Cat Bohannon & Kate Womersley
Tuesday 28th May
Topping & Company Booksellers of Edinburgh, 2 Blenheim Place, Edinburgh EH7 5JH
7.10pm
7.30pm
We're honoured to be hosting Cat Bohannon for her Women's Prize for Non-Fiction longlisted Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution.
Over ten years in the writing, Eve is a groundbreaking, agenda setting, myth-busting history of the evolution of the female body. Full of wild new science, Eve challenges everything we know, giving us an in-depth understanding of why female bodies are the way they are, and how biology and evolution affects our day-to-day experience.
Cat will be joined by the wonderful Kate Womersley, an NHS Doctor in Psychiatry whose research aims to improve sex and gender equity in biomedical research. Do join us in the bookshop in celebrating these two wonderful researchers!
EVE
How did wet nurses drive civilization? Are women always the weaker sex? Is sexism useful for evolution? And are our bodies at war with our babies?
In Eve, 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.
About Cat Bohannon
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. She lives in the US with her partner and two offspring.