Menopause: Nature's Way of Saying Older Women aren't Sexually Attractive?

Menopause: Nature's Way of Saying Older Women aren't Sexually Attractive?

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Menopause: nature's way of saying older women aren't NAKED OLDER WOMEN TAKING OILED UP SELFIE IN MIRROR sexually attractive?

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Sitting at my desk today is a benefit made possible by my mother-in-law. She is taking care of my son, causing me no cost to preferably perform various other do the job and, in biological terms, have more babies. That, in short, is the leading explanation for why she and other women of her age possess evolved to stop having babies of their own and live long post-menopausal lives. It's known as the grandmother hypothesis.

However, this basic idea, and its comforting portrait of family cooperation, is being challenged. It has been half a century since scientwill bets began to explore why human females were one of only a couple of species to became infertile so early in their lives. The American evolutionary biologist George Williams wrote in 1957 that the menopause may have emerged to protect older women from the risks linked to childbirth, preserving them alive rather long plenty to help to make positive their young children increased up to possess grandchildren.

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Since then, the scientific debate has heated up. Indeed, some researchers own possibly been recently the concentrate on of violent ship from the common. As the research of menopause provides harvested, with more female researchers joining the ranks, it has become tinged with gender politics. The reason behind the menopause is longer just a biological conundrum no; it's a question of female identity.

On one side of the divide are those who insist that older women have proven themselves so useful they have evolved to survive beyond their reproductive years. On the other happen to be those who claim that the menopause is little more than a by-product of increased longevity or, considerably more controversially, that infertility arose simply because men don't fancy older women.

Answers to the problem may be coloured by gender bias, suggests Dr Rebecca Sear, an evolutionary demographer at the Manchester Institution of Tropical and Personal hygiene Drugs. "A lot of menopause work is done by women," she says. In contrast, "a whole lot of work on sexual selection by men will be done by men".

At the heart of the menopause puzzle are two biological facts: nature is efficient, and the purpose of life is to reproduce. Chimps in the wild, for instance, almost never survive beyond their 40s. Elephants live comfortably more lengthy but take on getting children into their 60s. A long post-menopausal life is so rare a phenomenon in nature that humans are believed to share it with only a couple of species of whale.

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Humans are unusual in other ways, too. Our babies count on us for considerably more than those of various other kinds carry out; and we co-operate. All this means that the contribution of grandmothers may become important.

In the 1980s the grandmother hypothesis got a boost thanks to the fieldwork of Professor Kristen Hawkes, an anthropologist at the University of Utah. Observing the Hadza, a partly hunter-gatherer tribe in Tanzania who she says live a life as close to our early ancestors as anyone is likely to find today, she came to a surprising revelation. "There they were right in front of us. These ancient women who had been only dynamos," she says. There was a division of labour in the tribe that not only included older women, but depended on them.

According to Sear, whose function provides likewise displayed that grandmothers improve child mortality in lots of organizations, this should barely have got ended up astonishing. It is only our assumptions, she says, which are built on decades of research that put men at the heart of evolution, that make it appear odd.

"It is estimated that women do 80% of the work in African subswill betence agricultural societies, into old age even," says Sear. "The man-the-hunter model of human evolution really does drive me nuts. Adult men and girls in hunter-gatherer organizations are inclined to get again same volumes of meals. The concept that ladies are usually fresh to the workplace will be out-of-date."

Hawkes found that the Hadza grandmothers helped their daughters raise more and healthier children. She claims mathematical models prove that this contribution - small though it may seem - could be important enough to account for why women who can no longer give birth have evolved to live for so long. They were vital to reproduction even if they weren't themselves having babies.

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Last year, however, evolutionary biologist Dr Rama Singh, at McMaster University in copyright, emerged up with a entirely several reason. He and two co-workers furthermore at McMaster, Richard Morton and Jonathan Stone, posted a controversial document that stated that males had been the purpose for feminine infertility.

"Let's assume mating is not random. We know that men, old and young, prefer younger women. So in the presence of younger women, elderly ladies shall not really end up mating as many," says Singh. If they aren't having sex, hwill be argument goes, they don't need to get able to reproduce.

Singh's idea attracted worldwide news coverage, as well as a huge backlash. "A lot of women wrote bad letters to us. They thought we were giving men more say in evolution," he says.

Hawkes and Sear are among his critics. "It's a stupid argument and it was trashed when it came out. It's a circular explanation. The reason men don't prefer post-menopausal women is that they're post-menopausal and they can't get pregnant, not the other way round," says Sear.

Singh, meanwhile, insists that his case is correct obviously. "Whether you believe it or not, nowadays simply just take a look near world. The science is dried out and cut. The nagging problem with evolutionary biologists is that they like a story. The truth is, nature doesn't care about sympathy or feeling," he says. Hwill be lab, which focuses on male sexual selection, will be functioning to search for outside when in background the menopause evolved today.

But this dogged focus on male sexual selection is out of date, suggests Hawkes. "So much of the concentrate of human evolution was on what men were doing," she says. The grandmother hypothesis has changed that.

That is not to say that grandmothers are necessarily heartwarmingly selfless babysitters. A supplement to the theory proposes that inter-generational conflict will be what forces women into caring for their grandchildren rather than having babies of their own. Dr Virpi Lummaa, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sheffield, studied church parish record data in Finland, finding that if resources are limited, infant survival was drastically reduced if daughters-in-law and mothers-in-law had babies at the same time.

"If a mother-in-law cares for her grandchildren, she nonetheless advantages because she will be genetically linked to them. There is no such benefit the other way round for the daughters-in-law," says Lummaa.

Less harmonious though this family picture may be, it still affirms that the menopause does not mark the beginning of the end as far as nature is concerned, but the start of another equally productive phase in a woman's life.

The menopause question is a particularly tough one for scientwill bets because there are almost no species to comphappen to be us with. The notable exception is the female killer whale, which puts a stop to recreating in her 30s or 40s but can survive into her 90s.

In this case, there seems to be less of a "grandmother effect", than a "mother effect", according to Dr Darren Croft, a behavioural ecologist at the University of Exeter, who is studying whale menopause. "Our research shows that female killer whales act as lifelong carers for their own offspring, their adult sons particularly," he says.

However, with evolutionary exploration of this kind, which seems at traditions and behaviour, theories are so difficult to prove that almost anything can be true, says Sear. "The problem with the evolution of a trait is you can never know for certain. Basically, you can help make a unit explain to you anything."

Among the explanations out there, Sear, like many researchers in the field, does at least find the grandmother hypothesis plausible. "I do also like hypotheses that give women some agency in evolution," she says.