How Men's Choice Of Mates May Have Led To Menopause?
A dapper older gentleman spurns his mate of a certain age to take a fresh-faced young lover. You've seen that movie before, right? Well, this choice of youth may turn out to be more than a Hollywood trope. Researchers say decisions like that one may have been the evolutionary source of menopause. While conventional wisdom says that men prefer younger women because they're fertile, a recent report in PLOS Computational Biology suggests that it's precisely this preference for younger mates that caused older women to become infertile in the first place. Computational biologist Jonathon Stone of McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, spoke with Shots about the mathematical model he and some colleagues used to come up with that hypothesis. First, for the sake of computation, they assumed that women have infinite capacity for both fertility and survival. Then, they slowly introduced common genetic mutations into the math mix and observed how those changes led women to become inf...