Mary Roach Quote

Human fetuses have a vomeronasal organ, though no one knows whether it’s functional. You can no more ask a fetus about these things than a python. Rawson surmises that the organ is a holdover from when we were crawling out of the primordial soup,* and we needed to sense the chemicals in the environment and know which ones to go toward or away from.

Mary Roach

Human fetuses have a vomeronasal organ, though no one knows whether it’s functional. You can no more ask a fetus about these things than a python. Rawson surmises that the organ is a holdover from when we were crawling out of the primordial soup,* and we needed to sense the chemicals in the environment and know which ones to go toward or away from.

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About Mary Roach

Mary Roach (born March 20, 1959) is an American author specializing in popular science and humor. She has published seven New York Times bestsellers: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (2003), Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (2005), Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (2008), Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void (2010), Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal (2013), Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War (2016), and Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law (2021).