galley. This is an unbiased review.
January 29, 2024
Absolute woke garbage. Author went on and on about how different women are from men in ways of: anatomy, physiology, psyche. To only drag in men who pretend to be women and claim they ARE biological women. Didn’t you just write a whole book based on innate differences between WOMEN AND MEN? So how can a biological MAN claim to be a biological WOMAN?
Awful . What a waste of a good topic .
Awful . What a waste of a good topic .
September 7, 2023
thanks for the publishers and netgalley for a free copy in return for an open and honest review
Very detailed and interesting book looking at female body evolution has effected human evolution and has opened my eyes on certain subjects, the author tries to make the book simple in parts so the reader doesn't need a biological or medical knowledge to fully understand.
Very detailed and interesting book looking at female body evolution has effected human evolution and has opened my eyes on certain subjects, the author tries to make the book simple in parts so the reader doesn't need a biological or medical knowledge to fully understand.
July 2, 2024
A few years back, I remember learning the appalling fact that female bodies have traditionally been, and often still are, excluded from scientific research, drug trials, studies, etc because female bodies are, basically, too inconsistent. Reproductive cycles rely on a variety of hormones to trigger different cycle phases and produce bodily changes, and all of that makes getting reliable, reproduceable clinical results for [enter drug here]'s effects on the body very difficult.
So, science and medicine just... didn't.
Probably part of that is the patriarchy - male bodies are the default, and female bodies are the malformed, weaker version, and all that. It's not SCIENCE'S fault that the female body isn't understood as fully as the male body - have we tried just not having wrong bodies? Maybe one where the uterus doesn't wander around all willy-nilly?
This book examines, with a plethora of research and evidence, the ways which evolution is based on the needs of the female body. (By the way, my use of "male" and "female" refers to sex, not gender.)
Did you ever wonder where nipples came from? Imagine the looks you'd get trying to feed your baby if baby had to lick glandular secretions off your skin instead of having a handy dangly feed-tube that can be directed straight into the waiting food-hole. Ahhh, motherhood. So precious.
In all actuality though, it IS precious, and kind of wonderful (but not for me, thankyouverymuch). I learned that the nipple is actually a two way conduit that lets breast milk flow out, and baby's saliva flow in, and that the mother's body uses that saliva to assess what may be needed to support baby's health and adjusts the milk supply accordingly. I'd like to see Similac do that shit. (Seriously, fed is best. NO MOM SHAMING.)
Who even knew that the placenta prevents the mother's body from rejecting EVERY pregnancy as a parasitic invader? Not I. And I had to take 6th grade health class. Go figure.
There was a TON of surprising and fascinating information in this book, and it was presented in an accessible and interesting way, giving names and personalities to animals and primates long gone. Not truly anthropomorphizing, but just giving a bit of context around the lives they would have lived and the instincts that would have driven them and their behaviors.
I really enjoyed it, and highly recommend it.
So, science and medicine just... didn't.
Probably part of that is the patriarchy - male bodies are the default, and female bodies are the malformed, weaker version, and all that. It's not SCIENCE'S fault that the female body isn't understood as fully as the male body - have we tried just not having wrong bodies? Maybe one where the uterus doesn't wander around all willy-nilly?
This book examines, with a plethora of research and evidence, the ways which evolution is based on the needs of the female body. (By the way, my use of "male" and "female" refers to sex, not gender.)
Did you ever wonder where nipples came from? Imagine the looks you'd get trying to feed your baby if baby had to lick glandular secretions off your skin instead of having a handy dangly feed-tube that can be directed straight into the waiting food-hole. Ahhh, motherhood. So precious.
In all actuality though, it IS precious, and kind of wonderful (but not for me, thankyouverymuch). I learned that the nipple is actually a two way conduit that lets breast milk flow out, and baby's saliva flow in, and that the mother's body uses that saliva to assess what may be needed to support baby's health and adjusts the milk supply accordingly. I'd like to see Similac do that shit. (Seriously, fed is best. NO MOM SHAMING.)
Who even knew that the placenta prevents the mother's body from rejecting EVERY pregnancy as a parasitic invader? Not I. And I had to take 6th grade health class. Go figure.
There was a TON of surprising and fascinating information in this book, and it was presented in an accessible and interesting way, giving names and personalities to animals and primates long gone. Not truly anthropomorphizing, but just giving a bit of context around the lives they would have lived and the instincts that would have driven them and their behaviors.
I really enjoyed it, and highly recommend it.
March 26, 2024
2.5 stars rounded down. This was a frustrating read, portrayed as a popular science book when the author is definitely not a hard scientist (i.e., biologist) by training or expertise (her PhD from Columbia looks to be granted from the school's psychology or sociology department, so she's a social scientist by training). The other big red flag about Bohannon's credentials are that she's a relatively newly-minted PhD graduate (2022), not (yet) an established professor with robust principal investigator research accomplishments where she should have a stronger platform to discuss her research-informed opinions. Essentially this book reads as an extremely long research paper heavily interspersed with Bohannon's own opinions, with a lot of repetition and spurious conclusions thrown in.
Further reading:
T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us by Carole Hooven, PhD
Aroused: The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything by Randi Hutter Epstein, MD
This Is Your Brain on Birth Control: The Surprising Science of Women, Hormones, and the Law of Unintended Consequences by Sarah Hill, PhD
The Better Half: On the Genetic Superiority of Women by Sharon Moalem, MD, PhD
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez
Further reading:
T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us by Carole Hooven, PhD
Aroused: The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything by Randi Hutter Epstein, MD
This Is Your Brain on Birth Control: The Surprising Science of Women, Hormones, and the Law of Unintended Consequences by Sarah Hill, PhD
The Better Half: On the Genetic Superiority of Women by Sharon Moalem, MD, PhD
Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez
March 12, 2024
There were a lot of unscientific "facts" thrown here and there with non scientific sources that I almost dnf-ed it many times. The last straw was me wondering "Must you really include politics in everything these days ? Even a science book?"
Just found out the author is not even a scientist.
Can anyone write a book and shelve it in the science section these days or what ?
Just found out the author is not even a scientist.
Can anyone write a book and shelve it in the science section these days or what ?
November 14, 2023
This book had its ups and downs. Found some chapters more interesting than others. The general topic was really interesting and mostly it was written really well and was an easy read. But occasionaly i did find myself just skimming through pages.
Read
August 4, 2024BTP nonfiction finalist
May 21, 2024
‘Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution’ by Cat Bohannen is a terrific read, focusing on what should have been obvious to men of science in the past. Most studies are male-centric, focusing on the point-of-view of the male body from physiology studies and surmised social life even when skeletal remains found are determined to be female. But, in-depth scientific studies of the female body is essential to understanding evolutionary processes and the survival of species. Here at last is a book which has compiled in one place most of the more recent science investigations into the development of the female body and how it has made possible the survival of the human species. The fact that only the one sex has the womb to grow babies and the breasts to make milk and feed and innoculate children against many diseases should have made male scientists immediately think about how important female bodies are to evolution. There is no human race without female bodies. Full stop.
I have copied the book blurb as it is accurate:
”Goodreads Choice AwardNominee for Best Nonfiction (2023)
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION FINALIST • THE REAL ORIGIN OF OUR a myth-busting, eye-opening landmark account of how humans evolved, offering a paradigm shift in our thinking about what the female body is, how it came to be, and how this evolution still shapes all our lives today
“A page-turning whistle-stop tour of mammalian development that begins in the Jurassic Era, Eve recasts the traditional story of evolutionary biology by placing women at its center…. The book is engaging, playful, erudite, discursive and rich with detail."
—Sarah Lyall, The New York Times
“A smart, funny, scientific deep-dive into the power of a woman’s body, Eve surprises, educates, and emboldens.”
—Bonnie Garmus, #1 New York Times best-selling author of Lessons in Chemistry
How did the female body drive 200 million years of human evolution? • Why do women live longer than men? • Why are women more likely to get Alzheimer’s? • Why do girls score better at every academic subject than boys until puberty, when suddenly their scores plummet? • Is sexism useful for evolution? • And why, seriously why, do women have to sweat through our sheets every night when we hit menopause?
These questions are producing some truly exciting science – and in Eve, with boundless curiosity and sharp wit, Cat Bohannon covers the past 200 million years to explain the specific science behind the development of the female “We need a kind of user's manual for the female mammal. A no-nonsense, hard-hitting, seriously researched (but readable) account of what we are. How female bodies evolved, how they work, what it really means to biologically be a woman. Something that would rewrite the story of womanhood. This book is that story. We have to put the female body in the picture. If we don't, it's not just feminism that's compromised. Modern medicine, neurobiology, paleoanthropology, even evolutionary biology all take a hit when we ignore the fact that half of us have breasts. So it's time we talk about breasts. Breasts, and blood, and fat, and vaginas, and wombs—all of it. How they came to be and how we live with them now, no matter how weird or hilarious the truth is.”
Eve is not only a sweeping revision of human history, it’s an urgent and necessary corrective for a world that has focused primarily on the male body for far too long. Picking up where Sapiens left off, Eve will completely change what you think you know about evolution and why Homo sapiens has become such a successful and dominant species.”
The chapters are:
-Milk
-Womb
-Perception
-Legs
-Tools
-Brain
-Voice
-Menopause
-Love
Each chapter covers the involved topic with scientific eyes, backed by scientific studies. I suspect many readers will find this book life-changing, not simply eye-opening.
Quotes:
”The fact of the matter is that until very recently the study of the biologically female body has lagged far behind the study of the male body. It’s not simply that physicians and scientists don’t bother to seek out sex-specific data; it’s that until all too recently the data didn’t exist. From 1996 to 2006, more than 79 percent of the animal studies published in the scientific journal Pain included only male subjects. Before the 1990’s the stats were more disproportionate.”
“Taking the time to control for the female reproductive cycle is considered difficult and expensive; the ovary itself is thought of as a “”confounding factor.”” So, unless a scientist is specifically asking a question about females, the female sex is left out of the equation. The experiments run faster, the papers come out sooner, and the research is more likely to get grant funding and tenure.”
“As we’ve increasingly learned, female bodies aren’t just male bodies with “”extra stuff”” (fat, breasts, uteri). Nor are testicles and ovaries hot swappable. Being sexed permeates every major feature of our mammalian bodies and the lives we live inside them, for mouse and human alike. When scientists study only the male norm, we’re getting less than half of a complicated picture; all too often, we don’t know what we’re missing by ignoring sex differences, because we’re not asking the question.”
“After being struck by the stubborn reality of the male norm, I did what researchers like to do: I dug into the databases to see how big a problem it was. And, well, it’s huge. It’s so huge that many papers won’t even mention that they used only male subjects. I often had to email the authors directly and ask.”
“The National Instutues of Health managed to update some of these regulations [for studies] in 1994, but loopholes are regularly exploited: as of 2000, one in five NIH clinical drug trials still wasn’t using any female subjects, and of the studies that did, nearly two-thirds didn’t bother analyzing their data for sex differences.”
The author points out women are shorter and have a lot of different physical processes, like hormones, than men. Drugs have a history of working differently in women’s bodies than it does in men’s. Also:
“While a lot of attention is given to the fact that women’s bodies tend to be smaller, the reason we metabolize drugs differently may actually have as much to do with our livers. One recent study comparing biopsies of male and female liver tissue showed thirteen hundred genes whose mRNA expression was significantly influenced by sex; of these 75 percent showed higher expression in females (Renaud et al, 2011). It’s not, in other words, just a matter of how much drug distributes through how much body mass, but how the cells in a sex-typical livers go about their day. And “”day”” matters here, too: livers, like the rest of the body, have a circadian rhythm, and female mammals are especially sensitive to our long-evolved relationship to the sun (Lu et al., 2013). More on daylight and why it matters in the “”Perception”” chapter.
“…it turns out, women’s fat isn’t the same as men’s. Each fat deposit on our body is a little bit different. …but women’s hip, buttock, and upper thigh fat, or “”gluteofemoral’’’ fat, is chock-full of unusual lipids: long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids, or LC-PUFAs. (Think omega-3. Think fish oil.) Our livers are bad at making these kinds of fats from scratch, so we need to get most of them from our diet.”
“Meanwhile, we found out just a few years ago—again, someone finally asked the question—that a human girl’s hip fat may be one of the best predictors for when she’ll get her first period. Not her skeletal growth, not her height, not even her day-to-day diet, but how much gluteofemoral fat she has. That’s how important this fat is for reproduction. Our ovaries won’t even kick in until we’ve stored up enough of this fat to form a decent baseline. When we lose too much weight, our periods stop.”
Obesity is generally why girls are starting to menstruate earlier. Full stop. This isn’t good, because despite early menstruation, the involved body parts are still juvenile in development, and can be seriously damaged with intercourse. Yes, in many parts of the world, child marriage is still a thing, including the United States. Many states in the United States allow child marriage with an adult parent’s permission. True story. The author includes the data.
The following is NOT in the book:
Don’t even start with me about obesity being ok. I WILL fight for the right of all people to eat and live and work at jobs, even with excess eating of food, and including really really bad foods (I personally adore chocolate, ice cream, candy, cookies) as they please, and to be as fat as they want! But frankly, in my lifetime (I am in my 70’s, living in a senior park of old people, ok? I am overweight, as well, 27 bmi.) Obese people (30 bmi+) die younger, generally, and in much worse health. I see it in the elderly living all around me. In the 20 years I’ve lived here, obese people die WAY more younger and the “golden years” are full of extremely painful joints and an inability to get out of chairs, much less walk very far, far more earlier, in their 60’s, than those of us who are overweight or normal weight. There are a LOT of joint replacement surgeries among all of us old people, but obese old people seem to need more of them more often and earlier in age, two operations on one knee, for example. Diabetes 2 is a given with obese elderly folk way earlier than us who are overweight and normal weight, many of whom are more certain to have to have surgeries to remove toes and legs. Covid 19 killed a hell of a lot of obese elderly people, more than those of lesser weight, unless they had other bad health issues like COPD, kidney disease, cancer. We have to call the fire department to help elderly get on their feet after a fall, which happens earlier to a lot more obese old people than to the normal weight elderly, and it takes 6 or more men to lift, not the usual 3 or 4 men for the elderly even with regular bmi’s. If you live in an area with not enough emergency responders who can lift, you will have to wait until more men can be found and brought in to help. I’ve heard a lot of hospital stories about how difficult it is to treat obese patients in regards to operations and in nurses handling their inert bodies. Of course, this is personal anecdotal evidence, not in the book. However, my observation experiences in the senior park has changed my mind about not saying anything at all about what I still consider a personal decision that is not anyone else’s business. If you want to eat a lot, then eat a lot. But it has health consequences for most, especially once you begin to be 65+ in years. Obesity isn’t a health problem only for young girls of nine and ten, who start menstuating.
The author discusses how devastating dieting, even during a pregnancy (Western culture, especially the elite classes) and starvation (poor countries and areas of a country with marginalized races forced to live in food ghettos, and wars) can be to women’s brains, too. She notes in India the custom is for women to eat only after everyone else has eaten, which has resulted in health/brain growth issues for girls.
Personally, I do not believe in respecting cultural practices which are devastating, like cutting out a woman’s clitoris and sewing up the labia, leaving only a hole for urination. The author doesn’t describe this, however. But she does describe cultural eating order practices at the dinner table— women often eat last, eating the scraps left over by the men. She also describes how women lack education all over the world, and how that affects, or how it basically degrades, what women know about best child-rearing practices, or how they can help educate their children, for instance. The brain grows more dense, with more knowledge and education. It is being demonstrated in studies that the onset of dementia happens more often in people with less education and mental stimulation. There also are the cultural practices of denying women access to their money and jobs. It is proven women tend to spend money earned on raising their children and improving their homes, while men spend their money on gambling, drink and drugs.
And of course, the most obvious “culture” practice currently most harmful to women:
“The golden age of Islam, in other words, produced one of the most intellectual, egalitarian, cosmopolitan, and profundly influential societies of its time. And women were right there at the fore, contributing to its success.”
“But as of 1989, many Arab nations had become incredibly wealthy and yet managed to produce only 4 frequently cited scientific papers. The United States, by contrast, produced 10,481. Why? For one, they’d systematically cut off education for half their population. Roughly sixty-five million adult Arab people are illiterate right now, of which two-thirds are women.”
”Where women are undereducated, entire societies eventually go fallow. If history proves right, neglecting girls’ education is a sign of a civilization’s decline. You can neglect half the brains in your community for only so long.”
It’s science, folks.
And there is this:
”Men have bigger lungs than women, which means they have more oxygen still circulating while they’re talking. That’s one reason the male Clinton found it easier to deliver his acceptance speech. He simply had more hot air to work with.”
*giggle*
The book includes extensive Notes, Bibligraphy and Index sections.
I also recommend Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men.
I have copied the book blurb as it is accurate:
”Goodreads Choice AwardNominee for Best Nonfiction (2023)
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION FINALIST • THE REAL ORIGIN OF OUR a myth-busting, eye-opening landmark account of how humans evolved, offering a paradigm shift in our thinking about what the female body is, how it came to be, and how this evolution still shapes all our lives today
“A page-turning whistle-stop tour of mammalian development that begins in the Jurassic Era, Eve recasts the traditional story of evolutionary biology by placing women at its center…. The book is engaging, playful, erudite, discursive and rich with detail."
—Sarah Lyall, The New York Times
“A smart, funny, scientific deep-dive into the power of a woman’s body, Eve surprises, educates, and emboldens.”
—Bonnie Garmus, #1 New York Times best-selling author of Lessons in Chemistry
How did the female body drive 200 million years of human evolution? • Why do women live longer than men? • Why are women more likely to get Alzheimer’s? • Why do girls score better at every academic subject than boys until puberty, when suddenly their scores plummet? • Is sexism useful for evolution? • And why, seriously why, do women have to sweat through our sheets every night when we hit menopause?
These questions are producing some truly exciting science – and in Eve, with boundless curiosity and sharp wit, Cat Bohannon covers the past 200 million years to explain the specific science behind the development of the female “We need a kind of user's manual for the female mammal. A no-nonsense, hard-hitting, seriously researched (but readable) account of what we are. How female bodies evolved, how they work, what it really means to biologically be a woman. Something that would rewrite the story of womanhood. This book is that story. We have to put the female body in the picture. If we don't, it's not just feminism that's compromised. Modern medicine, neurobiology, paleoanthropology, even evolutionary biology all take a hit when we ignore the fact that half of us have breasts. So it's time we talk about breasts. Breasts, and blood, and fat, and vaginas, and wombs—all of it. How they came to be and how we live with them now, no matter how weird or hilarious the truth is.”
Eve is not only a sweeping revision of human history, it’s an urgent and necessary corrective for a world that has focused primarily on the male body for far too long. Picking up where Sapiens left off, Eve will completely change what you think you know about evolution and why Homo sapiens has become such a successful and dominant species.”
The chapters are:
-Milk
-Womb
-Perception
-Legs
-Tools
-Brain
-Voice
-Menopause
-Love
Each chapter covers the involved topic with scientific eyes, backed by scientific studies. I suspect many readers will find this book life-changing, not simply eye-opening.
Quotes:
”The fact of the matter is that until very recently the study of the biologically female body has lagged far behind the study of the male body. It’s not simply that physicians and scientists don’t bother to seek out sex-specific data; it’s that until all too recently the data didn’t exist. From 1996 to 2006, more than 79 percent of the animal studies published in the scientific journal Pain included only male subjects. Before the 1990’s the stats were more disproportionate.”
“Taking the time to control for the female reproductive cycle is considered difficult and expensive; the ovary itself is thought of as a “”confounding factor.”” So, unless a scientist is specifically asking a question about females, the female sex is left out of the equation. The experiments run faster, the papers come out sooner, and the research is more likely to get grant funding and tenure.”
“As we’ve increasingly learned, female bodies aren’t just male bodies with “”extra stuff”” (fat, breasts, uteri). Nor are testicles and ovaries hot swappable. Being sexed permeates every major feature of our mammalian bodies and the lives we live inside them, for mouse and human alike. When scientists study only the male norm, we’re getting less than half of a complicated picture; all too often, we don’t know what we’re missing by ignoring sex differences, because we’re not asking the question.”
“After being struck by the stubborn reality of the male norm, I did what researchers like to do: I dug into the databases to see how big a problem it was. And, well, it’s huge. It’s so huge that many papers won’t even mention that they used only male subjects. I often had to email the authors directly and ask.”
“The National Instutues of Health managed to update some of these regulations [for studies] in 1994, but loopholes are regularly exploited: as of 2000, one in five NIH clinical drug trials still wasn’t using any female subjects, and of the studies that did, nearly two-thirds didn’t bother analyzing their data for sex differences.”
The author points out women are shorter and have a lot of different physical processes, like hormones, than men. Drugs have a history of working differently in women’s bodies than it does in men’s. Also:
“While a lot of attention is given to the fact that women’s bodies tend to be smaller, the reason we metabolize drugs differently may actually have as much to do with our livers. One recent study comparing biopsies of male and female liver tissue showed thirteen hundred genes whose mRNA expression was significantly influenced by sex; of these 75 percent showed higher expression in females (Renaud et al, 2011). It’s not, in other words, just a matter of how much drug distributes through how much body mass, but how the cells in a sex-typical livers go about their day. And “”day”” matters here, too: livers, like the rest of the body, have a circadian rhythm, and female mammals are especially sensitive to our long-evolved relationship to the sun (Lu et al., 2013). More on daylight and why it matters in the “”Perception”” chapter.
“…it turns out, women’s fat isn’t the same as men’s. Each fat deposit on our body is a little bit different. …but women’s hip, buttock, and upper thigh fat, or “”gluteofemoral’’’ fat, is chock-full of unusual lipids: long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids, or LC-PUFAs. (Think omega-3. Think fish oil.) Our livers are bad at making these kinds of fats from scratch, so we need to get most of them from our diet.”
“Meanwhile, we found out just a few years ago—again, someone finally asked the question—that a human girl’s hip fat may be one of the best predictors for when she’ll get her first period. Not her skeletal growth, not her height, not even her day-to-day diet, but how much gluteofemoral fat she has. That’s how important this fat is for reproduction. Our ovaries won’t even kick in until we’ve stored up enough of this fat to form a decent baseline. When we lose too much weight, our periods stop.”
Obesity is generally why girls are starting to menstruate earlier. Full stop. This isn’t good, because despite early menstruation, the involved body parts are still juvenile in development, and can be seriously damaged with intercourse. Yes, in many parts of the world, child marriage is still a thing, including the United States. Many states in the United States allow child marriage with an adult parent’s permission. True story. The author includes the data.
The following is NOT in the book:
Don’t even start with me about obesity being ok. I WILL fight for the right of all people to eat and live and work at jobs, even with excess eating of food, and including really really bad foods (I personally adore chocolate, ice cream, candy, cookies) as they please, and to be as fat as they want! But frankly, in my lifetime (I am in my 70’s, living in a senior park of old people, ok? I am overweight, as well, 27 bmi.) Obese people (30 bmi+) die younger, generally, and in much worse health. I see it in the elderly living all around me. In the 20 years I’ve lived here, obese people die WAY more younger and the “golden years” are full of extremely painful joints and an inability to get out of chairs, much less walk very far, far more earlier, in their 60’s, than those of us who are overweight or normal weight. There are a LOT of joint replacement surgeries among all of us old people, but obese old people seem to need more of them more often and earlier in age, two operations on one knee, for example. Diabetes 2 is a given with obese elderly folk way earlier than us who are overweight and normal weight, many of whom are more certain to have to have surgeries to remove toes and legs. Covid 19 killed a hell of a lot of obese elderly people, more than those of lesser weight, unless they had other bad health issues like COPD, kidney disease, cancer. We have to call the fire department to help elderly get on their feet after a fall, which happens earlier to a lot more obese old people than to the normal weight elderly, and it takes 6 or more men to lift, not the usual 3 or 4 men for the elderly even with regular bmi’s. If you live in an area with not enough emergency responders who can lift, you will have to wait until more men can be found and brought in to help. I’ve heard a lot of hospital stories about how difficult it is to treat obese patients in regards to operations and in nurses handling their inert bodies. Of course, this is personal anecdotal evidence, not in the book. However, my observation experiences in the senior park has changed my mind about not saying anything at all about what I still consider a personal decision that is not anyone else’s business. If you want to eat a lot, then eat a lot. But it has health consequences for most, especially once you begin to be 65+ in years. Obesity isn’t a health problem only for young girls of nine and ten, who start menstuating.
The author discusses how devastating dieting, even during a pregnancy (Western culture, especially the elite classes) and starvation (poor countries and areas of a country with marginalized races forced to live in food ghettos, and wars) can be to women’s brains, too. She notes in India the custom is for women to eat only after everyone else has eaten, which has resulted in health/brain growth issues for girls.
Personally, I do not believe in respecting cultural practices which are devastating, like cutting out a woman’s clitoris and sewing up the labia, leaving only a hole for urination. The author doesn’t describe this, however. But she does describe cultural eating order practices at the dinner table— women often eat last, eating the scraps left over by the men. She also describes how women lack education all over the world, and how that affects, or how it basically degrades, what women know about best child-rearing practices, or how they can help educate their children, for instance. The brain grows more dense, with more knowledge and education. It is being demonstrated in studies that the onset of dementia happens more often in people with less education and mental stimulation. There also are the cultural practices of denying women access to their money and jobs. It is proven women tend to spend money earned on raising their children and improving their homes, while men spend their money on gambling, drink and drugs.
And of course, the most obvious “culture” practice currently most harmful to women:
“The golden age of Islam, in other words, produced one of the most intellectual, egalitarian, cosmopolitan, and profundly influential societies of its time. And women were right there at the fore, contributing to its success.”
“But as of 1989, many Arab nations had become incredibly wealthy and yet managed to produce only 4 frequently cited scientific papers. The United States, by contrast, produced 10,481. Why? For one, they’d systematically cut off education for half their population. Roughly sixty-five million adult Arab people are illiterate right now, of which two-thirds are women.”
”Where women are undereducated, entire societies eventually go fallow. If history proves right, neglecting girls’ education is a sign of a civilization’s decline. You can neglect half the brains in your community for only so long.”
It’s science, folks.
And there is this:
”Men have bigger lungs than women, which means they have more oxygen still circulating while they’re talking. That’s one reason the male Clinton found it easier to deliver his acceptance speech. He simply had more hot air to work with.”
*giggle*
The book includes extensive Notes, Bibligraphy and Index sections.
I also recommend Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men.
Want to read
November 9, 2023I feel like this would be interesting no matter what, but I'm basically obligated to read it now because she was my English 102 teacher.
January 20, 2024
[19 Jan 2024]
This book claims that many of the features of humans that distinguish us from other species evolved in order to meet the needs of the female body. I don't have the ability to judge the accuracy of these claims, but most of it seems to make sense to me.
Bohannon is not a scientist. She's an author. And this is her first book, though she has apparently written a lot of articles for a variety of publications. Again I'm not able to judge her qualifications but she does write well. Clearly. Understandably. With humor and occasional snark. The only time I could not fully follow her arguments was in her discussion of how we changed from a matrilineal species to a patriarchy. I found that confusing, but it was a small part of the last chapter.
Her arguments do seem to be supported by a lot of scientific evidence that she references often. Until the last chapter where she discusses love, sex, monogamy, and sexism. All interesting topics, but her discussion seems to be primarily opinion and speculation, and emotion, rather than based on concrete evidence. I have no problem agreeing with her conclusions, but again that's opinion and emotion on my part. And it's a little unfortunate that she stoops to that level when the rest of the book seems so solid scientifically.
However, it's still a very interesting book. Worthy of discussion. And I recommend it.
This book claims that many of the features of humans that distinguish us from other species evolved in order to meet the needs of the female body. I don't have the ability to judge the accuracy of these claims, but most of it seems to make sense to me.
Bohannon is not a scientist. She's an author. And this is her first book, though she has apparently written a lot of articles for a variety of publications. Again I'm not able to judge her qualifications but she does write well. Clearly. Understandably. With humor and occasional snark. The only time I could not fully follow her arguments was in her discussion of how we changed from a matrilineal species to a patriarchy. I found that confusing, but it was a small part of the last chapter.
Her arguments do seem to be supported by a lot of scientific evidence that she references often. Until the last chapter where she discusses love, sex, monogamy, and sexism. All interesting topics, but her discussion seems to be primarily opinion and speculation, and emotion, rather than based on concrete evidence. I have no problem agreeing with her conclusions, but again that's opinion and emotion on my part. And it's a little unfortunate that she stoops to that level when the rest of the book seems so solid scientifically.
However, it's still a very interesting book. Worthy of discussion. And I recommend it.
February 19, 2024
Really enjoyed the first few chapters. Other parts were a bit of a slog. Also although there's an admirable list of references it was not always clear what was consensus, conjecture, or the authors opinion. Given the uncertainty I think I would have preferred more straight science and less sociology comment. I think at times it got a bit confused in what it was trying to do.
March 26, 2024
We all descend from her, the mother. There is a first “Eve” for many things - lactation, wombs and menopause. This is a lively and fascinating tale on the differences between the sexes - don’t worry, gender fluidity is treated with silk gloves despite the starkness of biology. Women hear better, see better, smell better (despite the same amount of smelling sensors) and are generally the superior sex. I knew that! It’s just a shame that medical studies involving women have been so late coming, we don’t react the same as men to for example pain medication. We have finicky hormones that affect the result and often any ailment is ascribed to either those or mental disorders. It takes an average of seven years to be diagnosed with endometriosis, despite one in ten women suffering from it. “It’s just in our heads”. So it’s refreshing to have a female perspective on human evolution. It was long overdue. Plus it’s a fun and informative read.
One thing I learned that I did not know, is that malaria affects pregnant women worse than the rest of the population. The virus hides in the placenta and the women who fall ill usually get the worst type of the disease. I grew up in Thailand and cerebral malaria was badly feared. The usual kind was just something you got unless you were on quinine, not much to fuss about. The cerebral could leave you brain damaged though. Anyway, it was either not known or never discussed, that it hits women worse. Malaria is one of the biggest killers in the tropics. I also did not know that this disease was purposefully eradicated in the United States.
One thing I learned that I did not know, is that malaria affects pregnant women worse than the rest of the population. The virus hides in the placenta and the women who fall ill usually get the worst type of the disease. I grew up in Thailand and cerebral malaria was badly feared. The usual kind was just something you got unless you were on quinine, not much to fuss about. The cerebral could leave you brain damaged though. Anyway, it was either not known or never discussed, that it hits women worse. Malaria is one of the biggest killers in the tropics. I also did not know that this disease was purposefully eradicated in the United States.
June 4, 2024
4.5 stars
July 17, 2023
I enjoy books about evolution, and taking the topic from a female perspective was really interesting to me. As someone who has read other books on the topic one of my favorite parts about this book was, from the introduction I was learning new to me information, which really set this book apart from other books that I have read on the topic. I found the chapter on the evolution of the womb especially fascinating.
I was disappointed in the chapter on the brain that the discussion on dyslexia was more stereotypical than an actual representation of dyslexic thinking, and also male focused. If the author were to do a simple Google search they would see that this section of their book in inaccurate, as well as learn that dyslexic thinking is a skill that would have been quite useful during human evolution. There are many articles, and studies on the topic. I read an ARC, and did not see a footnote in the book in the section of this topic, and doing a text search for dyslexia did not bring one up either.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC of this book.
I was disappointed in the chapter on the brain that the discussion on dyslexia was more stereotypical than an actual representation of dyslexic thinking, and also male focused. If the author were to do a simple Google search they would see that this section of their book in inaccurate, as well as learn that dyslexic thinking is a skill that would have been quite useful during human evolution. There are many articles, and studies on the topic. I read an ARC, and did not see a footnote in the book in the section of this topic, and doing a text search for dyslexia did not bring one up either.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC of this book.
December 27, 2023
สนุกมาก ถ่ายทอดวิวัฒนาการของมนุษย์จากมุมมองของ "ร่างกายผู้หญิง" แต่ละบทเน้นอวัยวะหรือลักษณะหนึ่งอย่าง เช่น สมอง นม การรับรู้ (perception) เซ็กซ์ มดลูก วัยหมดประจำเดือน ฯลฯ เล่าตั้งแต่สมัยจูราสสิกไล่มา 200 ล้านปีถึงปัจจุบัน รวบรวมองค์ความรู้ล่าสุดเกี่ยวกับคำถามเช่น ทำไมผู้หญิงต้องมีเมนส์ ทำไมผู้หญิงเสี่ยงเป็นโรคอัลไซเมอร์มากกว่าผู้ชาย ฯลฯ
มีหลายเรื่องที่ชอบในหนังสือเล่มนี้เพราะคนเขียนเขียนเก่งและเต็มไปด้วยอารมณ์ขัน เรื่องที่ชอบมาก เช่น ประวัติศาสตร์วิทยาศาสตร์ที่มักจะใช้ผู้ชายเป็นค่านิยม ซึ่งก็ส่งผลกระทบในด้านต่าง ๆ เช่น ประวัติศาสตร์การทดลองยาในอดีตมักไม่ทดสอบกับผู้หญิงวัยเจริญพันธ์ุ (ซึ่งเป็นช่วงอายุที่กว้างมากตั้งแต่ 12 ถึง 50) เพราะกลัวว่าจะส่งผลกระทบต่อตัวอ่อนในอนาคตถ้าตั้งครรภ์ ซึ่งก็ทำให้ยามักก่อผลข้างเคียงในผู้หญิงมากกว่าผู้ชาย และถึงแม้เราจะรับรู้ข้อจำกัดในวันนี้แล้ว ก็ไม่มีกฎหมายอะไรบังคับให้บริษัทยาต้องทำการทดลองซ้ำกับกลุ่มตัวอย่างผู้หญิงมากขึ้น ทำให้ยาในท้องตลาดส่วนใหญ่ทุกวันนี้อาจไม่ถูกทดสอบกับ "ร่างกายผู้หญิง" เลย
อีกจุดที่ชอบคือ ผู้เขียนเชื่อมโยงร่างกายผู้หญิง (มนุษย์) เข้ากับ วิวัฒนาการของ "สัตว์เพศเมีย" หลายพันธุ์ในประวัติศาสตร์ เพื่อดูว่ามีอะไรบ้างที่ส่งผลต่อเราในปัจจุบันและเพราะอะไร เช่น "มอร์กี" หนูโบราณพันธ์ุ Morganucodon สัตว์ชนิดแรกที่เลี้ยงลูกแรกเกิดด้วยน้ำนม เป็นจุดเริ่มต้นจุดหนึ่งของวิวัฒนาการสัตว์ท���่จะกลายมาเป็นมนุษย์ เพราะน้ำนมช่วยขยายขอบเขตการปกป้องของมารดาไปยังทารก ผู้เขียนเสนอว่าพฤติกรรมของมอร์กีสุดท้ายก็วิวัฒนาการมาเป็น "แม่นม" ในเมืองโบราณอย่างบาบิโลน ซึ่งส่งผลให้ประชากรสามารถเติบโตอย่างรวดเร็วและสุดท้ายมนุษย์ก็ครองโลกได้
ข้อมูลและข้อเสนอหลายส่วนในหนังสือน่าจะก่อให้เกิดการโต้เถียงที่สนุก ๆ ตามมา เช่น ผู้เขียนเสนอว่า เนื่องจากสัตว์หลายพันธุ์มี "Bruce Effect" กลไกที่ร่างกายสัตว์บางชนิดแท้งทารก (ดูตัวอย่างใน https://www.nationalgeographic.com/sc...) โดยอัตโนมัติ แปลว่าเราควรมองว่าการแท้งในมนุษย์เป็นเรื่องธรรมชาติ และเฟมินิสต์บางคนก็อาจไม่พอใจกับการยกบางประเด็นของผู้เขียน (ซึ่งประกาศว่าเธอเป็นเฟมินิสต์เช่นกัน) เช่น บอกว่าปิตาธิปไตย (patriarchy) อาจเป็นผลลัพธ์ของวิวัฒนาการที่มีเหตุมีผล บรรพบุรุษเพศเมียของเราอาจ "ยอม" ให้เพศผู้ได้เป็นใหญ่เพราะอยากได้การปกป้องดูแลแลกกับการมีเซ็กซ์ด้วย เป็นต้น ผู้เขียนย้ำเตือนว่าอะไรที่เราไม่ชอบไม่ได้แปลว่ามันไม่จริง และวิวัฒนาการในแง่ชีววิทยาก็เป็นเพียงส่วนเสี้ยวเดียวเท่านั้นในเรื่องราวทั้งหมดของมนุษย์ เพราะมิติอื่น ๆ เช่น วิวัฒนาการของวัฒนธรรม ก็เป็นเรื่องที่สำคัญไม่แพ้กัน อะไรที่เราเคย "ยอม" ด้วยเหตุผลในอดีตไม่ได้แปลว่าเราต้องยอมไปตลอดเมื่อสถานการณ์เปลี่ยนแปลงไป
มีหลายเรื่องที่ชอบในหนังสือเล่มนี้เพราะคนเขียนเขียนเก่งและเต็มไปด้วยอารมณ์ขัน เรื่องที่ชอบมาก เช่น ประวัติศาสตร์วิทยาศาสตร์ที่มักจะใช้ผู้ชายเป็นค่านิยม ซึ่งก็ส่งผลกระทบในด้านต่าง ๆ เช่น ประวัติศาสตร์การทดลองยาในอดีตมักไม่ทดสอบกับผู้หญิงวัยเจริญพันธ์ุ (ซึ่งเป็นช่วงอายุที่กว้างมากตั้งแต่ 12 ถึง 50) เพราะกลัวว่าจะส่งผลกระทบต่อตัวอ่อนในอนาคตถ้าตั้งครรภ์ ซึ่งก็ทำให้ยามักก่อผลข้างเคียงในผู้หญิงมากกว่าผู้ชาย และถึงแม้เราจะรับรู้ข้อจำกัดในวันนี้แล้ว ก็ไม่มีกฎหมายอะไรบังคับให้บริษัทยาต้องทำการทดลองซ้ำกับกลุ่มตัวอย่างผู้หญิงมากขึ้น ทำให้ยาในท้องตลาดส่วนใหญ่ทุกวันนี้อาจไม่ถูกทดสอบกับ "ร่างกายผู้หญิง" เลย
อีกจุดที่ชอบคือ ผู้เขียนเชื่อมโยงร่างกายผู้หญิง (มนุษย์) เข้ากับ วิวัฒนาการของ "สัตว์เพศเมีย" หลายพันธุ์ในประวัติศาสตร์ เพื่อดูว่ามีอะไรบ้างที่ส่งผลต่อเราในปัจจุบันและเพราะอะไร เช่น "มอร์กี" หนูโบราณพันธ์ุ Morganucodon สัตว์ชนิดแรกที่เลี้ยงลูกแรกเกิดด้วยน้ำนม เป็นจุดเริ่มต้นจุดหนึ่งของวิวัฒนาการสัตว์ท���่จะกลายมาเป็นมนุษย์ เพราะน้ำนมช่วยขยายขอบเขตการปกป้องของมารดาไปยังทารก ผู้เขียนเสนอว่าพฤติกรรมของมอร์กีสุดท้ายก็วิวัฒนาการมาเป็น "แม่นม" ในเมืองโบราณอย่างบาบิโลน ซึ่งส่งผลให้ประชากรสามารถเติบโตอย่างรวดเร็วและสุดท้ายมนุษย์ก็ครองโลกได้
ข้อมูลและข้อเสนอหลายส่วนในหนังสือน่าจะก่อให้เกิดการโต้เถียงที่สนุก ๆ ตามมา เช่น ผู้เขียนเสนอว่า เนื่องจากสัตว์หลายพันธุ์มี "Bruce Effect" กลไกที่ร่างกายสัตว์บางชนิดแท้งทารก (ดูตัวอย่างใน https://www.nationalgeographic.com/sc...) โดยอัตโนมัติ แปลว่าเราควรมองว่าการแท้งในมนุษย์เป็นเรื่องธรรมชาติ และเฟมินิสต์บางคนก็อาจไม่พอใจกับการยกบางประเด็นของผู้เขียน (ซึ่งประกาศว่าเธอเป็นเฟมินิสต์เช่นกัน) เช่น บอกว่าปิตาธิปไตย (patriarchy) อาจเป็นผลลัพธ์ของวิวัฒนาการที่มีเหตุมีผล บรรพบุรุษเพศเมียของเราอาจ "ยอม" ให้เพศผู้ได้เป็นใหญ่เพราะอยากได้การปกป้องดูแลแลกกับการมีเซ็กซ์ด้วย เป็นต้น ผู้เขียนย้ำเตือนว่าอะไรที่เราไม่ชอบไม่ได้แปลว่ามันไม่จริง และวิวัฒนาการในแง่ชีววิทยาก็เป็นเพียงส่วนเสี้ยวเดียวเท่านั้นในเรื่องราวทั้งหมดของมนุษย์ เพราะมิติอื่น ๆ เช่น วิวัฒนาการของวัฒนธรรม ก็เป็นเรื่องที่สำคัญไม่แพ้กัน อะไรที่เราเคย "ยอม" ด้วยเหตุผลในอดีตไม่ได้แปลว่าเราต้องยอมไปตลอดเมื่อสถานการณ์เปลี่ยนแปลงไป
February 9, 2024
Trans-inclusionary-feminist propaganda. I don’t think I’ve ever given a book a 1 star review before, if I hate a book that much I stop reading it and return it. But this book got worse and worse as it went on. Right in the beginning she makes a statement about sex and gender being different and I figured that she was just making a statement to appease the trans cultists so she wouldn’t get cancelled. After all, if sex and gender are different and she’s talking specifically about the evolution of the female body, that makes sense. But then she keeps conflating sex and gender and making bizarre statements that not all XX bodies identify as women, and stopping what she was talking about to affirm trans identity. It was cringe worthy but at least the rest of it was somewhat interesting, the science stuff. But then in the last half of the book she drops the science almost completely and goes full-on feminist. Making a lengthy defense of Hilary Clinton’s voice that sounds like she’s angry and yelling, it’s just because she’s a woman with a woman’s voice. Later she talks about how women make better politicians, except Margaret Thatcher, who is a hero of mine and I will take offense. She even lists genocidal leaders and then says “and even less obviously murderous leaders, like Trump.” Let’s compare the foreign policy between Trump and Hilary Clinton and see which one is more of a warmonger! It’s just a parade of the most surface level feminist talking points imaginable. She’s a stereotype of the liberal professor who talks at length about things she doesn’t actually know much about. I think we’ve all had that professor that turns a biology lecture into a rant about their personal political beliefs. As the book goes on it just gets worse. She thinks climate change is an existential threat. She thinks we should end the practice of child brides because if women get pregnant too young it can kill them or disable them for life, reducing the birth rate, and birth rate is important because evolution. But then implies the country that made the minimum marriage age 20 has it right. Look, children shouldn’t be having sex, getting married or getting pregnant. But 20?! But then we should educate girls above boys because it’s better for the economy, because it reduces the birth rate, which is actually fine because immigration. Totally contradicting what she said before. She also insists on calling miscarriages abortions and talking about how great and necessary they are. This strange mix of eugenics and feminism that leads her to advocate for every policy that reduces birth rates is amazing. There’s no logical statement anywhere in any of her political rants. STDs are even somehow blamed on conservatives and the solution is getting rid of all social norms against sex. Even judging a woman for stealing another woman’s husband is…wrong? I was dizzy with the leaps in logic. The problems with women dying in childbirth at higher rates in Texas is somehow the fault of anti-abortion laws and not the thousands of pregnant immigrants walking across the border to drop an anchor baby? She constantly cherry picks one stat after another and if you know anything about these topics you realize what she’s doing but most won’t. Even the decline of the Middle East is the fault of Western influence and no mention of the inbreeding! Yes, the decline of the Middle East is because of the generations of cousin marriage lowering their IQs. Talking about nutrition to raise IQs is great but criticize Islam’s practice of cousin marriage? No way!
I don’t like talking about people’s personal lives, but she keeps talking about it in the book, so I kind of have to. She’s such a stereotypical liberal feminist. So she once considered being a prostitute but her boyfriend said he’d break up with her so she didn’t. And implied that she regrets not doing it, or should have charged the boyfriend. She had an abortion. She’s had children, I think two, and also had an ectopic. She used to be a nude model at the art school. She donated her eggs to a couple who waited too long to have children. She thanked a husband who supported her for years while she worked on her book. But also said she had a boyfriend so I guess they got divorced before publication. Can we talk about the current boyfriend? He’s a man child who plays his video games on full volume without headphones, bothering her. They made a deal that he turn off the weapon sound effects but can keep the soundtrack. She doesn’t know why he won’t use headphones, and makes the excuse that he’s never lived with a girlfriend before and adulting is hard. Ouch! Why is she dating him? Is she significantly older than him? Is this man child around her children? Where’s the father of her children, the husband that supported her for years? Are these all different men? I have no idea. Dating the man who plays his video games too loud is something I did in my 20s, not a current situation I would mention in a book I was writing. I think it shows her warped sense of not believing in social norms or shame and not realizing or caring how she makes herself come off as really immature, and doesn’t realize the real-life consequences of liberal sexual attitudes. Unless this husband she thanked in the acknowledgment was abusive, her children would be better off around him instead of the man-child boyfriend. It’s so annoying because she spent all this time going over the biological and cultural evolution of the male and female bodies and reproductive strategies which show how very very important social norms are. We evolved to be wives and mothers and having our husbands around to help, hunt meat and protect us and our children. But then she flips it by saying that sexism just “doesn’t work anymore” even though she didn’t actually make a good argument for this. Things have gotten much worse by relaxing these social norms but somehow relaxing them even more…would fix things? I could write an entire book refuting every dumb thing she said in the last half of this book, but I will stop here because I doubt anyone would read it.
I don’t like talking about people’s personal lives, but she keeps talking about it in the book, so I kind of have to. She’s such a stereotypical liberal feminist. So she once considered being a prostitute but her boyfriend said he’d break up with her so she didn’t. And implied that she regrets not doing it, or should have charged the boyfriend. She had an abortion. She’s had children, I think two, and also had an ectopic. She used to be a nude model at the art school. She donated her eggs to a couple who waited too long to have children. She thanked a husband who supported her for years while she worked on her book. But also said she had a boyfriend so I guess they got divorced before publication. Can we talk about the current boyfriend? He’s a man child who plays his video games on full volume without headphones, bothering her. They made a deal that he turn off the weapon sound effects but can keep the soundtrack. She doesn’t know why he won’t use headphones, and makes the excuse that he’s never lived with a girlfriend before and adulting is hard. Ouch! Why is she dating him? Is she significantly older than him? Is this man child around her children? Where’s the father of her children, the husband that supported her for years? Are these all different men? I have no idea. Dating the man who plays his video games too loud is something I did in my 20s, not a current situation I would mention in a book I was writing. I think it shows her warped sense of not believing in social norms or shame and not realizing or caring how she makes herself come off as really immature, and doesn’t realize the real-life consequences of liberal sexual attitudes. Unless this husband she thanked in the acknowledgment was abusive, her children would be better off around him instead of the man-child boyfriend. It’s so annoying because she spent all this time going over the biological and cultural evolution of the male and female bodies and reproductive strategies which show how very very important social norms are. We evolved to be wives and mothers and having our husbands around to help, hunt meat and protect us and our children. But then she flips it by saying that sexism just “doesn’t work anymore” even though she didn’t actually make a good argument for this. Things have gotten much worse by relaxing these social norms but somehow relaxing them even more…would fix things? I could write an entire book refuting every dumb thing she said in the last half of this book, but I will stop here because I doubt anyone would read it.
August 7, 2024
There are a few fascinating parts to this book, namely the “Milk” and “Womb” chapters, which were founded almost entirely on scientific evidence and reasoning. But as the book progresses, it abandons its comprehensive explanation of evolutionary biology for weak theoretical arguments that are clearly politically motivated. By the last chapter, which is titled “Love” but is mainly about sexism with several curious tangents such as the difference in scientific publications across the US and Arab nations, I was skimming.
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