Why do men have a longer period of fertility, relative to their lifespan, than women? (Bonus: is this true of other species as well?)
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« Seed's Daily Zeitgeist: 9/21/2006 | Main | Seed's Daily Zeitgeist: 9/22/2006 »
Ask A Sb, September 21
Category: Ask a ScienceBlogger
Posted on: September 21, 2006 1:04 PM, by Katherine Sharpe
Comments
A non-biologists guess:
Females only gain an evolutionary benefit from producing offspring if the offspring survive to sexual maturity. Having infants until the day you die doesn't do you any good because left-behind infants will probably die. Therefore women should stop being fertile, have just enough time to raise their last young to sexual maturity, and then drop dead. Men, of course, will carry on pursuing young totty until the day they keel over, dropping their jeans and spreading their genes with reckless abandon.
According to this model, for species in which females do the majority of child rearing, the gap between the end of fertility and death should be strongly correlated with the age of offspring at sexual maturity.
Posted by: csrster | September 22, 2006 7:34 AM
Crster's theory assumes, of course, that men have no vested evolutionary interest in their offspring, that all they do is supply sperm and be off. It's a popular belief of sociobiology that men are secondary to reproduction and it's a given of patriarchal evolutionary psychology that reproduction is all women's business, men just drop by to donate the sperm and then they're off. As charming as this theory is, I don't think we have any real evidence for this just-so story.
Posted by: Zuska | November 12, 2006 5:40 PM