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

"It’s about the neglect of the importance of female anatomy and physiology in our understanding of mammalian evolution, and much more broadly in society. It walks through the evolution of the female form, showing how massive those changes were in terms of their effect on the biology of our distant ancestors, which then affected all descendant mammals in certain ways. Bohannon then marches through the evolutionary tree, through different ancestors (or their proxies), ultimately to us—explaining how our biology as a species, not just as women, has been shaped by the influence of female biology. “Most importantly, the books should be accessible to a general audience—the science-interested public” Of course, half of our ancestors were females, but science has been sexist. There’s been a huge male-centric bias in the study of the evolution of mammals—and of organisms in general. The classic example of sexual selection might be giant, extinct male Irish deer growing gigantic antlers. This is an example of animals forming elaborate structures in order to compete for females. That, therefore, influenced their evolutionary fitness and propagation of their lineage. Those kinds of stories have been very powerful and infiltrated into our society, which has its own biases. We don’t similarly tend to hear as much about sexual selection linked to elaborate structures of females. The author is rightly offering a corrective to that male-centric view of evolution. Sure, males are very important, but it takes two sexes. The influence of female reproduction and physiology are clearly very powerful and have been so ever since the first mammals evolved. Yes. Basically, it goes from the ancient history of mammals, all the way up through time. Fossil evidence tells us about how milk production worked in the deep time of mammalian history, and so forth."