Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

by Cat Bohannon

In many Indian states, it’s normal for young women and new brides to eat last.

More than 90 percent of adolescent Indian girls are anemic. More than 42 percent of all Indian mothers are underweight.

And that’s not just down to poverty; only about 16.5 percent of sub-Saharan mothers are underweight.

But rural Indians make up 68 percent of the country’s population.

For a start, we might want to acknowledge that human brains are something that are made primarily out of women’s bodies: first in their wombs, and then from their breast milk, and then from the quality of interactions mothers have with their children.

Not only is half the population significantly less educated than it should be in places like Niger or Mali, but because future mothers are neglected when it comes to education, those mothers’ ability to fully support their future children’s education is also compromised.

While Europe was busy telling itself the plague was caused by an evil fog, Islamic doctors had already figured out that copper and silver instruments were best for surgery (the metals are antimicrobial).

Roughly sixty-five million adult Arab people are illiterate right now, of which two-thirds are women.

We can deliberately change American sex rules. But we can’t ask people not to care about that change. Sex rules are built into our cultural identity. Those rules used to help us survive.

Sharing cultural rules helps trick the human brain into thinking your neighbor is your sister. Call it a primate hack. Social primates are pretty good at extending “kinship” behavior,

Human beings, much like the bonobos, have a long evolutionary history of finding hacks to make their brains care about people who aren’t relatives. It’s one of the coolest things we’re able to do.

It’s the main reason we don’t dissolve into mutually warring family clans—we usefully trick ourselves into thinking people who aren’t related to us are actually our kin.

Though its evolutionary roots run deep, gynecology is uniquely human. So is our kinship behavior.

Shared social rules are one of the main ways cultures build extendable identity.

Conservative American Christians, for instance, use their sex rules to help signal to one another that they all believe the same things about the world,

Sex rules can also be a way into a group you wouldn’t otherwise be a part of: Promoting gay marriage has found a foothold in some Christian communities that would never condone a promiscuous homosexual love life.

For example, once your culture’s gynecological knowledge and traditions reach a certain level of effectiveness, they rapidly outstrip sexism’s usefulness.

And when there’s finally enough gynecology, like safe contraception and abortion and proper prenatal and postnatal care, but there’s still a lot of sexism, being sexist can even undermine gynecology.

In fact, over and over again in human history, massive events that killed off huge numbers of human beings dramatically altered human history. Something knocked out a good chunk of the world’s hominins about eighty thousand years ago—could have been a super volcano, could have been climate change in general, could have been a particularly bad cluster of things—so we had to leave Africa twice to become a global species.

The big assholes do enormous damage, but it’s the little assholes that chip away at every citizen’s confidence that they can rely on other people to do what needs doing to make a country work.

The best thing we do is create institutions to support and protect those fragile extended bonds.

And those institutions, like them or not, are precisely what allow us to overcome our less desirable behaviors: territoriality, sexism, competition for dominance.