Cat Bohannon, Ph.D. discusses EVE: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

www.catbohannon.com/
The talking points alone are enough to make you go hmmmm. She's insightful, intelligent and makes compelling points that science should listen to. We kept it more on the science end of the interview focusing on subjects you probably never thought about, but below are some of the talking points she includes in her book.
Women outlive men because female bodies are just better at not dying. And with few exceptions, that’s true from birth forward-even boys get more cancer than girls, and are more likely to die from it when they do-but this is especially true during our reproductive years. And that gap is only going to get bigger: 80 percent of the world’s centenarians are female.
We probably evolved to be sexist. But we don’t have to keep doing it. From an evolutionary perspective, sexism and gynecology are two sides of the same coin: they’re both ways we use behavior to innovate around our species’ terrible reproductive system. (When you don’t have the Pill or condoms, having strict social rules that restrict access to female bodies can usefully limit how many times a woman will be pregnant.) But gynecology has vastly outpaced sexism in this regard. Now that we can mostly deal with our glitchy, complication-prone reproductive systems, we can finally choose not to be sexist-which is good, because sexism is actually starting to kill us.
Breastfeeding babies talk to their mothers through their nipples. Or rather, their bodies talk to our bodies in an ancient language: because of the physics of nursing at the breast, babies’ spit is literally sucked into the mother’s breast through the nipple in a kind of undertow, wherein it’s “observed” by immuno-agents lining the mother’s milk ducts. (Formally, this is called “upsuck.”) Sick babies get different breastmilk than healthy ones. So do stressed babies-mom’s breast “reads” the cortisol in the babies’ spit and adjusts the composition of the milk accordingly.
Human penises are terribly boring. So, too, our testicles. And it’s probably because men didn’t compete for mates as much as other apes, and also because we didn’t rape each other very much in our evolutionary past-species prone to rape tend to have whiz-bang penises and complicated vaginas to match, like the mallard duck’s corkscrew contraption, or the dolphin’s J-shaped prehensile phallus, which can literally swivel and whack a female until she submits.
Female bodies probably led the way to bipedalism. The female musculoskeletal system is geared towards endurance, while the male’s is a bit closer to the older (chimp-like) model. So male bodies are usually better at explosive strength, and female ones better at enduring. That’s true all the way down to female muscle cells’ metabolism. And the thing about walking upright is you need endurance. Shame about our lower backs and knees, though… female sex hormones also make us more flexible, which is great for yoga and pregnancy, but absolutely terrible for long-term wear and tear on the joints.

[@iamwesleyfrazier]

Thank you, Cat 🫶🫶🫶🫶