#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 Attia. 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 peteratiamd.com forward slash subscribe. My guest this week is Carol Houven. Carol is a human evolutionary biologist, a former Harvard lecturer, and nonresident 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 Tea, 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, five 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, Testosterone, aging, and hormone therapy for both sexes, including Carol's personal experience after surgical menopause. And the cultural debate over masculinity and the cost of denying biological sex differences, a theme of Carol's forthcoming book. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Carol Hovind. Carol, thank you so much for coming out to Austin. Great to meet you in person. Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here. This is a topic that we talk a lot about on the podcast, but usually from a pretty narrow lens, which is in the form of replacement. We talk about hormones both in men and women, sex hormones, and we talk about how they wax and wane as an individual ages. We obviously then talk about the medical use of them. But I don't think we've spent any time understanding the more basic fundamentals of these hormones, the role they play in our evolution. And anecdotally, I'll just share with you kind of the observation that any parent probably has if they …