Humour and hard science in Cat Bohannon's lecture

The author held a packed Victoria Theatre audience rapt with her wide-ranging talk

- Ong Sor Fern

The mating habits of pandas, rhinoceroses and wombats, the relative sizes of hominid baby heads versus birth canals and why women rack up an additional US$15 billion (S$20 billion) in healthcare spending were just some of the topics covered in Cat Bohannon's wide-ranging keynote lecture at the Singapore Writers Festival on Nov 16.

Pacing back and forth across the Victoria Theatre stage, the author of Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years Of Human Evolution (2023) held a packed audience rapt as she spoke about the male norm and how badly made models lead to bad medicine.

Biological studies have traditionally been based on the male body, which is a way of avoiding the complications of oestrus in female mammalian bodies.

But, as Bohannon points out in her lecture and in greater detail in her best-selling book, this neglect leads to all sorts of unintended consequences in the real world.