Natalie Angier Quotes

We are made of stardust; why not take a few moments to look up at the family album?

Women never bought Freud's idea of penis envy: who would want a shotgun when you can have an automatic?

Scientists have discovered that the small brave act of cooperating with another person, of choosing trust over cynicism, generosity over selfishness, makes the brain light up with quiet joy.

Perhaps eggs are like neurons, which also are not replenished in adulthood: they know too much. Eggs must plan the party. Sperm need only to show up- wearing top hat and tails, of course.

The clitoris not only applauds when a women flaunts her mastery; it will give a standing ovation. In the multiple orgasm, we see the finest evidence that our lady Klitoris helps those who help themselves. It may take many minutes to reach the first summit, but once there the lusty mountaineer finds wings awaiting her. She does noy need to scramble back to the ground before scaling the next peak, but can glide like a raptor on currents of joy.

We are all yeses. We are worthy enough, we passed inspection, we survived the great fetal oocyte extinctions. In that sense, at least -- call it a mechanospiritual sense -- we are meant to be. We are good eggs, every one of us.

Touch is... one of the most ancient transactions, a defiance of the plasma membrane and the loneliness it brought.

Giving a girl the impression that girlhood is an extended bounce on Barney's knee is like prepping a young gazelle for life on the Serengeti by dipping it in cream.

We may love men and we may live with men, but some of them have said stupendously inaccurate things about us, our bodies, and our psyches.

You have your opinion, I have mine, and it takes all kinds of nuts and dips to make a party, right?

Our minds hurtled outward in all directions. We became absurdly creative, Homo artifactus, intolerant of bare cave walls and naked clay pots.

Eternal love is a myth, but we make our myths, and we love them to death.

What is wrong with looking muscular? Muscles are beautiful. Strength is beautiful. Muscle tissue is beautiful. It is metabolically, medically, and philosophically beautiful. Muscles retreat when they're not used, but they will always come back if you give them good reason. No matter how old you get, your muscles never lose hope. Few cells of the body are as capable as muscle cells are of change and reformation, of achievement and transcendence.

Nobody knows what the whales may have to click and clack about, but it could be a form of voting-time to stop here and synchronously dive down in search of deep water squid, now time to resurface, move on, dive again. Clans also seem to caucus on which males they like and will mate with more or less as a group and which ones to collectively spurn. By all appearances, female sperm whales are terrible size queens. Over the generations, they have consistently voted in favor of enhanced male mass. Their dream candidate nowadays is some fellow named Moby, and he's three times their size.

I'm an Atheist. I don't believe in God, Gods, Godlets or any sort of higher power beyond the universe itself, which seems quite high and powerful enough to me. I don't believe in life after death, channeled chat rooms with the dead, reincarnation, telekinesis or any miracles but the miracle of life and consciousness, which again strike me as miracles in nearly obscene abundance. I believe that the universe abides by the laws of physics, some of which are known, others of which will surely be discovered, but even if they aren't, that will simply be a result, as my colleague George Johnson put it, of our brains having evolved for life on this one little planet and thus being inevitably limited. I'm convinced that the world as we see it was shaped by the again genuinely miraculous, let's even say transcendent, hand of evolution through natural selection.

If your doctor has no experience with hysteroscopic myomectomies, find one who does; the procedure is the best first-line attack against symptomatic fibroids.

I’m less opposed to pink than I am to dresses, for the simple reason that I hated dresses and skirts as a child. I hated the way they impeded my mobility and playground power, and I hated the fear I had while wearing them that with one stiff breeze I would be exposed to the world, with no choice afterward but to slip quietly into a permanent vegetative state.

The brain is an organ of aggression, and there are many roads to this Rome of imagined conquests — so many that mental disorders, regardless of their particulars, often result in a derangement of our aggressive drive. Schizophrenics stand on the streetcorner screaming obscenely at passersby; depressives lie in their beds screaming mutely at themselves. Our gentle aggressions, the drive to be, prods us out of bed in the morning and draws us toward each other. And in each other we find what our aggressive brain desires: love. As we are wired for aggression, so we are wired to love. We are a lavishly loving species, aggressively sentimental. We are tirelessly in pursuit of fresh targets for our love. We love our children so long that they come to despise us for it. We love friends, books... We love answers. We love yesterday and next year. We love gods, for a god is there when all else fails, and God can keep all conduits of love alive — erotic, maternal, paternal, euphoric, infantile.

They talk about myths: the myth that links testosterone to libido, for example, in both men and women. If the myth were true, then these women should have no sex drive; they can’t, after all, respond to the testosterone their bodies produce. Some sex researchers have said as much about AIS patients—that they’re frigid, uninterested, dead in bed. The women themselves come close to spitting in rage at that sort of talk. Whether or not they manage to inflate their vaginas sufficiently to have intercourse, their erotic nature remains intact. They fantasize about sex. They are orgasmic. They lust when there is somebody worth lusting after.

We lived so long and so self-consciously that we assumed we must live forever, and we buried our dead with enough talismans and spare change for eternity.

The uterus, then, is like a deciduous tree, an oak or a maple, and the endometrium acts like the leaves. When the weather is warm, when sunlight sings, the tree awakes and invests in leaves. The branching pattern of the tree—its trunk, its branches, its twigs—is like the branching of the body’s vascularization, parceling out water rather than blood. The homology of the pattern is no coincidence. Holy water, sacred blood, they are one and the same, and branching is the most hydraulically efficient means of pumping the fluid from a central source—the heart, the trunk—out to all extremities. Thus nourished, the leaves bud, unfurl, thicken, and darken. The leaves are photosynthetic factories, transforming sunlight into usable energy. That energy allows the tree to create seeds and nuts, the acorns that are embryonic trees. The leaves are expensive to maintain—the tree must deliver them water, nitrogen, potassium, the nutrients from the soil—but they repay the tree by spinning sunlight into gold.

In 2013, science writer Natalie Angier gave the centrality of female friendship a zoological boost, pointing out that, "In animals as diverse as African elephants and barnyard mice, blue monkeys of Kenya and feral horses of New Zealand, affiliative, long-lasting and mutually beneficial relationships between females turns out to be the basic unit of social life.

Your opinion doesn’t count. Your fond hopes and fantasies of Paradigms Found don’t count. What counts is the quality and the quantity of the evidence.

You don’t need to visit a foreign country or hike a desert canyon or go out on a cloudless, moonless night and get drunk on star champagne.

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people,” the novelist and essayist Thomas Mann complained. “When I come home for lunch after writing all morning, my wife says I look like I just came home from a funeral,” said Carl Hiaasen—and he writes comic novels.

physicist Werner Heisenberg, whose famed uncertainty principle says that you can know the position of an electron as it orbits the nuclear heart of an atom, or you can know its velocity, but that you can’t know both at once.

Scientists get annoyed at the hackneyed notion that their pursuit of knowledge diminishes the mystery or art or “holiness” of life.

Or try the star-spangled bowl of a desert sky at night and consider that, as teeming as the proscenium above may seem to your naked gape, you are seeing only about 2,500 of the 300 billion stars in our Milky Way—and that there are maybe 100 billion other star-studded galaxies in our universe besides, beyond your unaided view.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,

All baby clothes are adorable, whoever they’re meant for (and in the end, of course, they’re meant for the parents). All remind you of how vulnerable an infant is, how wholly incompetent and in need of adult largess. You don’t look at blue clothes and think “strong” or pink clothes and think “fragile.” You look at everything in these micromatized dimensions and think, “How precious! How ridiculous! What was evolution thinking of?

Open the ovoid mother and find the ovoid girl; open the child and the next egg grins up its invitation to crack it. You can never tell a priori how many iterations await you; you hope they continue forever. My daughter, my matryoshka.

Most keep their condition secret from all but a few close friends. Interestingly, many of them say the thing they regret most is not their inability to have children but the lack of menstruation, the event they see as a monthly voucher of femaleness.

We are all yeses. We are worthy enough, we passed inspection, we survived the great fetal oocyte extinctions. In that sense, at least—call it a mechanospiritual sense—we are meant to be. We are good eggs, every one of us.

The attrition continues, though at a more sedate pace, throughout a woman’s youth and early middle age. At most, 450 of her eggs will be solicited for ovulation, and far fewer than that if she spends a lot of time being pregnant and thus not ovulating.

They are, in fact, Cheaters, luring men into the foaming waters of carnality without even the vaguest possibility of conception. What a delight, what a subversion of expectation. The healthiest and most womanly of women are in fact a rendition of Amazon queens, self-possessed and self-defined, women whose bodies have an enviable integrity and a fleshy, nonreplicative beauty that razzes Charles Darwin. The buck, the stud, the bull, stops here.

An internally conceived and gestated fetus is a protected fetus, and a protected fetus is a fetus freed to loll about long enough to bloom a giant brain. So we lend new meaning to the term egghead: from the cloistered egg is born the bulging frontal lobe.

My daughter’s eggs are silver points of potential energy, the light at the beginning of the tunnel, a near-life experience. Boys don’t make sperm—their proud “seed”—until they reach puberty. But my daughter’s sex cells, our seed, are already settled upon prenatally, the chromosomes sorted, the potsherds of her parents’ histories packed into their little phospholipid baggies.

Not all of the women were influenced by the pheromones, but enough of them were to elevate the findings to robust statistical significance and to demonstrate with fair firmness that human pheromones exist. What we see in this carefully controlled experiment is that women can push and women can pull, and they can respond to other women in varying ways, all unconsciously, without knowing why, without the benefit even of olfaction, for the women in the study said they smelled nothing when the swab was applied under their nose, save for the scent of rubbing alcohol used as a prep in the experiment.

In a sense, evolution adheres to the classic twelve-step program: it takes things one day at a time. It does not strive for perfection; it does not strive at all. There is no progress, no plans, no scala natura, or scale of nature, that ranks organisms from lowly to superior, primitive to advanced.

More often than not, the ideal breast is an invented breast. Decolletage, the tushy breast, is an artifact of clothing. Naked breasts don't dance cheek to cheek--they turn away from each other. Breasts vary in size and shape to an outlandish degree, but they can be whipped into an impressive conformity, and because we are human and we can't leave anything alone, we have whipped away.

Let’s reject the notion that men have exclusive rights to the sun. Must Helios, Apollo, Ra, Mithras, and the other golden boys take up every seat in the solar chariot that lights each day and coaxes forth all life? This is a miscarriage of mythology, for a woman’s egg resembles nothing so much as the sun at its most electrically alive: the perfect orb, speaking in tongues of fire.

Experience, after all, is a trustworthier friend than intuition.

The body of the average woman is 27 percent fat, that of the average man 15 percent fat. The leanest elite female athletes may get their body fat down to 11 or 12 percent, but that is nearly double the percentage of body fat found on the elite male athlete,

It is hard to exaggerate the utility of muscle. We have more than six hundred muscles in our body, some of them under voluntary control—our skeletal muscles—and some of them smooth muscles, the autonomic staff. Muscles allow us to move, of course. They stand between us and dissipation, apathy. But muscle tissue helps us even when we are immobilized by illness. In sickness, the body loses its power to tap the caloric reserves of fat. If you’re fasting, intentionally or otherwise, but you are healthy, your insulin levels fall and your body begins to call on its fat reserves for energy. But when you’re sick, with either an acute infection or a chronic illness, your insulin levels rise. Because insulin levels also rise when you eat, your body grows confused. It thinks it is fed, so it won’t tap its stored fat for calories. Your body still needs energy, though, and if you’re too sick to eat, it will begin breaking down its muscle for fuel. Muscle has fewer calories to offer: the average woman stores only about 20,000 calories in her muscle tissue, compared to the 180,000 or so in her fat. An acutely ill person who cannot eat will starve to death in ten days rather than forty. (Cachexia, the wasting of lean mass seen in people with cancer or AIDS, occurs more gradually than that, but it too is caused by a disruption of the body’s ability to burn fat and its fallback tendency to cannibalize its muscle.) The more muscle you have, then, the better your chances are of withstanding illness. Young people survive an acute disease more readily than the old do in part because they have more muscle in escrow.

it’s better to be sullen and strong than sullen and weak.

The authors present many things that are new, and many things that are true; unfortunately, the things that are true are not new; and the things that are new are not true.

Other women say they can climax best with the application of pressure deep within the vagina, which led the gynecologist Ernst Grafenberg and his partisans to propose the existence of a Grafenberg, or G, spot, a sort of second, internalized clitoris. The G spot is said to be a two-inch cushion of highly erogenous tissue located on the front wall of the vagina, right where the vagina wraps around the urethra, the tube that carries urine from the bladder. Some have said that the G spot is embedded in the so-called Skene’s glands, which generate mucus to help lubricate the urethral tract. Others have said that the gee-whiz spot is actually the sphincter muscle, which keeps the urethra clamped shut until you’re ready to void. Still others question the existence of a discrete G spot altogether. Let’s not bother inventing novel erogenous loci, they say, when the existing infrastructure will do. The roots of the clitoris run deep, after all, and very likely can be tickled through posterior agitation. In other words, the G spot may be nothing more than the back end of the clitoris.

A normal vagina should have a slightly sweet, slightly pungent odor. It should have the lactic acid smell of yogurt.” The contract is simple. We provide lactobacilli with food and shelter—the comfort of the vaginal walls, the moisture, the proteins, the sugars of our tissue. They maintain a stable population and keep competing bacteria out. Merely by living and metabolizing, they generate lactic acid and hydrogen peroxide, which are disinfectants that prevent colonization by less benign microbes. The robust vagina is an acidic vagina, with a pH of 3.8 to 4.5. That’s somewhat more acidic than black coffee (with a pH of 5) but less piquant than a lemon (pH 2). In fact, the idea of pairing wine and women isn’t a bad one, as the acidity of the vagina in health is just about that of a glass of red wine.

In an effort to get fresh ’n’ clean and to look like the dewy, virginal women pictured on the packages of Massengill, women can make themselves dirtier than ever. Douching kills off the beneficial lactobacilli and paves the way for infestation by anaerobes and their trails of cadaverine. So while I rarely dispense medical advice, this one is easy: don’t douche, ever, period, end of squirt bottle.

heavy bleeding in the premenopausal years is in fact normal.

In truth, we know remarkably little about the purpose of the various opiates, chemicals, hormones, and hormone precursors that the uterus secretes with such vigor. We don’t know how important the output is to our overall health and well-being beyond considerations of reproduction, nor do we know whether the various secretory skills continue past menopause. When the endometrium ceases to wax and wane, does the secretory program of the uterus likewise lapse into quiescence? Some experts say yes, some say no, all should probably settle with “don’t know.” We should be humbled by the fact that scientists discovered the very dramatic concentrations of anandamide in the uterus as recently as the late 1990s. And that humbleness should in turn enhance our vigilance against removing the uterus in all but the most extreme circumstances. The

The liver, for example, the largest gland in the body, performs more than five hundred tasks, including processing glucose, protein, fats, and other compounds the body needs, generating the hemoglobin that is the soul of a red blood cell, and detoxifying the poisons we consume when we drink wine or eat those fibrous packets of natural toxins called vegetables.

As youth flowers into maturity, the barrier between nerd and herd grows taller and thicker and begins to sprout thorns.

We are of the universe, and by studying the universe we ultimately turn the mirror on ourselves.

We are made of stardust; why not take a few moments to look up at the family album? “Most of the time, when people walk outside at night and see the stars, it’s a big, pretty background, and it’s not quite real,” said the Caltech planetary scientist Michael Brown. “It doesn’t occur to them that the pattern they see in the sky repeats itself once a year, or to appreciate why that’s true.

Another fail-safe way to change the way you see the world is to invest in a microscope.

You understand that photons representing all colors of the rainbow stream from the sun and strike the surface of the rose, but that, as a result of the molecular composition of pigments in the rose, it’s the red photons that bounce off its petals and up to your eyes, and so you see red.

As the Princeton astrophysicist John Bahcall put it in an interview shortly before he died, we crawled out of the ocean, we are confined to a tiny landmass circling a midsize, middle-aged, pale-faced sun located in one arm of just another pinwheel galaxy among millions of star-spangled galaxies; yet we have come to comprehend the universe on the largest scales and longest time frames, from the subatomic out to the edge of the cosmos. “It’s remarkable, it’s extraordinary, and it didn’t have to be that way,” Bahcall said.

The physicist Eugene Wigner talked of ”the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics“—in delineating the present, disinterring the past, and baking a trustier fortune cookie.

It is about attacking a problem with the most manicured of claws and tearing it down into sensible, edible pieces.

not a body of facts, it is a way of thinking.

the great statistician Frederick Mosteller had a point when he said, “It is easy to lie with statistics, but it is easier to lie without them.” Nevertheless, there are some steps you can take to, as Huff put it, “talk back to a statistic.” Among the biggies recommended by many scientists is to ask a simple question: Does the figure, finding, or correlation make sense, that is, accord with what you know of objective reality?

I have great, wild hopes of finding my daughter as she will be in adulthood, when she nominally stops needing me, when she is past the seizures and denunciations that I expect will come at adolescence because they came so brutally for me. I hope that I am right in my interpretation of the organic grandmother, that mother hunger is a primal trait of womanness, and that my daughter's need for me may prove larger, more enduring, more passionate than the child's needs for meals, clothes, shelter and applause. I hope that she needs me enough to show me who she is, to give regular dispatches, her intellectual progeny, and to trust me with their safekeeping. I hope that she likes to barter- Youth and Experience haggling over Notoriety. May she spit fire and leave me gladly but sense in her very hemoglobin that she can find me and rest with me and breathe, safely breathe, if only for the intermission between cycles of anger and disappointment. For as long as they last, my bones, brains, and strength are her birthright, and they may not be much, but they are tenacious by decree, and they’ll comply happily with the customs of dynasty. When Youth comes calling, Experience gets her shovel and digs.

that without the promise of great reward we’d be content to stay home and catch up on our flossing.

When people talk of the indelibility of a strong memory, they speak of recalling exactly where they were when Kennedy was shot or the Challenger space shuttle exploded. But what a woman really remembers is her first period; now there’s a memory seared into the brain with the blowtorch of high emotion.

The uterus is a part of the endocrine system, the macramé of glands, organs, and brain structures that secrete and respond to hormones

mucus, a mixture of white blood cells, water, the sticky protein known as mucin, and cast-off tissue cells.

progesterone, the so-called hormone of pregnancy; progesterone means progestation. Progesterone inhibits the contractibility of muscle cells. Throughout the whole nine months of baby-baking, the negotiation between estrogen and progesterone is a dynamic one. Small, fleeting contractions pass over the swelling womb like local thunderstorms flickering over the desert. The more advanced the pregnancy, the more insistent these so-called Braxton Hicks contractions become. Mother of goddess, how extraordinary it is! Your belly is swelling, and you think, I will explode, I am a supernova. And then contractions seize you up and you think, No, I will collapse, I am a giant black hole.

estrogen spurs the growth of many cell types—mammal, insect, grain.

Pitocin, the drug given to pregnant women to jump-start recalcitrant labor, is a synthetic version of oxytocin.

A ewe usually is a good mother, but she will turn bad if for some reason she is separated from her lamb shortly after birth. Then she is likely to reject the lamb, refusing to nurse it. Sheep farmers have a way of persuading her otherwise. They stimulate her vagina with a kind of sheep dildo. The tickling releases a stream of oxytocin in her brain, and she then takes the lamb to udder. An oxytocin pump in her spinal cord will have the same maternogenic impact.

sexual access to the woman is formalized through a public ceremony

A group of same-aged people is inherently unstable. Peers will compete just as siblings compete. The ancestral sorority was transgenerational, and if we want whatever strength and balm may come from sisterhood, it wouldn’t hurt to recapitulate in some measure the timeworn model and brace our listing library of cohorts with bookends of the young and the seasoned.

I hope that I’m right in my interpretation of the organic grandmother, that mother hunger is a primal trait of womanness, and that my daughter’s need for me may prove larger, more enduring, and more passionate than the child’s need for meals, clothes, shelter, and applause.

the body evolved to gather vegetables, not to become them, and who resists being absorbed entirely by the creamy perilife that is the desk-computer dyad, may decide, Feh, I’ll forgo the pills, I’ll take a walk, I’ll lift a weight, I’ll visit my daughter and offer to babysit her kids right now.

By the classic definition, a hormone is a substance secreted by one tissue that travels through blood or another body fluid to another tissue, whereupon the hormone arouses the encountered tissue to a new state of activity.

the pinkish peritoneum, the springy membrane that encloses and protects other organs.

The ovaries know no bounds. They are the primary source of sex hormones that sexualize the body. Before the ovaries are able to serve up a viable egg, they are quite adept at dishing out the sex hormones. The sex hormones cause pubic hair to grow, fat to gather on the breasts and hips, the pelvis to widen, and eventually menstrual blood to flow.

All steroid hormones in vertebrates are built of cholesterol. The choice of cholesterol as the foundation for these hormones makes sense, because the body brims with it. Even if you never touch cholesterol-rich food such as eggs, oil, and meat, your liver continues to make cholesterol around the clock, and with reason. Cholesterol is an essential component of the plasma membrane, the fatty, protective coat surrounding every cell. At least half of the average cell’s membrane consists of cholesterol, much more than half in neurons. Without cholesterol, your cells would fall apart. Without cholesterol, new cells could not be manufactured. There would be no way of replacing the cells of the skin, gut, and immune system, which die by the millions each day. Cholesterol is the fat of the earth and the fat of the brain.

Estrone is an estrogen, the family of hormones that we call female hormones, although both sexes—all sexes—have them. There are many forms of estrogen in the body, any body, but three hold sway: estrone, estradiol, and estriol. They are named for the number of hydroxyl groups (pairs of hydrogen and oxygen atoms) that festoon each hormone’s torso. You can teach your baby daughter to count with estrogens. Estrone has one hydroxyl group, estradiol two, and estriol three. Counting hydroxyl groups is a chemist’s way of naming names, not a biologist’s; the number of hydroxyl groups doesn’t predict anything about the molecule’s behavior

I don’t want to make too much of androstenedione, though. Testosterone isn’t the only hormone that’s overrated. All hormones are ultimately overrated, as well as poorly understood. But even though we know this mantra, we still get shackled by testosterone and need a new perspective to shake ourselves free.

And now I must reiterate the almighty fact that a hormone does not cause a behavior. We don’t know what hormones do to the brain or the self, but we do know what they don’t do, and they don’t cause a behavior, the way turning a steering wheel will cause a car to veer left or right. Nor does the ability to behave in an aggressive or dominant fashion require a hormonal substrate. If hormones do anything, any little thing at all, they merely raise the likelihood that, other things being equal, a given behavior will occur. An estrogen peak at midcycle may make one’s eros a shade brighter or tauter, nothing more. At the same time, it helps to remember the concept of biofeedback: behaviors and emotions can change the hormonal milieu and the connections between neurons. The brain is pliant. Synapses linking one brain cell to another arise and die and arise again.

The brain is never fixed. It is a moving target. Your hormones don’t make you do anything. Habit and circumstance can have a more profound effect on behavior than anything hormonal. A person who is accustomed to deference will be obeyed into old age, whatever her or his estrogen or testosterone or androstenedione levels may be doing or failing to do. A tomcat that sprayed your house with territorial and reproductive resolve before being neutered may well continue spraying when his testicles are gone. He has learned how to do it, and though the impetus to start spraying may have come with a pubertal surge in testosterone, he no longer needs the hormone to know (as cats know, for they are infinitely wise) that a tomcat must leave a spackle of pong wherever he goes.

Aggression and depression sound like two different, even polarized phenomena, but they’re not. Depression is aggression turned inward, directed against the self, or the imagined, threatening self. A seriously depressed person may look anesthetized to an observer, but the depressed person is never anesthetized to herself. She may wish to be, and she may seek to be with chemical aid, but she cannot truly placate her sneering, jabbering, nested aggressor.

If you are or have ever been a girl, you know that girls are aggressive. This is news the way the Code of Hammurabi is news. Yet the girls in station break Candyland are never aggressive; in fact, they are getting gooier by the year. Nor are the girls who prance through the meadows of biological theory ever aggressive. No, they’re prosocial. They’re verbal, interactive, attentive, amiable. They’re the friends you wish you could buy along with the Belchee Baby you saw on TV.

A meditative state can be attained through measured, rhythmic breathing.

Learn to play the drums. The world needs more girl drummers. The world needs your wild, pounding, dreaming heart. 12 MINDFUL MENOPAUSE Can We Live Without Estrogen?

Learn to play the drums. The world needs more girl drummers. The world needs your wild, pounding, dreaming heart.

so single-minded, as the placenta-mammary dyad. They exist only for the baby, and if the baby does not call on them, they are retired. They are expensive organs, and they are not maintained unless absolutely necessary. That is why the suckling of the baby is crucial to the productivity of the mammary gland. The mammary gland will not continue making milk unless the mechanical sensation of suckling tells it that lactogenesis is necessary. In evolutionary terms, babies die too often to make automatic milk ejection a sane strategy. It would be terribly wasteful if, after the arrival of a stillborn infant, a woman’s body were to generate milk automatically for anything more than a handful of days, at a cost of 600 calories a day. Lactation is a contingent function and a conditioned response, which is why it can be so frustrating to initiate and maintain. The body stands poised to flow, and to stop flowing. In a way, lactation is analogous to blood. Blood must course through your veins nonstop, yet it must be prepared to coagulate if the skin is breached, or else we would bleed to death at the brush of a thornbush.

I’ve talked about the mammary gland as a modified sweat gland, but there is another way to think of it: as a modified placenta. The placenta and the mammary gland have much in common. They are specialists, and they are temporary workers. They are designed to nourish a baby. No other organs are so fleeting, so single-minded, as the placenta-mammary dyad. They exist only for the baby, and if the baby does not call on them, they are retired. They are expensive organs, and they are not maintained unless absolutely necessary. That is why the suckling of the baby is crucial to the productivity of the mammary gland. The mammary gland will not continue making milk unless the mechanical sensation of suckling tells it that lactogenesis is necessary. In evolutionary terms, babies die too often to make automatic milk ejection a sane strategy. It would be terribly wasteful if, after the arrival of a stillborn infant, a woman’s body were to generate milk automatically for anything more than a handful of days, at a cost of 600 calories a day. Lactation is a contingent function and a conditioned response, which is why it can be so frustrating to initiate and maintain. The body stands poised to flow, and to stop flowing. In a way, lactation is analogous to blood. Blood must course through your veins nonstop, yet it must be prepared to coagulate if the skin is breached, or else we would bleed to death at the brush of a thornbush.

The egg made the clone. In the experiments, the scientists extracted a cell from the udder of an adult sheep, and they removed the nucleus from the cell, the nucleus being the storehouse of the cell’s genes. They wanted those adult genes, and they could have taken them from any organ. Every cell in an animal’s body has the same set of genes in it. What distinguishes an udder cell from a pancreatic cell from a skin cell is which of those tens of thousands of genes are active and which are silenced.

What is wrong with looking muscular? Muscles are beautiful. Strength is beautiful. Muscle tissue is beautiful. It is metabolically, medically, and philosophically beautiful. Muscles retreat when they’re not used, but they will always come back if you give them good reason. No matter how old you get, your muscles never lose hope. Few cells of the body are as capable as muscle cells are of change and reformation, of achievement and transcendence… Women need muscle, as much as they can muster. They need muscle to shield their light bones, and they need muscle to weather illness. And being strong in a blunt way, a muscleheaded way, is easier than being skilled at a sport. It is a democratic option, open to the klutzes and the latecomers, and women should seize the chance to become cheaply, fowzily strong, because the chance exists, and let’s be honest, we don’t have many. Being strong won’t make you happy or fulfilled, but it’s better to be sullen and strong than sullen and weak

the empty-closet theory of the breast: if it’s there, it will be stuffed.

A woman’s breasts welcome illusion and the imaginative opportunities of clothing.

The spiral arteries support a large, Draculean placenta. The placenta must be large and rich to support the growth of the fetal brain. Brain tissue is insatiable. Pound for pound, it is ten times more expensive to maintain than any other tissue of the body. During the last three months of pregnancy, the growth of the fetal brain is so explosive that stoking it demands nearly three quarters of all the energy entering the baby through the umbilical cord. No wonder the cord is so fat, so much like a long sausage, and no wonder the expulsion of the meaty placenta after the birth of the baby is considered an event in itself, worthy of being classified as the third stage of labor (the first being the dilation of the cervix, the second the delivery of the infant). The baby’s brain must eat, and it eats blood.

Phylogeny,

Janus

humans have twenty-three pairs of chromosomes and that the pairs of chromosomes are the same in men and in women, with the exception of pair number 23—the sex chromosomes. In that case, women have two X chromosomes and men have one X and one Y. Moreover, a woman’s two X chromosomes look pretty much like all her other chromosomes. Chromosomes resemble Xs.

(For the record, the average penis is about 4 inches long when flaccid, 5.7 inches when erect. That’s a bit bigger than the gorilla’s 3-inch erection, but then there’s the blue whale, the world’s largest mammal, who has, yes, a 10-foot pole.)

By growing a beard, a man turns his face into an echo of his crotch; and the capacity to grow a beard very likely predates the use of cosmetics by a few hundred thousand years.