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Informationen zum Autor A leading researcher in the dynamic and rapidly expanding field of evolutionary psychology Sarah E. Hill completed her PhD at UT Austin and is now a professor at TCU. With more than fifty scientific publications and multiple prestigious research grants to her credit, Dr. Hill has become an authority on evolutionary approaches to psychology and health. She has appeared on The Today Show and been quoted in The New York Times , The Washington Post , Scientific American , and The Economist . Klappentext "An eye-opening book that reveals crucial information every woman taking hormonal birth control should know"-- Leseprobe CHAPTER 1: WHAT IS A WOMAN? Although there are a whole bunch of different ways that a person could answer a question like this one (we could talk about gender identity or social roles or any of the other numerous forces that make you who you are), we’re going to look at what evolutionary biology has to say about it. Because it turns out that we can learn a lot about women by understanding the things that our brains were designed to do. You see, each one of us is the result of an unbroken chain of successful survival and reproduction that has gone on now—uninterrupted—for millions of years. If even one of your ancestors had failed to survive long enough to reproduce, or simply failed to reproduce, you wouldn’t be here. This is a pretty remarkable thing to think about. As women, we have inherited from our successful female ancestors traits that allowed them—generation after generation, and without pause— to make good decisions about everything ranging from whether to approach a snake (no!) to whether to have a clandestine love affair with the hot guy from a neighboring tribe (maybe!). Traits that promote successful survival and reproduction get passed down from one genera- tion to the next. Traits that don’t promote survival and reproduction don’t. It’s that simple. This process of inheritance is called natural selec- tion. And it turns out to be a very powerful explanatory tool when it comes to understanding what it means to be a woman and to have a female brain. YOU ARE YOUR GAMETES To understand what it means to be a woman and to have a woman’s brain, we first need to define what it means to be female. And in the eyes of evolutionary biology, this is something that’s defined by the size of your gametes (a.k.a. your sex cells). If you have a limited supply of large, calorically expensive gametes, you are a female and we call your sex cells “eggs.” If you have an unlimited supply of small, metabolically inexpensive gametes, you are a male and we call your sex cells “sperm.” And although this designation may sound overly simplistic (and potentially even a little crass), it’s at the very heart of almost all reliably occurring sex differences observed in creatures great and small, including human beings. And it’s actually incredibly fascinating stuff. For instance, being the sex with the larger, more expensive sex cells means that women— before they even meet the future fathers of their children —have already invested more in any babies that they may have than their future baby-daddies-to-be have. And in humans (and many other species), this investment asymmetry only grows larger once an egg gets fertilized. We are mammals, after all. And for female mammals, reproduction is costly. So having larger sex cells oftentimes means set- ting the stage for costly reproduction. And costly it is. Women hoping to reproduce have to be willing to share their bodies with another human being for nine months. This is no small request. It’s energetically costly. It’s uncomfortable. And it’s a logistical nightmare for a woman’s immune and circulatory systems. Further, despite the wonder that is modern medicine, complications from pregnancy and childbirth continue to...
