Christopher: Alright Lucas, quick-fire. What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the title EVE: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years Of Human Evolution? Lucas: Honestly? My first thought is, "Finally, a history book where women do more than just show up in the last chapter to invent agriculture and have babies." Christopher: Exactly! And that's the whole point. It’s a fundamental reframing of the entire story of us. Today we're diving into EVE: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon. Lucas: And this book has been making waves. It was a bestseller, shortlisted for the prestigious Royal Society Prize for Science Books, but I’ve also heard it’s been pretty polarizing for some readers. Christopher: It has, and that’s because it takes a sledgehammer to some very old, very established ideas. What makes Bohannon the perfect person to do this is her background. She has a PhD not just in biology, but in the evolution of narrative and cognition. She’s a scientist who thinks like a storyteller, which is why this book reads less like a textbook and more like an epic. Lucas: A storyteller, huh? Okay, so give me the opening scene. What’s the big, dramatic problem she’s trying to solve with this book? Christopher: The problem is a massive, dangerous blind spot at the heart of science and medicine. Bohannon calls it the "male norm," the default assumption that the male body is the standard human body, and the female body is just a complicated, niche variation of it. Lucas: That sounds… problematic. Christopher: It's more than problematic; it's life-threatening. Bohannon opens with this incredible, visceral metaphor from the sci-fi film Prometheus. Lucas: Oh, I love that movie. The one with the creepy aliens. Christopher: That's the one. The scientist, Elizabeth Shaw, has been impregnated with an alien squid and she needs an emergency C-section to save her life. She rushes to the ship's medpod, this multi-trillion-dollar, futuristic surgical machine. She climbs in, bleeding, desperate, and tells it to perform the procedure. And the computer just says, "Error. This medpod is calibrated for male patients only." Lucas: Whoa. Okay, that's a great sci-fi metaphor, but does that kind of thing actually happen? It feels a little on the nose. Christopher: That's the chilling part. It happens all the time, just in less dramatic ways. The book is filled with examples. Think about drug trials. For decades, women of childbearing age were actively excluded from them. The rationale was to protect potential fetuses, but the result was a massive gap in knowledge. Lucas: So the drugs hitting the market were basically tested on men. Christopher: Primarily, yes. And the consequences are staggering. Bohannon tells this heartbreaking story about the painkiller OxyContin, which was released in 1996. It was heavily prescribed to women for things like endometriosis and other uterine pain. But the clinical trials hadn't rigorously tested for sex differences. Lucas: Let me guess. The dosage was based on the male standard? Christopher: You got it. Women's bodies often metabolize drugs differently. In this case, the relief wore off too soon, or it wasn't strong enough. So what did they do? They took more, and more often. This led to a huge spike in addiction among women. The number of infants born addicted to opiates tripled in just ten years, partly because of this exact issue. Lucas: That is horrifying. All because the initial research didn't bother to check. It wasn't even malice, just… a complete blind spot. Christopher: A blind spot that comes from this idea that studying males is just "cleaner science." That's a direct quote from a researcher in the book. The thinking is that female hormonal cycles introduce too many variables. But Bohannon’s point is that those variables aren't noise to be eliminated; they are the very thing that needs to be understood. Lucas: It’s like an engineer saying they’re only going to test a car in the desert because rain and snow make the data "messy." Christopher: Perfect analogy. And sometimes the discoveries are made completely by accident. There was a study in 1999 testing a new EEG monitor for patients under general anesthesia. It was a big study, lots of men and women. The monitor worked, but the truly fascinating discovery was something they weren't even looking for. Lucas: What was it? Christopher: They found that women, on average, wake up from anesthesia significantly faster than men. It didn't matter their age, their weight, or the dose they were given. They just came to faster. Lucas: And they only found this out in 1999? Accidentally? Christopher: Accidentally. The researchers only went back and analyzed the data for sex differences after the fact. It just wasn't the primary question. And Bohannon’s central argument is that not asking that question is incredibly dangerous.

Lucas: Okay, so the first half of the book is about this massive problem, this 'male-norm' bias. Where does she go from there? How do you even start to fix a blind spot that big? Christopher: This is where Bohannon flips the script. Instead of seeing the female body as a 'problem' for science, she argues it's the source code for our entire species. She takes us on this incredible journey back in time to show how the female body was the primary engine of human evolution. Lucas: The whole 200 million years. So how do you even begin to tell that story? Where's the starting point? Christopher: She starts 200 million years ago, in the Jurassic period, with a tiny, shrew-like creature she nicknames "Morgie." This is Morganucodon, one of our earliest mammalian ancestors. And she paints this vivid picture of Morgie's life, scurrying around in the dark, dodging the feet of dinosaurs, trying to keep her tiny, helpless babies alive in a burrow. Lucas: A tough gig. So what does this little shrew have to do with us? Christopher: Everything. Because Morgie was a mammal, she had to solve a fundamental problem: how to care for her fragile, egg-hatched young. And her solution is the origin of breasts. She didn't have nipples yet. Instead, she had specialized sweat glands in her armpits and groin that secreted a fluid. Lucas: Hold on. Are you saying milk is basically… evolved egg sweat? That's wild. Christopher: That's exactly what it is! Initially, this secretion was just a moisturizer for her leathery eggs, with some antimicrobial properties to keep them from getting infected in a dirty burrow. But over millions of years, evolution tinkered with it. It became richer in fats, sugars, and immune factors. It became milk. Lucas: Wow. So evolution isn't some grand design. It’s more like a series of clever, small-scale hacks. Christopher: Bohannon calls it "evolution by cheap upgrades." You don't invent a whole new system from scratch. You just tweak what's already there. The sweat glands were there, so they got repurposed. This is the core of her argument: female biology, facing these intense life-or-death pressures, was the site of постоянной innovation. Lucas: That makes so much sense. And it connects to something I see today. I mean, the way we talk about women's bodies is so often in terms of problems. Christopher: Right. And the book has this perfect, modern-day example that ties back to this deep history: liposuction. In 2011, there was this article about how women who get liposuction on their hips and thighs often find that the fat grows back somewhere else, like their upper arms. Lucas: Oh, I've heard people talk about that, but I never knew the why behind it. I just assumed fat was fat. Christopher: That’s the male-norm thinking right there. Bohannon explains that female gluteofemoral fat—the fat on the hips, butt, and thighs—is biochemically unique. It's incredibly rich in a specific type of fatty acid, LC-PUFAs, which are essential for building a fetal brain. Lucas: You're kidding me. So that fat is literally baby brain food? Christopher: It's the fuel for the next generation's intelligence. During the third trimester of pregnancy and while breastfeeding, a mother's body literally mines these fat deposits and transfers those lipids to the baby. The violent process of liposuction can disrupt this tissue so much that the fat can't properly grow back in that location. The body, still programmed to store this vital resource, just finds somewhere else to put it. Lucas: Wow. So women are literally carrying the building blocks for the next generation's intelligence on their thighs, and our culture has turned it into a cosmetic 'problem' to be sucked out. That's... deeply ironic. Christopher: It's the perfect encapsulation of the book's thesis. We've ignored the function of the female body for so long that we misinterpret its features as flaws. We see 'fat' instead of 'fuel.' We see 'hormonal complexity' instead of a 'responsive, adaptive system.' Lucas: And by doing that, we not only misunderstand women's health, we misunderstand the very story of how we all got here. Christopher: Precisely. The book argues that every major step in our evolution—from milk, to the womb, to bipedalism, even to our big brains—was driven by the unique challenges and biological solutions pioneered by the female body.

Lucas: So, putting it all together, it feels like the book is making a much bigger point than just 'include women in studies.' It's saying our whole picture of 'humanity' is warped because we've been looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Christopher: Exactly. Bohannon argues that the female body isn't a deviation from the norm; it is the evolutionary mainline. The challenges of female biology—gestating big-brained babies, producing that complex milk we talked about, surviving childbirth, raising those helpless infants—these are the very selective pressures that made us human. Not asking about it, as she says, is not just dangerous, it's scientifically illogical. Lucas: It’s like trying to understand the history of cars by only studying the engine and ignoring the chassis, the fuel system, and the factory where it was built. You get a piece of the story, but you miss the whole point. Christopher: That's a great way to put it. And the book is full of these mind-bending reframes. Bohannon has this powerful quote that really stuck with me. She says, "Female bodies aren’t just male bodies with 'extra stuff' (fat, breasts, uteri). Nor are testicles and ovaries hot swappable. Being sexed permeates every major feature of our mammalian bodies and the lives we live inside them, for mouse and human alike." Lucas: That really lands. It’s not an add-on. It’s fundamental. It makes you think, what other 'norms' in our world are built on a foundation that's missing half the story? In design, in business, in politics. Christopher: It’s a huge question. And that’s the power of a book like EVE. It doesn't just give you facts; it gives you a new lens to see the world. Lucas: We'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Find us on our socials and share one area where you've noticed this kind of bias, where the 'male norm' is treated as the default. The examples are everywhere once you start looking. Christopher: This is Aibrary, signing off.