Autorentext

Cat Bohannon is a researcher and author with a Ph.D. from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her essays and poems have appeared in Scientific American, Mind, Science Magazine, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Georgia Review, The Story Collider, and Poets Against the War. She lives with her family in Seattle.

Klappentext

The groundbreaking New York Times bestseller adapted for young adults! This is the 200-million-year story of how the female body gave rise to the human species and forever shaped life on Earth and what that means for us in the future, now in paperback.

Why do women live longer than men? Why do girls score better at every academic subject than boys until puberty, when suddenly their scores plummet? Is the female brain "wired differently?" These questions and common debates around scientific claims are thoughtfully examined in this adaptation perfect for young people.

This brand-new adaptation is a friendly, funny, and engaging read. It explores teen related topics such as mental health and the biology behind it, including insights on how adolescent brains are going through all kinds of changes, and shifting hormones. Author Cat Bohannon explains the roots of sexism and shows how, though it may have even served some evolutionary purpose long ago, it no longer serves us today, and it’s high time we leave it in the past.

Filled with amazing stories of both past and present, Eve will delight any young reader looking to understand the body—its amazing history, its wondrous capability, its oddities and mysteries, and its relevance to so many issues captivating contemporary thought and discussion.

Leseprobe
Chapter 1
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Milk

No sooner had the notion of the Flood subsided,

Than a hare paused amid the clover and trembling bellflowers and

said its prayer to the rainbow through the spider’s web.

Blood flowed in Bluebeard’s house—­in the slaughterhouses—­in the

circuses, where God’s seal made the windows blanch. Blood and milk

flowed together.

—­Arthur Rimbaud, “After the Flood”

Got Milk?

—­ ad campaign for the California Milk Processor Board, 1993

There in the soft grass, in the wet crush of evening, she was waiting: furred body shining with drops of rain, no bigger than a human thumb.

We call her Morgie. Little hunter. One of the first Eves.

She waited at the mouth of her burrow because the sky was still pale. She waited because her cells told her to, and her whiskers twitching in the air, and the temperature of the dirt under her footpads. She waited because there were monsters in the world, and they waited for her, too.

When the night was dark enough, Morgie risked it, skittering along the ground, searching for her prey—­insects, some nearly as big as she was. She heard them before she saw them: the high-­pitched hum of their wings, the wheezy tapping of their legs. Her skinny muzzle snapped. She loved the sweet crunch of its body, the little dribble of fluid down her chin. She licked it off and resumed the hunt. Never safe to stop. Jaws everywhere. Claws and teeth. The thing that looked like a tree could be a leg; the wind in the ferns could be hot breath. She ran, and hunted, and hid, the wet air as heavy as a fist. She flitted over the feet of dinosaurs like a grass­hopper hopping an elephant’s toe. She felt their low bellows not as a sound so much as an earthquake.

This was life every night for Morganucodon: she who lived under giants.

When she was tired, she returned to her waiting place, fleeing the gray dawn. She crawled down her tunnel like a lizard, belly dragging over the familiar earth, paws pulling her forward into the close dark of home. The burrow was warm with the soft, radiating heat of her pups, all piled together. The smells of leathery eggs, urine, poop, and dried spit mingled in the damp hole she’d dug for her family. A place safe from the monsters above. Safe enough.

Exhausted, she settled in. Her pups woke, blind and chirping, and swam across one another toward her belly, where beads of milk sweated out of her skin. Each pup jockeyed for the best spot. They slurped her wet fur, faces soon coated in milk. She stretched out on her side, whiskers finding the one closest to her head. Lazily she rolled him over on his back, nuzzling his unrolled ears, his thin eyelids, still closed. She dragged her raspy tongue down his belly to help him defecate, which he couldn’t yet do on his own.

The milk and the crap and the egg scraps in that dark little burrow—­these are the origins of breasts. Creatures like Morgie nursed their young in a dangerous world, not only to feed them, but also to keep them safe.

To put it in the simplest terms, women have breasts because we make milk. Like all mammals, we nurse our young with a cloyingly sweet, watery goo that we secrete from specialized glands in our torso. Why human breasts are high on our chests, rather than near our pelvis, why we have only two of them instead of six or eight, and why they’re surrounded, to varying degree, by fatty tissue that some people find sexually appealing are all questions we’ll get to. But at the heart of things, human beings have breasts because we make milk.

And as far as the latest scientific research can determine, we make milk because we used to lay eggs and, weirdly, because we have a long-­standing love affair with millions of bacteria. Both can be traced back to Morgie.

Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg . . . ?

Jurassic beasts tramped above Morgie’s burrow every day. Meat eaters as big as semitrucks ran around like ostriches on steroids. Some, in fact, looked like ostriches on steroids. Loch Ness–­style plesiosaurs lived in the seas. With all the big niches in the ecosystem taken, most of our early Eves evolved underfoot, which is hardly the place you wanted to be 200 million years ago. Even the earth was dangerous: The supercontinent, Pangaea, was starting to break up. Tectonic shifts tore Morgie’s world apart. Water rushed in to fill the widening gaps, birthing new oceans with the hiss of lava hitting water.

Still, Morgie was an incredibly successful species. Her fossils have been found from South Wales to South China. Where there could be a Morgie, it seems, there was. She was adaptable. Resource­ful. And she had a lot of kids. The geneticist J. B. S. Haldane liked to say that God had an inordinate fondness for beetles, for he made so many of them. Eating insects was a successful strategy for insectivores like Morgie. For God so loved the beetles, and the furry, warm Eves who ate them.

But it wasn’t just the abundance of beetles that made Morgie so successful. Unlike the Eves who came before her, Morgie nursed her young.

Once they are born, newborn animals face four essential dangers: desiccation (loss of moisture), predation, starvation, and disease. They can die of thirst. Something can eat them. They can starve to death. And if they manage to dodge all those, they can still die from bacteria or parasites overwhelming their immune systems. Every mother in the animal world has evolved strategies to try to protect her offspring, but Morgie managed to combat all four by dousing her kids in stuff made of her own body.

When we talk about breast milk, we often describe it as a baby’s first food. The last thing you want to do is underfeed a baby, because a newborn needs fuel to build new fat and blood and bone and tissue. As a result, we assume newborns cry for milk because they’re hungry, but that is and isn’t true. The …