Cat Bohannon > Quotes

“We live, at all times, both in the present and in the long rivers of evolutionary time.”
― Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

“I found considerably more studies about women’s scent preferences than men’s. I don’t know if that’s because male scientists are particularly curious about What Women Want. Among studies on men, there’s the now-famous bit about men tipping strippers more if they’re ovulating—they do, the effects are reproducible, and they go away if the woman is on birth control—but that may or may not be scent related. (It’s hard to say what you’re smelling, exactly, in a strip club.) Men also prefer the smelly T-shirts of ovulating women, don’t like the pit smells of menstruating women and women who are less immuno-compatible as much, and almost universally dislike the smell of a woman’s tears, regardless of her reproductive status.”
― Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

“Primatologists have seen this many times in the field: Say a male is fighting with another male. The females largely ignore the conflict, so long as it doesn’t bother them or their children. But then one of the combatants goes off and picks up a baby, who blithely clings to his chest hair or his back. Then he goes over to the male he was having the fight with. If the baby likes the male it’s clinging to, the kid will scream at his opponent if he acts aggressively. So the other male either backs off or is mobbed by friends of the mother, spurred on by the baby’s cries. It’s so effective, in fact, that some males simply carry a baby around as a kind of adorable bodyguard, preventing fights before they start.”
― Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

“Sharing food is a big deal for primates like us. Food sharing is a big part of chimp social bonding, too—you don’t let just anyone eat your banana.”
― Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

“And a human being whose life is nurtured in an advantage which has accrued from the disadvantage of other human beings, and who prefers that this should remain as it is, is a human being by definition only, having much more in common with the bedbug, the tapeworm, the cancer, and the scavengers of the deep sea.—JAMES AGEE, COTTON TENANTS”
― Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

“From 1996 to 2006, more than 79 percent of the animal studies published in the scientific journal Pain included only male subjects. Before the 1990s, the stats were more disproportionate.”
― Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

“there’s a massive difference between biological sex—something wound deep into the warp and weft of our physical development, from in-cell organelles all the way up to whole-body features, and built over billions of years of evolutionary history—and humanity’s gender identity, which is a fluid thing and brain based and at most a few hundred thousand years old.[* 1]”
― Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

“The tale of Noah and the ark wasn't originally about sinful humans; it was about urban overpopulation and birth control.”
― Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

“Generally speaking, innovation is something that weaker individuals do in order to overcome their relative disadvantage.”
― Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

“If you’re a pregnant woman living in a malaria-prone country, you have a very different relationship to risk. Pregnant women with malaria are three to four times more likely to suffer from the most severe forms of the disease, and of those who do, 50 percent will die. Ever wonder why the Centers for Disease Control is located in Atlanta? Malaria. The entire reason the United States built the CDC is that malaria was rampant throughout the American South. Malaria was finally eradicated in the United States in 1951. That wasn’t very long ago. Some argue that getting rid of malaria did more good for American women than universal suffrage. Some say it had a bigger effect than Roe v. Wade. Nowadays, in the United States, only 0.65 out of every 100,000 legal abortions will result in the woman’s death, while 26.4 American women still die for every 100,000 live births. Before Roe v. Wade, 17–18 percent of all maternal deaths in the United States were due to illegal abortions—that stat was as true in 1930 as it was in 1967. Meanwhile, as many as one in four maternal deaths in today’s malarial countries are directly tied to the disease. During our worst outbreaks, the same was true in the United States.”
― Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

“When babies babble, they are testing out their vocal apparatus to see what sounds they can make. They're also testing out their brains' language faculties—seeing whether people around them respond more to one sound or another. Imagine learning an instrument before you even have an idea what music is. You play a note or two, hear it, see if you like it, see if your audience likes it, and then you play more. Except that the instrument is located in your own chest, throat, and head. Meanwhile, your brain is rewiring itself with simple sorts of rules for communication by paying careful attention while your main caregiver talks to you.”
― Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

“women who never give birth are less likely to develop autoimmune diseases than women who have given birth at least once.”
― Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

“The field of research is fairly new, but primatologists have been able to find tantalizing evidence of self-medication. In one case, the medicine in question was the bitter pith and juice from shoots of the Vernonia amygdalina plant. Mahale chimps, sick with parasitic intestinal worms, spend up to eight minutes carefully peeling away the bark and outer layers of the shoots in order to get at the extra-bitter innards. They chew on the pith and suck out its juice. This isn’t tasty. Nearby adult chimps who are not sick avoid the stuff. Primatologists sampled the poo from before and after this pith-eating behavior and found fewer parasite eggs in the post-medication poo. And it just so happens that local humans also had the habit of using this bitter pith in traditional medicine for treating intestinal parasites. As with humans, the chimps presumably learn to treat themselves this way from other chimps.”
― Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

“You do a lot of math when you’re broke.”
― Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

“Contrary to popular belief, a nursing mother’s breasts are not full of milk. They’re swollen, sure, sometimes to the point that they resemble fleshy water balloons, but they’re full of blood, fat, and glandular tissue. There’s no bladder in a breast that holds a sloshing cup of milk that empties as the baby nurses and then gradually fills up again, ready for next time. Even a dairy cow’s udder isn’t the bag of milk you might think it to be; like us, a cow’s udder is a visible mound of mammary tissue, along with a few nipples.[*10] The ductwork of a nursing human breast can hold, at most, a couple of tablespoons of milk at a time. It’s the act of suckling that normally triggers a breast’s “let-down reflex”—a cascade of signals that tell the milk glands to kick up production and dump fresh milk out the front door.”
― Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

“If you have two X chromosomes, as most women do, it’s incredibly unlikely that you’ll end up being red-green color-blind, whereas roughly 10 percent of men are. If red-green color vision was obviously selected for in diurnal primates, why was it located on the X chromosome? It’s possible this type of color vision was more advantageous for the primate Eve than for her consorts and sons. Perhaps being more efficient at spotting more nutritive foodstuffs (extra-sweet berries, extra-tender young leaves) made a real difference in pregnancy and breast-feeding. If Purgi utilized the same sex-specific parenting strategies as many living primates do, foraging for herself and her infant offspring, then the survival of the young depended far more on the female than the male. In other words, there was more pressure to see red and green on the newly diurnal Purgi than there was on her male counterparts. The second possibility is that Purgi foraged for food with a group, as some of today’s New World monkeys do. In that scenario, it’d be advantageous to have both trichromatics and dichromatics working together, grazing not only in daylight but in the dim light at dawn and dusk, when the dichromats would be better at finding the good stuff. Or both of these things were true: our Eve, as the female, had the most pressure on her to be able to see red and green, but in a highly social species that did some amount of food sharing, it would have been advantageous to have some dichromats, too.”
― Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

“Then, in 2018, researchers gathered three more observed cases of what might as well be called bonobo midwifery—this time in captivity, where observations were naturally easier (the bonobos were used to human beings being around, and the location of the births were more predictable and visible). In each case, other females gathered around the laboring bonobo, grooming her and standing guard. In a couple of cases, females even cupped their paws under the newborn as it came out of the mother, and again they all shared a bit of placenta as a bloody reward. This is, as the researchers note, entirely unlike the behavior of the chimpanzee, whether in the wild or in captivity, most likely—they plainly note—because chimpanzee society is male dominated, whereas bonobo society has strong female coalitions and is female dominated.”
― Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

“Certain members of anthropology and biology departments in the 1980s and 1990s wondered, What’s with all those women synchronizing their periods when they live together? That must have an evolutionary advantage, right? One ambitious fellow (published by Yale University Press, no less, in 1991) decided this meant that ancient women somehow evolved to go on collective sex strikes by synchronizing their periods, thereby enabling/encouraging men (less distracted by the pressing desire to screw) to go out and hunt and forage. This, the author theorized, was the root of all human culture. In effect, he argues that humans build cool stuff like the Pyramids and rocket ships because women get periods and therefore don’t have sex for a set number of days per month.”
― Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

“I know some people still struggle with this idea, but most of the scientific community agrees that biological sex is fundamentally separate from human gender identity. The belief that the sex-typical features of a person’s body inevitably assign them a gender identity and behavior to match is sometimes called “biologism” or, more broadly, “gender essentialism” (Witt, 1995). The thing about gender essentialism is that it is a natural extension of sexism. Societies that form deep cultural beliefs about what one or another gender “should be” also tend to believe that a person is one of two genders from birth depending on how their body looks. Those societies then strongly reinforce those beliefs through various rules for each gender, ranging from the sort of fine, irritating cognitive grit of social exclusion to incredibly violent punishment of “rule breakers” and everything in between.”
― Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

“Obese males, too, may develop additional breast tissue—not only fat, but also mammary tissue—likely because adipose tissue, on its own, triggers greater production of estrogen in the human body”
― Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

“all human gynecological practices have some very basic things in common: They try to preserve the life of the mother and, if possible, the child. They try to prevent and treat excessive uterine bleeding. They try to prevent and treat bacterial infection.[*6] They tend to guide the intensity of the mother’s labor efforts to coincide with the dilation of her cervix.”
― Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

“Ever wonder why the Centers for Disease Control is located in Atlanta? Malaria. The entire reason the United States built the CDC is that malaria was rampant throughout the American South. Malaria was finally eradicated in the United States in 1951.”
― Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

“The Oldowan tools are one good reason we should think of Habilis as an Eve of tools. Though chimps use tools today, and Lucy also used primitive stone tools, the Oldowan style—adopted by later australopithecines and finally by Habilis and Homo erectus after her—was our first advanced tool technology.”
― Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

“I haven’t yet mentioned the 1 in 4,500 girls born every year without a uterus. Since the male-to-female birth ratio is about 1.7 to 1 and roughly 133 million babies are born annually, that means more than 14,000 baby girls are born without a womb every year.”
― Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

“Some scientists think our milk sugars are so different from other primates’ because they evolved to help our gut bacteria handle our crazy human lifestyle. They may even provide clues to specific infections our ancestors had in the past: not only do our special milk sugars feed friendly bacteria, but they can also trick unwanted pathogens to bind to them instead of to an infant’s intestines, and then send them into the diaper.”
― Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

“When male mammals want to make sure the females they’re having sex with will have their babies and not some other male’s, they sometimes produce a clumpy, sticky seminal fluid that “plugs” or blocks the female’s cervix against later intruders. Among primates at least, the more promiscuous the species, the thicker this seminal plug. Chimps have the thickest of them all: inside the female’s vagina, the fluid in the male chimp’s semen turns into a four-inch-long piece of clear rubbery spunk. Primatologists know this because they’ve watched such plugs fall out of a female’s vagina, usually when they’re dislodged by another male’s penis. Many scientists gather these from the forest floor like prized gems.”
― Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

“For example, women who work night shifts famously have trouble with fertility:”
― Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

“Human child rearing is already highly cooperative, and perhaps homosexuality—wherein, barring social pressure, an individual does not naturally produce his or her own children—is a strong case for human eusociality.”
― Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

“as of 2000, one in five NIH clinical drug trials still wasn’t using any female subjects, and of the studies that did, nearly two-thirds didn’t bother analyzing their data for sex differences.”
― Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

“the ideas that human beings have about reality—what it’s made of, how it works, how we all fit into grander schemata—can change fundamentally. Sometimes, those changes are so dramatic and so far-reaching that it becomes nearly impossible to understand the world the way we did before.”
― Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution