The Female Origin of Species

Important, Not Important

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.

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INI Book Club:

• Behind The Beautiful Forevers by Katharine Boo
• Find all of our guest recommendations at the INI Book Club: https://bookshop.org/lists/important-not-important-book-club

Links:

• Read Cat's book "Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution"
• Keep up with Cat's work
• Our World in Data: Life Expectancy
• Support the Trevor Project

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• Edited by Anthony Luciani
• Produced by Willow Beck
• Intro/outro by Tim Blane: timblane.com

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