Eve 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

“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

“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

“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

“As troubling as it sounds, the data exist: when you leave men in charge, roads and bridges and dams are effectively left to rot.”
― Cat Bohannon, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

“Men, meanwhile, are more likely to spend it on entertainment and on weapons and—if we’re talking global trends—on gambling or the local equivalents.[*”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“There is, in other words, a disconnect between the human penis as a sexual show trait and its functionality.”
― 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

“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

“Thus, the majority of what you and I call evolution—what we’re debating about endlessly in litigation and fitful bursts on op-ed pages and conflicting textbooks in far-flung communities, this thing that has caused so much trouble—represents only 13 percent of the time there’s been any life on Earth at all.”
― 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

“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

“When a male red deer calls out during mating season, it actually moves its larynx all the way toward its breastbone, producing a deep, throaty, and frankly intimidating sound. (It also pumps its penis up and down while it’s making its calls—red deer aren’t subtle.)”
― 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

“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

“social influences have cognitive outcomes.”
― 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

“I was just happy that I was alive and our daughter was alive….I think that the baby saved my life.” Of course, it was the baby who nearly killed her. But that’s no way to start a relationship with your child.”
― 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

“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