Hacker News Reader

There's the grandmother hypothesis that holds we could just not have menopause and reproduce more, but we don't because there's greater evolutionary advantage for having the elderly provide support to their kin. Maybe this type of kin selection is bounded by consanguinity though, and that limits the advantage? Or maybe population pressure discourages family units from getting too large?

View on HN

That’s the kind of evolutionary explanation that doesn’t fit natural selection at all in any time period

You would need to explain how populations who did those things were selected against

Instead of the more aligned reality that there was a random attractive or forceful menopausal mutant that popped out alot of babies or put alot of babies in others

speaking of attractive, what we see now is that older women are selected against and everything considered attractive is correlated to ability of carrying a pregnancy to term. which came first? impossible for me to say, would older women have many more pregnancies if the menopause never happened? the viable eggs would have still gone towards zero, unlike other mammals and beings

Reply on news.ycombinator.com