#374 - The evolutionary biology of testosterone: how it shapes male development and sex-based behavioral differences, | Carole Hooven, Ph.D.

Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, and we've established a great team of analysts to make this happen. It is extremely important to me to provide all of this content without relying on paid ads.

To do this, our work is made entirely possible by our members, and in return, we offer exclusive member-only content and benefits above and beyond what is available for free. If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, it's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price of the subscription. If you want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership, head over to peterateiamd.com forward slash subscribe. My guest this week is Carol Hooven. Carol is a human evolutionary biologist, a former Harvard lecturer, and non-resident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Her research focuses on testosterone, sex differences, and behavior. She holds a PhD in biological anthropology, now human evolutionary biology, from Harvard University and is the author of T, the story of testosterone, the hormone that dominates and divides us. In this episode, we discuss how prenatal testosterone shapes the male body and brain turning genetic signals into thousands of developmental changes that underlie later sex differences, critical hormone surges and why they matter for lifelong behavior, DHT, androgen receptors, and rare natural experiments, for example 5 alpha reductase deficiency, that reveal how external genitalia and the prostate masculinize, distinct male and female aggression styles, direct physical confrontation versus indirect or relational tactics, and the evolutionary logic behind each, why modern life changes but doesn't erase ancient drives like male competitiveness and the trade offs of trying to suppress them.

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