Seed has a piece on the discoveries relating to menopause and its importance to the "Grandmother Hypothesis." Unlike male decline in fertility menopause is a specific and deliberate sequence of proactive processes by the female body to shut down reproductive capacity. Something like this is almost certainly functionally significant, and anthropological work which seems to show cross-cultural evidence of lower infant mortality in the presence of a maternal grandmother in the household is another important avenue in the overall program.
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Seeing as this is Mother's Day, I want to point to this working paper, Menopause and post-generative longevity: Testing the 'stopping-early' and 'grandmother' hypotheses. It is a 44 page review of a lot of literature that is out there. The short of it is that menopause is something of a mystery,…
I've discussed menopause as an adaptation and the grandmother effect before. I was also pleased to see the responses of Larry Moran's readers when he presented his standard anti-adaptationist line of argument. I don't want to retread familiar ground here, I'm not sure if menopause is an adaptation…
Here's an article on The Grandmother Hypothesis. Personally, I didn't take the idea seriously until a biological anthropologist told me that menopause was a tightly integrated proactive cascade of biochemical changes which shuts down female procreative capacity. In contrast, human males exhibit…
In biological anthropology there is a Grandmother Hypothesis as an explanation for why adult human females live so long after their reproduction ceases, and, why menopause occurs in the first place (male fertility tapers off over time, while women undergo a concerted physiological change which…
I saw an article recently about a study that concluded gorillas do indeed experience menopause. This surprised me because I had been told that female great apes (excepting humans) could continue to get pregnant their entire lives.
(Note: Our zoo has a female chimpanzee who is about 54 and goes through estrus frequently. I get a lot of questions from the public about her ability to have more babies. She is on birth control.)