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5 episodes with female body drove
2 episodes with female body drove
2 episodes with female body drove
In this episode, Cat Bohannon joins Laura and Adrian to discuss her most recent book, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, where she reframes the stories we tell about human evolution with women at the center.Cat Bohannon's is a poet, academic, and scientist. She completed her PhD in 2022 at Columbia University, where she studied the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her work has appeared in Science, The Atlantic, Scientific American, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Lapham's Quarterly, The Georgia Review, and Poets Against the War.
As Jurassic beasts roamed the earth, a little weasel-like animal called Morganucodon was making an evolutionary breakthrough in parenting — producing milk to feed her young. Author Cat Bohannon calls this creature Morgie in her 2023 book “Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.” Bohannon discusses the book, and insights from the evolution of Morgie, ahead of an author event in St. Louis County.
The birds are chirping, the sun is shining, and the snowdrops and crocuses are bursting through the soil; Ostara is upon us! The Spring Equinox is a time for renewal, hope, and abundance. We're entering the light half of the year and it's now time to plant the seeds we've been lovingly protecting during the cold, winter months. What growth are you looking to nurture in your life? What seeds are you finally ready to sow? As we stroll through the muddy thaw, ponder the abundance of Ostara and the many ways it can bring richness to your life. What am I reading?The Witchy Homestead by Nikki Van de CarEve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat BohannonWhat's playing on repeat?Sheena is a Punk Rocker by The Ramones What's for dinner? Mediterranean Quinoa BowlIngredients3 cups cooked quinoa, from 1 cup uncooked1/2 cup cooked salmon or chicken (optional)2 cucumbers, thinly sliced1 cup cherry or grape tomatoes, halved2 avocados, dicedPickled Red OnionsFresh mint and/or parsley leavesGarlic Yogurt Sauce (1 cup Greek yogurt, 1 tablespoon olive oil, one tablespoon lemon juice, diced garlic, 1/2 teaspoon salt)Roasted Chickpeas1½ cups cooked chickpeas, drained, rinsed, and patted dryExtra-virgin olive oil, for drizzling1 teaspoon smoked paprika½ teaspoon ground cumin¼ teaspoon sea saltPinch of cayenne pepperInstructionsCook the quinoa according to this recipe.Meanwhile, make the smoky chickpeas: Preheat the oven to 425°F and line a baking sheet with parchment paper.Place the chickpeas on the baking sheet. Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with the smoked paprika, cumin, salt, and cayenne. Toss to coat and spread evenly on the baking sheet. Roast for 20 to 30 minutes, or until golden brown and crisp.Assemble bowls with the quinoa, chickpeas, cucumbers, tomatoes, and avocado. Top with pickled onions, and fresh herbs. Drizzle with garlic yogurt sauce and serve.Iced Butterfly Pea Flower Tea LatteIngredients:1 tbsp dried butterfly pea flowers or 5-6 fresh butterfly pea flowers (or 1 butterfly pea tea bag) more for garnish1 cup hot water1/2 cup milk of choice1-2 tsp honey, maple syrup, or sugar Ice cubes1 tsp lemon juice optional, for color change effectInstructions:Steep the dried butterfly pea flowers, fresh flowers, or tea bag for 5-7 minutes in boiled water. Strain the tea to remove the flowers or remove the tea bag, and allow the tea to cool to room temperature.Stir in honey or your preferred sweetener while the tea is still warm. Mix until fully dissolved.In a separate container, froth the milk using a milk frother or by shaking it vigorously in a tightly sealed jar or shaker. You can also use a blender to make the cold milk foamy.Fill a glass with ice cubes and pour the cooled butterfly pea tea over the ice. If desired, add a teaspoon of lemon juice to the latte. Watch as the vibrant blue tea transforms into a beautiful purple hue.You can garnish the drink with fresh or dried butterfly pea flowers for an extra touch of elegance. Enjoy your refreshing Iced Butterfly Pea Flower Tea Latte!https://yerbamateculture.com/iced-butterfly-pea-flower-tea-latte/Support the show
Featuring : CAT BOHANNON, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human EvolutionYou loved Rachel Gross's VAGINA OBSCURA? Of course you did. Then you MUST join us for this myth-busting, eye-opening landmark account of how humans evolved—answering questions like what IS the female body? How did it come to be? How does this evolution still shapes all our lives today? Some fast facts to whet your appetite: Women live longer than men; women are more likely to get Alzheimer's; girls score better at every academic subject than boys until puberty, when suddenly their scores plummet. What's behind all of this? And why, seriously why, do women have to sweat through our sheets every night when we hit menopause? (asking for me). Bohannon covers the past 200 million years to explain the specific science behind the development of the female sex: “We have to put the female body in the picture,” she writes, “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.” Which means we are gonna talk about breasts. And blood and fat and vaginas and wombs. Let's face it, the world has focused primarily on the male body for far too long. It's time to dig deep—so join us for book talk, cocktails, and evolutionary science.Episode was recorded live February 27, 2025.Email: peculiar@bschillace.comWebsite: https://brandyschillace.com/peculiar/Newsletter: http://eepurl.com/ixJJ2YPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/PeculiarBookClub/membershipYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/@PeculiarBookClub/streamsBluesky: @peculiarbookclub.bsky.socialFacebook: facebook.com/groups/peculiarbooksclubInstagram: @thepeculiarbook
There is a historical lack of research on the female body—and this has hurt women, men, everyone. But now, there is some fascinating research on the female body, which Cat Bohannon, PhD, shares today. (Bohannon is the New York Times–bestselling author of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.) For example, Bohannon explains why the fat around our butts and hips is quite special, and how women tend to metabolize painkillers differently than men. She breaks down the evolutionary origins of breast size and shape, and she debunks the myth that men are much larger than women. We talk about why women tend to heal better and live longer than men. And what's really at stake for our health and lives when it comes to understanding sex differences. For the show notes and more on Cat Bohannon, head over to my Substack. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Did you know that the composition of a mother’s breast milk changes based on a baby’s saliva? Or that human pregnancy has been compared to running many marathons in a row? These are only a few of the mind-blowing findings researcher and author Cat Bohannon describes in her book, “Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.” She joins Danielle and Simone to talk about some of the lesser-known superpowers of the female body, and clears up some common misconceptions.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Join the conversation by letting us know what you think about the episode!Regardless of whether you are tuned in to popular "news", chances are pretty good that you've heard something about the Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni saga. We dive in with our opinions about this debacle in this minisode. What are your thoughts about all of this?Mentioned in this episode:Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat BohannonSupport the showBe part of the conversation by sharing your thoughts about this episode, what you may have learned, how the conversation affected you. You can reach Raquel and Jennifer on IG @madnesscafepodcast or by email at madnesscafepodcast@gmail.com.Share the episode with a friend and have your own conversation. And don't forget to rate and review the show wherever you listen!Thanks!
Guest: Cat Bohannon is a researcher and theorist specializing in the evolution of narrative and cognition. She is the author of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. The post How The Female Body Drives Evolution appeared first on KPFA.
Join us as we chat about so many of our favourite things: food, kitchen gadgets, people who comment on our weight, and the joys of being women. Just kidding . . . those aren't all our favourite things, but we DO talk about them all this week! We go from air fryers to shepherd's pie to menopause in just over an hour. Ready to join us?! **Show Notes** Podcast we mentioned: Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel Book we mentioned: Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon
Women have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to have more sensitive noses, sharper hearing at high frequencies, and longer life expectancy than men. But why have women's bodies been so under-researched? It's one of the many questions Cat Bohannon raises in her book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. Shortlisted for the Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize, Eve explores how women's biology has shaped human history and culture. In the lead up to the winner's announcement, New Scientist books editor Alison Flood meets all six of the shortlisted authors.In this conversation, we hear what motivated Cat to spend more than a decade researching and writing the book, how understanding the evolution of female traits can give us deeper insights into the workings of our species, and the overlap between sexism and science. The winner of the Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize will be announced on the 24th October. You can view all of the shortlisted entries here:https://royalsociety.org/medals-and-prizes/science-book-prize/ To read about subjects like this and much more, visit https://www.newscientist.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
On this episode of Shelf Care: The Podcast, host Susan Maguire spoke to Allison Escoto of the Center for Fiction about book groups, being a solo librarian, and getting the opportunity to read nonfiction for the Carnegie Awards. Then, Audio Editor Heather Booth chats with librarian and author Van Hoang about the walking audiobook club she runs at her library. Finally, Susan and Adult Books Editor Donna Seaman talk about her forthcoming book, River of Books: A Life in Reading as well as what she's been reading and loving lately. Here's what we talked about: Stanley Ellin, mystery writer James, by Percival Everett Out of the Sierra: A Story of Rarámuri Resistance, by Victoria Blanco Girl Giant and the Monkey King, by Van Hoang The Monstrous Misses Mai, by Van Hoang Sociopath, by Patrick Gagne, read by the author Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, by Naomi Klein, read by the author Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, Cat Bohannon, read by the author Elyse Dinh, audiobook narrator The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative, by Florence Williams, read by Emily Woo Zeller In Praise of Walking: A New Scientific Exploration, by Shane O'Mara, read by Liam Gerrard River of Books: A Life in Reading, by Donna Seaman The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America, by Sara B. Franklin The World She Edited: Katarine S. White at the New Yorker, by Amy Reading Booker Prize Long List Creation Lake, by Rachel Kushner This Strange Eventful History, by Claire Messud Playground, by Richard Powers The Overstory, by Richard Powers Wandering Stars, by Tommy Orange Reading the Room: A Bookseller's Tale, by Paul Yamazaki
Dördüncü sezonun ilk "Münasibət"ində yay tətilimizdə öyrəndiklərimizdən danışdıq. Bizdə niyə gen xəritəsi yoxdur? Bu xəritə bizə istər tarixi, istərsə də tibbi tərəfdən hansı fərqli yanaşmaları verə bilər, bu suallara cavab axtardıq.Buraxılışın dəstəkçisi “Azərçay”a təşəkkürlər☕ Azərçay, Doğma Çay!
Claire Mabey discusses 'the perfect Sunday read' from David Nicholls. She also recommends Commune: Chasing a utopian dream in Aotearoa by Olive Jones and a deep dive into evolution: Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon.
Please welcome author illustrator Ana Velez to the show!!!
Where would human evolution be without the female body? Despite the invaluable ability to create life, Cat Bohannon says the female body has been historically overlooked in medical research. As an author and researcher, she wants to close the gaps in our understanding of the female body by taking a trip through time. We unpack medical bias, sexism and Cat's book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.
******Support the channel****** Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thedissenter PayPal: paypal.me/thedissenter PayPal Subscription 1 Dollar: https://tinyurl.com/yb3acuuy PayPal Subscription 3 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ybn6bg9l PayPal Subscription 5 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ycmr9gpz PayPal Subscription 10 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y9r3fc9m PayPal Subscription 20 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y95uvkao ******Follow me on****** Website: https://www.thedissenter.net/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thedissenteryt/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheDissenterYT This show is sponsored by Enlites, Learning & Development done differently. Check the website here: http://enlites.com/ Dr. Cat Bohannon is a researcher and author with a Ph.D. from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her essays and poems have appeared in Scientific American, Mind, Science Magazine, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Georgia Review, The Story Collider, and Poets Against the War. She is the author of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. In this episode, we focus on Eve. We start by talking about females from 200 million years ago, going back to the early mammals, and we also talk about the difference between sex and gender, and the “male norm”, or how the female body has been neglected in biology and medicine. We then go through the evolution of some of the traits Dr. Bohannon explores in her book, namely milk, and whether men and trans women can produce it; breasts and sexual selection; the origins of the placenta; the female orgasm; menstruation; female vision and smell; bipedalism and birth; and menopause. Finally, we discuss the origins of sexism and patriarchy. -- A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: PER HELGE LARSEN, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, PHIL KAVANAGH, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, FERGAL CUSSEN, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, ROMAIN ROCH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, NELLEKE BAK, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, EDWARD HALL, HEDIN BRØNNER, DOUGLAS FRY, FRANCA BORTOLOTTI, GABRIEL PONS CORTÈS, URSULA LITZCKE, SCOTT, ZACHARY FISH, TIM DUFFY, SUNNY SMITH, JON WISMAN, WILLIAM BUCKNER, PAUL-GEORGE ARNAUD, LUKE GLOWACKI, GEORGIOS THEOPHANOUS, CHRIS WILLIAMSON, PETER WOLOSZYN, DAVID WILLIAMS, DIOGO COSTA, ANTON ERIKSSON, ALEX CHAU, AMAURI MARTÍNEZ, CORALIE CHEVALLIER, BANGALORE ATHEISTS, LARRY D. LEE JR., OLD HERRINGBONE, MICHAEL BAILEY, DAN SPERBER, ROBERT GRESSIS, IGOR N, JEFF MCMAHAN, JAKE ZUEHL, BARNABAS RADICS, MARK CAMPBELL, TOMAS DAUBNER, LUKE NISSEN, KIMBERLY JOHNSON, JESSICA NOWICKI, LINDA BRANDIN, NIKLAS CARLSSON, GEORGE CHORIATIS, VALENTIN STEINMANN, PER KRAULIS, KATE VON GOELER, ALEXANDER HUBBARD, BR, MASOUD ALIMOHAMMADI, JONAS HERTNER, URSULA GOODENOUGH, DAVID PINSOF, SEAN NELSON, MIKE LAVIGNE, JOS KNECHT, ERIK ENGMAN, LUCY, YHONATAN SHEMESH, MANVIR SINGH, AND PETRA WEIMANN! A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, TOM VANEGDOM, BERNARD HUGUENEY, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, THOMAS TRUMBLE, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, JONCARLO MONTENEGRO, AL NICK ORTIZ, NICK GOLDEN, AND CHRISTINE GLASS! AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MATTHEW LAVENDER, SERGIU CODREANU, BOGDAN KANIVETS, ROSEY, AND GREGORY HASTINGS!
Columbia University Professor Cat Bohannon asks how it was that the male body became the scientific default in her new book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.
https://www.catbohannon.com/ The talking points alone are enough to make you go hmmmm. She's insightful, intelligent and makes compelling points that science should listen to. We kept it more on the science end of the interview focusing on subjects you probably never thought about, but below are some of the talking points she includes in her book. Women outlive men because female bodies are just better at *not dying.* And with few exceptions, that's true from birth forward—even boys get more cancer than girls, and are more likely to die from it when they do—but this is especially true during our reproductive years. And that gap is only going to get bigger: 80 percent of the world's centenarians are female. We probably evolved to be sexist. But we don't have to keep doing it. From an evolutionary perspective, sexism and gynecology are two sides of the same coin: they're both ways we use behavior to innovate around our species' terrible reproductive system. (When you don't have the Pill or condoms, having strict social rules that restrict access to female bodies can usefully limit how many times a woman will be pregnant.) But gynecology has vastly outpaced sexism in this regard. Now that we can mostly deal with our glitchy, complication-prone reproductive systems, we can finally choose not to be sexist—which is good, because sexism is actually starting to kill us. Breastfeeding babies talk to their mothers through their nipples. Or rather, their bodies talk to our bodies in an ancient language: because of the physics of nursing at the breast, babies' spit is literally sucked into the mother's breast through the nipple in a kind of undertow, wherein it's “observed” by immuno-agents lining the mother's milk ducts. (Formally, this is called “upsuck.”) Sick babies get different breastmilk than healthy ones. So do stressed babies—mom's breast “reads” the cortisol in the babies' spit and adjusts the composition of the milk accordingly. Human penises are terribly boring. So, too, our testicles. And it's probably because men didn't compete for mates as much as other apes, and also because we didn't rape each other very much in our evolutionary past—species prone to rape tend to have whiz-bang penises and complicated vaginas to match, like the mallard duck's corkscrew contraption, or the dolphin's J-shaped prehensile phallus, which can literally swivel and whack a female until she submits. Female bodies probably led the way to bipedalism. The female musculoskeletal system is geared towards endurance, while the male's is a bit closer to the older (chimp-like) model. So male bodies are usually better at explosive strength, and female ones better at enduring. That's true all the way down to female muscle cells' metabolism. And the thing about walking upright is you need endurance. Shame about our lower backs and knees, though… female sex hormones also make us more flexible, which is great for yoga and pregnancy, but absolutely terrible for long-term wear and tear on the joints.
Guest: Guest: Cat Bohannon is a researcher specialized in the evolution of narrative and cognition. She is the author of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon. The post How The Female Body Drives Evolution appeared first on KPFA.
On this episode, we celebrate Women's History Month with fiction and nonfiction about women's history, one of the prompts on the Winter-Spring 2024 Books & Bites Bingo reading challenge. From a graphic novel about Soviet women fighter pilots to a page-turning book about the evolution of female bodies, we'll show you that there's nothing dull about women's history. Michael's PickThe Night Witches is a graphic novel written by Garth Ennis and illustrated by Russ Braun. During World War II, the Soviet Union formed the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, recruiting women to fly night missions, bombing the invading Nazis as they cut deeper into Russia. The Nazis came to dub them the “Nachthexen” or “Night Witches.”The novel follows Anna Kharkova, a fictional Night Witch. It opens as Anna is recruited to join the 588th regiment with her friend and gunner, Zoya. If you're a World War II history buff or a fan of military history, you might enjoy this powerful story.Pairing: A glass of Kompot, homemade fruit juice enjoyed by many Russian and Ukrainian families. Carrie's PickEve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolutionby Cat Bohannon upends popular and scientific belief to argue that female bodies have been the primary agents of humans' evolutionary change. Bohannon builds her case over nine well researched and lively chapters: Milk, Womb, Perception, Legs, Tools, Brain, Voice, Menopause, and Love.Pairing: Chocolate Covered Frozen Bananas in honor of our matriarchal primate relatives.Jacqueline's PickThe Lovely War by Julie Berry tells the love stories of two WWI couples through the frame of the Goddess of Love's own love story.She seeks to answer the age-old question: "Why are Love and War eternally drawn to one another?" but her quest for a conclusion that will satisfy her jealous husband, Hephaestus, uncovers a multi-threaded tale of prejudice, trauma, and music, revealing that War is no match for the power of Love.Pairing: The war-time treat Lemon Sponge Cake. It's made with rice flour instead of wheat, which was in short supply during World War I. Books & Bites Reading PartyThursday, March 14, 6:30 pm to 7:30 pmConnect with fellow book lovers at a party that celebrates readers! Join us for some silent reading time followed by bookish conversation. If you're participating in the Books & Bites Bingo reading challenge, you'll earn another free bingo square of your choice just for attending. No registration is required.
“There's this really old, really crap story that how we got here is about what the guys did. And women were just like some side character behind a hill, just like pounding some tubers, saying, ‘Oh, sorry guys. I see you're busy. I'm just gonna build the future of our species in my actual body'.” That's how the brilliant and hilarious Cat Bohannon introduces the idea behind her New York Times bestselling book, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. Ten years in the making, and making a huge splash internationally, the book is a fascinating, myth-busting tour of biological evolution that re-examines everything we think we know about the human body by placing women at the center of it all. In honor of International Women's Day on March 8th, we're thrilled to talk with Cat about her boundary-breaking book, which puts the female body in the foreground of biological research. “ It's not that there's a sexist cabal saying, ha ha! We're gonna understudy females”, she tells us, “It's that there's this pre-existing idea that ovaries don't matter”. Cat shares how there's a long history of female bodies being excluded from medical, evolutionary and biological research, and why that matters for everyone.The interview also dives into Cat's sci-fi movie inspiration for the book, how female figures in evolution were key to the humans of today, why the “male norm” in biological research developed in the first place, and how change in the scientific community is happening…slowly: “paradigm shifts are hard…that's the hardest thing to break out of. A paradigm shift is the biggest thing there is”. Don't miss this eye-opening discussion that looks at the human body from a whole different vantage point. About the ShowThe Breakout is the hit podcast hosted by human resources and change experts Dr. Keri Ohlrich and Kelly Guenther. The founders of Abbracci Group, a results-driven coaching, HR Management and consulting firm, Keri and Kelly are laser-focused on getting the best out of people. They launched The Breakout in early 2023 to find the best stories and advice on busting boundaries and making change, and since then the show has charted #1 in self-improvement, #1 in education, and #7 in all podcasts.Join Keri and Kelly on The Breakout as they get advice and insights from change experts, and learn from people who have really done it how you can dive into personal growth, increase self confidence, and move your life into bold new territory.Each episode comes with lessons on living courageously, with topics on self-help, leadership, personal development, building success, setting personal boundaries, growing your confidence, overcoming self doubt, and knowing your self worth. From huge transformations to quiet shifts, The Breakout highlights why every change matters.At Abbracci Group, Keri and Kelly offer a four-step coaching process to help you increase your self-awareness, break out of expectations, and live life on your terms. Learn more at abbraccigroup.com.Keri and Kelly's new book Whatever the Hell You Want – An Escape Plan to Break Out of Life's Little Boxes and Live Free From Expectations, is out in October 2024 and available for pre-order now!Dr. Keri Ohlrich's book The Way of the HR Warrior is available now.Connect with Dr. Keri Ohlrich and Kelly GuentherThe Breakout on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/thebreakoutpod/Abbracci Group website https://abbraccigroup.com/podcast/The Breakout Facebook https://www.facebook.com/thebreakoutpodcast/Abbracci Group LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/company/abbraccigroup/The Breakout on YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/@thebreakoutpodcastAbout Cat BohannonResearcher, 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.Connect with Cat BohannonCat Bohannon's WebsiteCat on XEve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution
Cat Bohannon's new book puts female anatomy at the center of human evolution. She tells Steve why it takes us so long to give birth, what breast milk is really for, and why the human reproductive system is a flaming pile of garbage. SOURCE:Cat Bohannon, researcher and author. RESOURCES:Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, by Cat Bohannon (2023).“Genomic Inference of a Severe Human Bottleneck During the Early to Middle Pleistocene Transition,” by Wangjie Hu, Ziqian Hao, Pengyuan Du, Fabio Di Vincenzo, Giorgio Manzi, Jialong Cui, Yun-Xin Fu, Yi-Hsuan, and Haipeng Li (Science, 2023).“The Greatest Invention in the History of Humanity,” by Cat Bohannon (The Atlantic, 2023).“A Newborn Infant Chimpanzee Snatched and Cannibalized Immediately After Birth: Implications for ‘Maternity Leave' in Wild Chimpanzee,” by Hitonaru Nishie and Michio Nakamura (American Journal of Biological Anthropology, 2018).“War in the Womb,” by Suzanne Sadedin (Aeon, 2014).“Timing of Childbirth Evolved to Match Women's Energy Limits,” by Erin Wayman (Smithsonian Magazine, 2012).“Bonobo Sex and Society,” by Frans B. M. de Waal (Scientific American, 2006). EXTRAS:“Ninety-Eight Years of Economic Wisdom,” by People I (Mostly) Admire (2023).“We Can Play God Now,” by People I (Mostly) Admire (2022).“Yuval Noah Harari Thinks Life Is Meaningless and Amazing,” by People I (Mostly) Admire (2022).“Jared Diamond on the Downfall of Civilizations — and His Optimism for Ours,” by People I (Mostly) Admire (2021).
Frank Schaeffer In Conversation with Author Cat Bohannon, exploring the themes of her new book, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution._____LINKShttps://www.catbohannon.comBOOKEve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolutionhttps://bit.ly/482OLNu_____Cat completed her PhD in 2022 at Columbia University, where she studied the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her writing has appeared in Scientific American, Science magazine, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Lapham's Quarterly, The Georgia Review, and on The Story Collider. Eve is her first book. She lives in the U.S. with her partner and two offspring._____I have had the pleasure of talking to some of the leading authors, artists, activists, and change-makers of our time on this podcast, and I want to personally thank you for subscribing, listening, and sharing 100-plus episodes over 100,000 times.Please subscribe to this Podcast, In Conversation… with Frank Schaeffer, on your favorite platform, and to my Substack, It Has to Be Said.Thanks! Every subscription helps create, build, sustain and put voice to this movement for truth.Subscribe to It Has to Be Said. Support the show_____In Conversation… with Frank Schaeffer is a production of the George Bailey Morality in Public Life Fellowship. It is hosted by Frank Schaeffer, author of Fall In Love, Have Children, Stay Put, Save the Planet, Be Happy. Learn more at https://www.lovechildrenplanet.comFollow Frank on Substack, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Threads, and YouTube. https://frankschaeffer.substack.comhttps://www.facebook.com/frank.schaeffer.16https://twitter.com/Frank_Schaefferhttps://www.instagram.com/frank_schaeffer_arthttps://www.threads.net/@frank_schaeffer_arthttps://www.youtube.com/c/FrankSchaefferYouTube In Conversation… with Frank Schaeffer PodcastLove In Common Podcast with Frank Schaeffer, Ernie Gregg, and Erin Bagwell
Researcher Cat Bohannon joins This Is Hell! to discuss her new book from Knopf, "Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution." Rotten History follows the interview. Check out Cat's book here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/227568/eve-by-cat-bohannon/ Help keep This Is Hell! completely listener supported and access weekly bonus episodes by subscribing to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thisishell
Science evolves, often through fits and starts. Yet for most of medical history, there's been one consistent theme: most science has been conducted on male bodies. And this has created a range of problems for women. Thankfully, says Cat Bohannon, that's changing. As more women and BIPOC are entering the STEM fields, we're undergoing a renaissance in our understanding of a more inclusive and expansive science. On today's episode, the author of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution tells Derek how much science has gotten wrong by focusing exclusively on male bodies—and what we're now doing right. Show Notes Cat Bohannon Epidemic Podcast | Tony Fauci: from one pandemic to another Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Keeping track of passwords can be a real pain. If you use a simple one or use the same one for everything, that makes you easy to be hacked. If you use a complicated one or lots of different ones, it's hard to remember. This episode starts with a strategy to create good passwords that you will remember. Source: Sid Kirchheimer, author of Scam-Proof Your Life (https://amzn.to/3SeWhA5) Men and women are different, obviously. However, some of the most interesting differences you may not know. For example, how men and women hear differently; the real reason women live longer than men, and how hormones affect behaviors differently in men and women. Joining me to discuss this is is Cat Bohannon. Cat is is a researcher with a Ph.D. from Columbia University and author of the book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution (https://amzn.to/3SgBUlO). The world is full of pests: rats, insects, bees, deer, spiders – there are lots of them. So, what is it that makes a pest a pest? In some cases, what you consider a pest may not be to someone else. Generally, though, pests are something we strive to get rid of. What is the best way to do that? Maybe pests are really trying to tell us something. Here to discuss this is Bethany Brookshire. She is an award-winning science writer, a contributor to Science News magazine and a host on the podcast Science for the People (http://www.scienceforthepeople.ca/) and she is author of a book called Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains (https://amzn.to/3vzlpZt). Most drivers don't take the time to adjust the headrest in their car. In fact, many of us don't even think about doing it and aren't sure of the best position for it anyway. If you are ever in a crash, the position of your headrest can make a big difference. Listen as I explain how to adjust it. https://www.adlergiersch.com/provider-blog/how-to-properly-adjust-your-headrest-to-prevent-whiplash/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! NerdWallet lets you compare top travel credit cards side-by-side to maximize your spending! Compare and find smarter credit cards, savings accounts, and more today at https://NerdWallet.com Indeed is offering SYSK listeners a $75 Sponsored Job Credit to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING TurboTax Experts make all your moves count — filing with 100% accuracy and getting your max refund, guaranteed! See guarantee details at https://TurboTax.com/Guarantees Dell Technologies and Intel are pushing what technology can do, so great ideas can happen! Find out how to bring your ideas to life at https://Dell.com/WelcomeToNow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Where do we come from and how did we evolve into the beings and bodies we are today? The new book "Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution" argues for a better understanding of our origins with critical implications for our present. Jeffrey Brown spoke with author Cat Bohannon for our arts and culture series, CANVAS. PBS NewsHour is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders
Where do we come from and how did we evolve into the beings and bodies we are today? The new book "Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution" argues for a better understanding of our origins with critical implications for our present. Jeffrey Brown spoke with author Cat Bohannon for our arts and culture series, CANVAS. PBS NewsHour is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders
Cat Bohannon says for far too long the story of human evolution has ignored the female body. Her new book offers a sweeping revision of human history. It's an urgent and necessary corrective that will forever change your understanding of birth and why it's more difficult for humans than virtually any other animal species on the planet. Her best-selling book is called Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, and we're talking all about it in this episode. Transcript BLAIR HODGES: When Cat Bohannan was working on her PhD, she noticed something was missing from the story she usually heard about human evolution. Specifically, women are missing. That seemed like a pretty big oversight. So she tracked down the most cutting edge research and pulled it together into a fascinating new book. Cat is here to talk about it. It's called Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution. Since we're taking a new look at families, gender and sex on the show, I thought, what better place to begin than the place where we all begin at birth? Let's look at how that messy dangerous, incredible process came to be. There's no one right way to be a family and every kind of family has something we can learn from. I'm your host Blair Hodges, and this is Family Proclamations. INSPIRED BY SCI-FI (7:12) BLAIR HODGES: Cat Bohannon joins us. We're talking about the book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution. Cat, welcome to Family Proclamations. CAT BOHANNON: Hey, thanks for having me. BLAIR HODGES: You bet. I'm thrilled about this. This is this is such a good book. Your introduction suggests the idea for it was conceived in a movie theater or after you had just seen a movie prequel to Alien. I didn't see that coming. Talk about how the book started. CAT BOHANNON: Right, so as a person who is femme-presenting, as a person who identifies as a woman, I have many triggering moments for where I might want to talk about the body and its relation to our lives. However, there was this one kind of crystallizing bit. I'm a big sci-fi fan, big Kubrick fan, big Ridley Scott fan, so I'm gonna go, when they come out, I'm gonna go. Now, this is a prequel to Alien, so you know going into this film that whatever characters you meet, it's not gonna go well for them. You just accept it in that kind of sadistic way as an audience of these things, like this is—yeah, you know where it's going. But in this case, what happened is the main character has been impregnated, effectively, with a vicious alien squid, as you do. And she's sort of shambling in a desperate state, and she arrives in this crashed spaceship at a MedPod. So it's like surgery in a box, you know, that's the idea. And she asked the computer for a cesarean. I think she actually says something like, “CESAREAN!”, you know, but she wants help with her situation, her tentacled situation. And the MedPod says, “I'm sorry, this MedPod is calibrated for male patients only.” And I hear in the row exactly behind me, a woman say, “Who does that?” Exactly. Who does that? Who sends a multi-trillion dollar expedition into space? Right? Presumably that's the, maybe it costs more and doesn't make sure that the medical equipment works on women, right? And it turns out us. Yeah, it's us. We're the ones who do that. Right now, in every single hospital, It's a problem. BLAIR HODGES: So your book is looking at the “male norm” problem. You're looking at how, and not just in medical science, but I think in the ways anthropology has worked, a lot of sociological studies, studies of medicine—they assume the male body as the norm and then proceed from there. There are practical reasons for this that you talk about in the book, with medicine trials, for example, where you want a body that isn't maybe going to experience a lot of hormonal flux over the course of the study, or that isn't going to be pregnant or something. CAT BOHANNON: Mm-hmm. BLAIR HODGES: And so women get left out of scientific conversations a lot, not just in medicine but also in the history of evolution. Your book wants to address that gap. CAT BOHANNON: Yes, absolutely. And you can see it even in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, where they're inventing the first tool, right? And they're banging a bone on the ground that they use to beat the crap out of a guy. The camera tracks it, the bone goes up into the air and turns into a spaceship. This is the classic idea of tool triumphalism—that where we come from is male bodies doing what we stereotypically associate with male body stuff, like beating the crap out of people. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. CAT BOHANNON: And there's no females in that scene. Where are they? Are they behind a hill having the babies? Like how—this is where evolution works, people. These are the bodies that make the babies, that make the babies that make the babies, right? And it's absolutely true that in the stories we tell ourselves about our bodies and where we come from, we often erase the idea of femininity. We often erase the presence of females as this kind of insignificant side character. But in biology, particularly in mammals, it's often quite the reverse. Things that drive mutations in female bodies, biologically female bodies, are often major drivers for the trajectory of that species because the outcome of our reproductive lives is strongly, strongly tied to the health of the bodies of the female. BLAIR HODGES: I love how you framed this: You invite us to think about our bodies as a collection of things that evolved at different times for different reasons. And you're looking especially at how female bodies have evolved. So breasts themselves have a heritage; milk has a heritage; ovaries have a heritage; senses have a heritage. And instead of one singular female that we'll look back to as our origin—like the biblical Eve, for example—you say there are actually a lot of different Eves. Because you're looking at the origins of all of these different parts of the body. CAT BOHANNON: Yep, absolutely. I mean, when you look in the mirror, what you see, if you're a sighted person is—well, it's a mix, right? It's actually the photons bouncing off of that mirror surface, which have already bounced off the surface of your body and then eventually find their way to your retinas. And that's all the technical features of how your eyeballs do what they do if you have eyeballs that do that. But it's also inevitably embedded in cultural understandings. And it's also embedded in an idea of time. That you begin at a certain point, your body arrives through—well actually through a very wet passage usually, into the world and so you are you. But actually, the body itself is a continuation of many processes that work very chaotically and intricately together that started a very long time ago. And your intestines are effectively way older than even your upright pelvis. Your pelvis is way older than your encephalized brain. So what you're looking at in the mirror is almost like, this might be too lyric, but it's almost like a point in a stream of light blasting out backwards from you and out forwards in front of you, because what you are isn't so much a thing, but something that is happening. MORGIE AND THE MILK (7:12) BLAIR HODGES: And you take us way back in time. 200 million years ago is when you take us, back to the first Eve. This is the “milk” mom, the mammal who kind of brought milk here. You describe her, you call her Morgie, and she's sort of this little weasel mouse. Tell us a little bit about Morgie. CAT BOHANNON: Morgie's fun. We nicknamed her Morgie because the Smithsonian did that before I did, thank you very much. She is an exemplar genus. There are many species of morganucodon, but they're often nicknamed Morgie in the community of paleo folk. And they are this lovely little kind of weasel rat bitch. She's great. She's only about the size of a field mouse. She is presumed to be burrowing. So she lives in little holes in the ground. BLAIR HODGES: The drawing is so cute, by the way, that you have in there. CAT BOHANNON: Isn't she wonderful? I hired this amazing illustrator. And as you'll see in the book and duly cited, she was very, very talented and we worked together. She wanted to have portraits of all the Eves. And I was like, yeah, let's do portraits of all the Eves. But she's coming from a Catholic background, my mother's Catholic too, so she wanted to do them like Saint cards, where you have the iconography in the center, but then all in the periphery around the side, you have all of these symbolic things. So you have a picture of Morgie, which is the real Madonna, thank you. But she doesn't have nipples. She's sweating drops of milk out of her milk patches on her belly. And she has these weird little pups sipping from it. Anyway, this is a podcast. You can look at it for yourselves when you get the book. But it's a beautiful, beautiful portrait. And the reason I picked Morgie as the start is, what people often forget is that, okay, yeah, we know we're mammals. You might've heard that even in high school bio. You're like, okay, homo sapiens, mammals, right? But what's not often talked about is, one of the many characteristic traits that make us mammals are deeply tied to how we reproduce, which is to say are deeply tied to the female sex of a species. And Morgie is this moment roughly when we think, okay, here's where we start lactating. Here's where we start making milk. And that becomes a key part of how we continue the development of our offspring after they exit the womb. And the funny thing about milk, of course, is that we're still laying eggs while we're first making milk, right? So we are egg-laying weird weasels, which is Morgie, in our little burrow, under the feet of dinosaurs, but also that we start lactating before we have nipples. When we often, for those of us who have breasts— BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I didn't know this. CAT BOHANNON: I know, isn't it wild? I also learned this on my journey in the research. So when we look in the mirror, we think, oh, breasts, these things, where do they come from? And we think of them as a sexual trait. We think of them as a thing that is meant to signal attractiveness to our partners. But the thing is, is that exactly—But we may not even parse that, “Oh, are we talking about the shape? Are we talking about the fat? Are we talking about the—" And it's like, whoa, no, the origin of lactation is before you even have a nipple, that you actually are just sweating this thing out from modified endocrine glands out of your skin through your hair. And in fact, the duck-billed platypus, which is often modeled as a kind of weird monitoring basal mammal, she doesn't have nipples either. Her pups through their weird little bills are slurping the milk off the bottom of her belly through these milk patches. So that's where these things come from. BLAIR HODGES: I had no idea. And also that milk wasn't just for nutrition, but also a way to sort of protect the eggs, right? So Morgie was laying eggs and then milk would be produced to help the eggs, rather than just feed the babies? CAT BOHANNON: Yes. So for a lot of egg layers—not hard shell, not like a chicken, but a softer leathery shell, there are many species that make leathery eggs, yeah? The trick is, is when you're on land, you need to keep them moist. You can't have them dry out while that offspring is continuing to develop in there. So a lot of egg layers, it's kind of gross, but they secrete this kind of egg-moistening goo that also has a lot of useful anti-fungal and antibacterial properties. Because of course you also don't want the eggs to be overrun like old bread. You want it to both be wet but not moldy. Wet but not infested with parasites, right? BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Sure. CAT BOHANNON: And so, yeah, the best model I've seen for the evolution of milk is actually derived from that original egg-moistening goo. Which is of course incredibly gross to think about, but more likely the origin of lactation. BLAIR HODGES: And you talk about the mechanics of the nipples themselves. So we do get to a nipple, evolutionarily we do develop these nipples. CAT BOHANNON: We do. I got two. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, I do too! CAT BOHANNON: Some people have more. Yeah. BLAIR HODGES: I mean, mine would be a little bit trickier to get to milk from, but you do point out in the book that some male folks can lactate, given the right exercises and the right stimulation, et cetera. But with the nipple— CAT BOHANNON: And the right hormonal cocktail, usually. Yeah. BLAIR HODGES: Right, right. But with the nipple, it wasn't so straightforward. So even today, babies—it's not this natural, you know, it can be tough to get babies to latch. So it's like the odds were still stacked against us. Even though we developed a nipple. It's this dance that a breastfeeder and a baby have to do to figure out how to still transfer that food across. CAT BOHANNON: Absolutely, and some species seem to be a little bit better at that, what we often call latching than others. My son was terrible at it. Absolutely just mangled my chest wall in ways that alarmed even the nurses. They're like, “oh God, here's a pump.” It's okay, eventually, whatever, I didn't have a moral goal for it. Luckily, I was able to not be embedded in that debate that many women do in the way we punish ourselves. “Oh, I wasn't able to lactate well enough!” But yeah, come on, it's fine. I mean, and when you think of it from a biological perspective, when you think about it in that evolutionary frame, in many ways, the mammalian chest wall, our bodies know how to make milk better than babies know how to latch. It's an older trait, right? But there are many really, really cool traits about the latching when it does work, because milk is what's called a co-produced biological product. That means the mother and the offspring are actually making it together. Not simply because when you suckle, when an offspring suckles, that means you arrive at that letdown reflex—because we're not carrying a sloshing cup of milk around in our boobs no matter how big they are. This isn't a Ziploc bag in there, right? This is actually like maybe a couple tablespoons at a time if you're lucky when you're lactating. But no, the suckling actually triggers the milk glands to kick up production, and that's what starts the whole process rolling. But the more important thing there, for the latching—because once you have that vacuum-like seal, once the kid's mouth latches on, forms the seal like a weird lamprey, and sucks that relatively giant nipple into its mouth, well now actually you've created something of a tide. Because as the child suckles, it's creating a vacuum while it sucks its cheeks in. And that's to suck the milk down as it's coming. But the tongue's moving back and forth, which moves the focus of the vacuum back and forth, which creates a tide, like a wave on the shore, of milk over the top and under the bottom. The baby's spit is sucked back up into the nipple because that's how undertow works, it's just physics! Which is gross and invasive to think about as a person who's done it. But it's true that the spit is then drawn up into the whole lining of the tubing of the breast where it's read like some weird ancient code. BLAIR HODGES: Right! CAT BOHANNON: And the mother's immune system is responding. All sorts of different sensors are responding and changing the content of the milk to suit. So if the kid's sick, then you get more immunoagents coming down that nipple to help the kid fight off the infection. And a bunch of hormonal stuff and ratios of proteins to sugar. We make our milk to suit, given what we're effectively, anciently reading in the kid's spit. Now that said, breast pumps are awesome. Your kid will be fine if you're not able to do this, okay? You know, modern technology is beautiful, “Fed is best.” But if you are getting the latching, then that's what's actually happening. BLAIR HODGES: This is the kind of thing your book is chock full of. So many times people are going to run into things they may have never heard of that are just unreal. You also talk about how the breast can be dangerous business too. I mean, evolution has trade-offs. Breast cancer, for example, is so common with women. So you can benefit the baby, but having the ability to produce this milk and do this thing through the breasts also increases a risk to the breast-haver as well. You talk about such trade-offs throughout the book. CAT BOHANNON: Absolutely, and I'll also offer that male bodies and men and trans women are also all capable of getting breast cancer. We all actually have mammary tissue, but male typical bodies tend to have way less of it. And mammary tissue, because it's so dynamically responsive to hormonal signaling, is just one of those places in the body that's more vulnerable to the processes that can drive cancer. And BLAIR HODGES: Mmhmm. Cells going haywire. CAT BOHANNON: Exactly, exactly. So it's still something absolutely that non-binary folk and gender queer folk of all types should pay attention to. If something's bugging you in your body, talk to your doctor. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, there are so many footnotes that have that caveat of like, by the way, talk to your doctor just in case. CAT BOHANNON: Well, it's so important. DONNA AND THE WOMB (16:27) BLAIR HODGES: Let's talk about the next Eve, this is Donna. And this is a chapter about the womb. Donna emerged after a catastrophic cataclysm, whatever killed off the dinosaurs. There was this little weasel type animal that made it through all that destruction. This is 60 million some odd years ago, and you point to her as a reason why so many women today have periods. Let's talk about Donna. CAT BOHANNON: Donna, which is, I nicknamed her Donna, of course, Protungulatum Donnae, but Donna's easier. It's cuter to call her Donna. So she is an ancestor of the modern placental womb. Now we only have one womb. Many mammals still have two because they're evolved, of course, from the shell gland of our former egg layers. And the reason we have one, we're not entirely sure why, but we know the mechanism is that you have these two organs that are merging into one and producing that kind of, in our case, pear-shaped thing, but many, many women and girls are still born with a uterus that has a little dent in the top. Very common. Some even have a whole fibrous divide down the middle. Some are even still born with two uteri, less common, but happens, and two cervixes and two vaginas to match. CAT BOHANNON: So the easiest way to remember the difference between us and marsupials is: marsupials pouch, us no pouch. But also marsupials: two or more vaginas, which is fun, and us only the one. But the thing the reason to think about that isn't simply that it's cute and weird and fun imagining all of the things you might do with an extra vagina—all of which I'm sure are for the good, but that it's really talking about, at what point in development is that offspring coming out of that maternal body, and how much of development is finished outside of the womb, in or out of a pouch or a burrow or what have you. So this is the moment we start going down the path towards our somewhat catastrophic human reproductive system that is long derived from early, early mammals just after that cataclysm, which knocked out almost all the dinosaurs except for a few disgruntled birds, right? That's what's left of them. Your house sparrow. But what we have now is, we have this really patently crazy thing where instead of laying eggs like a sensible creature, we effectively hot dock them into our bodies within a uterus and then transform, not simply the uterus, but the entire body into this kind of eggshell slash meat factory of a burrow. Because our body is now effectively the burrow for that phase of development. In marsupials, it comes out like the size of a jelly bean, comes out a lot sooner, finishing out most of that development in the pouch and then elsewhere. For us, we're finishing a lot of the development inside our bodies, which has all kinds of knock-on effects. BLAIR HODGES: One of my favorite parts of the book that just blew me away was the illustration—I think it's on page 76—of the female pelvic anatomy. What we usually see is the uterus, and it's stretched out and it looks kind of like hip bones. It looks like our hips, like the ovaries are stretched out, the tubes are. And you show, no, it's actually sort of just like balled and smooshed up in there all together— CAT BOHANNON: Totally. BLAIR HODGES: —which I mean, I have never seen this illustration before! I've always seen that other illustration where it's all laid out. CAT BOHANNON: Yeah. So a lot of us learn—if we're lucky enough to have something like sex ed. Sadly, not all of us do, but for those of us who are able to have that be part of our education, it's kind of like a T shape, like a capital letter T, where you have that uterus and the vag in the middle, and then you have those fallopian tubes extending out to the side with two little grapes, you know, near the fringy bits, right, which are the ovaries. But the body doesn't have all this extra room in it. It's not like stretching out its arms. It's all kind of smooshed up in there. Which means that I've had the very real and very common experience of having had a transvaginal ultrasound, where they're like trying to image my ovaries and they can't find one. Because for whatever reason, the path of that ultrasound beam is being blocked by a part of the bowel or the uterus itself, or just, something's in the way and the ovary's hiding. And I was very alarmed at this moment, partially because I had a large thing inside my vagina and I was trying to maintain a conversation. It's rough. BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Right. CAT BOHANNON: But it's also like, this person's telling me they can't find one of my ovaries. I'm like, “Well where the hell is it?” Like, did I lose an ovary? Like what? You know? And no, actually it's just that everything is very smushed in there, which is part of why ovarian cysts can hurt so much for people who have them. Because you have that radiating signal of irritation hitting many different organs in that area, right? And so it can be kind of hard to pinpoint what you're feeling exactly. You just know it hurts or that it's like pressure, right? And it's different person to person. It's also unfortunately why ovarian cancer is so very dangerous. People who have these biologically female bodies, we kind of get used to aches and pains down there. It's kind of a weird common sensation, for fluctuations over a menstrual cycle, to have some kind of achy bits, some kind of bloated bits, some kind of “what was that sharp pain, I don't know, it went away, cool,” right? So in the early stages of ovarian cancer, it's often the case that a patient may not be fully aware that what's happening might be new. Now that's not to have your listeners be terrified. If something's bothering you, again, talk to your doctor. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. CAT BOHANNON: But it is absolutely why it's so dangerous, because of course, given that it's so smushed against everything in there, it's not hard to metastasize. You're right up against the bowel. You're very close to the liver. You're in the mix in there. BLAIR HODGES: It's packed in there! And you talk about how bonkers this is, and how many people who have gone through pregnancy have said, like, “What the hell is this?!” [laughs] Like, why do I have to do this? CAT BOHANNON: Fair! Fair question. Yes. Somewhere in our very deep sci-fi future, if we don't blow ourselves up first—which given the news today seems very close to happening, thanks—but assuming we survive the insanity that is human culture and conflict, there is a future in which there is a truly external womb. Which would have to be effectively an entire synthesized female body, right? Because it's not just, it's also your immune system, it's your respiration, it's many things. But assuming in the very deep, many hundreds of years in the future that this happens, it immediately changes everything. Because of course, then it immediately becomes unethical to ever ask a female to do this dangerous thing. She may still choose, but it becomes unethical to ask, because there's truly an alternative. BLAIR HODGES: Hmm. CAT BOHANNON: Anyway, so there's a thought experiment for you in our future sci-fi. But yeah, it is nuts. It's nuts that we make babies the way we do. Our pregnancies and our births and our postpartum recoveries are longer and harder and more prone to dangerous complications that can and do cripple and or kill mother, child or both. And that's true compared to almost any other primate except for squirrel monkeys, and we feel sorry for them. But that's true for almost any other mammal. We suck at this! We're actually bad at reproduction, which seems counterintuitive because there are eight billion of us. But it's true. BLAIR HODGES: Right. And we see you trying to theorize as to why that is. Like, we're so bad at reproduction, but we're also so highly successful, one might even say an invasive species in a way. CAT BOHANNON: Right. BLAIR HODGES: We've spread out everywhere. How did that happen if we're so bad at reproduction and it's such a costly and dangerous thing to do? CAT BOHANNON: Well, it took all of our very classic hominin resources to pull it off. We had to be super social and super clever problem solvers who are good at thinking about the world as a tool user. Which is to say, tool use is about behavior. So it's not like a paleoanthropologist actually gives a damn about this rock that someone used to cut something, right? The stone axes are not the thing they care about. They care about what they can infer about the behavior of its user. All paleoanthropologists are deeply behaviorists. What that means is, if all tool use is essentially overcoming a limitation of your body in order to achieve a goal in your given environment and using some manipulation of your behavior to do that, well, our most important invention, if we suck at reproduction, was gynecology. Lucy—and I'm not the first to say this—Lucy the australopithecine, 3.2 million years ago, had a freakin' midwife. And habilis after her had even more reproductive workarounds, as did erectus, all the way up to homo sapiens. We were manipulating our fertility patterns through behavior. And that's a huge upgrade. Now you don't have to wait around for your uterus to evolve to a thing that's less deadly—because, of course, you could also just go extinct. There's that. That's an option in evolution. You could also just not exist when you have bad reproduction. But if you can work around it behaviorally, if you can have midwives—we're one of the only species that regularly helps each other give birth. If you can manipulate your fertility patterns to up or down regulate your fertility too, because in any given environment, it might be better to cluster your births earlier in your reproductive life and then care for your sort of “useless” babies—I love my kid, but they're useless, right? For a long period of time, right? Like in your given environment, given your food supply, maybe that's a good plan. Or maybe things are more seasonal, or maybe it's actually there's not a lot of food at all and you need to stretch that sh*t out. You need to actually have them every four to six years or so, which is what chimpanzees do, which is what some known human communities do. So you have to think about how we choose to have babies and what we do to manipulate our fertility, including medicinally, including behaviorally, in the space of medical practices, as something that's adapting this buggy and fault-prone thing that is human reproduction to suit our different environments and lifestyles. And that starts not a few hundred years ago, not just in the deep history of racism and eugenics sadly in modern gynecology, but actually millions of years ago. BLAIR HODGES: Sure. And you're inviting us to think again about tools. So you talked about that scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the tool is this bone that's a weapon, and we think about the rise of humanity as being tied to this type of tool. You're inviting people to re-envision that and say, actually, the tool of gynecology—which would have involved our own hands as tools—would have been such a crucial turning point for who we are as a species or who we could become. CAT BOHANNON: Mm-hmm. BLAIR HODGES: Because I think you even say, we “seized the means of reproduction,” or something at that point, which is a great pun. CAT BOHANNON: Yes, yes, and meant to be, because I too am a nerd. Yes, we do. We do indeed seize the means of actual freakin' reproduction and get our hands on the levers that are controlling not only our reproductive destiny, but then effectively our destiny as a species. PURGI AND HUMAN SENSE PERCEPTION (27:29) BLAIR HODGES: That's Cat Bohannon and she's a researcher and author with a PhD from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition. We're talking about her book, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. It's a brand new book, and it's a fabulous book. The next part I wanted to talk about was perception. And you say you got thinking about whether men and women perceive the world in different ways. And you got thinking about this as a college student working as a nude model at the local art school. And when students would take a break, you'd kind of wander through and check out how people were seeing you, how they were drawing you. And you noticed, invariably often, the men would be drawing your breasts too big. You're like, those aren't mine. But then as the weeks went by, they would get closer to normal size. Like something was changing in how they initially saw you, how they were drawing you. And so you wondered, like, are they seeing things differently than me? Is perception different? CAT BOHANNON: Mmhmm. BLAIR HODGES: Now, the danger in this question is falling into the trap of “men are from Mars, women are from Venus,” right? Essentializing gender. CAT BOHANNON: Yyyuuup. BLAIR HODGES: So we'll keep that in mind as you talk about perception and what you found in this chapter. CAT BOHANNON: Yeah, so there were some genderqueer folk in the art classes where I was a professional naked person, which was my job at the time. But for the most part, they were cis folk with a variety of sexualities. So I would just point out that in these rooms, there of course was diversity, and there was racial diversity too. However, the most obvious variable, you know, if you want to call it that, was simply that the male presenting folk who were almost universally cis, were drawing my boobs too big. Now, they're not small. I'm like a 34D. It's a problem. The straps dig into my shoulders. I know that I am not a small-breasted person for good and ill, but it's more that there's just the skill of literally, proportionally, how big are these knockers you're putting on this figure drawing. And the females, the women, the femmes, were not doing that. And it wasn't the case then—And it was happening semester after semester in multiple classes. So this is not a scientific study that I'm basing this on. This is an anecdote. But like, it was a thing. And I asked some other people who had been models and they were like, “Oh yeah, they always do that.” And I was asking them, what do you think it is? And they usually said something like, “Eh, it's just porn. Whatever, they get over it. It's fine. They just don't know how to not see porn when they see naked female bodies,” right? Although this was the late 90s and early aughts, so it was before the massive proliferation of internet porn, but whatever. It was a thing, is what I'm saying. It was a freakin' thing that was fairly consistent. And so I had to ask myself, like, do they literally look larger to them? You know? Is this a cultural thing? Is this gender mess? Is this just sexism? Is it just, you know, that soup of that thing where it's complicated? Or is there something physiological going on? And so for that, I take us back to the dawn of primates. Not in the “men are from Mars, women from Venus” way, but actually when were we actually weird little proto monkeys in a tree? And can that tell us anything about why they draw my boobs too big? And it's a journey. I go through quite a lot because there's a lot that goes into the evolution of the sensory array. The nose, the eyes, the ears. So there's a lot to work with there and it doesn't always come back to my naked self. The central reason why, as best as I could tell, they were drawing them too large is that they were literally fixating on them. So when your eye looks out on the world, it's doing a mixture of things. It's doing a mixture of saccades, which are these twitchy little movements. Your eyes are doing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, that you don't even notice. And fixations, which means they're landing on one spot and staying there for a period before they move around again. And there does seem to be in the lab notable sex differences in how male saccade versus fixation patterns seem to work. Again, mostly these subjects are cis men. So there's your caveat, right? But one of the famous things about male versus female facial perception that classically in the psychological literature, cis women seem to be better at remembering faces—and these are sighted people of course—than cis men. And it seems to be, after doing some eye tracking studies with some careful cameras, that what's happening is that male eyes seem to focus more centrally on the center of the face, almost kind of around the tip and bridge of the nose, like that center zone. Whereas female typical eyes are doing fixations through all of the major points of facial features, eyes, nose, cheekbones, chin, up again, all around, all around, all around. BLAIR HODGES: Huh. CAT BOHANNON: Which is to say it may be the case that it's not that—you know, the stereotype women are more social, we're just better at remembering people because we're all kind of emotionally mushy or some sh*t, right? No. It's actually that where you fixate is giving you more signal for your long-term memory. And so if you're getting a broader range of information to dump into long-term memory, just literally what your eyes are doing may be helping you do that, right? Which is not about a psychology thing, it's a physiology thing. And in the boys' cases, I think they were quite literally fixating more on my breasts. Now, why they were doing that may well be cultural— BLAIR HODGES: Right. CAT BOHANNON: They don't have them for the most part. And you know they're 18 years old, people. I was naked in front of 18-year-old boys, so I have no more nightmares, right? But like, that's new. That's not in our culture. That's not a thing they've seen a lot in the social setting as opposed to an intimate setting, right? So you know, literally it's looming large in their mind and over the course of the semester as they get used to it—right? So it's both what their eyes are doing, but it's also cultural. BLAIR HODGES: Right, and this is where—and you point this out as well sometimes, especially in the footnotes—where studies on trans folks are going to shed a lot more light on this— CAT BOHANNON: Oh yeah. BLAIR HODGES: —where we can probably get a better sense of where culture fits in, where expectations fit in versus physiology. And we're still so early in scientific endeavors of thinking about trans perception— CAT BOHANNON: Absolutely we are. BLAIR HODGES: It's just huge questions to explore, so much more to explore there than we know. CAT BOHANNON: Mm-hmm. It's gonna be fun, it's gonna be great. THE NOSE (33:38) BLAIR HODGES: Yeah! This also talks about—So our eyes, our nose, and our ears are in this chapter. The nose, it was really cool to learn about how our faces flattened out over time, which made smell—We're not as great smelling like as we used to be. Our faces are flat. We don't have this big organ in there that does a lot of good smell stuff. And a lot of these changes happened when we were up in the trees, to our eyes and ears, that point to what seem to be some sex-based differences. Give us some examples of these sex based differences in smell, in sight, in sound, that still carry through today that are kind of throwbacks to this time when we were swinging from the trees, or I guess really just kind of crawling around in the trees. CAT BOHANNON: Yeah, yeah, we didn't have those brachiated shoulders yet. So swinging less so. But no, this is a kind of classic story of how we got the so-called monkey face. Even a kid can kind of draw a monkey face on a piece of paper. You got the big ears, got that kind of flat face, two forward-facing binocular stereoscopic eyes. Like we know what that looks like, but that's a very big change from something like a weasel or a mouse, right? Where you have that elongated snout, you have eyes a little bit more to the side. Right, and most of the people who talk about the evolution of primates do talk about how this came about. If a face is a sensory array, it's not just what we use to smile at each other. It's where we're hanging our primary sensors of the eyes, the nose, and the ears, and how we position them on our head is very much shaping how we perceive our environment. So the move up into the trees is a very different environment from the ground, especially from burrowing. There are many different ways in which we have to process the world differently. When it comes to the nose, one of the things that's interesting about human beings is we lost what's called the vomeronasal organ. In a lot of mammals, the perception of pheromones, you know, smells that usually the opposite sex put out that we innately strongly react to, which in a mouse is incredibly a dominant part of their perceptive lives. For us, we don't have it. We evolved away from it. We actually still have a teeny tiny little passage. It's like at the bottom of our sinuses, but it ends in kind of a—it hits a wall. It's not much going on there. Human beings don't seem to have a whole lot of pheromone perception left. But what we do have is a whole bunch of cisgender women who are a lot better at smelling stuff than males are. And we're not entirely sure we know why it is. But it is absolutely true classically in olfaction that female subjects are going to be better at detecting scents that are faint in a room. That's a concentration thing. You only need a little whiff, you know, whereas a male typical might need a stronger dose. We're better at discerning between different kinds of scents and we're better at recognizing it quickly. So we're literally smelling more finely than males are. But it's not because we have more receptors, actually. And in fact, our noses, our nostrils sucking in that air are smaller than most males in fact. No, the big difference actually seems to be in the olfactory bulb itself. This is the part of the brain that processes smell information. Yeah. And the cells are more tightly packed with more of them, even controlling for body size, in a female typical brain than in a male. And that just means it is transmitting that signal more quickly and more widely and more effectively, and then sending a stronger signal out to other parts of the brain. So we're literally wired differently. Don't entirely know why. And we're not really sure if that's a tree problem or if it's just like a sex pheromone problem that's a leftover. Not really sure. THE EARS (37:19) BLAIR HODGES: Not only not only our smell is discussed in this chapter, but our hearing is as well. You say that probably the most important differences between sex as pertains to hearing here—volume and pitch, women tend to hear better in higher pitches, they retain hearing better with age. What are the differences that stood out to you in a male typical versus a female typical body when it comes to our hearing? CAT BOHANNON: Uh, this was kind of wild for me. So I'd often heard the story, and maybe you have too, that female ears, human female ears, are better tuned to higher pitches that often correspond to baby cries, right? Men and women can hear the same pitches for most of our early lives, but we're more tuned in to the pitches that are associated with the pitches that babies usually use when they cry. To me, this was kind of an annoying story. Once again, I seem to be hardwired to make babies. And as a feminist, I'm like, “ugh.” But it's true, so it's fine. It's a long-evolved thing. But the more interesting thing in that story for me was that most cis men start losing the upper range of their hearing starting at age 25. Now it's a gradual slope. Guys in their thirties don't need a hearing aid necessarily if they're normally hearing people, right? But you do have this slope of decline that's just, it's like a band filter. It's just cutting off the top end of your range, every year a little bit more, down, down, until you arrive in your fifties. And the thing is, female voices, female typical cis women's voices are a little bit higher pitched and our overtones on our voices, the full timbre of our voice, it really extends up to the top end of human hearing. So what happens is quite literally starting age 25, cis men aren't hearing women's voices very well and the older they get, the worse it gets, until finally in their fifties or so, quite without realizing it, a lot of men, a lot of cis men, our voices, our female voices sound thin, a little bit tinny, harder to pick out, and may well be boosted by a hearing aid. Right? So that totally changes some of how I understand the dynamic of a boardroom. Now, it doesn't explain why a sexist man cares about what a woman says less. It doesn't say that. That's just sexism. BLAIR HODGES: Right. CAT BOHANNON: But it does say that literally he might be having trouble hearing you without realizing he is. BLAIR HODGES: And again, as you discuss, all of these interesting things throughout the chapter of perception—and I don't remember if we mentioned Purgi is the name of this Eve, 60-some-odd-million years ago. CAT BOHANNON: Purgatorius, yes! BLAIR HODGES: Yes, ancestor of the primates. So if people want to learn even more about these kind of things about our nose, our eyes, our ears—Purgi's chapter is the place to go. We're talking with Cat Bohannon about her book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. You can also check out some of Cat's essays and poems. They've appeared in Scientific American, Mind Science Magazine, The Best American Non-required Reading, and other places. She lives with her family in Seattle but is currently touring to talk about this new book called Eve. ARDI AND THE LEGS (40:21) Let's talk about the legs. So we talked a little bit about being up in the trees already. But at some point, we came down, this is about four and a half-ish million years ago, we decided to stand upright. And that had some big implications for differently sexed bodies. Let's talk about some of those. CAT BOHANNON: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I don't know that we decided to do much of anything, at least in the sense of conscious choice— BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Maybe had to. CAT BOHANNON: We didn't choose, I mean, to modify our pelvic arrangement. Although some individual choices happen along the way. So yeah, one of the big things in a shift for the human evolution pattern is that we mistakenly believed for a while that our ancestors were knuckle walkers, like chimps or gorillas, and then we stood upright. You remember that old diorama, that old, you know, you got the knuckle walking— BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it's classic. CAT BOHANNON: —and then you eventually stand up and then there's jokes about it, eventually you're like sitting typing on the computer at the far right. You know? BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, all hunched over, yeah. CAT BOHANNON: Yeah. And so that kind of meme kind of has been around, but actually we were never knuckle walkers, none of our ancestors were, none of our Eves certainly. We were just hanging out in trees and then on the ground a bit more and eventually walking. The thing about walking is that what you really need to be able to do besides just having a spine absorb more pressure than it would otherwise—that's why we have an S-shaped lower back to help distribute that force over our bodies without crippling us. But also, what we needed to be able to do was endure. In other words, the story of walking and bipedalism is an endurance story. A primatologist once told me that there is no safe place to be in a room with a chimpanzee. There's no possibility that you are in a safe space because they are incredibly fast, incredibly strong, and can be incredibly violent. They will rip off your face—sometimes, literally, hopefully not, and they'll do it really, really fast. So the idea that we got faster when we became upright is actually wrong. What did happen, however, is that if a chimp does attack you, not long after all of that incredible violence and speed and running away more than likely, because that's mostly going to happen if the chimp's scared, you know, they're going to want to go eat a mango under a tree somewhere. They're not keeping it up for a long period of time. BLAIR HODGES: Hmm. CAT BOHANNON: What we can do is we can walk all freakin' day. Very few animals have the kind of metabolic capability of doing such a thing. Because it's not simply what your muscles can do. It's how your muscles are utilizing what's called the substrate. Utilizing local energy resources, and when those run out, tapping into other resources—usually in our case from fat. So that's why we're able to walk from point A to B for hours and hours, whereas a chimpanzee can't do that sh*t, right? So the interesting thing about sex differences here is that, we know that female bodies in human bodies are slightly better at endurance by many different measures. So untrained bodies—bodies that haven't been trying to do this, in other words, haven't been working out in the gym—your classic female body does have slightly less muscle mass, but that isn't the big story. The bigger story is that when you do a deep tissue biopsy, female typical skeletal muscles have a little bit more of what's called slow twitch muscle. You might have heard, that's an endurance muscle. That's a type of tissue that's better at doing things for a long period of time, as opposed to fast twitches, which is what lets you be a sprinter, which is what lets you really have explosive strength. There does seem to be that sex difference, I mean, between male bodies—typical, average, I mean—and female bodies, just in terms of what those muscles seem to be geared for, right? And it's tricky, right? Most of us aren't ultra marathoners, for many reasons, most of them psychological! Uh, some of them financial actually, right? But most of us aren't going to do those extreme tests of endurance. But once you get up to those extreme lengths, actually, female runners, tend to not only match or beat male runners in those races, but actually tend to outpace them over time. Which is to say there may be something about the female body that, in long feats of endurance, is slightly better at this. Very slightly better at tapping into a second wind. And so if that's the case, then it's curious that usually how we tell the story about becoming upright is all about some sh*t that we assume guys were doing. Usually it's around hunting. The idea that we were running down big game, you've probably read some popular science books about that, that we evolved to run, right? BLAIR HODGES: Right. CAT BOHANNON: And sort of. Maybe. But it's a little bit weird, one, to assume that the males were the ones doing that. Two: We were upright way before we were hunting big game. Like Ardipithecus is the Eve I use in the legs chapter— BLAIR HODGES: Yes, Ardi! CAT BOHANNON: And you know, this is a very, very—Ardi, she's wonderful, recently discovered, wonderful, wonderful fossil. She was upright well before big game was a big part of our food strategies. So like we were actually doing stuff on two legs way before it was a matter of running anything down. CRAFTING SCIENTIFIC NARRATIVES (45:23) BLAIR HODGES: And this is where it seems tricky for researchers to pin down is, we're dealing with these huge lengths of time, and we're dealing with a pretty limited record. CAT BOHANNON: Mmhmm. Yeah. BLAIR HODGES: And we see you piecing the story together in ways that challenge the conventional narrative. And you've got the evidence there—just as much evidence and sometimes more than what the typical narrative tells us, which is, like you said, we started walking upright because males were hunting and running after game or whatever. And you're like, “Well, actually, there's all this other evidence that shows there's probably other stuff going on.” And looking at today's bodies gives us some ideas about the bodies of the past as well. So you mentioned the different sort of muscle things that female bodies tend to have. Now would that definitely be something that developed through evolution rather than through, like, boys getting played with more or something in their youth than girls do, or roughhousing with boys versus girls, or something like that? CAT BOHANNON: You know, it's hard to say. I think that's a smart question. I think of the studies that I was using, that I was wielding—juggling even, in the legs chapter—those were all done on adult bodies, in part because there are ethics around doing a deep tissue biopsy in an infant. You know, like what is consent there? Why would a—you know, and also the occasion; why it might happen and what's the clinical setting. Like there are many ways into a scientific study, but adult consent and informed consent's a big one, right? BLAIR HODGES: Mm-hmm. CAT BOHANNON: So yeah, I don't think those were pediatric studies, and I think it's smart. I think it's smart to say that when we do studies on adult bodies, there have been whole lived lives and whole lived childhoods up to that point. That's absolutely true, and that plays into some of the issues we talk about later in the book too. So I don't know, I don't know. I do know that at least when there have been cellular studies of metabolism in human muscle cells, XX cells seem to be slightly better at utilizing multiple substrates, which is to say multiple energy sources—tapping into that second wind when the local sugar runs out is usually how we tell that story, yeah?—than XY cells, right? So it does seem to be true at the cellular level and not just types of tissue. But you're absolutely right that I don't know how much childhood is gonna play into that adult musculoskeletal system, at least not from the research I've seen. BLAIR HODGES: And you also say that going upright was harder on female bodies. Can you give me an example of why that would be? CAT BOHANNON: Yes. So, for one thing, relaxin. Relaxin is this thing that is floating around in the bloodstream of both male and female bodies, but it is slightly more dominant in female typical bodies. Again, I'm always here talking about “biological females,” usually pre-menopause here, okay? Just to put a pin in that so we know what we're talking about. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, okay. CAT BOHANNON: Relaxin is a thing that during pregnancy loosens the ligaments and the support structures around, not only the hip bones and the pelvic structure to help it widen and carry that additional load, but of course also to widen our very narrow birth canal, which is a problem! BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. CAT BOHANNON: But it's also, even when we're not pregnant, it tends to make the fixtures of the joints a little looser. It actually has to do with a vascular response around the joints, so I won't get too technical with you. But basically what it does is it makes a typical female body a bit more flexible, you know. Now this is part of why our feet expand when we are pregnant. It's not simply fluid retention, but for female bodies that become pregnant, it's also that these higher doses of relaxin are loosening the ligaments that are binding all of those foot bones together. So they literally get wider, and sometimes a little bit longer, which is very freaky when you think about it. And, uh, it doesn't always quite go back—I can tell you—afterwards, many women gain as much as a whole shoe size during pregnancy— BLAIR HODGES: Wow. CAT BOHANNON: —and then just retain that, which sucks for buying new shoes, but there you go. You have greater concerns when you're in your postpartum period, I could say, um, yeah. But it also means that we're especially prone to lower back pain, possibly because of some instability there in the lower back. Especially going through pregnancy and back again, that can make you more vulnerable too, because it does a lot to the curvature of the spine. Right? So in other words, being upright with this extra relaxin in your bloodstream can make you a little more vulnerable to certain kinds of bone and muscle related pains than it would be if you were a totally sensible four-legged creature who isn't doing this crazy thing, because basically we used to be like tables with four legs and now we're standing on two of the legs of the table and our body is still kind of catching up. BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Right. Yeah, and you're bearing that extra weight of a pregnancy, too, on that back. And so the common lower back pain is a remnant of this decision—or not “decision” as you pointed out, but this evolutionary move of going upright, exactly, right. CAT BOHANNON: Accident. Yeah. PREGNANCY AND THE BRAIN (50:06) BLAIR HODGES: That's not the only change that women undergo during pregnancy, these physical changes you talked about—the joints, the feet. But also the brain undergoes changes similar to what happens to the brain during puberty. You describe it almost like a second sort of puberty. There's so much development and change happening in the actual brain that it's like a second puberty for women who become pregnant? CAT BOHANNON: It's like an extra transition in a life cycle. Yeah. BLAIR HODGES: Okay, right. CAT BOHANNON: So in biology, you have these classic, maybe you've seen, developmental trajectories in the life cycle. It usually looks like a circle with arrows around it. You see like an egg and then a juvenile—like in insects, you'll have like a larva and then you have a chrysalis and then you have a butterfly. For mammals, we do this too. And we say, what are the developmental phases? What are the phases of this life cycle? And one of the interesting things, at least when it comes to how the human brain seems to go through this life cycle—because there are changes in our incredibly plastic, very malleable human brain that shift and actually have very notable physiological changes at each of these major transitions. So in puberty, there's actually an incredible rewiring and developmental thing that happens all throughout the teens. Can be very challenging, can make you more vulnerable to certain kinds of mental illness, actually, and then not suffer as much when you come into your twenties. There are outcomes, in other words, from what's going down in there. BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Schizophrenia will often emerge around that time, for example, and a little bit later for women than men, right? CAT BOHANNON: Yeah, yeah, yes, absolutely so. And one of the cutting-edge things in research there is whether or not the brain development during puberty is in any way affecting that trajectory. Both men and women—and by this I mean males and females—are prone to schizophrenia, right? Schizophrenia, it's a strongly genetically related thing, but we're not entirely sure what all the triggers are. What we do know is that males and females both get it. But what happens is that males are diagnosed sooner. And very obviously so, they move into psychosis. Whereas females have a slightly different symptomology, slightly different path towards diagnosis. And then they have, and are diagnosed later in their twenties. Now some of that's a diagnosis bias in that— BLAIR HODGES: Sure. How signs are read by society or whatever. Yeah. CAT BOHANNON: Exactly, which is a cultural thing and sometimes a sexist thing. There are just, there are complications there. There are confounds. However, it may also be the case, that because the pubertal shift is sort of long and slow in humans, we actually start many of the features of our puberty sooner and then take longer to complete them in female bodies. Whereas for males, it hits you later and it hits you like a truck. It just hits you like a ton of bricks. It's just, um, it, that's just, it's just faster and a bit harder, if you will, because you're condensing that into a later point. And interestingly, even in rodents actually—though what you might call a puberty isn't exactly the same as what we do—they likewise in the female have a sort of longer period of going through it than the male. So it might just be a basic mammalian thing. But the effect in the human brain is that you have this longer and slightly…Subtle isn't the right word but you have this longer period of brain development that's dealing with the hormones of puberty, that has a slightly different slope while that brain's developing, whereas in the male brain, it's shorter, it's more impacted, it might be a bit rougher, you know. So in a brain that's already prone to psychosis—this is where the research, some branches of research are going, you know—is that a factor? Are there physiological shifts in sex differences in puberty that make those brains differently vulnerable to different kinds of mental illness? BLAIR HODGES: And so female brains are undergoing these changes during puberty. But then later during pregnancy, as we were talking about, there's also more shifts. And this is literally like stuff sort of moving around. Is this like neurons kind of remapping and different things? Like what's actually happening up there? CAT BOHANNON: Yeah, yeah, yeah. What the hell is this wet lump of tissue in our heads that we center the self in? Good question, good question! Neuroscience would like to know. BLAIR HODGES: [laughs] Yeah. CAT BOHANNON: No, it's true. Well, a pregnant female's brain—and by this I mean human now, actually shrinks in the third trimester, like significantly so, which is alarming. Like is the baby actually eating my brain? Good question! No one's really sure quite why this is happening. BLAIR HODGES: Mom brain! CAT BOHANNON: I know, actual mom brain, it turns out, is hella real. Yeah, in the stereotypical sense. So yeah, some of it actually, interestingly, doesn't seem to be a loss of neurons. It's not a loss of cells necessarily from what little they've been able to see in various studies. It seems to be more a loss of—There is a rewiring. There is a kind of clear, you know, snipping out a bunch of connections in your existing neural network, which in some ways may make room for new pathways. So one of the big arguments for why our brains develop so long during that pubertal period—which is very unlike other primates, right? We really have this huge period of social learning in our childhoods and then our adolescence—is that we have deep social learning to do. We have really complex social societies, and we're constantly having to map them and learn not just new things to do with ourselves, but new ways to be in different social environments, especially as we shift around through different social environments. So in that case, when you think about what's happening in the last trimester of pregnancy, and then in the postpartum recovery period, this is someone who is having major social shift. Now the story in the sciences is usually told that, oh, this is helping her better bond with her baby, her really, really vulnerable baby, who's so very useless, can't even hold up its head. You know, so like, wow, so this is all about that bonding. And it's true that some of the regions that show some of that shrinkage, if you will—which sounds like a bad thing, but is actually allowing for more pathways to form. That's the argument that's usually made about it— BLAIR HODGES: Okay. CAT BOHANNON: —have to do with social bonding and reading social cues, and so it's a sociality story. One of the things that I say in the book is that, must we again render the mother invisible? Maybe it's not all about the baby. Maybe she matters too. Because actually one of the big things that happens in a social species like ours when we give birth and come into motherhood, especially for the first time, is that we are learning new ways to be. We're learning how to differently map our social environment and new relationships with different sorts of people, and who's going to be most helpful in this new feature in my life. And who of my old friends are like, maybe not gonna help out with the kids so much. Just, you know, we love them, but that's not their strength. You know, in other words, and how to ask for things that you need, and when to learn new social rules. Which is to say, I suspect some of the brain changes that are happening there are not simply about bonding with the baby, but are about being able to read the room once you have one. Which I assume is a long-evolved trait that is just repurposed in the human. This is probably happening in chimps to a degree. It's more like, “Okay now that you're human, let's repurpose this trait in your hyper social environment.” Does that make sense? BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it does. CAT BOHANNON: Okay. WHAT MAKES A WOMAN (57:16) BLAIR HODGES: And time and time again, we see this in your book where you'll take the mainstream story about why a particular biological thing is happening—so mom brain, for example, which is that maybe people might encounter forgetfulness or feeling scattered or like ADHD type symptoms or whatever—and saying, “Oh, this is happening because they're doing this for baby.” And you're saying, “Okay, like, sure. But also, what if it's also this?” CAT BOHANNON: Yep. BLAIR HODGES: Because those type of questions are what are driving scientific outcomes and the theories that we have about it. So your book, again and again, is saying, well, what about this as well? Or what about this instead? So we're just sort of getting a different point of view. CAT BOHANNON: Mm-hmm. BLAIR HODGES: And I think with a lot of these questions, it's hard to just say, this is the definitive answer. And you do write with a level of humility there. But you're really opening up possibilities that can change the way we the way we interact with people who aren't parents, or people who are. Because you're also not saying, “Look, in order to be a perfect woman, you need to go through this change in your brain or else you're an unfulfilled woman!” CAT BOHANNON: Oh, god no. No no no no no. BLAIR HODGES: Right. So you're speaking to a lot of different experiences. CAT BOHANNON: You know, I think this is true for all women. We people who have uteri are not merely vessels for babies. Even in an evolutionary sense, because we are a hyper-social species in interdependent complex social environments and cultures. Which is to say, it is not a woman's destiny to freaking give birth. It is a woman's destiny to survive as best as she can, just like any other organism. You know what I mean? And it's also true that there are many, many ways to contribute to the wellbeing of a group, even in a biological sense, even in an ancient ancestral sense, besides simply producing more babies. And that's sometimes the confusion when we talk about the book. Some people have been confused thinking, “Are you saying that women are the way they are—you know, cis women—because it's our destiny to have babies?” And I'm like, “No!” It's more that the way we have babies is really crap, and many, many features in our bodies have evolved to withstand it. If this is a thing that hopefully you choose to do and isn't forced upon you, hopefully you have some long-evolved traits to make it suck less. It's more like that, more like that. BLAIR HODGES: And so, women who don't undergo that or have the same kind of like brain changes, it doesn't mean that their brains are somehow lesser than or whatever, they're just suited for different things. CAT BOHANNON: Exactly. BLAIR HODGES: And this is also where trans identities come into play as well. You don't have to be this “biologically sexed”—let alone intersex folks as well, where there's not this sort of binary that exists there—but that trans women can experience the world as women, as trans women especially, even though they may not be able to physically carry a pregnancy. Because I think one of the reasons people who are sort of anti-t
In biological and medical research, the majority of studies that use mice are only using males. Why? Because female mammals' estrous, or sexual, cycle means that their bodies are more “messy” than their male counterparts.
In a special episode of People I (Mostly) Admire, Steve Levitt talks to Cat Bohannon about her new book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. SOURCE:Cat Bohannon, researcher and author. RESOURCES:Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, by Cat Bohannon (2023)."Genomic Inference of a Severe Human Bottleneck During the Early to Middle Pleistocene Transition," by Wangjie Hu, Ziqian Hao, Pengyuan Du, Fabio Di Vincenzo, Giorgio Manzi, Jialong Cui, Yun-Xin Fu, Yi-Hsuan, and Haipeng Li (Science, 2023)."The Greatest Invention in the History of Humanity," by Cat Bohannon (The Atlantic, 2023)."A Newborn Infant Chimpanzee Snatched and Cannibalized Immediately After Birth: Implications for 'Maternity Leave' in Wild Chimpanzee," by Hitonaru Nishie and Michio Nakamura (American Journal of Biological Anthropology, 2018)."War in the Womb," by Suzanne Sadedin (Aeon, 2014)."Timing of Childbirth Evolved to Match Women's Energy Limits," by Erin Wayman (Smithsonian Magazine, 2012)."Bonobo Sex and Society," by Frans B. M. de Waal (Scientific American, 2006). EXTRAS:"Yuval Noah Harari Thinks Life Is Meaningless and Amazing," by People I (Mostly) Admire (2022)."Jared Diamond on the Downfall of Civilizations — and His Optimism for Ours," by People I (Mostly) Admire (2021).
The female body has been neglected in anthropological narratives, minimized in the archeological record, and excluded from modern-day clinical trials. But what if that weren't the case? How would our origin story change if we made women the protagonists? Cat Bohannon asked herself that question a decade ago. She has finally shared her answer in a New York Times bestselling book called “Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.”
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.comCat is a researcher who focuses on the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her essays and poems have appeared in Scientific American, Mind, Science Magazine, and other publications. Her fascinating new book is Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, and I highly recommend it.For two clips of our convo — on the combat that occurs within a pregnant woman between mother and child, and the magic of nipples while breastfeeding — pop over to our YouTube page. Other topics: Cat growing up near the “Confederate Mount Rushmore”; her mom the pianist and her dad the research psychologist; Cat helping him in the laboratory he ran; why medical research has ignored female subjects; plastination and Body Worlds; studying the first lactating mammal, Morganucodon; the origins of sex bifurcation; how “binary” is now controversial; how your gut contains countless organisms; how the placenta protects a fetus from being attacked by the mom; the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth; preeclampsia; how human reproduction is much longer than other mammals'; postpartum depression; why the left breast is favored in breastfeeding; the maternal voice; Pinker's The Language Instinct; humans as hyper-social animals; how women hunted and obtained just as much protein as men — in different ways; our omnivore flexibility; sexed voices; how even livers have a sex; the only reliable way to determine the sex of brains; how male cells can end up in a female brain; why women are more likely to wake during surgery; sexual pleasure; bird copulation; duck vaginas; the chimp's “polka dot” penis; why the slower sex of humans was key to our evolution; my challenging of Cat's claim that 20 percent of people are homosexual; and foreskin and boobs and clits, oh my.On that “20 percent of humans are homosexual” question, which I challenged directly on the podcast, it turns out Bohannon made a mistake which she says she will correct in future editions. As often happens, she conflated the “LGBTQ+” category with homosexuality, and relied on a quirky outlier study rather than the more reliable and standard measurements from places like the Williams Institute or Gallup. Williams says 1.7 percent of Americans are homosexual, i.e. gay or lesbian. Gallup says it's 2.4 percent. The trouble, of course, with the LGBTQIA+ category is that almost 60 percent are bisexual, and the “Queer” category can include heterosexuals as well. As a way of polling actual, same-sex attracted gays and lesbians, it's useless. And designed to be useless.Note too Gallup's percentage of “LGBTQIA+” people who define themselves as “queer”. It's 1.8 percent of us. And yet that word, which is offensive and triggering to many, and adopted by the tiniest fraction of actual homosexuals, is now regarded by the mainstream media as the right way to describe all of us. In the podcast, you can see that Cat simply assumes that “queer” is now used universally — because the activists and academics who form her environment have co-opted it. She readily sees how that could be the case, when we discussed it. I wish the MSM would do the same: stop defining all gays the way only 1.8 percent of the “LGBTQ+” “community” do. Of course they won't. They're far more interested in being woke than telling the truth.Browse the Dishcast archive for another convo you might enjoy (the first 102 episodes are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: McKay Coppins on Romney and the GOP, Jennifer Burns on her new biography of Milton Friedman, Joe Klein with a year-end review, and Alexandra Hudson on civility. Please send any guest recs, dissent and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
Why do women live longer than men? Why do women have menopause? Why do girls score better at every academic subject than boys until puberty, when suddenly their scores plummet? And does the female brain really exist? Considering the science and data collection methods we currently have, it is somewhat of a wonder that there is so little known about biology as it relates to sex, as well as our behavior. Author and Researcher, Cat Bohannon, argues that these questions should have been investigated decades ago, with a level of thoroughness and care that is still lacking in mainstream science. Bohannon points to the fact that societal attention has been on the male body for so long, that even natural occurrences like menopause, are considered a medical mystery. In her debut publication, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, Bohannon examines the evolution of the female sex. From the development of breastmilk, initially in mammals no larger than a field mouse, to the first placental mammals, to the way C-sections in the industrialized world are altering women's pelvic shape, Bohannon brings hard science and a passionate curiosity to the subject of female biology. Please join us as Town Hall as Cat Bohannan makes the case for a greater understanding of the female body. Cat Bohannon is a researcher and author with a Ph.D. from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her essays and poems have appeared in Scientific American, Mind, Science Magazine, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Georgia Review, The Story Collider, and Poets Against the War. She lives with her family in Seattle. Bonnie Garmus is a copywriter and creative director who has worked widely in the fields of technology, medicine, and education. She's an open-water swimmer, a rower, and mother to two pretty amazing daughters. Born in California and most recently from Seattle, she currently lives in London with her husband and her dog, 99. Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution Third Place Books
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.com(The main Dish and VFYW contest are taking a break for the holiday; we'll be back with full coverage on December 1st. Happy Thanksgiving!)Matthew is a writer and philosopher. He's currently a senior fellow at UVA's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and a contributing editor at The New Atlantis. His most famous book is Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. He also has an excellent substack, Archedelia.This episode was recorded on October 17. You can listen to it right away in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For two clips of our convo — the antihumanism of Silicon Valley, and the obsession with kid safetyism — pop over to our YouTube page.Other topics: Matthew's birthplace in Berkeley; his dad the physics professor and jazz player; his mom the New Age “seeker type”; Matthew taken out of school at age 10 for five years to live in an strict ashram and travel to India; he left to join “the great bacchanal” of high school where he “didn't learn much”; did unlicensed electrical work and studied physics in college; he believes bureaucracy “compromises the vitality of life”; Hannah Arendt; Tocqueville; Christopher Lasch and the close supervision of kids' lives; Johan Huizinga and the spirit of play; Oakeshott's metaphor of a tennis match; Enoch Powell; behavioral economics; William James; Nudge and choice architecture; Kant; TS Eliot; Nietzsche; gambling addiction and casino manipulation; Twitter and “disinformation”; self-driving cars; plastic surgery; kids and trans activism; the Nordic gender paradox; nationalism; why the love of one's own is suspect on the political left; how “diversity is our strength” decreases diversity; Hillary's “deplorables”; Matthew's book The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction; brainy people not understanding practical ones; knowledge workers threatened by AI; the intelligence needed in manual work; why Americans are having fewer children; liquid modernity; the feminization of society; Bronze Age Pervert; Ratzinger; Matthew's recent conversion to Christianity; and gratitude being the key to living well.Browse the Dishcast archive for another convo you might enjoy (the first 102 episodes are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Cat Bohannon on Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, Jennifer Burns on her new biography of Milton Friedman, McKay Coppins on Romney and the GOP, and Alexandra Hudson on civility. Please send any guest recs, dissent and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
This week, Kate sits down with author Cat Bohannan to talk about her book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. This conversation takes you on a captivating journey through the intricacies of human evolution viewed through the stories our bodies have to tell - and the female body in particular. In this podcast, they explore elements of the book as well as exploring what it means to look at the narrative arc of female bodies through deep time. We look at how our evolution is a product of environment, culture, behaviors, context, and bodies exploring topics like menopause and menstruation, tool use, mating behaviors, and so much more. Cat shares a message of agency and empowerment and what it might mean to think about how the human species might evolve from here. Find Cat:Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human EvolutionX (Twitter): @catbohannonBooks Mentioned in the Podcast:Ultra-Processed People by Chris van TullekenSkin: A Natural History by Nina Jablonsky Current Discounts for MBS listeners:15% off Farm True ghee and body care products using code: KATEKAV1520% off Home of Wool using code BF 20 through November 27th (code KATEKAVANAUGH for 10% after that). Support the Podcast:SubstackLeave a one-time Tip
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.comJohn Judis is an editor-at-large at Talking Points Memo, a former senior editor at The New Republic, and an old friend. Ruy Teixeira is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a contributing columnist at the WaPo, and politics editor of the fantastic substack The Liberal Patriot. In 2002 they wrote The Emerging Democratic Majority, and their new book is Where Have All the Democrats Gone? The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes.You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For two clips of our convo — on the ways the Democrats are losing on immigration, and discussing the core failings of Obama — pop over to our YouTube page.Other topics: John's wealthy upbringing in Chicago until parents fell on hard times and faced anti-Semitism; Ruy raised by a single mom in DC and whose dad worked at the Portuguese embassy; John and Ruy becoming friends in the early ‘70s as socialist radicals; John writing a biography of Bill Buckley in the ‘80s that garnered him respect among conservatives; Ruy working in progressive think tanks before ending up at the center-right AEI; the Reagan Era shifting to the New Democrats and a triangulating Clinton; John and Ruy writing the famous Emerging Democratic Majority that did not, in fact, write off the white working class; Brownstein's “coalition of the ascendent” seeming to gel with Obama's election; how Obamacare didn't help the working class enough; the 2008 crash and recession; how Obama was “the last New Democrat” and failed to strengthen labor laws; how he enforced the border; how Hillary deployed identity politics to her peril in 2016; Trump capitalizing on trade and immigration; how even John endorsed the feeling behind “Make America Great Again”; the rise of BLM; Wendy Davis' campaign as a harbinger for Latino support on border enforcement; Trump's growing support among non-white voters; how the GOP became the party of the working class; how Biden hasn't changed Dems into the normie party; his industrial policy, IRA and CHIPS; being mum on boosting energy production; his main weaknesses of age and inflation; the dearth of patriotism on the left; how blacks are a moderating force within the Dems; Asians drifting toward the GOP on education and crime; the war in Israel and Gaza; how Ukraine could be a big issue next election; the GOP weakness on abortion; Trump's “vermin” and enemies list; and who could replace Biden among the Dems or independents like RFK Jr.Browse the Dishcast archive for another convo you might enjoy (the first 102 episodes are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Matthew Crawford on anti-humanism and social control, David Leonhardt on his new book about the American Dream, Cat Bohannon on Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, Jennifer Burns on her new biography of Milton Friedman, McKay Coppins on Romney and the GOP, and Alexandra Hudson on civility. Please send any guest recs, dissent and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
In her new book Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, author Cat Bohannon explores the history and science behind the development of the female sex. In this episode, Bohannon explains to Róisín Ingle why the frequent omission of female bodies from scientific research inspired her to write the book, the ‘superpowers' that she says only females are born with and how the advancement of gynaecology and midwifery helped drive civilisation forward. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
How did the female body drive 200 million years of human evolution? And why the hell are we just finding out about it now? That's today's big question, and my guest is Cat Bohannon. Cat is the author of the incredible new book, “Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution”. Cat is also a researcher and author with a Ph.D. from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative in cognition. Cat's essays and poems have appeared in Scientific American, Mind, Science Magazine, The Best American, Non Required Reading, The Georgia Review, Story Collider, and Poets Against the War. Look, for a very long time, scientists ignored everything about the female body, except for how to have sex with it. And even that, they barely understood (and still don't). They didn't think or care to ask helpful questions like: How did we get here? What else about the female biological body is different from the traditional male body? Why might those differences matter? And how might they have gotten us to where we are today, atop the animal kingdom, for better or worse, and a huge outlier in about 500 different ways from even our closest primate cousins? Why are we so weird? Cat's book asks all of these questions, and I genuinely cannot wait for you to listen to this conversation, and read the book.-----------Have feedback or questions? Tweet us, or send a message to questions@importantnotimportant.comNew here? Get started with our fan favorite episodes at podcast.importantnotimportant.com.-----------INI Book Club:Behind The Beautiful Forevers by Katharine BooFind all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-clubLinks:Read Cat's book "Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution"Keep up with Cat's workOur World in Data: Life Expectancy Support the Trevor ProjectFollow us:Subscribe to our newsletter at importantnotimportant.comSupport our work and become a Member at importantnotimportant.com/upgradeFollow us on Twitter: twitter.com/ImportantNotImpSubscribe to our YouTube channelFollow Quinn: twitter.com/quinnemmettEdited by
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.comGraeme is a foreign correspondent, and one of the most brilliant men I've ever met. He's been a staff writer at The Atlantic since 2006 and a lecturer in political science at Yale since 2014. He's also been a contributing editor to The New Republic and books editor of Pacific Standard, and he's the author of The Way of the Strangers: Encounters with the Islamic State. Graeme was in Israel when we spoke earlier this week. It's — shall we say — a lively conversation, covering every taboo in the Israel/Palestine question.You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For two clips of our convo — on the ways Hamas is more evil than even ISIS, and on the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank — pop over to our YouTube page.Other topics: growing up in an upper-middle-class home in Dallas; how his parents gave him the travel bug, which he took to the extreme; why the challenges of travel are often the best parts; how time slows down abroad; Paul Theroux and Emerson on travel; going to Afghanistan in 2001 at age 21; why ISIS hated the Taliban and considered them non-Muslims; the caliphate; the easy divisibility of Islamists because of doctrinal differences; Israelis leaving Gaza in 2005; a Nakba in the West Bank; Bibi opposing a two-state solution; the savagery and evil glee of 10/7; the rank corruption and greed of the Hamas government; the dismal economy of Gaza; the terrible conundrum of killing Hamas among human shields; Fallujah vs. Gaza; the fanatical settlers; how the Orthodox right doesn't start tech companies or join the military; Kushner funding the settlements; Trump and the Abraham Accords; Graeme disagreeing with me over the Accords; the protests over judicial reform; the Israelis who oppose settlements; AIPAC and the dearth of US pushback on Israel; the Dem rift over the Gaza war; far-left denialism over 10/7; destroying the posters of hostages; and the upcoming mass protest in London on 11/11.Browse the Dishcast archive for another convo you might enjoy (the first 102 episodes are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: David Leonhardt on his new book about the American Dream, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira on Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, Cat Bohannon on Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, Matthew Crawford, and Jennifer Burns. Please send any guest recs, dissent and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Cat Bohannon about the evolutionary history of females. They discuss her background, limited female subjects in many research papers, “morgie” and how milk became important, other features of milk such as bonding, attachment, and the “let-down” reflex. They also talk about the different types of wombs for monotremes, marsupials, and placentals, placenta and the menstrual cycle, and risks of pregnancy. They also talk about the grandmother hypothesis, future of females, and many more topics. Cat Bohannon is a research and author with her PhD from Columbia University. She has studied the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her writing has appeared in Scientific American, Science magazine, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Lapham's Quarterly, and other outlets. She is the author of the book, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. Website: https://www.catbohannon.com/Twitter: @catbohannon Get full access to Converging Dialogues at convergingdialogues.substack.com/subscribe
Sarah Silverman covers RFK Jr.'s three-way race with Biden and Trump, orcas sinking another yacht, and Ronny Chieng chimes in on WeWork's bankruptcy. Smoking pot is now legal in NYC, but is it still cool? Sarah hits the streets to find out how New Yorkers have changed their weed habits and checks out one of NYC's newest licensed dispensaries. Plus, Cat Bohannon, researcher and New York Times Bestselling author of "Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution,” stops by to discuss some of the crazy ways the female body has evolved to survive reproduction, why the female body has historically been left out of biological and medical research, and how men can actually live longer, healthier lives without testicles.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.comPamela is a journalist. For nine years she was the editor of The New York Times Book Review, where she also hosted a weekly podcast, and she's now a columnist for the Opinion section of the Times where she writes about culture, ideas, society, language and politics. She's the author of eight books, most recently 100 Things We've Lost to the Internet. We had a fun chat about a whole host of topics.You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player above (or on the right side of the player, click “Listen On” to add the Dishcast feed to your favorite podcast app). For two clips of our convo — on how computers are killing off deep reading, and the growing rate of anorexia among girls — pop over to our YouTube page.Other topics: growing up in NYC and Long Island with divorced parents; her mom wrote ad copy and her dad was a contractor; Pamela was the only girl among seven brothers; she always wanted to be a writer; studied history at Brown; considered a PhD but didn't want to focus on an “ism”; spent a year alone in northern Thailand with little tech — “probably best decision of my life”; how a career is not a linear path, especially in your 20s; the benefits of very little Internet; how media today is homogenized across the Western world; the publishing industry; Jon Stewart ambushing me on his show; how non-natives often see a country better than its natives; Tocqueville; how professors have stopped assigning full books; the assault on the humanities; Reed College and Hum 110; the war in Israel and Gaza; the ignorance and hateful ideology against Israel; Jewish liberals waking up to wokeness; how Israeli officials are botching their PR; “the death of Israeli competence”; gender and trans ideology; how gays and trans people are far more persecuted outside the West; Iran's program of sex changes; what priests and trans activists have in common; Thatcher a much better feminist than Clinton; the decline of magazines and the blogosphere; The Weekly Dish; and Pamela defending the NYT against my barbs.Browse the Dishcast archive for another convo you might enjoy (the first 102 episodes are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: David Leonhardt on his new book about the American Dream, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira on Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, Cat Bohannon on Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, Matthew Crawford, and McKay Coppins. Please send any guest recs, dissent and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
How well is Ottawa handling its carbon tax policies after latest freeze? Guest: Kathryn Harrison, a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia How old is too old to trick or treat and does it matter? Guest: Dr. Vanessa Lapointe, child psychologist and parenting educator Canadian teen takes skateboarding gold at the Pan Am Games Guest: Fay De Fazio Ebert, skateboarding gold medalist, Pan Am Games Buffy Sainte-Marie's claims to Indigenous ancestry called into question Guest: Kim TallBear, professor, Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and Society How the female body drove 200 Million years of human evolution Guest: Cat Bohannon, author of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution
Guest: Cat Bohannon is a researcher specialized in the evolution of narrative and cognition. She is the author of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon. The post How The Female Body Drives Evolution appeared first on KPFA.
The writer and academic Emma Dabiri encourages unruliness in her latest book, Disobedient Bodies. She puts the origins of western beauty ideals under the spotlight and explores ways to rebel against and subvert the current orthodoxy. The book is accompanied by an exhibition, The Cult of Beauty, at the Wellcome Collection from 26 October 2023 to 28 April 2024. It was in the Wellcome's archive that the filmmaker Carol Morley came across the works and writings of the artist Audrey Amiss. In her new film, Typist Artist Pirate King, Morley creates an imaginative tribute to an unjustly neglected and misunderstood artist. The norm in the world of medical research has been the male body, but in her latest work the scientist and author Cat Bohannon focuses exclusively on women. In Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 million Years of Human Revolution she looks at everything from birth to death. Producer: Katy Hickman
This week we smash the patriarchy with interviews with multidisciplinary artist, poet, and author Mimi Tempestt on her new collection of poetry, "The Delicacy of Embracing Spirals" and writer and researcher Cat Bohannon on her book “Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.” Catch up on the week's most compelling interviews in 30 minutes or less.
This shouldn't shock any woman in the world: most medical research is based on male bodies. The effects of that reach out across our societies, leaving women behind not only in medicine but in so many other parts of our cultures. Cat Bohannon is working to change that—painting a picture of the evolutionary history of women in her stunning new book “EVE: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution.” Cat is a researcher and author with a Ph.D. from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her essays and poems have appeared in Scientific American, Mind, Science Magazine, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Georgia Review, The Story Collider, and Poets Against the War. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/alyssa-milano-sorry-not-sorry/message
How many vaginas does it take to understand the role of evolutionary biology into modern social environments? On One Bad Mother, two. Maybe. Cat Bohannon, researcher and author of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, joins Biz to talk fancy miscarriages, chimpanzees, and the oeuvre of Ridley Scott.Get your copy of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution wherever books are sold.Thank you to all our listeners who support the show as monthly members of MaximumFun.org. Go to MaximumFun.org/join to become a member! This week, we're sponsored by Factor. Go to FactorMeals.com/BADMOTHER50 and use code BADMOTHER50 to get 50% off.Share a personal or commercial message on the show! Details at MaximumFun.org/Jumbotron.Visit our Linktree for our website, merch, and more! https://linktr.ee/onebadmotherYou can suggest a topic or a guest for an upcoming show by sending an email to onebadmother@maximumfun.org.Show MusicSummon the Rawk, Kevin MacLeod (www.incompetech.com)Ones and Zeros, Awesome, Beehive SessionsMom Song, Adira Amram, Hot Jams For TeensTelephone, Awesome, Beehive SessionsMama Blues, Cornbread Ted and the ButterbeansMental Health Resources:Therapy for Black Girls – Therapyforblackgirls.comDr. Jessica Clemmens – https://www.askdrjess.comBLH Foundation – borislhensonfoundation.orgThe Postpartum Support International Warmline - 1-800-944-4773 (1-800-944-4PPD)The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) Helpline - 1-800-662-4357 (1-800-662-HELP)Suicide Prevention Hotline: Call or chat. They are here to help anyone in crisis. Dial 988 for https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org and there is a chat option on the website.Crisis Text Line: Text from anywhere in the USA (also Canada and the UK) to text with a trained counselor. A real human being.USA text 741741Canada text 686868UK text 85258Website: https://www.crisistextline.orgNational Sexual Assault: Call 800.656.HOPE (4673) to be connected with a trained staff member from a sexual assault service provider in your area.https://www.rainn.orgNational Domestic Violence Hotline: https://www.thehotline.org/help/Our advocates are available 24/7 at 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) in more than 200 languages. All calls are free and confidential.They suggest that if you are a victim and cannot seek help, ask a friend or family member to call for you.Teletherapy Search: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapists/online-counseling
What does it really mean biologically to be a woman? That's one of the central questions Cat Bohannon explores in her new book “Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.” Bohannon makes the case that until recently scientists have effectively ignored women: the majority of subjects in clinical drug trials are male, and too many researchers still mistakenly assume that sex differences are mainly about sex organs, rather than a panoply of biological and physiological features that evolved in the female body over millions of years. We talk to Bohannon about her new book, at once an evolutionary history and a call to action to “tear down the male norm and put better science in its place.” Guests: Cat Bohannon, researcher; author, "Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution"
Cat Bohannon, researcher and author of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution (Knopf, 2023), uses the latest research into women's bodies to recast the origins of humanity. →Event: Cat Bohannon appears in conversation with Claudia Dreifus at Book Culture (112th and Bway in NYC) at 7pm on Tuesday, October 3rd.
Cat Bohannon, a researcher and author with a Ph.D. from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition, discusses why gynecology was the most important human invention, why not conducting medical research on females is dangerous, and how the female body drives evolution. Cat's new book is Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.
Researcher and writer, Cat Bohannon, discusses her new book "Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution." (1:03)Ultra runner and Park City resident Jared Campbell joins the show to discuss the READY Speaker Series which focuses on highlighting, empowering, and inspiring athletes. On Oct. 14th at the Park City Community Church, award-winning endurance athlete Jennifer Pharr Davis will speak. She holds a record on the Appalachian Trail, averaging 47 miles a day to complete the 2,091 miles of the trail in 46 days. Jules Campanelli joins Jared to discuss. (29:10)
In this week's episode of Pages n' Pages, we talk about all the amazing books coming out in the remainder of 2023. Some of most anticipated books of the year are coming out in this quarter, so be prepared for some excitement! What We've Read and What We Are Reading: Stars in Your Eyes by Kacen Callendar. Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review. King of Wrath (Kings of Sin #1) by Ana Huang King of Pride (Kings of Sin #2) by Ana Huang The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakrabroty and narrated by Lameece Issaq and Amin El Gamal Lotus by Jennifer Hartmann and narrated by Marie Hawkins and Tj Clark- Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review One True Loves by Taylor Jenkins Reid and narrated by Julia Whelan Supernova (Renegades #3) by Marissa Meyer and narrated by Rebecca Soler and Dan Bitner Fly with Me by Andie Burke and narrated by Chelsea Stephens- Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review. The Black Witch (The Black Witch Chronicles) by Laurie Forest and narrated by Julia Whelan He Who Drowned the World (The Radiant Emperor #2) by Shelby Parker-Chan and narrated by Natalie Naudus Additional Mentions: The Long Game by Elena Armas The September House by Carissa Orlando King of Greed (Kings of Sin #3) by Ana Huang Midnight is the Darkest Hour by Ashley Winstead Wildfire by Hannah Grace Starling House by Alix E. Harrow The Fragile Threads of Power by VE Schwab Hopeless (Chestnut Springs #5) by Elsie Silver Two Twisted Crowns (The Shepherd King #2) by Rachel Gillig Enchanted to Meet You by Meg Cabot Throne of the Fallen by Kerri Maniscalco A Holly Jolly Ever After by Julie Murphy and Sierra Simone Bright Young Woman by Jessica Knoll The Ashfire King (The Sandsea Trilogy #2) by Chelsea Abdullah Iron Flame (The Empryean Assistant to the Villain by Hannah Nicole Maehrer Nineteen Steps by Millie Bobby Brown Do Your Worst by Rosie Danan Check and Mate by Ali Hazelwood Bookshops and Bonedust by Travis Baldree Cleat Cute by Cheryl Milsner The Mystery Guest (Molly the Maid #2) by Nina Prose Hunt on Dark Waters by Katee Robert Plot Twist by Erin La Rosa All I Wank for Christmas by Tori Ross The Chalice of the Gods (Percy Jackson and the Olympians #6) by Rick Riodran Fall of Ruin and Wrath (Awakening #1) by Jennifer L. Armentrout Eve:How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon On the Plus Side by Jenny Howe The Stage Kiss by Amelia Jones Meet the Benedettos by Katie Cotugno The Spells We Cast by Jason June The Scandalous Confessions of Lydia Bennett, Witch by Melissa Taub Find Him Where You Left Him Dead by Kristen Simmons Being Ace: An ANthology of Queer, Trans, Femme, and Disabled Stories of Asexual Love and Connection by Madeline Dryer Hatchet Girls by Diana Rodriguez Wallach 10 Things That Never Happened by Alexis Hall The Woman in Me by Britney Spears Iris Kelly Doesn't Date by Ashley Herring Blake System Collapse by Martha Wells Gwen & Art Are Not In Love by Lex Croucher Raiders of the Lost Heart by Jo Segura Heartstopper: Volume 5 by Alice Oseman Check out Pages n' Pages on Instagram. These opinions are entirely our own. Image by Kapona via Vector Stock.
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