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

“In the biological sciences, they’re still such a thing as the ‘male norm.’ The male body, from mouse to human, is what gets studied in the lab. Unless we’re specifically researching ovaries, uteri, estrogens, or breasts, the girls aren’t there.”

The quote establishes Bohannon’s frustration with the scientific community’s tendency to treat the male body as the default body. She sees the lack of female bodies in research as a disservice not only to female individuals but also to humanity as a whole. She believes that there is so much the science and medicine communities and other groups can learn from the female body and so many mysteries to still solve. The inequality in the biological and anatomical research highlights The Intersection of Science and Gender, showing that even progressive fields like science and medicine can still ignore important details and studies about groups, including female individuals.

“That’s the real problem with origin stories like the one in Genesis: our bodies aren’t one thing. There’s no one mother of us all. Each system in our body is effectively a different age, not only because the cellular turnover rate differs between cell type and location (your skin cells are far younger than most of your brain cells, for instance), but also because the things we think of as distinct to our species evolved at different times and in different places. We don’t have one mother; we have many.”

Bohannon challenges the myth of Eve in the Book of Genesis, believing it to be overly simplistic and treating female individuals, and humanity, as coming from a singular source. However, she believes that many figures have contributed to the creation of female bodies and humanity. She soon details the various pre-human Eves that contributed to human evolution, as well as the Eve of humanity that continues humanity’s evolution today. She also regards these myths as unrealistic in comparison to how species come to be in life. Because humans evolved, it is important, according to Bohannon, to see how female ancestors developed different aspects of the female body.