14 DAY TRIAL // Women get menopause because of men's preference for younger women, biologist Rama Singh has concluded after spending numerous hours analyzing this phenomenon.
Apparently, menopause is not at all common in the animal kingdom. Quite the contrary, there are some who say that only human females enter menopause once they pass a certain age.
Up until now, it was believed that women become infertile in their later years so that they may help raise their grandchildren. This is the so-called grandmother theory.
Rama Singh says that, rather than being intended to keep women from continuing to reproduce, menopause is the direct result of the fact that older women no longer get to reproduce, seeing how men would much rather go for younger partners.
Otherwise put, menopause is triggered by natural selection, and it is an unintended outcome of this process, EurekAlert explains.
“We designed and used a computational model and computer simulation to show that male mating preference for younger females in humans could have led to the accumulation of mutations deleterious to female fertility and thereby produced menopause.”
“Our model demonstrates for the first time that neither an assumption of pre-existing diminished fertility in older women nor a requirement of benefits derived from older, non-reproducing women assisting younger women in rearing children is necessary to explain the origin of menopause,” the biologist writes in his paper.
Rama Singh goes on to explain that, contrary to popular opinion, menopause is not a phenomenon that ups the specie's survival chances by having older women look after children.
The biologist believes that, all things considered, menopause is a recognition of the fact that, once a woman passes a certain age, fertility no longer serves a purpose.
Interestingly enough, the biologist suspects that, provided that women were the ones who had the opportunity to pick and choose mainly younger men, human males would have been the ones to become infertile as they got older.
A detailed account of this investigation and its findings was published in this week's issue of the journal PLOS Computational Biology.