Inquiring Minds

Featured Speaker: Maria Penny

This quarter we will read Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, by Cat Bohannon, published in 2023 (ASIN: B0BR51FB12). From the Amazon webpage: Cat Bohannon covers the past 200 million years to explain the specific science behind the development of the female sex: “We need a kind of user’s manual for the female mammal. How female bodies evolved, how they work, what it really means to biologically be a woman. Something that would rewrite the story of womanhood. This book is that story. We have to put the female body in the picture. Modern medicine, neurobiology, paleoanthropology, even evolutionary biology all take a hit when we ignore the fact that half of us have breasts.” 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 numerous publications.

These are the reading assignments:
 
April 1: Introduction, Chapters 1, 2 (up to break on p. 92)
 
April 15: Chapters 2 (from break on p. 92), 3, 4 (up to break on p. 184)
 
April 29: Chapter 4 (from break on p. 184), 5, 6 (to bottom of p. 276)
 
May 13: Chapters 6 (from top of p. 277), 7, 8
 
June 3: Chapter 9
 

Presenter Biography

Maria Penny retired from two careers, as a high-school physics teacher and as a scientific programmer. She earned a B.A. in physics from New York University and a Ph.D. in science education from the University of Maryland.