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Menopause: An Interesting Article on Skepchick

Schwadevivre

Schwadevivre

Antitheist
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Dec 13, 2014
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This is a subject in which (because I am male) I have had only a peripheral awareness that there is an evolutionary problem.
Insights Into Menopause Come from Killer Whales
A fun fact about human people with uteruses is that we are one of the very few species in which menopause happens and the person can continue living a long and happy life for many years afterwards. There are only three species in the world in which females live for significant years after they lose their fertility: humans, pilot whales, and killer whales. So that’s a little weird. Most mammals have pretty similar reproductive patterns, and it does make an evolutionary sense that after an animal has stopped being able to produce babies they don’t stick around for too long and take up resources. So why on earth do we have menopause?

There are a few theories that have been floating around for a while. One suggests that technology and medicine simply changed our lifespans so that women lost their fertility at about the same age but kept living. But the most common hypothesis was called the Grandmother Hypothesis, which suggests that women stop bearing children and move to caretaking roles that improve the chances their children and grandchildren have of surviving. Of course there’s nothing about this hypothesis that explains why humans but almost no other species do this, or why it would improve one’s evolutionary chances more than having your own kids (who are more genetically similar to you than your grandchildren).

But studies on killer whales might give insight into the mechanisms of menopause. One of the most striking things that orcas, pilot whales, and humans all have in common is the patterns of habitation that offspring use. In all of them, children either continue to live with their parents into adulthood, or only daughters leave and move to their mate’s family. That means in all these cases, only some of the mother’s grandchildren will be in close proximity to her.
Click to expand...
 
The link states adult male whales are 14 times more likely to die in the year after their mother. Death certainly cuts down on the male's chance for sex.

"Especially in fields like evolutionary psychology, many people operate on the assumption that all of the adaptations that have got us where we are happened in order to allow men to have more sex and to allow women to keep their mates close to help raise children."

The author challenges this assumption, but the article seems to support the idea that having the mother alive in the pod helps the adult males have sex. Not having much sex if you're a dead whale.
 
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