Eve
How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution (Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction)
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4.8 • 5 Ratings
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2024
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ROYAL SOCIETY TRIVEDI SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE 2024
FOYLE'S NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023
LONGLISTED FOR BLACKWELL'S NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023
ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S BEST IDEAS BOOKS OF 2023
ONE OF THE TELEGRAPH'S FIFTY BEST BOOKS OF 2023
ONE OF PROSPECT'S BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2023
ONE OF DUA LIPA'S SERVICE95 RECOMMENDATIONS FOR '5 INSPIRING READS TO KICK START THE NEW YEAR'
'Funny and very important' Chris van Tulleken, bestseling author of Ultra-Processed People
'Educates and emboldens' Bonnie Garmus, bestselling author of Lessons in Chemistry
'Should revolutionise our understanding of human life' George Monbiot, bestselling author of Regenesis
'A vast and revolutionary history of female evolution' Sunday Times
How did wet nurses drive civilization? Are women always the weaker sex? Is sexism useful for evolution? And are our bodies at war with our babies?
In Eve, Cat Bohannon answers questions scientists should have been addressing for decades. With boundless curiosity and sharp wit, she covers the past 200 million years to explain the specific science behind the development of the female sex. Eve is not only a sweeping revision of human history, it's an urgent and necessary corrective for a world that has focused primarily on the male body for far too long. Bohannon's findings, including everything from the way C-sections in the industrialized world are rearranging women's pelvic shape to the surprising similarities between pus and breast milk, will completely change what you think you know about evolution and why Homo sapiens have become such a successful and dominant species, from tool use to city building to the development of language.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cognition researcher Bohannon's ambitious debut "traces the evolution of women's bodies, from tits to toes." She explains that milk production likely evolved around 205 million years ago from the "moistening mucus" that rodent-like pre-mammals coated their eggs with, and that the antecedent to human wombs first developed 65 million years ago in a "weasel-squirrel" whose legs lifted it high enough off the ground to accommodate carrying "a swollen uterus." Comparisons with other species enlighten, as when Bohannon contends that because humans didn't evolve to have "trapdoor" vaginas—such as those of mallards, who can redirect sperm from unwanted partners away from the ovaries—it's likely "ancient hominins just weren't all that rapey." Bohannon offers a bracing corrective to male-centric evolutionary accounts, arguing that female hominins were likely on two legs before their male counterparts because they needed to provide more food for their offspring and so benefitted more from being able to carry large quantities of stuff in their arms, and she balances scientific rigor with entertaining prose ("The truth is we should have more vaginas," she writes, explaining how the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs significantly depleted the planet's marsupial population, most of which have between two and four vaginas). It's an illuminating and fresh take on how human evolution unfolded.
Customer Reviews
Sisters doin’ it for themselves
4.5 stars
The author is an American academic, whose non-fiction writing has appeared in ‘Scientific American’, ‘Science’, ‘The Best American Nonrequired Reading’, ‘Lapham’s Quarterly’, ‘The Georgia Review’, and on ‘The Story Collider’: titles you don’t often see grouped together. She wrote this book in parallel with, or as an extension of, research for her 2022 PhD thesis on the evolution of human narrative and cognition.
Ms Bohannon had already been hard at work for some years when Caroline Criado Perez’s best-selling 2019 non-fiction title ‘Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men’ was published. That focussed on why academic research, biological, linguistic or just about anything else, is so male centric. Ms B asks the same question, and a whole lot more besides, in what is a significant expansion, rather than just an extension, of Perez’s book. Indeed, Bohannon provides a fresh spin on how we got to where we are today, but with females rather than males at the centre of the narrative (an XX chromosome version of Yuval Noah Harari).
Much of the content is highly scientific and would appear to be outside the author’s primary area of expertise, yet she handles things with aplomb and considerable humour that make it readily comprehensible for the non-scientifically trained (“Readily” might be stretching things at times). While there is some repetition, I found that understandable, indeed necessary, to communicate the level of technical detail covered.
The reference list is impressive, and well chosen based on a sample I pursued, although the narrative does drift from hard facts to authorial opinion towards the end. That having been said, the author’s take on sexism is interesting. For someone who spent so much time championing biological females, she exhibited a surprisingly (to me at least) inclusive attitude to transgender issues.