Cat Bohannon, 'celebrated' author of Eve claims castrated males live longer.

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Cat Bohannon who claims castrated men live longer is a science writer, does anyone know if she has a science degree? Her master's degree is in creative non-fiction and her doctorate in narrative and cognition, whatever that means. I couldnt find what her basic degree was and I have some worry about that as she is being touted as a scientist online, based largely, I suspect, on her science writing and her book , Eve : How the female body drove 200 million years of evolution. She is going to deliver a talk at the Royal Institute on June 8 which she styles as the Faraday Lecture her website at .

There is a mumsnet thread on her book and it reveals the bias of the author as well as some fairly basic errors.

She is on X and there was a furore over a Guardian Science tweet about their feature on her. She is very breezy about men prolonging their lives by getting rid of two "death nuggets", yep, their balls. She is very much a TWAW and maybe she is doing her bit for the eunuch community?

This tweet references a very controversial remark apparently by Bohannan : The subheading "men and other castrated mammals we use for cheap labour live longer and create less of a generational burden on society, says researcher" seems to have been removed. Also removed : Cat Bohannon says that unlike Europeans, the Arabs used to castrate their male slaves which stopped them reproducing and prevented the burden of a generational population".

https://twitter.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1797267285532361171

Study referenced, based on 81 eunuchs.

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(12)00712-9

I'd not be surprised that removing fighting and violence from a subgroup would increase the average lifespan. There's nothing in the article to support the hypothesis of cardiovascular event link.

Eunuchs weren't a random subgroup that were castrated, they'd have a different social role at that period in history.

So the statement is fairly benign, the extrapolation to it being good for men now is a totally daft.

probably not relevant, but it's widely accepted that neutered male cats live a lot longer on average than intact ones.

I think this could be difficult to test, you aren't going to have anything like a random castrated population. That being said, I don't think it would be a bizarre thing if true. If you could get good data, I wouldn't be surprised either way.

I'd have expected a good science writer to be less definitive.

It is certainly true that Arabs castrated most of their male slaves which is why you don't tend to see populations of descendents of their slaves, even though they were involved in the slave trade for something like 1000 years.

At least one study where it was possible to compare the lifespans of comparable groups found little difference between the longevity of castrated and non-castrated men who had, presumably, very similar lifestyles.

In 1993, Eberhard and Susan Neishlag published in the journal, Nature, the results of a survey* on the longevity of 50 castrati with birth dates between the year 1581 and 1858, who are mentioned in published encyclopedias and biographies. Their control group was a series of 200 intact male singers from similar sources born during the same period. The two groups were indistinguishable; the castrati had a lifespan of 65.5 + 18.8 years and the intact singers 64.3 + 14.1 years (mean + SD).

Any study has to take into account lifestyle factors.

*Eberhard Nieschlag, Susan Nieschlag, & Herman Behre, Life span and testosterone, Nature, 366, 215, 1993

She claims she was joking and that much has been made of one throwaway line. But it seems that it was more than a single joke and she referenced studies, fine, even if they werent particularly definitive but the historical examples she cites of Arab slavers is problematic, especially as it relates to the liberal Hay Festival and Guardian crowd. I do think it is toxic feminism to treat men's fertility as disposable- a similar joke about women would land badly, wouldnt it?

OP - I think if you want to attack Cat Bohannon, you'll have to find a better angle than this rather lame one.

It may or may not be true that castration increases expected male lifespan - that's a scientific question, and not a straightforward one. Controlling for lifestyle as a PP recommended doesn't seem right to me, since one possible mechanism is that castration causes men to make different lifestyle choices.

Whether castration would be good for men's overall well-being is a different question, and also an interesting one. Men remain fertile almost their entire lives. Is it really necessary for most men to be fertile in their 60s and 70s? Or would they be happier, healthier, longer-lived without testicles? I don't know what the answer to this is, but it's doesn't seem inhumane to ask.

A little detail of her discusssing her book at Hay:

https://x.com/Sorelle_Arduino/status/1796514256516759963

My primary question was about her scientific credentials- does anyone know?

'Researcher, scholar, writer, freak. Cat completed her PhD in 2022 at Columbia University, where she studied the evolution of narrative and cognition.';

Whether castration would be good for men's overall well-being is a different question, and also an interesting one. Men remain fertile almost their entire lives. Is it really necessary for most men to be fertile in their 60s and 70s? Or would they be happier, healthier, longer-lived without testicles? I don't know what the answer to this is, but it's doesn't seem inhumane to ask.

Doesnt seem inhumane? Well ask the same of women past childbearing age being relieved of their wombs and breasts (they can run faster for one!).

Her LinkedIn mentions her PhD (narrative and cognition) and her Master's degree (creative non-fiction), but not her first degree. Presumably there's a reason she doesn't mention it, and my best guess is that she's not a scientist but likes to pass herself off as one.

My thoughts exactly. A lot of people are describing her as a scientist - biologist and even, geneticist. I happen to think that science credentials are important when one such as Bohannon projects herself as a voice of authority on these matters. She is officially described as a researcher and that word hides a lot.

Kathleen Stock and Helen Joyce are often attacked for lacking medical and scientific credentials and yet having the temerity to write books on the trans issue. Of course those attacks are specious because the trans issue is primarily a socio-political phenomenon nd both women are more than qualified to write their books.. Bohannon belongs to a group - often very activist, and well placed in institutions considered authoritative/scientific- who mouth off on scientific issues in the media and yet their credentials are often not questioned at all.

Helen Joyce has a PhD in maths, so I'd argue she has more impressive credentials than most of her critics.

I am now really curious about Bohannon's academic background. It's normally hard to get into science journalism if you haven't got a science degree, so I'd like to give her the benefit of the doubt - and yet, if she has a science degree, why not shout about it? Very odd.

I agree totally. Many scientific institutions( and science adjacent characters like Adam Rutherford who wouldnt be caught dead with Helen Joyce) are fawning over this woman when they laugh at Dawkins for being an out of touch old fogey for his views on the trans issue. I would like to know her bloody credentials.

This NYT article says she "temporarily" dropped out of Butler University, though it doesn't say whether she went back, or what she was studying:

'She was born in Atlanta. Her parents — a psychology professor and a pianist — divorced when she was young, and her early life was restless and peripatetic, with her interests careering between the sciences and the arts.

'While a student at Butler University in Indianapolis, Bohannon temporarily dropped out to join the Revolutionary Anarchist Youth Group in western Massachusetts, and eventually studied poetry with the British poet Andrew Motion at the University of East Anglia.

'After a temporary move to Marseille, France and an equally temporary engagement to a French Moroccan biologist, Bohannon relocated to New York and joined several bands, playing the keyboard and guitar. She later enrolled in an M.F.A. program at the University of Arizona and married and divorced a musician. (After the marriage broke up, she said, she lived for three months in her car in a parking lot near the University of Arizona football stadium.) She wrote a lot of poetry, “mostly about science or using scientific literature,” she recalled.

'She then went to Columbia, earning an M.F.A. in creative writing before embarking on her Ph.D. Her thesis involved writing computer programs that “analyzed parts of speech in many thousands of novels over the last 400 years in the English language, and treated them as my subject pool to ask cognitive questions,” she explained.'

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/books/cat-bohannon-eve.html

First degree from Columbia School of Arts (class of 2009)
[source https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/eve-cat-bohannon-review]

PhD in the English department in 2022: https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/rdwn-xg39

I very much doubt that she has any scientific credentials.

Her Master's degree is in "creative non-fiction". I had to look up what that is supposed to mean. Here are some results.

"The term creative nonfiction is credited to Lee Gutkind, who defines this genre as “true stories well told.”"

"Within the world of creative writing, the term creative nonfiction encompasses texts about factual events that are not solely for scholarly purposes."

So that would include looking up studies on a particular subject and writing a story around them. As a creative writer, not a scientist. I suspect the research in the "researcher" part of the self-description consists of reading the studies.

Can't we run a mass trial experiment to test the hypothesis?

Judging by her LinkedIn, the 2009 degree was her Master's, not her bachelor's.

I hadn't considered the Twaw aspect to be honest. There might be a case for having your prostate removed in your 40s , if prostate cancer is in your family I suppose. Didn't eunuchs suffer with various conditions though , like obesity or brittle bones?

I'm not really seeing this as some elixir of life tbh. After all , bacteria are virtually immortal. But I don't fancy being a microscopic organism living on a piece of poo.