To think the menopause makes no sense evolutionarily speaking

[CurdinHenry]

Sure maybe it makes sense that women evolve into a new phase of wisdom and a role that's different from child having and of that. But how come we all seem to run out of the basic chemicals needed to keep our pelvic floor from collapsing? How can we be evolved to be almost certain to get very unwell across time (in our longer years on this planet) if we don't take supplements that have only existed for less than 100 years????

Feel a bit stressed about it.

But what age was a child capable of surviving and when we talk about ‘evolution’ what does that mean?
The early Homo sapien children were probably truly capable of being self sufficient and able to survive at about 12 yrs, a woman having a child at say 20 would then die at 32? No. Life expectancy date is skewed by infant and child mortality so we think people dropped dead at 30 or 40 but if they survived childhood and adolescence and didn’t die from an infection or eaten by a wild animal but just lived to a natural death they would have died at 70ish like today.

Evolution happens very very gradually over generations, but in terms of our bodies it’s still pretty similar the biggest change to our ability to survive has been medicine and science as well as societal changes and how we live.

Someone has probably already said this, but evolution isn't about designing the 'best' outcome.

At its simplest, evolution is just the result of creatures being able to successfully reproduce and raise their young to independence. There's no evolutionary pressure to select for what happens to the creatures after they've successfully reproduced and raised their young.

I suppose if a female line who was were healthier into old age resulted in more young being raised to adulthood, and out-competing other, less healthy elderly female lines and their young, then naturally that healthier line would become dominant and the other might eventually die out.

But otherwise, evolution doesn't care what happens to anything once it's raised its young to independence.

We're not 'supposed' to die, it just doesn't really matter, evolutionarily speaking, if we do.

Although I imagine that groups of humans with plenty of fairly healthy middle-aged and older group members would be more successful and prolific than humans who lost their older generation (and their knowledge, skills, and childcare) early on in adulthood, so would out-compete the groups where older humans were less long-lived.

I’m post menopausal and have no issues all, not taking hrt, it’s certainly not a given you will have problems. Remember many people didn’t live past 50 in the past. I actually think many of the issues women face today in peri/meno are due to lifestyle, psychological issues seek to be huge for many and they are a product of how we live today - I work with older women and they don’t understand why women 20 years or more their junior whine about menopause so much, very few of them had hrt and they are fully functioning in their 80’s and 90’s now.

I’m 4 years past menopause and if I’m very unwell from it nobody has mentioned it. I don’t take HRT, my bladder is fine, my moods are fine.

Absolutely untrue.

Maybe if we lived as we were originally built to - as busy, active hunter gatherers doing hard work all day - we wouldn't have weak pelvic floors or a slew of the other common symptoms?

Not that I am volunteering to give it a try!

How lovely for you. 85% of women do get symptoms. So you’re very lucky. Well done.

To be fair there's a lot of bandwidth between 'got symptoms' and being genuinely incapacitated.

In the same way at least 85% of women probably say they don't get 8 hours of good unbroken sleep a night but the vast majority of those will crack of without seeking treatment for it.

i think it makes perfect sense. Our bodies shut down reproductive function to conserve energy in our physical decline. This allows us to survive and exist to pass on knowledge. Continuity of knowledge is the distinguishing factor in human development.

Sadly, I agree with this.

Menopause is the payoff for having to birth babies with huge but immature brains. Human infants are helpless for a good few years, they need feeding and nurturing to reach mental and physical maturity so human mothers are designed to invest time and effort in having and raising fewer offspring than say cats or badgers do.

As we get older the chance of being able to raise a child for the number of years it takes to physical and mental maturity stops being possible so our bodies don’t waste the effort of producing viable eggs that are not going survive long enough to in turn reproduce.

But we would have been grandmothers at 30 ish because we'd be having babies at 14/15/16 (basically as soon as we were fertile). By the time we were menopausal it's possible we'd already be great grandmothers and possibly also still mothers of dependent children at the same time. Having middle aged women in the community unburdened by their own young children probably did (does?) have some benefits but I think it's been overplayed in this relatively new attempt to reframe menopause as this positive new life phase.

But from an evolutionary perspective it doesn't really come into play, unless it's a case of early or late menopause conferring an advantage in terms of multi-generational child rearing and that tendency being hereditary, but I'm not sure that's the case.

It's also the case that a lot of the "issues" of menopause like sweats/brain fog/ insomnia are more of a problem in modern society. If you were just hunting and gathering it likely didn't affect your ability to function/ contribute to the community that much.

Only things that affect our ability to reproduce have an influence on natural selection and therefore evolution. Menopause symptoms happen after reproduction so there is no selection in force. Similarly with the symptoms of ageing.

Having said that, babies and children with an available grandmother to protect and feed them as well as parents were more likely to survive historically. Therefore families with the genetic trait to lose the ability to reproduce many years before death would have a survival advantage amd so genes causing menopause would be passed on to the next generation.

I have "evolved into a new phase of wisdom" myself thanks.

Don't put women down. Menopause is called second spring in Chinese medicine. It's a time of empowerment and growth not decline.

Being less physically active as we age.has a significant impact on many symptoms of menopause and aging. If you spend a lot of time squatting and carrying heavy loads your sleep, pelvic floor, heart health, strength and bone health will all benefit. There's a variant of the grandmother hypothesis, the active grandparent hypothesis, which suggests that selection indirectly favours menopausal women who were active, so likely to be helping with childrearing and contributing to their community.

You do appreciate how many women died in childbirth? I recently did our family tree and got it back to 1450. Nearly all the deaths of women in their 20s/30s were in childbirth, and far fewer men than women of that age seemed to die. Those who survived cracked on until mostly the 70s, many to the 80s.

Not everyone struggles. Found out through a blood test that I’m at the end and I didn’t even know I’d started.

Nature doesn’t care about your pelvic floor, your use is over.

Menopause is physically the beginning of the end. Once upon a time we would have been lucky to reach menopause, and the few women that did certainly wouldn’t have had another half a lifetime ahead of them like we do. Once you’re no longer popping eggs out, your oestrogen levels drop dramatically - like a castrated man’s testosterone levels would. Once that happens, our bones and cardiovascular systems are affected as well as cell turnover. We heal much more slowly and we are more vulnerable to infection and autoimmune diseases: It’s not evolution, it’s nature’s way of pulling the plug.

Yes to this. It would have been around 70-75 in the Victorian era if we disregarded the fact 25% of children died in infancy for example.

Anyway, I agree about the way menopause makes a woman feel. It seems unnecessarily cruel. I understand why it makes sense to prevent a woman from having children past a certain age when it’s no longer safe and the risks to both her and the baby are excessive but there’s no need to make women feel like shit for years in the process. I always think if god is real he sure hated women.

The average age was low because so many children died in infancy. If you made it to adulthood you had a very reasonable chance of getting to old age. It’s absolutely not true that until the 20th century nearly everyone was dead by 40.

Yes menopause sucks for some women ( but only a third get really bad symptoms ) but it’s the sort of thing you can get through, even if hard. And it obviously hasn’t affected your ability to breed. So there’s no natural selection against it.

It meant that our ancestors could have more children as there were older women to look after the older children and support with child rearing. Other species such as elephants and I believe orcas do something similar (I could have made that up but I’m sure I read than somewhere).

This is my favourite explanation of menopause.