Meet the Eves (with Cat Bohannon)

Episode Transcript
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Cat Bohannon (00:00):
It is nuts. It's nuts that we make babies the way
we do. Our pregnancies and ourbirths and our postpartum
recoveries are longer and harderand more prone to dangerous
complications. And that's truecompared to almost any other primate.

Blair Hodges (00:20):
When Cat Bohannan was working on her PhD, she
noticed something was missingfrom the story she usually heard
about human evolution.Specifically, women are missing.
That seemed like a pretty bigoversight. So she tracked down
the most cutting edge researchand pulled it together into a
fascinating new book with catshere to talk about it. It's
called Eve how the female bodydrove 200 million years of

(00:42):
evolution. And you know, sincewe're taking a new look at
families, gender and sex on theshow, I thought, what better
place to begin than the placewhere we all begin at birth?
Let's look at how that messydangerous, incredible process
came to be.

(01:19):
There's no one right way to be afamily and every kind of family
has something we can learn from.I'm your host Blair Hodges, and
this is family proclamations.Cat Bohannan joins us we're
talking about the book Eve howthe female body drove 200
million years of human evolutioncat Welcome to family
proclamations.

Hey, thanks for having me.

You bet. I'm thrilled about this. This is
such a good book, yourintroduction to the book
suggests that the idea for itwas conceived in a movie theater
or after you've just seen amovie prequel to alien, I didn't
see that coming talk about howthe book started. So

as a person who is femme presenting as a person who
identifies as a woman, I havemany triggering moments for
where I might want to talk aboutthe body and its relation to our
lives. However, there was thisone kind of crystallizing bit.
So I'm a big sci fi fan, bigCooper fan, big Ridley Scott
fan. So I'm gonna go when theycome out, I'm gonna go. Now this

(02:17):
is a prequel to alien. So youknow, going into this film that
whatever characters you meet,it's not going to go well for
them. You just accept that inthat kind of sadistic way as an
audience of these things likethis is yeah, you know, or it's
good. But in this case, whathappened is the main character
has been impregnated effectivelywith a vicious alien squid, as
you do, and she's sort ofshambling in in a desperate

(02:39):
state, and she arrives in thiscrash spaceship at a med pod. So
it's like surgery in a box, youknow, that the idea? And she
asked the computer for cesarean,I think she actually says
something like Sousa or, youknow, but she, she wants help
with her situation, her tentaclesituation. And the med pod says,
I'm sorry, this med pod iscalibrated for male patients

(03:02):
only. And I hear Bob in the rowexactly behind me a woman say,
who does that? Exactly? Who doesthat? Who sends a multi trillion
dollar expedition into space?Right? Presumably, that's the
maybe it costs more, and doesn'tmake sure that the medical
equipment works on women. Right?And and it turns out, us yes,

(03:24):
yeah, it's us. We're the oneswho do that. Right now, in every
single hospital. It's a problem.Right?

So your book is looking at the male norm
problem, right? You're lookingat how and not just in medical
science, but I think in the waysthat anthropology has worked, a
lot of sociological studies,studies of medicine, assume the
male body as the norm and thenproceed from there. And there
are practical reasons for this,that you talk about in the book,
for example, with with medicinetrials, for example, that you

(03:52):
want a body that isn't maybegoing to experience a lot of
hormonal flux over the course ofthe study, or there isn't going
to be pregnant or something. Andso what ends up happening is
women get left out of scientificconversations a lot, not just in
medicine, but also in thehistory of evolution. And your
book wants to address that gap.Yes,

yes, absolutely. And you can see it even in
Stanley Kubrick's 2001 You know,where they're inventing the
first tool, right? And they'rebanging a bone on the ground
that they beat the crap out of aguy, you know, the camera tracks
that the bone goes up into theair and turns into a spaceship.
This is the classic idea of tooltriumphalism that where we come
from is male bodies, doing whatwe stereotypically associate

(04:31):
with male body stuff. Yeah, likebeating the crap out of people,
right? And there's no females inthat scene, where we're there.
They're like, behind the hillhaving the babies like how this
is where evolution works, peoplethese are the bodies that make
the babies that make the babiesthat make the babies right. And
it's absolutely true that in thestories we tell ourselves about
our bodies and where we comefrom, that we often erase the

(04:54):
idea of femininity, we oftenerase the presence of females as
this kind of and significantside character. But in biology,
particularly in mammals, it's,it's often quite the reverse.
Things that drive mutations infemale bodies. Biologically,
female bodies are often majordrivers for the trajectory of

(05:14):
that species, because theoutcome of our reproductive
lives is strongly strongly tiedto the health of the bodies of
the female. That's

right. I love how you framed this because you
invite us to think about ourbodies as a collection of things
that evolved at different timesfor different reasons. And
you're looking especially at howfemale bodies have evolved. And
so breasts themselves have aheritage milk has a heritage,
ovaries have a heritage senseshave a heritage. So instead of
one singular female that we'relooking back to as our origin,

(05:46):
like the biblical Eve, forexample, you say that they're
actually a lot of differentEve's, in fact, I think your
book could have been calledEve's plural rather than Eve,
right? Yes. As you're looking atthe origins of all these
different parts of the body.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 bouncingoff of that mirror surface,
which have already bounced offthe surface of your body, and
then eventually find their wayto your retinas. And that's all
the technical feature of howyour eyeballs do what they do,
if you have eyeballs that dothat. But it's also inevitably

(06:20):
embedded in culturalunderstandings. And it's also
embedded in an idea of time thatyou begin at a certain point
your body arrives through wellactually through a very wet
passage, usually into the world.And so you are you, but
actually, the body itself is acontinuation of many processes
that work very chaotically andintricately together that

(06:42):
started a very long time ago.And your intestines are
effectively way older than evenyour upright pelvis. Your pelvis
is way older than yourencephalitis brain. So what
you're looking at in the mirroris almost like this might be to
lyric but it's almost like apoint in a stream of light

(07:03):
blasting backwards from you andout forwards in front of you.
Because what you are isn't somuch a thing, but something that
is happening. Yeah.

And you take us way back in time, you know, 200
million years ago is when youtake us to the first Eve this is
the the milk mom, the the mammalwho kind of brought milk, you
describe her you call her morgieand she sort of this weasel
mouse tell us a little bit aboutMargie

larki spawn We nicknamed her mortgage because
the Smithsonian did that beforeI did. Thank you very much. She
is an exemplar genius. There aremany species of Morgana codon,
but they're often nicknamedmorgie in the community of paleo
folk. And they are this lovelylittle kind of weasel rat bit.
She's great. She's only aboutthe size of a field mouse, he is

(07:51):
presumed to be burrowing, so shelives in little holes in the
ground.

The drawing is so cute, by the way that you have
in there. It's so isn't she wasso cute. I

hired this amazing illustrator. And as you'll see
in the book, and duly cited, asshe was very, very talented, we
work together, she wanted tohave portraits of all the eaves.
And I was like, Yeah, let's doportraits of all the Eve. But
she coming from a Catholicbackground, my mother's Catholic
too, you know, she wanted to dothem like Saint cards, you know,
iconography in the center, butthen all in the periphery around

(08:20):
the side, you have all of thesesymbolic things. So you have a
picture of Margie, which is thereal Madonna. Thank you. But she
doesn't have nipples. She'ssweating 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 youget the book, but it's a
beautiful, beautiful portrait.And the reason I picked morkie

(08:41):
as the start, is what peopleoften forget. Is that okay,
yeah, we know we're mammals, youmight have heard that even in
high school biology, like, okay,homosapiens mammals, right. But
what's not often talked about asone of the many characteristic
traits that make us mammals aredeeply tied to how we reproduce,
which is to say, are deeply tiedto the female of a sex species.

(09:05):
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 keypart of how we continue the
development of our offspringafter they exit the womb. And
the funny thing about milk, ofcourse, is that we're still
laying eggs while we're firstmaking milk. Right? So we are

(09:25):
egg laying weird weasels, whichis more in our little burrow
under the feet of dinosaurs, butalso that we start lactating
before we have nipples, right?Yeah,

I didn't know this. Yeah, I know.

Is it wild? I also learned this on my journey in in
the research. So when we look inthe mirror, we think, Oh, breast
these things. Where did theycome from? We think of them as a
sexual trait. We think of themas a thing that is meant to
signal attractiveness to ourpart. Yeah.

Why did they become fatty or whatever? Yeah,
exactly. Exactly. But

we may not even parse that. Oh, are we talking
about the shape? Are we talkingabout the fat are we Talking
about, and it's like, whoa,whoa, whoa, no, the origin of
lactation is before you evenhave a nipple. Right that you
actually are just sweating thisthing out from modified
endocrine glands out of yourskin through your through your
hair. And in fact, the duckbillplatypus, which is often modeled
as a kind of weird monitoringbasal mammal, he doesn't have

(10:18):
nipples either. Her pups,through their weird little goals
are slurping the milk off thebottom of her belly through
these milk patches. Yeah, sothat's where these things come
from. I had

no idea. And also the milk wasn't just for
nutrition, but also a way tosort of protect or the eggs
right, so morkie was was layingeggs and and milk would be
produced to help the eggs ratherthan just feed the babies.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So for a lot of egg layers of
not hardshell not like achicken, but soft or leathery
shell. There are many speciesthat make leathery eggs. Yeah.
The trick is, is when you're onland, you need to keep them
moist. You can't have them dryout while that offspring is
continuing to develop in there.So a lot of egg layers, kind of
grows, but they secrete thiskind of egg moistening goo. That

(11:04):
also has a lot of usefulantifungal and antibacterial
properties. Because of course,you also don't want the eggs to
be overrun, like old bread youwant it to, you want it to both
be wet, but not moldy, wet, butnot infested with parasites.
Right. And so yeah, so the bestmodel I've seen for the
evolution of milk is actuallyderived from that original egg

(11:25):
moistening goo, which is, ofcourse, incredibly gross to
think about, but more likely theorigin of lactation.

And you talk about how the mechanics of the nipple
themselves, so we do get to anipple, like, evolutionarily we
do. We do. Tools? Yeah, I do.Yeah. So I mean, yeah, mine
would be a little bit trickierto get to milk. But you do point
out in the book that some, somemale folks can can lactate,
given the right exercises, andthe right stimulation, etc. But

(11:57):
with

hormonal cocktail, usually, yeah, right.

Right. But with the nipple, it wasn't so
straightforward. So even today,like babies, it's not this
natural. You know, it's it canbe tough to get babies to latch
and to do all the so it's like,the odds were still stacked
against us, even though wedeveloped a nipple. It's this
dance that breastfeed her and ababy have to do to like figure
out how to still transfer thatfood across.

Absolutely. And some species seem to be a little
bit better at that. What weoften call latching, then
others. Yeah, my son wasterrible at it. Absolutely. Just
mangled my chest wall in waysthat alarmed even the nurses,
they're like, Oh, God, here's apump. It's okay. Eventually,
whatever, I didn't have like amoral goal for it. Luckily, I
was able to not be embedded inthat debate that many women do

(12:43):
and the way we punish ourselves,oh, I wasn't able to lactate
well enough. Sure. Come on, it'sfine. I mean, and when you think
of it from a biologicalperspective, when you think
about it in that evolutionaryframe, in many ways, the
mammalian chest wall, our bodiesknow how to make milk better
than babies know how to latch.It's an older trait, right? You

(13:05):
know, 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 itto gather not simply because
when you suckle when anoffspring cycles, that means
that you arrive at that letdownreflex because we're not
carrying a sloshing cup of milkaround in our boobs, no matter

(13:27):
how big they are, right? This isan unripe this isn't a ziplock
bag in there, right? This isactually maybe a couple
tablespoons at a time if you'relucky when you're lactating. But
no, the suckling actuallytriggers the milk glands to kick
up production. And that's whatstarts the whole process
rolling. But the more importantthing there for the latching.
Because once you have thatvacuum, like seal, once the
kid's mouth, latches on, formsthe seal like a weird Lamprey,

(13:50):
and sucks that, you know,relatively giant nipple into its
mouth. Well, now actually,you've created something of a
tide, right, because as thechild cycles, it's creating a
vacuum while it sucks its cheeksin, right, and that's to suck
the milk down as it's coming.But the tongues moving back and
forth, which moves the focus ofthe vacuum back and forth, which

(14:10):
creates a tide, like a wave onthe shore of milk over the top,
and under the bottom, the babyspit is sucked back up into the
nipple, because that's howUndertow works. It's just
physics, and which is gross andinvasive to think about as a
person who's done it. But it'strue that the the spirit is then
drawn up into the whole liningof the tubing of the breast
where it's red, like some weirdancient code. And the mother's

(14:34):
immune system is responding allsorts of different sensors of
responding and changing thecontent of the milk to suit so
if the kids sick, then you getmore immuno agents coming down
that nipple. To help the kidfight off the infection and a
bunch of hormonal stuff andratios of proteins to sugar. We
make our milk to suit given whatwe're effectively anciently

(14:57):
reading in the kids spit. Nowthat's that breast pumps are
awesome, your kid will be fineif you're not able to do this,
okay? You know, moderntechnology is beautiful fat is
best. But if you are getting thelatching, then that's what's
actually happening.

This is the kind of thing your book is chock full
of like so many times people aregoing to run into these things
that like, you know that they'vemay have never heard of that or
just unreal. You also talkedabout how the rest can be
dangerous business too. I mean,evolution has trade offs. So
breast cancer, for example, isso common with women. And so

(15:31):
there are these things werelike, you can benefit the baby.
But having the ability toproduce this milk and do this
thing through the breasts alsoincreases a risk to the breast,
however, as well. So there arethese trade offs that you talk
about through throughout thebook as well. Absolutely.

And I'll also offer that male bodies and men
and trans women are also allcapable of getting breast
cancer, we all actually havemammary tissue, just male
typical bodies tend to have wayless of it, right. And mammary
tissue, because it's sodynamically responsive to
hormonal signaling. It's justone of those places in the body

(16:05):
that's more vulnerable toprocesses that can drive cancer
cells going haywire. Exactly,exactly. So it's still something
absolutely that non binary folkand genderqueer folk of all
types should pay attention to ifsomething's bugging you and your
body, talk to your doctor. Yeah,

there's so many footnotes that, that have that
caveat of like, by the way, talkto your doctor, just in case
what's so important. Let's talkabout the next Eve. This is
Donna. And this is a chapterabout the womb and Donna emerged
after a catastrophic cataclysm,whatever killed off the
dinosaurs. Yeah, there was thislittle weasel type animal that
made it through all thatdestruction. This is 60 million

(16:43):
some odd years ago. Yeah. Andyou point to her as a reason why
so many women today haveperiods. It let's talk about
Donna Donna,

which is a nickname her Donna, of course,
protect you a lot of DuNay. ButDonna's easier, Don is easier
said it's cuter to call herDonna, though she is an ancestor
of the modern placental womb.Now we only have one womb, many
mammals still have to becausethey're evolved, of course, from
the shell gland of our formeregg layers. Yeah. And the reason

(17:15):
we have one, we're not entirelysure why but we know the
mechanism is that you have thesetwo organs that are merging into
one and producing that kind of,in our case, kind of pear shaped
thing. But many, many women andgirls are still born with a
uterus that has a little dent inthe top, very common. Some even
have a whole fibrous divide downthe middle. Somewhere even still

(17:37):
born with two uterine lesscommon but happens and two
cervix is and to vaginas tomatch. So the easiest way to
remember the difference betweenus and marsupial's marsupials
pouch, us no pouch. But whatthat also marsupial is two or
more vaginas, which is, youknow, fun, and us only the one.
But the reason to think aboutthat isn't simply that it's cute

(18:00):
and weird and cute, andimagining all of the things that
you might do with an extravagina, all of which I'm sure
for the good. But like that it'sreally talking about at what
point in development is thatoffspring coming out of that
maternal body? And how much ofdevelopment is finished outside
of the womb in or out of a pouchor a burrow or what have you,

(18:20):
right? So this is the moment westart going down the path
towards our Samoyed catastrophichuman reproductive system that
is long derived from early earlymammals just after that
cataclysm, which knocked outalmost all the dinosaurs, except
for a few disgruntled birds,right like that. That's what's
left of them your house Sparrow.But what we have now is we have

(18:43):
this really, patently crazything, 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 bodyinto this kind of eggshell slash
neat factory of a burrow, right,because our body is now

(19:06):
effectively the burrow for thatphase of development. And
marsupial's comes out like thesize of a jelly bean comes out a
lot sooner finishing out most ofthat 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.

And one of my favorite parts of the book that
just blew me away was theillustration. I think it's on
page 76, where the female pelvicanatomy where you know, what we
usually see is the uterus andlike, it's stretched out and it
looks kind of like a hip. Itlooks like our hips, like the
ovaries are stretched out thattoo. You shouldn't know. It's
actually sort of just like baldand smushed up in there, like

(19:46):
all together. I mean, I havenever seen this illustration
before. I've always seen thatother illustration where it's
like all laid out. Yeah,

yeah, yeah. So a lot of us learn if we're lucky
enough to have something likesex ed. Sadly, not all of us do,
but For those of us who are ableto have that be part of our
education, it's kind of like a Tshaped like a capital letter T,
where you have that uterus andthe veg in the middle. Yeah. And
then you have those fallopiantubes extending out to the side,
or to little grapes, you know,near the fringy bits, right,

(20:14):
which are the ovaries, right,but the body doesn't have all
this extra room in it. It's notlike stretching out its arms,
it's all kind of smushed up inthere, right, which means that
I've had the very real and verycommon experience of having had
trans vaginal ultrasound, wherethey're like trying to image my
ovaries, and they can't findone. Because for whatever
reason, the path of thatultrasound beam is being blocked

(20:37):
by a part of the bowel or theuterus itself, or just
something's in the way and theovaries Hidin. And I was very
alarmed at this moment,partially because I had a large
thing inside my vagina, and itwas trying to maintain a
conversation. It's read through,right. It's also it's also like,
this person's telling me theycan't find one of my ovaries,
I'm like, well, where the hellis it? Like, did I lose an
ovary? Like what? You know? Andno, actually, it's just that

(21:00):
everything is very smushed inthere, which is part of why
ovarian cysts can hurt so muchfor people who have them,
because you have that radiatingsignal of irritation, hitting
many different organs in thatarea. Right. And so it can be
kind of hard to pinpoint whatyou're feeling exactly. And you
just know it hurts, or that it'slike pressure, right? Yeah. And

(21:22):
it's different person to person.It's also unfortunately, why
ovarian cancer is so verydangerous. People who have these
biologically female bodies, wekind of get used to aches and
pains down there. It's kind of aweird common sensation for
fluctuations over a menstrualcycle, to have some kind of achy
bit some kind of bloated bitsome kind of what was that sharp
pain? I don't know, it wentaway. Cool, cool. Cool. You

(21:43):
know. And so in the early stagesof ovarian cancer, it's often
the case that a patient may notbe fully aware that what's
happening might be new. Now,that's not to have your readers
be terrified. If something'sbothering you, again, talk to
your doctor. But it isabsolutely why it's so
dangerous, because of course,given that it's so smushed
against everything in there.It's not hard to metastasize,

(22:03):
you're like right up against thebowel, you're very close to the
liver, you're, you're in themix, right? Yeah, yeah, it's

packed in there. And you talk about how, just
bonkers This is that? And howmany people who have gone
through pregnancy have saidlike, What the What the hell is
this? Like? Why do I have to dothis? Fair

question. Yes, somewhere in our very deep sci
fi future, if we don't blowourselves up first, which given
the news today seems very closeto happening, thanks. But
assuming we survive theinsanity, that is human culture,
and conflict, there is a futurein which there is a truly
external wound, which would haveto be effectively an entire

(22:45):
synthesized female body, right?Because it's not just it's also
your immune system. It's yourrespiration, it's many things.
But assuming in the very deepmany hundreds of years, in the
future, that this happens, itimmediately changes everything.
Because of course, then itimmediately becomes unethical to
ever ask a female to do thisdangerous thing she may still

(23:06):
choose. But it becomes unethicalto ask, because there's truly an
alternative. Anyway. So there'sa thought experiment for you in
our future sci fi. But yeah, itis nuts. It's not that we make
babies the way we do ourpregnancies and arbors. And her
postpartum recoveries are longerand harder and more prone to
dangerous complications that canand do cripple and or kill

(23:27):
mother child or both. And that'strue, compared to any almost any
other primate except forsquirrel monkeys, and we feel
sorry for them. But that's truefor almost any other mammal we
suck at this. We're actually badat reproduction, which seems
counterintuitive because thereare a billion of us, right, but
it's true.

And we see you trying to sort of theorize as to
why that is like we're so bad atreproduction. But we're also so
highly successful. One mighteven say invasive species, in a
way spread out everywhere. Andhow did that happen if we're so
bad at reproduction, and it'ssuch a costly and dangerous
thing to do?

Well, it took all of our very classic almond and
resources to pull it off. We hadto be super social and super
clever problem solvers who aregood thinking about the world as
a tool user, which is to saytool use is about behavior.
Yeah. So it's not like a paleoanthropologist actually gives a
damn about this rock thatsomeone used to cut something.

(24:24):
Right, the stone axes are notthe thing they care about. They
care about what they can inferabout the behavior of its user.
All paleoanthropologists aredeeply behaviorists. What that
means is, if all tool use isessentially overcoming a
limitation of your body, inorder to achieve a goal in your
given environment and using somemanipulation of your behavior to

(24:44):
do that, well, our mostimportant invention if we suck
at reproduction, was gynecology.Lucy and I'm not the first to
say this, Lucy. They also putthe scene 3.2 million years ago
at a frequent midwife, andHabilis after her heavy More
reproductive workarounds as todirect us all the way up to Homo
sapiens, we were runningepilating our fertility patterns

(25:08):
through behavior. And that's ahuge upgrade. Now you don't have
to wait around for your uterusto evolve to a thing that's less
deadly. Because of course, youknow, you could also just go
extinct, there's that that's anoption in evolution, you could
also just not exist, yeah, whenyou have bad reproduction. But
if you can work around itbehaviorally, if you can have

(25:29):
midwives, we're one of the onlyspecies that regularly helps
each other give birth, if youcan manipulate your fertility
patterns to upper down regulateyour fertility to because in any
given environment, it might bebetter to cluster your births
earlier in the year reproductivelife and then care for your sort
of useless babies. I love mykids, but they're useless,
right? For a long period oftime, right? Like in your given

(25:51):
environment, given your foodsupply, maybe that's a good
plant, or maybe things are moreseasonal? Or maybe it's actually
there's not a lot of food atall, you need to stretch that
out. Yeah, you need to actuallyhave them every four to six
years or so, which is whatchimpanzees do, which is what
some known human communities toRight, right. So you have to
think about how we choose tohave babies and what we do to

(26:11):
manipulate our fertility,including medicinally, including
behaviorally in the space ofmedical practices, as something
that's adapting this buggy,fault prone thing that is human
reproduction to suit ourdifferent environments and
lifestyles. And that starts nota few 100 years ago, not just in
the deep history of you know,racism and eugenics, sadly, in

(26:34):
modern gynecology, but actuallymillions of years ago, short,

and you're inviting us to think again,
about tools. So you talked aboutthat scene in 2001, Space
Odyssey where the tool is thisbone, that's a weapon. And we
think about the rise of humanityas being tied to this type of
tool. And you're inviting peopleto re envision that and say,
Actually, the tool of gynecologywhich would have involved our
own hands as tools would havebeen such a crucial turning

(27:02):
point for who we are as aspecies or who we could become
because I think I think you evensay like we seize the means of
reproduction or something atthat point, which is a great
pun.

Yes, yes. And meant to be because I too, am a
nerd. Yes, yes, we do. We doindeed seize the means of actual
freakin reproduction, and getour hands on the levers that are
controlling our not only ourreproductive destiny, but then
effectively our destiny as aspecies.

That's Kat Bohannan. She's a researcher and
author with a PhD from ColumbiaUniversity in the evolution of
narrative and cognition. Andwe're talking about her book,
Eve, how the female body drove200 million years of human
evolution. It's a brand newbook, and it's a fabulous book.
The next part I wanted to talkabout was perception in you say
you got thinking about whethermen and women perceive the world

(27:52):
in different ways. And you gotthinking about this as a college
student working as a nude modelat the local art school. And
when students would take abreak, you'd kind of wander
through and check out how peoplewere seeing you how they were
drawing, you noticed,invariably, often the men would
be drawing your breasts too bigor like those aren't mine. But
then as the weeks went by, theywould get closer to normal size,

(28:13):
like something was changing inhow they initially saw you or
how they were drawing you. Andso you wonder like, are they
seen things differently than me?Is perception different? Now,
the danger in this question isfalling into the trap of men are
from Mars, Women are from Venus,right? essentialism, gender and
doing all of this. So keep thatin mind as you talk about

(28:33):
perception and what you found inthis chapter. Yeah.

So there were some gender queer folk in the art
classes where I was aprofessional naked person, whose
job at the time but for the mostpart, they were they were sis
folk and with a variety ofsexualities. So I would just
point out that in these rooms,there, of course, was diversity.

(28:57):
And there was racial diversitytoo. However, the most obvious
variable, you know, if you wantto call it that, was simply that
the male presenting folk whowere almost universally says,
we're drawing my boobs too big.Now, they're not small, unlike a
34 D, it's a problem. They kindof straps dig into my shoulders.
I know that I am not a smallbreasted person for good and

(29:20):
ill. But it's more that there'sjust you know, the skill of
literally proportionally Yeah,how big are these knockers
you're putting on this, thespeaker drawing, and the females
were the the women defends,we're not doing that. And it
wasn't the case then. And it washappening semester after
semester in multiple classes. Sothis is not a scientific study
that I'm basing this on this,this anecdote, but like, it was

(29:41):
a thing. And I asked some otherpeople who had been models and
they're like, oh, yeah, theyalways do that. And I was asking
them, What do you think it is?And they usually said something
like ads, just porn, whatever,they get over it, it's fine.
They just don't know how to notsee porn when they see naked
female bodies until right?Although this was the late 90s
and early aughts. So it wasbefore the massive proliferation
of Internet porn or whatever itwas a thing is what I'm saying

(30:03):
it was a frequent thing that wasfairly consistent. And so I had
to ask myself, like, do theyliterally look larger to them?
You know? Yeah. Is this acultural thing? Is this gender
mess? Is this just sexism? Is itjust, you know, that soup of
that thing where it'scomplicated? Or is there
something physiological goingon? And so for that I take us
back to the dawn of primates notin the men are from Mars, Women

(30:26):
from Venus way, but actually,when were we actually weird
little proto monkeys in thetree, you know, and can not tell
us anything about why theirdrama boobs too big. And I end
it's a journey, I go throughquite a lot, because there's a
lot that goes into the evolutionof the sensory array, the nose,
the eyes, the ears. Yeah, sothere's a lot to work with
there. And it doesn't alwayscome back to my naked self. The

(30:50):
central reason why as best as Icould tell they were drawing
them too large, is that theywere literally fixating on them.
So when your eye looks out onthe world, it's doing a mixture
of things, it's doing a mixtureof sick COD's, which are these
twitchy little movements, youreyes are doing back and forth,
back and forth, back and forth,you don't even notice and
fixations, which means they'relanding on one spot and staying

(31:12):
there for a period. And beforethey move around again, and
there does seem to be in the labnotable sex differences in how
male, the cod versus fixationpattern seems to work. Again,
mostly the subjects are Sysmon.So there's your caveat, right?
Yeah. But one of the famousthings about male versus female

(31:32):
facial perception thatclassically in the psychological
literature, says women seem tobe better at remembering faces.
And these are sighted people, ofcourse, then sis men. And it
seems to be after doing some eyetracking studies with some
careful cameras, that what'shappening is that male eyes seem
to focus more centrally on thecenter of the face, almost kind

(31:53):
of around the tip and bridge ofthe nose, like at center zone,
where stereotypical eyes aredoing fixations through all of
the major points of facialfeatures, eyes, nose,
cheekbones, chin up, again, allaround all around all around,
which is to say it may be thecase that it's not that, you
know, the stereotype, women aremore social, we're just better
at remembering people, becausewe're all kind of emotionally

(32:14):
mushy or something right now.Yeah, it's actually that where
you fixate is giving you moresignal for your long term
memory. And so if you're gettinga broader range of information
to dump into long term memory,yeah, just literally what your
eyes are doing may be helpingyou do that. Right, which is not
about a psychology thing. It's aphysiology thing. And in the
boys cases, I think they werequite literally fixating more on

(32:38):
my breasts. Now, why they weredoing that may well be cultural.
They don't have them, for themost part. So here's that, you
know, and they're 18 years oldpeople, I was naked in front of
a two year old boy. So I have nomore nightmares. Right. But like
they were, you know, so that'snew. That's not in our culture.
That's not a thing they've seena lot in a social setting, as
opposed to an intimate setting.Right? You know, so literally,

(32:59):
it's looming large in their mindand over the course of the
semester as they get used to it.Yeah. Right. So it's both about
the rise are doing but it's alsocultural. Right.

And this is where, and you point this out as well,
sometimes, especially in thefootnotes, where like, studies
on trans folks are going to sheda lot more light on this where
we can probably get a bettersense of Oh, yeah, of where
culture fits in whereexpectations fit in versus
physiology in this so and we'restill so early in, in scientific
endeavors of like, thinkingabout trans perception that

(33:28):
it's, you know, it's justsalutely questions to explore so
much more to explore there thanwe know.

Gonna be thought it's gonna be great. Yeah, yeah.
This also talks about

so our eyes, our nose, and our ears, is in this
chapter of the nose. It wasreally cool to learn about how
like our faces flattened outover time, which made Snell
we're not as great smellinglike, as we used to be, our
faces are flat. We don't havethis big like Oregon in there
that that does a lot of goodsmell stuff. And a lot of these
changes happen when we were upin the trees to our eyes and

(34:01):
ears. Yep, that point to somewhat seemed to be some sex based
differences. So give us someexample of the sex based
differences in, in smell insight and sound that still carry
through today that are kind ofthrowbacks to this time when we
were swinging from the trees orI guess really just kind of
crawling around in the trees?

i Yeah, yeah, we didn't have those breaking
shoulders get so swinginglesson. But note so this is kind
of classic story of how we gotthe the so called Monkey Face,
you know, even a kid kind ofdraw a monkey face on a piece of
paper, you know, you got the bigears got that kind of flat face
to forward facing that ocularstereoscopic eyes. Like we know
what that looks like. But that'sa very big change from something

(34:42):
like a weasel or a mouse rightwhere you have that on gated
snout, you have eyes a littlebit more to the side. Right. And
most of the people who talkabout the evolution of primates
do talk about how this cameabout that our if a face is a
sensory array, it's not justwhat we used to smile at each
other is where we're hanging ourPrimary sensors of the eyes, the
nose and the ears and how weposition them on our head is

(35:04):
very much shaping how weperceive our environment. So the
move up into the trees is a verydifferent environment from the
ground, especially fromburrowing. So there are many
different ways in which we haveto process the world
differently. When it comes tothe nose, one of the things
that's interesting about humanbeings, is we lost what's called
the Mara nasal Oregon, which isthis in a lot of mammals, the

(35:27):
perception of pheromones, youknow, smells that usually the
opposite sex put out, that weinnately strongly react to,
which in a mouse is incredibly adominant part of their
perceptive lives for us, wedon't have it, we evolved away
from it, we actually still havea teeny tiny little passage,
just like at the bottom of oursinuses, but it ends in kind of
a it hits a wall, it's not notmuch going on there, human

(35:50):
beings don't seem to have awhole lot of pheromone
perception left. But what we dohave is a whole bunch of
cisgender women who are a lotbetter at smelling stuff than
males are, and we're notentirely sure we know why it is.
But it is absolutely trueclassically and olfaction, that

(36:11):
female subjects are going to bebetter at detecting scents that
are faint, you know, in a room,like that's a concentration
thing, you only need a littlewhiff, you know, whereas a male
typical might need a strongerdose, we are better at
discerning between differentkinds of scents, and we're
better at recognizing itquickly. So we're literally
smelling more finely than malesare. But it's not because we

(36:35):
have more receptors, actually.And in fact, our noses are now
our nostril sucking in that airhave are smaller than most
males. In fact, you know, thebig difference actually seems to
be in the olfactory bulb itselfis the part of the brain that
processes smell information. Andthe cells are more tightly

(36:55):
packed with more of them evencontrolling for body size in a
female typical brain in a male.And that just means that it is
transmitting that signal morequickly and more widely more
effectively, and then sending astronger signal out to other
parts of the brain. So we'reliterally wired differently,
don't entirely know why. Andwe're not really sure if that's
a tree problem. Or if it's justlike a sex pheromone problem.

(37:17):
That's a leftover. Not reallysure. Not

only or smell is discussed in this chapter, but
our hearing as well. And you saythat probably the most important
differences between sexespertains to hearing hear volume
and pitch, women tend to hearbetter and higher pitches, they
retain hearing better with age,what are the differences that
stood out to you in a maletypical, versus a female,
typical body when it comes toour hearing. This

was kind of wild for me. So I'd often heard the
story. And maybe you have too,that female ears human female
years are better tuned to higherpitches that often correspond to
baby cries, right? It's men andwomen can hear the same pitches
or most of our early lives. Butwe're more tuned in to the

(38:00):
pitches that are associated withthe pitches that babies usually
use when they cry. To me thiswas kind of an annoying story.
Once again, I seem to behardwired to make babies and as
a feminist, I'm like, uh, butit's true. So it's fine. So one
of the things, but the moreinteresting thing in that story
for me was that most sis menstart losing the upper range of

(38:23):
their hearing starting at age25. Now, it's a gradual slope,
you know, guys in their 30s,don't need a hearing aid
necessarily, if they're normallyhearing people, right. But you
do have the slope of decline,that's just it's like a band
filter is just cutting off thetop end of your range every year
a little bit more down, down,down until you arrive in your
50s. And the thing is, is thatfemale voices a female typical

(38:47):
says women's voices are a littlebit higher pitch. And our
overtones on our voices are alsothe full timbre of our voice. It
really extends up to the top endof human hearing. So what
happens is quite literallystarting age 25 Sis men aren't
hearing women's voices verywell. And the older they get,
the worse it gets, until finallyin their 50s or so quite without

(39:09):
realizing it. A lot of men, alot of sis men, our voices, our
female voices sound being alittle bit tinny, harder to pick
out, and it may well be boostedby a hearing aid. Right. So that
totally changes some of how Iunderstand the dynamic of a
boardroom. Now, it doesn'texplain why a sexist man cares

(39:29):
about what a woman says lessdoesn't say that. That's just
sexist. But it does say thatliterally he might be having
trouble hearing you withoutrealizing he is

and and again the as you discuss all of these
interesting things throughoutthe chapter of perception and I
think I don't remember if wementioned perigee is the name of
this eve 60 some odd millionyears ago good story. Yes, yes,
yes ancestor of the primates. Soif people want to learn even
more about these kinds of thingsabout our nose, our eyes or
ears, perk ease Chapter is theplace to go we're talking with

(40:00):
cadboro Hannon about her bookEve, how the female body drove
200 million years of humanevolution. You can also check
out some of cat's essays andpoems. They've appeared in
Scientific American Mind ScienceMagazine, the best American
nonrequired reading and otherplaces. And she lives with her
family in Seattle, but iscurrently touring to talk about
this new book called Eve. Let'stalk about the legs. So we

(40:23):
talked a little bit about beingup in the trees, right? Yeah.
But at some point, we came down.This is about four and a half
ish million years ago, wedecided to stand upright, and
that had some big implicationsfor differently sex bodies.
Let's talk about some of those.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I don't know that we
decided to do much of anything.At least in the sense of
conscious choice. We didn'tchoose I mean to modify our
pelvic arrangement, althoughsome individual choices Oh, you
know, happened along the way. Soyeah, so one of the big things
in a shift for the humanevolution pattern is that we
mistakenly believed for a whilethat our ancestors were knuckle

(41:03):
walkers, you know, like chimpsor gorillas, and then we stood
upright. Remember that old?Yeah. You know, diorama that
old? You know, you got theknuckle walking, and then you
eventually stand up. And thenthere's jokes about it
eventually. You're like sittingtyping on the computer at the
far right.

Yeah, hunched over. Yeah,

yeah. And so that kind of meme kind of has been
around. But actually, we werenever knuckle walkers. None of
our ancestors were none of ourEve. Certainly, we were just
hanging out in trees, and thenon the ground a bit more and
eventually walking. So the thingabout walking is that what you
really need to be able to dobesides just having a spine
absorb more pressure than itwould otherwise. That's why we

(41:37):
have an S shaped kind of lowerback to help distribute that
force over our bodies withoutcrippling us. But also what we
needed to be able to do wasendure. In other words, the
story of walking in bipedalismis an endurance story. So a
primatologist once told me thatthere is no safe place to be in
a room with a chimpanzee,there's no possibility that you

(42:00):
are in a safe space, becausethey are incredibly fast,
incredibly strong, and can beincredibly violent, they will
rip off your face, sometimes,literally, hopefully not. And
they'll do it really, reallyfast. So the idea that we got
faster when we became upright isactually wrong. What did happen,
however, is that if a fit if achimp does attack you, not long

(42:20):
after all of that incredibleviolence and and speed and
running away more than likely,because that's mostly going to
happen if the chimp scared, youknow, they're going to want to
go eat a mango under a treesomewhere, they're not gonna
they're not keeping it up for along period of time, what we can
do is we can walk all frickinday, very few animals have the
kind of metabolic capability ofdoing such a thing, because it's

(42:43):
not simply what your muscles cando. It's how your muscles are
utilizing what's called thesubstrate utilizing and local
energy resources. And when thoserun out, tapping into other
resources, usually, in our casefrom fat, so that's why we're
able to walk from point A to Bfor hours and hours, whereas the
chimpanzee can't, can't do that.Right. So the interesting thing

(43:04):
about sex differences here isthat we know that female bodies
in human bodies are slightlybetter at endurance by many
different measures. So untrainedbodies bodies that haven't been
trying to do this, in otherwords haven't been working out
in the gym, your classic femalebody does have slightly less
muscle mass. But that isn't thebig story. The bigger story is

(43:25):
that when you do a deep tissuebiopsy, female, typical skeletal
muscles have a little bit moreof what's called slow twitch
muscle. You might have heardthat that's an endurance muscle.
It's a type of tissue that'sbetter at doing things for a
long period of time, as opposedto fast twitches, which is what
lets you be a sprinter, which iswhat lets you really have
explosive strength. There doesseem to be that sex difference,

(43:47):
I mean, between male bodies,typical average, I mean, and
female bodies just in terms ofwhat those muscles seem to be
cared for. And it's tricky,right? Most of us aren't Ultra
marathoners, for many reasons,most of them psychological. Some
of them financial, actually,right. But like, most of us
aren't going to do those extremetests of endurance. But once you

(44:09):
get up to those extreme lengths,actually, female runners tend to
not only match or beat malerunners in those races, but
actually tend to outpace themover time. Which is to say there
may be something about thefemale body that in long feats
of endurance is slightly betterat this very slightly better at
tapping into a second wind. Andso if that's the case, then it's

(44:32):
curious that usually how we tellthe story about becoming upright
is all about some some shit thatwe assumed guys were doing.
Usually it's around hunting. Theidea that we were running down
big game, you probably read somepopular science books about
that, that we evolved to runright and sort of, maybe, but
it's a little bit weird one toassume that the males were the
ones doing that, too. We wereupright way before we were

(44:55):
hunting big game. LikeArdipithecus is the Eve I use in
the legs chapter Dirt Yes,already. And you know, this is a
very, very arty, she'swonderful, recently discovered
wonderful, wonderful fossil, shewas upright well before big game
was a big part of our foodstrategies. So like we were
actually doing stuff on two legsway before it was a matter of

(45:18):
running anything down.

And this is where it's tricky for researchers to
pin down is we're dealing withthese huge lengths of time. And
we're dealing with a prettylimited record. And so we see
you piecing the story togetherin ways that challenge the
conventional narrative. Andyou've got the evidence there
just as much evidence assometimes more than what the
typical narrative tells us,which is, like you said, we
started walking upright becausemales were hunting and running

(45:41):
after game or whatever. Andyou're well, actually, there's
all this other evidence thatshows us probably other stuff
going on. And looking at today'sbodies gives us some ideas about
the bodies of the past as well.So you mentioned the different
sort of muscle, things that thatfemale bodies tend to have now,
would that definitely besomething that developed them
through evolution, rather thanthrough like boys getting played

(46:04):
with more or something as intheir youth than girls do or
roughhousing with boys versusgirls or something like that?
You know,

it's hard to say, I think that's a smart question.
I think of the studies that Iwas using, that I was wielding,
juggling, even in the legschapter, those were all done on
adult bodies, in part becausethere are ethics around doing a
deep tissue biopsy in an infant,you know, like, what is consent
there? Why would a you know, andalso the occasion why it might

(46:33):
happen? And what's the clinicalsetting? Like there are many
ways into a scientific study,but adult consent and informed
consent is a big one. Right? Soyeah, I don't think those are
pediatric studies. And I thinkit's smart. I think it's smart
to say that when we do studieson adult bodies, there have been
whole lived lives and whole livechildhoods up to that point.
That's absolutely true. And thatplays into some of the issues we

(46:55):
talk about later in the book,too. So I don't know, I don't
know, I do know that at leastwhen there have been cellular
studies of metabolism in humanmuscle cells. XX cells seem to
be slightly better at utilizingmultiple substrates, which is to
say, multiple energy sources.Tapping into that second, when
when the local sugar runs out isusually how we tell that story.

(47:17):
Yeah. Then x y cells. So it doesseem to be true at the cellular
level, and not just types oftissue. But you're absolutely
right, that I don't know howmuch childhood is gonna play
into that adult musculoskeletalsystem, at least not from the
research I've seen. And you

also say that going upright was harder on
female bodies. Can you give mean example of why that would be?
Yeah, so

for one thing relaxing. So relaxation is this
thing that is floating around inthe bloodstream of both male and
female bodies, but it isslightly more dominant. In
female typical bodies. Again,I'm always here talking about
biological females, usually premenopause here. Okay, just to
put a pin in that. So we knowwhat we're talking about. Yeah.
Okay. Relaxing, is a thing thatduring pregnancy loosens the

(48:03):
ligaments and the supportstructures around not only the
hip bones and the pelvicstructure to help widen and
carry that additional load. Butof course, also to widen our
very narrow birth canal, whichis a problem. Yeah, but it's
also even when we're notpregnant, it tends to make the
fixtures of the joints a littlelooser, and actually has to do

(48:24):
with vascular response aroundthe joints. So I won't get too
technical with you. Butbasically, what it does is it,
it makes a typical female body abit more flexible, you know,
now, this is part of why ourfeet expand when we are
pregnant. It's not simply fluidretention. But for female bodies
that become pregnant. It's alsothat these higher doses of

(48:47):
relaxing are loosening theligaments that are binding all
of those foot bones together, sothey literally get wider, and
sometimes a little bit longer,which is very freaky. When you
think about it, and doesn'talways quite go back. I can tell
you afterwards, many women gainas much as a whole shoe size
during pregnancy, and then justretain that, which sucks for buy
a new shoes. But there you go.You have greater concerns when

(49:10):
you're in your postpartumperiod, I could say, Yeah, but
it also means that like, we'reespecially prone to lower back
pain, possibly because of someinstability there in the lower
back, especially going throughpregnancy and back again, that
can make you more vulnerable tobecause it does a lot to the
curvature of the spine. Right.So in other words, being
upright, with this extrarelaxing in your bloodstream, it

(49:33):
can make you a little morevulnerable to certain kinds of
bone and muscle related painsthan it would be then if you
were a totally sensible, fourlegged creature who isn't doing
this crazy thing, becausebasically, we used to be like
tables with four legs and nowwe're standing on two of the
legs of the table, and our bodyis still kind of catching up.
Yeah,

and you're bearing that extra weight of a pregnancy
to on that back and so that thecommon lower back pain is a
remnant of this decision thatare Not decision as you pointed
out, but this evolutionary moveaccidents going on right instead
of exactly right. That's not theonly change that women undergo
during pregnancy, these physicalchanges, you talked about the

(50:12):
joints, the feet, but also thebrain, the brain undergoes
changes similar to what happensto the brain during puberty, you
describe it almost like a secondsort of puberty, that there's so
much development and changehappening in the actual brain
that it's like a second pubertyfor women who become pregnant.

It's like an extra transition in a lifecycle. Yeah,
yeah. So in biology, theseclassic, maybe you've seen
developmental trajectories inthe lifecycle, it usually looks
like a circle with arrows aroundit. And you see, like, you know,
an egg and then a juvenile likean insects, you'll have like a
larva, and then you have achrysalis and the butterfly for
mammals, we do this too. And wesay, what are the developmental

(50:51):
phases? What are the phases ofthis lifecycle, and one of the
interesting things, at leastwhen it comes to how the human
brain seems to go through thislife cycle, because there are
changes in our incrediblyplastic, very malleable human
brain, that shift and actuallyhave very notable physiological
changes that each of these majortransitions. So in puberty,
there's actually an incrediblerewiring and developmental thing

(51:15):
that happens all throughout theteens can be very challenging
can make you more vulnerable tocertain kinds of mental illness
actually, and then not suffer asmuch when you come into your 20s
their outcomes, in other words,from what's going down in there,
like schizophrenia

will often emerge around that time, for example,
and yeah, and men, right?

Yes, absolutely. So and one of the cutting edge
things in research there iswhether or not the brain
development during puberty is inany way affecting that
trajectory, both men and women.And by this, I mean males and
females are prone toschizophrenia, right?
Schizophrenia, it's a stronglygenetically related thing, but
we're not entirely sure what allthe triggers are. But we do know

(51:54):
is that males and females bothget it. But what happens is that
males are diagnosed sooner, andvery obviously, so they they're
moving to psychosis, right.whereas females have a slightly
different symptomology, slightlydifferent path towards
diagnosis, and are diagnosedlater in their 20s. Now, some of
that's a diagnosis bias in that,you know,

sure how signs are read by society or whatever.
Yeah, exactly,

which is a cultural thing. And sometimes a
sexist thing. They're just,there are complications there
there are confounds. However, itmay also be the case that
because the pubertal shift issort of long and slow. In
humans, we actually start manyof the features of our puberty
sooner, and then take longer tocomplete them in female bodies.

(52:40):
Whereas for males, it hits youlater and it hits you like a
truck, it just hits you like aton of bricks is just, it,
that's just, it's just faster,and a bit harder, if you will,
because you're condensing thatinto a later point. And
interestingly, even in rodents,actually, what you might call a
puberty isn't exactly the sameas what we do. They likewise in
the female have a sort of longerperiod of going through it than

(53:03):
the male. So it might just be abasic mammalian things. But the
effect in the human brain isthat you have this longer and
slightly subtle isn't the rightword, but you have this longer
period of brain developmentthat's dealing with the hormones
of puberty, that has a slightlydifferent slow, while that
brains developing, whereas inthe male brain, you know, it's

(53:24):
it's shorter, it's more impactedmight be a bit rougher, you
know, so in a brain that'salready prone to psychosis, this
is where the research, somebranches of research are going,
you know, is that a factor? Arethere physiological shifts in,
you know, sex differences inpuberty that make those brains
differently vulnerable todifferent kinds of mental
illness?

And so female brains are undergoing these
changes during puberty. But thenlater during pregnancy, as we
were talking about, there's alsomore shifts. And this is
literally like stuff sort ofmoving around. Is this like,
neurons kind of remapping anddifferent things? Like what's
actually happening up there?Yeah, yeah.

What the hell is this one lump of tissue in our
heads that we center the selfin? Good question. Yeah. Good
question. Neuroscience wouldlike to know, know, as well, a
pregnant females brain, and bythis, I mean, human now actually
shrinks? In the third trimester,like, significantly. So which is
alarming? Like, is the babyactually eating my brain? Good

(54:18):
question. No, one's really suremy brains happening. I know,
actual Mom Brain, it turns outis Hello real? Yeah. And in the
stereotypical sense, so yeah,some of it actually,
interestingly, doesn't seem tobe a loss of neurons. It's not a
loss of cells, necessarily, fromwhat little they've been able to
see, in various studies. Itseems to be more a loss of there

(54:42):
is a rewiring. There is a kindof clear, you know, snipping out
a bunch of connections in yourexisting neural network, which
in some ways may make room fornew pathways. So one of the big
arguments for why our brainsdevelop so long during that
pubertal period, which is veryunlike other primates, right, we

(55:04):
really have this huge period ofsocial learning in our
childhoods. And then ouradolescence is that we have deep
social learning to do, we havereally complex social societies.
And we're constantly having tomap them and learn not just new
things to do with ourselves, butnew ways to be in different
social environments, especiallyas we shift around through
different social environments.So in that case, when you think

(55:26):
about what's happening in thelast trimester of pregnancy, and
then in the postpartum recoveryperiod, this is someone who is
having a major social shift. Nowthe story in the sciences is
usually told that oh, this ishelping her better bond with her
baby, her really, reallyvulnerable baby who's so very
useless can't even hold up itshead, you know. So like, wow, so

(55:49):
this is all about that bonding.And it's true that some of the
regions that show some of thatshrinkage, if you will, which
sounds like a bad thing, butit's actually allowing for more
pathways to form. That's theargument that's usually made
about it have to do with socialbonding and reading social cues.
And so it's a sociality story.One of the things that I say in

(56:09):
the book is that must we again,render the mother invisible,
maybe it's not all about thebaby, maybe she matters to you,
because actually, one of the bigthings that happens in a social
species like ours, when we givebirth and come into motherhood,
especially for the first time,is that we are learning new ways

(56:29):
to be, we're learning how todifferently map our social
environment, and newrelationships with different
sorts of people, and who isgoing to be most helpful in this
new feature in my life, and whoof my old friends are like,
maybe not going to help out withthe kids so much? Just you know,
we love them. But that's nottheir strength. You know? In
other words, yeah, how to askfor things that you need, and

(56:50):
when to learn new social roles,which is to say, I suspect some
of the brain changes that arehappening there are not simply
about bonding with the baby, butare about being able to read the
room. Once you have one, which Iassume is a long evolved trait
that is just repurposed in thehuman, this is probably
happening in chimps to a degree,it's more like, Okay, now that

(57:12):
you're human, let's repurposethis trait in your hyper social
environment. Does that makesense?

Yeah, it does. And time and time again, I see this
happening, where you'll takekind of the mainstream story
about why a particularbiological thing is happening.
So Mom Brain, for example, whichis like, maybe people might
encounter just likeforgetfulness, or feeling
scattered or like, yeah, ADHDtype symptoms, or whatever. And
saying, Oh, this is happening,because they're doing this for

(57:36):
baby. And you're saying, okay,like, sure. But also, what if
it's also this? Because thosetype of questions are what are
driving scientific outcomes andthe theories that we have about
it? So your book again, andagain, is saying, Well, what
about this as well, or thinkingabout this instead? So we're
just sort of getting a differentsort of view? And I think with a

(57:56):
lot of these questions, it'shard to just say, this is the
the definitive answer. Yeah. Andyou do right, with a level of
humility there, but you'rereally opening up possibilities
that can change the way we theway we interact with people who
aren't parents or people who arebecause you're also not saying,
Look, you're in order to be aperfect woman, you'll you need
to go through this change inyour unfulfilled No, no, no.

(58:20):
Right. So you're speaking to alot of different experiences.
You know,

I think this is true for for all women, we are
not merely, we people who haveuterine, are not merely vessels
for babies, our entire that's aneven in an evolutionary sense,
because we are a hyper socialspecies and interdependent,
complex social environments andcultures, which is to say, it is

(58:43):
not a woman's destiny to frickingive birth, it is a woman's
destiny to survive as best asshe can just like any other
organism, you know what I mean?And it's also true that there
are many, many ways tocontribute to the well being of
a group, even in a biologicalsense, even in an ancient
ancestral sense, besides simplyproducing more babies. And

(59:05):
that's sometimes the confusionwhen we talk about the book.
Some people have been confusedthinking, Are you saying that
women are the way they are, youknow, says women, because it's
our destiny to have babies? AndI'm like, no, no, it's more that
the way we have babies is reallycrap. And so many features in
our bodies have evolved towithstand it. Yeah, if this is a

(59:26):
thing that hopefully you chooseto do and isn't forced upon you,
hopefully, you have some longevolved traits to make it suck
less, more like that. More likethat.

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 thanor whatever. They're just suited
for different things. Exactly.This is also where trans
identities come into play aswell is that you don't have to
be this biologically sexed as asa female to not even mention
intersex folks as well, wherethere's this sort of binary that

(59:57):
exists there, but that transwomen can experience The world
as women, as trans women,especially, even though they may
not be able to carry a baby, orto have this, you know, because
I think one of the reasons,people who are sort of anti
trans voices are really hung upon this being able to
biologically sexually reproduceas what it means to be a female.

(01:00:19):
And because trans women can'tnecessarily do that, therefore,
they're not. And your bookspeaks to the so maybe take a
minute here to talk a little bitabout trans identities, you've
been signaling it all the way.But this is a moment to really
sort of unpack it for folks.Sure.

Cat Bohannon (01:00:32):
So I'm queer. I'm not gender queer, I have friends
who are, that doesn't mean I gota hall pass for it, but I do.
And of course, people who aregenderqueer will speak most
authentically to what it's liketo be them. Because of course,
we are each the best authorityon what it's been like to live
in these crazy mammalian bodiesrelate actually, when somebody

(01:00:52):
tells you something about theintimate experience of what it's
been like to live in theirbodies. It's not just good to
listen, because it's polite,it's good to listen, because you
now have an opportunity tolisten to the world's authority
on a topic, because literally noone else knows better about
that, than that person. So I domy best, as best as I can in the

(01:01:13):
book, I'm not a perfect agent,but I do the best I can to
signal where the studies thatI'm drawing from juggling,
wielding, you know, movingaround on the page, when they
are done on says bodies, whichis the vast majority of the
time, and when there actuallyhave been some beautiful papers

(01:01:33):
on people who identify as trans,or as genderqueer of other
types. Unfortunately, a lot ofthat good work has to be done in
footnotes to say, this wouldhave been a great moment for
that data to exist shame, itdoesn't right, you know, right.
But there have been momentswhere I could then and I use it
not simply to wave a flag,although we all want to be part

(01:01:54):
of the good work, right. Butbecause it then helps discuss
something I'm wanting to say inthe book. For example, I met a
lactation consultant for transmothers trans women in Seattle,
because Seattle is awesome andhas such people and and they're
not having to be in hiding. Andshe sent me this was a she was a

(01:02:15):
sis woman, the consultant butshe sent me down this incredible
research rabbit hole, becauseshe's the first person who told
me that trans women who want tohave the experience of providing
breast milk for their babies whohave come into their lives
either through adoption asnewborns or or through IVF. Take
the exact same hormone protocolas sis women who adopt and

(01:02:40):
likewise want to be able tobreastfeed their child. It's
called the I think it's calledthe Newman Goldfarb protocol. I
don't know you can look that upthe book but yeah, and it's
basically a sequence of hormonesthat effectively mimics the the
hormone cascade of estrogens,etc. That happens in the body
and then mimics what happensduring birth hormonally. And and
they do they do in fact, thenlactate right and the reason to

(01:03:03):
discuss that isn't simply tohonor their experiences but to
point out that it's weird tocall the male nipple vestigial
because we what we really

Blair Hodges (01:03:11):
are in other words, it's useless it's a
throwback to this Yeah, purpose.

Yeah, there's no reason for it to be there. But
it's like oh, no, no, what wereally are is freakin mammals
and what mammals are and some ofthe most ancient scents are
creatures that lactate and giventhe right hormonal protocol, you
know, the right hormonal signalis just like the freakin Paul
Revere ringing the bell, rightand down and your abduct your
chest wall is saying, Oh, God,baby, incoming better start

(01:03:37):
making milk. So even if you havea Y chromosome, if your tissue
is duly exposed in the rightsequence, you will have to end
Importantly, the milk is thesame stuff. This is not like
special trans milk is just milkis just human milk with
basically the same profile ofproteins and lipids and water
and, and the microbiomes. Andboth. It's the same freakin

(01:03:58):
stuff. It's not quite the same.They don't seem to on this
protocol produce colostrum. Oris it colostrum?

I don't really know, especially early on sounds

like which stuff? Yeah. And this is the problem
with doing interdisciplinarywork. A lot of stuff and then
you have to talk about it.Anyway. But yeah, so the yellow
early milk that happens after aperson has given birth so that
that hormone protocol in transparents who have a white
chromosome and who who want tolactate, they don't make that
the yellow stuff, but but thewhite, mature milk? Yes, they're

(01:04:32):
making the exact same stuff. Sothat's one of the things I try
and do in the book, because Ithink Masha Gessen has written
really, really beautifully abouttheir experience of being a
person from Russia, who was ateenager didn't have access to
all of these ideas about a transidentity or intersex or the
access to the language todescribe that experience that

(01:04:53):
they had growing up. But one ofthe things that Marcia has
written about is how beautifulit's been to have conversation
about the trans experience andintersex experiences being
normal, that it's not alwaysabout waving a flag, that it's
simply a part of theconversation. And when it's
appropriate to say you say it,and then when it's not a thing,

(01:05:13):
you don't have to always ringthe bell. That is just, it's not
like, we have to have the wholeconversation be about it now.
It's just a normal, natural partof the conversation of human
experience. Yeah, I hope I'mrepresenting their work there.
They are far more beautifullyintelligent about these topics
than I am. But that was one ofmy guiding lights. When I was
working on the book, I was like,Okay, I'm going to acknowledge

(01:05:35):
that there is a dearth ofresearch on trans reality, but
it's getting better. And here'swhere it's cool. And here's when
it directly ties into the topic.You know, what I mean?

I do people that read the book will know, to your
signaling throughout it in inreally helpful ways. Also, I
think calls for research and formore questions to be asked,
which is also use Absolutely. Iffor lack of time, we'll skip
through, there's a great chapteron voice, where you're talking
about yeses, and voice and lungcapacity and all sorts of things
so that people want to check outthe book. Again, it's called Eve

(01:06:05):
that can learn more about howvoices and are different, like
why our voices often sounddifferent, age wise, and how far
they carry and all of thatstuff. So people to check out
the book and hear that, butlet's go through to connect with
something you said just just amoment ago here about women not
just being here just to makebabies. Oh, yeah, animals
reproduce in some way. And whenthey can't any more, they

(01:06:29):
basically die, right? Humans andorca whales are the exceptions
here, you point out in the book,and human females go through
menopause. So their periodsstopped, they stopped being
fertile. And they can livedecades beyond that. Whereas
other animals, they stoppedbeing able to give birth. It's
basically if they just die. Andyou talk about some of the
theories about why that is,there's the grandma theory,
which you don't find veryconvincing. So give us an idea

(01:06:51):
of what the grandma theory isand why you don't find it
convincing. So

I think there are I think it's like four species
of toothed whale that havemenopause the way we do. I talk
mostly about transient orcabecause what I saw on the
research, they were the beststudied. It's really, really
hard to study things that livein oceans, in their natural
setting,

especially when they crash into your boats when
you're like going alongsidethem. There's

so many problems with cetacean research. I know
they're wonderful. And all thepeople who do cetacean research
are just kind of like wildBuccaneers. They're just like
really cool people to hang outwith anyway. So when it comes to
menopausal Orca, when I say thatthey have menopause the way do
we do, I mean, it's important tokind of define your terms, what,
what that means is you're livinga full third of your average

(01:07:37):
lifespan, after having ceasedhaving babies. And in mammals,
that means your ovaries haveshut down. It's not like you've
stopped having sex, but yourovaries are no longer doing the
thing, such that the sexing canproduce the babies. So it's an
unusual thing. It's kind of adeep mystery in biology in
principle, you know, ifreproductive fitness is the big
evolutionary fitness of yourspecies, right, then why on

(01:07:59):
earth would you give out a fullthird. So there have been a lot
of Just So Stories there, andsome are better than others
around why we evolved to stophaving babies, one of the most
popular of them is called thegrandmother hypothesis. And the
theory there, there are a fewdifferent angles on it. But the
main theory is that it comesabout because instead of

(01:08:21):
competing with her daughters forresources and sexual partners,
it we're talking primates, now,we're not talking right now.
Right, but you know, that afemale might stop having her own
babies and help take care of thegrandkids. And that, therefore,
the very vulnerable obviously,sort of, again, I love my kids,
but kind of worthless offspringthat we make that takes so much

(01:08:42):
extra care to keep alive. Youknow, they are they have a
grandma on hand. And isn't thatso useful? And she's not busy
taking care of her own kids, soshe can help with yours. You
know, and

also, let me just say, that's not for the moral
like impact of it of like, it'sa nice thing for them to do, but
actually, that makes them morefit, because that means children
are going to be better takencare of. And so if like, these
female chimps live longer thanthose offspring are probably
going to be able to, etcetera,etcetera, because it makes them
more fit. Not necessarily likeit's nice for grandma to help
out. Exactly,

exactly. Right. Like we're talking now about the
evolution along a hominin line.So things that are chimpy. We
didn't evolve from chimps, butfrom chimpy. Like things Yeah.
All the way through up tohumanity. The kind of primate we
are, the idea is that if youhelp the grandchildren survive
better and give them competitiveedges in their given

(01:09:33):
environment, then that'ssomething that gets selected for
a genetic line, right? Becausethose kids survive, have their
own kids and it keeps going onand on like this. The thing that
I found a little bit dubiousabout that, at least when
looking at what we know aboutthe behavior of matriarchal,
menopausal Warka because theyare matriarch sexually, it's a
female dominant society, the sunstay with their mothers their

(01:09:54):
whole lives. They actually don'ttend to die a bit sooner if the
mom dies, actually. So it'sreally their mama's boys. Those
killer whales. But the thing is,is that the grandmother figure
these older matriarchs in thepod, they're not really helping
out with the grandkids more.They're not like, like they help
the whole pod. It's not likethey're, they're jerks. They're,
you know, it's a social species,but like they're not on

(01:10:15):
childcare duty. That's notwhat's up. What they're
especially known for, is forwhen the pod is in crisis, or
there has been a depletion of alocal food source. They help
lead the pod to other rare foodsources, where there's good
food, or they're instrumental inhelping teach the younger
members of their pod how to dospecial hunting techniques, like

(01:10:37):
all of the killer whales liningup in a row and kind of bum
rushing and ice flows such thatthe bow wick knocks the seal off
of the flow, which is terriblefor the seal, but very nice for
the Orca, right? And very coolwhen you see the videos of it
happening. But again, we're sadfor the seal. It's how they

live with apologies to all of our CO
listeners. Yes, exactly,

exactly. You know what it is, Nature doesn't care
how we feel about it, right? Sothis is how it is. So in other
words, that model of themenopausal worker, at least,
doesn't seem to be about extrachild care, it seems to be about
having wisdom, effectively. Now,that's a very human idea,
wisdom, but just literallyknowing stuff that younger

(01:11:15):
members might not know, becausethey literally haven't lived
long enough to encounter thatchallenge. And remember how you
got around that challenge?Right? So in a deeply social
species like ours, maybe insteadwhat ends up happening is that
the whole species, all ofhumanity evolves to extend our
lifespan. Remember, we're dyingoff much like chimps for a very

(01:11:36):
long time until like age 3540 orso at some point, we actually
extend our lifespan. And this ishappening in deep stuff and how
our cells are, are going abouttheir business. It's not like we
decided to live longer, it'slike our bodies just found
workarounds around death,longevity is about not dying. So
both males and females evolvedto live longer in the whole

(01:11:56):
species, it just so happens thatthe female body is slightly
better at it. And it might bethat our ovaries are still
running an older plan. Like ifthe ovaries didn't get the
message that now we're living,you know, up into our 80s. And
they're still senescing in thatnormal primate way. senescing
means aging is the slope ofaging, how quickly is stuff
falling apart down there? So ifour ovaries are still aging in a

(01:12:19):
normal primate pattern, well,then menopause is a side effect
of just all of us selecting tolive longer in complex social
groups, where the wisdom ofelderly people is beneficial.
Yes. So

women will often on average, live longer than
men, for example, and you'resaying this could be like an
accidental thing of history ofdeep evolution, where it just so
happens that Yeah, we actuallywere sort of as a species, we
would have been primed to diearound the time that menopause
happens. But that evolutionfound these other workarounds to
extend our life, but the ovariesstill kind of didn't get that

(01:12:52):
memo. And so they're like, nowthis is like, we put in our
time, goodbye.

Yeah. And people who have ovaries are dealing
with the fallout in the lastthird of our lives. Now, that
doesn't mean that it didn't thenas a kind of add on perk, a door
prize, if you like, be calm,beneficial, to help out the
grandkids, and not compete withyour daughters, for resources
for your own kids, right? It'snot like that. It's more like,
when we tell ourselves the storyof how a thing evolves, it's

(01:13:18):
useful to say, Okay, is itactually tying in to these very
cultural stories we tell aboutwomen? Or is there a broader
picture here? And weirdly, Ithink we were just kind of
forgetting that old people arevaluable, just in general, like
there might that there issomething valuable in a social
group. In other words, in beingold enough to remember valuable

(01:13:39):
information in times of crisis,that's what I mean. Yeah,

like how to survive in a cold snap, or a
famine or drought, like maybefolks that were able to
absolutely that informationalong. So this ties into the
development of the brain whereyou talk about language
happening. And that's also a bigpart. We kind of skipped through
this, but in the voice chapter,you talk about Mother E's, the
kind of like, Oh, yep, Gucci,Gucci, like the little things
that, that are pretty universal,and how we communicate with each

(01:14:04):
other and the kind ofstorytelling that was developed
probably as, as women werenursing babies, and all of these
things then so so many of yourchapters kind of intersect with
each other in just a reallywonderful way. And it all takes
us to the final section of thebook, which is about love, your
last chance the history ofrelationships, and the human

(01:14:26):
body itself. Is your scene ofthe crime so to speak, you're
going to find out yes, thispressing question about like,
were our ancestors deepancestors, polygamous,
monogamous, patriarchal? How didit look and you say, by actually
looking at, at our genitals, wecan get a pretty good idea of
sexual dominance in the historyof things like rape and other

(01:14:47):
things compared to othercreatures. And I put a trigger
warning at the beginning of theepisode so that people know
we're going to be talking alittle bit about that, but talk
about what the human body itselfcan tell us about whether our
ancient ancestors live In thisworld where cavemen were like
dragging women into their cavesand all of that, for how it was
actually working. Yeah, yeah,

I mean, I assume some of our ancestors utilized
caves, especially in coldplaces, because caves have this
really nice benefit of alwaysbeing at a fairly okay, but
slightly chilly temperature isjust a thing that happens when
you go underground. So that'swhy caves are useful. It's not
just about shielding from therain. It's like, is it really
freaking cold outside? It's lessgold in the cave. But there are
many cases in which we wereliving in the world without

(01:15:30):
caves. Yeah. Anyway, that's aside note. So yeah, so in many
ways, the love chapter is thething I kind of, at first I kind
of had to do because I keptgetting this question. So was it
like King Solomon? Is it like,you know, is it natural for men
to cheat on women? Is itnatural? I get the natural
question a lot natural, which iskind of weird, because I'm like,

(01:15:51):
you're asking me verycontemporary social, cultural
questions. And then you're usingthe natural word. And I'm like,
that feels loaded. Not sureexactly how to answer you. But I
can tell you in biology, butwhat other animals do isn't
necessarily what we want to do.So like penguins, none of us
should be like penguins. Theyare just terrible to each other.

(01:16:11):
And I'm sorry. Yeah, winningpenguins are

so sad. Yes. Yeah,

I know. I know. They're so cute. They're so
cute. But their sex lives. Idon't want any part of that. And
ever again, having seen thosetwo reports, ducks I know, I've
ruined ducks, too. I promise thebook doesn't ruin everything for
everyone. But it's true. It'strue. There's the which is to
say the behavior of otheranimals isn't a good excuse for
bad behavior in humans aboutthat. But I still get I still

(01:16:37):
get the question, you know, isit natural for one male and a
bunch of females? Is that ourancestral past? Is it monogamy
in our ancestral past? Or is itmore like the chimps and bonobo
is where everyone's just kind ofgetting laid all the time? It's
just kind of like a daily orgy,but you know, add some fruits
and a lot of fighting like,right, like, what is our mating

(01:16:57):
pattern? ancestrally. And thething is, is that we're always
tempted to look at contemporarycultures. And just like, kind of
way, how many versions thatthese contemporary cultures
have, and say, Well, this oneseems to be winning. So that
must be the way it always was.In other words, we want to
retrofit our evolution to whatwe think is normal. And that's
just bad science. You know,that's just not, that's not

(01:17:19):
remember, our species is 300,000freakin years old, possibly even
older depends on us, right? Solike, recorded history is a
handful of 1000s of years,that's not a good sample size.
What we do have, as you say, isthe body because history is
quite literally in theevolutionary sense written on
the body. So you can look to thebody and compare to what we see

(01:17:42):
in other species to askquestions about our mating
patterns. So for example,species that have a lot of male
male competition, at least,especially among primates, have
gigantic testicles. So they havewhen you need to literally
compete with your sperm, youneed to make more sperm, and
therefore you have giant balls.Okay? So a chimpanzee has a

(01:18:05):
pretty small penis, like not,not a lot going on there kind of
cone shaped, not not a giantthing. The balls are massive,
just for an animal that size,you would not expect that much
to be swinging down there. Andthey are meanwhile, the gorilla,
big bodied male right has aharem has a bunch of females
around him. Not as much malemale competition, of course,
because he mostly beats hischest to chase off the guys to

(01:18:27):
the balls, like peanuts, justlittle like nothing, nothing
really to see they're downthere. So in other words, one of
the places weirdly, I know it'sa book about the female body,
but one of the places to lookfor mating strategies, is what's
going on in the testicles,right. And what human beings
have are kind of, for an animal,our size, kind of medium balls,
kind of Goldilocks, kinda likenot too big, not too small,

(01:18:50):
some, some kind of in themiddle, right? So reduced male
competition, in other words, butalso not a harem, not King
Solomon and his wives becauseyou would then expect or at
least, if, in the time in whichwe had those mating strategies,
the time it takes for testiclesto evolve differently. There's
assumptions there, right?Because we don't know how fast
that kind of stuff can change.But at least it's it's a clue.

(01:19:13):
It's a clue. You have to kind ofthink of these as all clues from
which we infer. It's also truethat we do not have a lot of
bells and whistles and the humanmouse. The human penis is kind
of boring. I mean, compared toother species, you know, it's
just kind of a very simplestructure. Yeah,

like it doesn't have a bone inside of it, for
example, right, like some itdoesn't

have a baculum although that mostly seems like
a sad thing for you guys, giventhat it's more vulnerable than
to have injuries break withoutthe baculum sorry about that.
Yeah, but it is true forexample, that you don't have a
Laborat penile spines arecurlicue structures or any kinds
of other things that are oftenseen in species that evolved

(01:19:53):
with a lot of rape. Becauseremember that the penis CO of
walls with the vagina, whichmeans that in every species that
has them. I mean, it's war downthere it is. It's a very sexy
Cold War down there. So youknow, the female vagina is
evolving in ways over deep time,that support female reproductive
choice, effectively, given thehistory of the species, that's

(01:20:16):
the general model. And likewise,the male is evolving to support
male reproductive choice, andthey are often in conflict.
Right? So ducks have veryelaborate vaginas and very
elaborate penises.

There's like folds and stuff in the vagina right
where they can. This reminds methat yeah, congressmen or
whatever that had thatridiculous claim of like, well,
if it's a legitimate female bodyhas a way to shut that thing
down, which is like, actually,no, but there

are so many problems with that sentence.
Also, grammatically, just somany problems with the word
legitimate is obviously thebiggest problem. That's
obviously a good a good starterpoint of like, What now, but
also just the simple lack ofinformation about biology. I
mean, God take bio 101, please,what are you even saying yes,

because like ducks, you say, have these
labyrinthine vaginas and thepenis has evolved to sort of
like try to get around up inthere. It's more like a
tentacle. In

other words, what she has is kind of a trapdoor
vagina. It's an elaboratestructure. But when she is she's
experienced sexual coercion whenshe's having sex when she
doesn't want to with some guy isforcing that on her, she can
close off pockets of her vaginato trap the unwanted semen in
sperm. And then when theassaulter thankfully goes away,
she's able to expel that semenand it never makes it to the

(01:21:36):
egg. Right? So and you can seethis statistically, in the
studies that have been done,that rape is actually not a
highly successful meetingstrategy for the male, and just
successful enough that they keepdoing it, but not so much so
that her body hasn't longevolved ways of helping support
her choice. Yeah, herreproductive choice.

And biology is a molar labyrinth, you don't have
that in human

beings, we do not the miscarriage rate for women
who have been raped versus womenwho have had consensual sex is
absolutely the same. It is notthe case that rape is an
advantageous strategy. And it isalso not the case that unwanted
sex has been such a thing in theevolution of our bodies, that

(01:22:20):
our bodies have evolvedworkarounds, if it had been, in
other words, if historically, wehad been raping, you know, I
mean, in the in deep time, Imean, obviously, people's
suffering right now is very,very real. But is that the best
model for how we used to goabout things most of the time as
our bodies evolved? No, probablynot. You would expect more

(01:22:42):
elaborate genitals, you woulddefinitely expect a different
miscarriage rate betweenconsensual sex versus not, there
are many, many different signalsthat tell me at least, that the
absolutely horrific thing thatsome people do to other people
in the world with sexualviolence is actually not the
base state for how our bodiesevolved.

Right? So we can't say, oh, rape is a product of
like, evolution has evolvedmeant to be able to do this. And
I think that increases theresponsibility, and gives more
credence to why rape is sowrong. We can see it
biologically why it's so wrong,in addition to all of the other
reasons why rape is wrong, likewe have long evolved reasons to

(01:23:24):
believe in the problems of rape,rather than thinking this is
something men might just dobecause they evolved from
cavemen or something.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think how we tell the
story of ourselves matters. Andtalking about our evolution,
inevitably, is also telling thestory of ourselves, you know
what I mean? Now, there's alwaysa tension between what we want
to be true and what may wellhave been true, which we may not
like. And I've tried to be verycareful in the book in saying

(01:23:52):
what research supports and whatit doesn't. And sometimes it
says stuff I don't like it does.Penguins are ruined for me now?
Many things, right. But in thiscase, I think it's incredibly
important, at least to say thatNo, or at least from what
physiology can tell us, it's notthe case that says men and boys
are born freakin rapists, right?I know what I mean. That that

(01:24:13):
actually is very, very muchsomething that's coming out of
our current social contextthat's coming out of rape
culture, not from an innatepredilection of our bodies. In

addition, this chapter on love, you're talking
about sexism in this chapter,that sexism itself, maybe had
some evolutionary advantages,and you believe that it's pretty
much outlived those advantages.So maybe just give us a sense of
what those some of thoseadvantages might be? And how
sexism has outlived thoseadvantages to where it's time we
really try to address it morethan we have so far.

The way I'm talking about sexism in the book
is slightly different from howwe usually talk about it. In
here, I don't meaninstitutionalized sexism, and
who gets a job up, and I'm noteven meaning some guy being a
jerk to some girl, individualacts of aggression. What I am
talking about when I talk aboutsexism in the book is the

(01:25:11):
broadest sense pulling thecamera back and taking that
broadest view of what's commonacross known human cultures. And
one of the things that's verycommon are sex rules, which are
fundamentally tied tocontrolling access to female
bodies. Where can she go? Whatcan she be seen in? And who with

(01:25:31):
how much of her body is allowedto be touched? And in what
context? It when is she allowedto be solo? Where does she go in
a day? And certainly by the timeyou arrive at sex itself, who
does she get to have sex with inwhat context? And what about the
baby making and all of that, soall of those I call sex rules,
and every human culture seems tohave them not all the rules are
the same, actually. And that'sthe important thing. There's

(01:25:53):
nothing in your DNA that codesfor the length of a frickin
skirt. But there may besomething in how we go about
being the human species, in thatwe're culture makers, and part
of our deep culture making ismaking rules around sex. Why
would that be from anevolutionary standpoint? Well,
if it is true that we are crapat making babies, and I think I

(01:26:13):
make a pretty good case in thebook for that being true, and
one of our big solutions thereand deep time was the invention
of gynecology broadly defined,you know, not simply the moment
of helping one another givebirth and Midwifery, but all of
the different things that wehave done in deep time to
manipulate a female fertilitypattern. Those are all
behavioral workarounds. Well,there are other behavioral

(01:26:35):
workarounds, their sex rules. Soif sex rules in your local
culture help produce a localfertility pattern that fits your
environment really well, andhelps your culture survive and
thrive, then that is somethingthat gets reinforced and
develops over time. So in deeptime, you can think about
ancient gynecology and sex rulesworking in parallel. Some of

(01:26:58):
these are still pretty goodactually. For example, I'm super
down to the sex rule or againstpedophilia, right? Just super,
super into that not be anythingwe're cool. And, and in that
sense, if you think about it,from a biological point of view,
many, many cultures have thisrule, because it's absolutely
the case that the cost ofbecoming pregnant and giving
birth before you're done withpuberty in a female body is just

(01:27:21):
massive, you think it's hard todo this as an adult, try a 12
year old oh my god, right. So inthat sense, there are some rules
that make obvious sense, andsome that make less sense. But
if you can think about sexism asthe sex rules and think about
them, in terms of manipulatingfemale fertility patterns to
suit local culturalenvironments, and if basically

(01:27:42):
directly having those hands onthe levers of how we make
babies, and how we work aroundhaving more mothers and more
babies survive the process. Andyou can see how it goes hand in
hand. The trick is, is that atthis point, modern gynecology is
amazing. Like I would be so verydeceased, without modern

(01:28:03):
gynecology, just personally manytimes over, not just the
hemorrhaging, but also when Idid that, which is to say that
if the goal if the deepancestral goal would be to help
more mothers and offspringsurvive, right, again, moving
away from that idea of maledominance, because remember that
men and women equallyparticipate in creating and

(01:28:23):
reinforcing the sex rules. So ifwe're equal players, males and
females, well then, with anoutcome of having more female
survive, that certainly makessense for the female. But now
that modern gynecology is sovery good, it is way outpaced
the benefits of sex rules. Infact, in many cases, sexism is
very detrimentally impacting thehealth of women and girls

(01:28:47):
throughout the world. So we'reonly just now I think, coming to
that point where we get to getour heads above water and
choose. And personally, I thinkthe choice is obvious, right?

The book goes into detail about how sexism hurts
health, wealth, and wisdom inparticular, those three things,
it gives examples of those. Sopeople that want to check out
the book and learn even moreabout that. And cat. Before we
go, I wanted to talk to youabout regrets, challenges and
surprises. This is how we engageepisode of Family proclamations

(01:29:20):
as we go throughout the series,I'll ask each author to share
something about their process ofwriting the book, something that
they regret now that it's outwho hasn't finished a book and
thought, Oh, if only I couldhave changed that one thing. So
a regret or a challenge? Whatwas the biggest the hardest part
about doing your project, or asurprise, something you learned
in the process of it that you'vereally carried with you, you can

(01:29:40):
give an example of all three ofthose or you can speak to one of
them that just kind of has thebest story? It's really up to
you. Let's hear it. One

of the things that I wish I could have told myself
about five years ago when I wasfeeling really stressed about
not being done yet, because ofcourse this book took about 10
years of my life to finish. Iwas running it in parallel with
my PhD experiments and writingup the dissertation. So I was
busy, I was a little bit splitbrain, the PhD was only semi

(01:30:07):
related to the book at best, itprepped me a little bit for the
brain chapter and voice chapter,but pretty much just that the
rest, I was just climbingphysiology mountain over with
all of the rest of my time and Iwas having children, I do wish
that I could have told myselffive years ago that it is it's
okay, it's a big topic, don'tstress out, sometimes the big
questions take longer to workthrough, I certainly would have

(01:30:29):
told myself that one of theregrets I have in the book is
that I do wish I could havefound a way to wave the flag a
little bit more for all of theamazing scientists whose work I
completely rely on in to tellthe story of the book. What I
ended up doing in the book isputting a lot of that in the

(01:30:50):
notes. So the last third ofthose 600, some odd pages are
the bibliography in the notes.So I'm able to speak more
directly to their work and wavethe flag for them talking about
how wonderful they are. But itis true that I wish I could
have, I wish I could have donemore of that. Or maybe, or maybe
done a podcast or somethingwhere I can really shine the
light on these amazingscientists, many of whom are

(01:31:13):
women, many of whom are peopleof color, who are really a part
of this big sea change in thebiological sciences, driving
forward the question of sexdifferences in new and awesome
ways, you know, mostly because Iwant them to get grants, I want
that for them. I wish I couldjust rain money down on them.
But I'm not rich enough,personally, but I wish I could.

(01:31:34):
But also because, you know,science is a collaborative
project. We often hear thesestories about the standout
scientists, and they had theireureka moments. But actually all
modern science is done by a lotof people in a lab and is deeply
collaborative. And it's not ahero's story. It actually
involves it's a community story,you know what I mean? So I wish
I could have done more there.And maybe that's something I

(01:31:58):
ended up doing in another formatlater. Just because since there
were literally 1000s ofscientists whose work I rely on
in this book, I would not thenhave been able to wield them as
characters. But I would like inthe future to be able to do more

for that. Fair enough. You did tuck away a lot
in the footnotes. But you alsomade the footnotes pretty funny.
And so there's a lot ofincentive. I think you're
sending people that way. Insteadof being the kind of footnotes
we're like, I'm never going tocheck these. I found myself
going to the footnotes because Iknew they'd be great. I try and
make it fun for you people thathave listened this interview. I

(01:32:33):
hope they get a sense for likeyour sense of humor and your
voice because they come out sostrongly in the book. I can't
recommend this book. Enough.Really cat This is such a
fantastic book.

Thank you. It's

got this humor. It's got pathos. Thank you so
much, much here. Yeah, you'rewelcome. I thank you for putting
it together. It's called Eve howthe female body drove 200
million years of humanevolution. Cat. Congratulations,
keep doing what you're doing.You're a powerful voice. And I
love this book.

Thank you so much. It was so nice to be on your
podcast. Thanks

for listening. We're just getting started here
on family proclamations. I can'twait to share more with you.
There's so much stuff. We'lltalk about adoption, foster
care, single adult life, whatit's like to be an only child.
We'll meet people who don't wantkids, people who can't have
kids. We'll talk about what it'slike to not want any kids. We'll
talk about queer familiesfeminism, masculinity,
postpartum depression,immigration, family cults,

(01:33:26):
gender identity, caregiving forolder folks, and so much more.
If you enjoyed this episode, youcan do two quick things for me.
First, please rate and reviewthe show in Apple podcasts and
second, share it with a friend,the more the merrier. Thanks to
the great band mates of statefor providing our theme song.
Family proclamations is part ofthe dialogue Podcast Network.

(01:33:50):
I'm Blair Hodges, and I'll seeyou next time

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