Actually having elders in human societies is shown to positively correlate with better outcomes for the youth in that society. Grandmothers in particular have a measurable benefit.
Yeah. One idea is that, since our offspring take SO long to mature and take so many resources relative to other animals, that it makes more sense at some point for mothers to devote their resources to existing children rather than focus on trying to have more. So it benefits us as a species to have “support” people like grandmas in our society. This is getting into a tangent but there are all sorts of things that kinda “make sense” if you think about life before modern society. Homosexual men would have probably been an evolutionary advantage to a clan of early humans since it would have provided extra strong male bodies without adding to mating pressure. People with a preference for staying up at night and sleeping during the day could have provided more alert guards to watch for predators. Etc etc.
Except that it isn’t a religious thing. I don’t know if it was natural selection or societal pressure causing artificial selection, but human’s are something of an evolutionary anomaly in the sense that the only other animals on earth who go through menopause are a few species of whales. There’s a whole evolutionary hypothesis tied to it called the grandmother hypothesis. Or you can watch this PBS video about it if you don’t feel like reading. It’s pretty interesting really.
Edit: I’m also just gonna paste a paragraph from the wikipedia if people want the tl;dr.
Evolutionary theory dictates that all organisms invest heavily in reproduction in order to replicate their genes. According to parental investment, human females will invest heavily in their young because the number of mating opportunities available to them and how many offspring they are able to produce in a given amount of time is fixed by the biology of their sex. This inter birth interval (IBI) is a limiting factor in how many children a woman can have because of the extended developmental period that human children experience. Extended childhood, like the extended post-reproductive lifespan for females, is relatively unique to humans.[8] Because of this correlation, human grandmothers are well-poised to provide supplemental parental care to their offspring’s children. Since their grandchildren still carry a portion of their genes, it is still in the grandmother’s genetic interest to ensure those children survive to reproduction.
darwinian selection has nothing to do with aging. that’s religious right / 1920s robber baron bullshit.
Actually having elders in human societies is shown to positively correlate with better outcomes for the youth in that society. Grandmothers in particular have a measurable benefit.
https://elifesciences.org/articles/92914
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-93652-4
Yeah. One idea is that, since our offspring take SO long to mature and take so many resources relative to other animals, that it makes more sense at some point for mothers to devote their resources to existing children rather than focus on trying to have more. So it benefits us as a species to have “support” people like grandmas in our society. This is getting into a tangent but there are all sorts of things that kinda “make sense” if you think about life before modern society. Homosexual men would have probably been an evolutionary advantage to a clan of early humans since it would have provided extra strong male bodies without adding to mating pressure. People with a preference for staying up at night and sleeping during the day could have provided more alert guards to watch for predators. Etc etc.
Ohh, add this recent episode of Radiolab to the list.
https://radiolab.org/podcast/the-menopause-mystery
Except that it isn’t a religious thing. I don’t know if it was natural selection or societal pressure causing artificial selection, but human’s are something of an evolutionary anomaly in the sense that the only other animals on earth who go through menopause are a few species of whales. There’s a whole evolutionary hypothesis tied to it called the grandmother hypothesis. Or you can watch this PBS video about it if you don’t feel like reading. It’s pretty interesting really.
Edit: I’m also just gonna paste a paragraph from the wikipedia if people want the tl;dr.