Male mating choices: The drive behind menopause?

Anthia Le, Kristen Hawkes and Peter S. Kim

Theoretical Population Biology, 2022, vol. 145, issue C, 126-135

Abstract: When we examine the life history of humans against our closest primate relatives, the other great apes, there is notably a greater longevity in humans which includes a distinctive postmenopausal life stage, leading to the question, “How did human females evolve to have old-age infertility?†In their paper “Mate choice and the origin of menopause†(Morton et al., 2013), Morton et al. developed an agent-based model (ABM) to investigate the novel hypothesis that ancestral male mating choices, particularly forgoing mating with older females, were the driving force behind the evolution of menopause. From their model, they concluded that indeed male preference for young female mates could have driven females to lose fertility at older ages through deleterious mutations, leading to menopause.

Keywords: Human evolution; Ordinary differential equations; Menopause; Male mating preference (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:thpobi:v:145:y:2022:i:c:p:126-135

DOI: 10.1016/j.tpb.2022.04.001

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