We’re celebrating the release of the fascinating new book "Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution" with a special conversation between author Dr. Cat Bohannon and award-winning Canadian science journalist Alanna Mitchell. Bring your questions and curiousities and join us for what promises to be an engaging evening and celebration of the female body!
Why do women live longer than men? Why do women have menopause? Why are women more likely to get Alzheimer’s? Why do girls score better at every academic subject than boys until puberty, when suddenly their scores plummet? And does the female brain really exist?
In Eve, Dr. Cat Bohannon answers questions scientists should have been addressing for decades. With boundless curiosity and sharp wit, she covers the past 200 million years to explain the specific science behind the development of the female sex. Eve is not only a sweeping revision of human history, it’s an urgent and necessary corrective for a world that has focused primarily on the male body for far too long. Bohannon’s findings, including everything from the way C-sections in the industrialized world are rearranging women’s pelvic shape to the surprising similarities between pus and breast milk, will completely change what you think you know about evolution and why Homo sapiens have become such a successful and dominant species, from tool use to city building to the development of language.
A 21st-century update of Our Bodies, Ourselves, Eve offers a true paradigm shift in our thinking about what the female body is and why it matters.
We’ll have copies of the book available for purchase on site.
About the Speakers
Dr. Cat Bohannon is a researcher and author with a PhD 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.
Photo Credit: Chloe Ellingson
Alanna Mitchell is an award-winning science journalist, author and playwright. Since 2023, she has also been features editor at the acclaimed Broadview Magazine. She has written five books, including Sea Sick: the Global Ocean in Crisis and The Spinning Magnet. She has written for The New York Times, Canadian Geographic Magazine, The Walrus, Maclean’s, The Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail, among other publications. In 2014, with the help of two theatre directors, she turned Sea Sick into a one-woman play that she continues to perform all over the world.