Dr. Deena Emera is an evolutionary geneticist, author, and teacher. She received her master’s in human evolution at NYU. At Yale, where she received her Ph.D., she studied the evolution of pregnancy, periods, and labor in mammals and humans. She then studied at the Yale School of Medicine, where she was awarded a fellowship from the National Institute of Health to continue investigating evolutionary mechanisms.
Below, Deena shares 5 key insights from her new book, A Brief History of the Female Body: An Evolutionary Look at How and Why the Female Form Came to Be.
Why do we get breast cancer? Why do we suffer from autoimmune disorders? Why do we struggle with our weight? To answer these questions, we need to keep in mind that our bodies evolved on the order of millions of years, but our cultures evolved on the order of hundreds of years. Genes don’t change as quickly as culture, so our bodies still expect the conditions in which our ancestors lived.
Our ancestors spent most of their adult lives pregnant and nursing, they were frequently infected with parasitic worms, and they didn’t have a steady supply of food. Our solutions to these issues today, such as better sanitation to rid our bodies of parasitic worms, may have introduced different problems, such as autoimmune disorders. An important step in improving women’s health is understanding these mismatches between our ancient bodies and modern lifestyles.
