ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2007
Testing evolutionary theories of menopause.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2007. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 36 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
36 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 115 citations in OpenAlex.
- Alternatives to the grandmother hypothesis: a meta-analysis of the association between grandparental and grandchild survival in patrilineal populations.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2011Pooled it
- Dark Skin Evolution in Early Humans: Revisiting the Skin Cancer Hypothesis Through Migration-Related Mismatch.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Review
- The evolution of menopause in toothed whales.Nature · 2024Article
- Sex Differences in Biological Systems and the Conundrum of Menopause: Potential Commonalities in Post-Menopausal Disease Mechanisms.International journal of molecular sciences · 2022Review
- On age-specific selection and extensive lifespan beyond menopause.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- Sexual frequency is associated with age of natural menopause: results from the Study of Women's Health Across the Nation.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- Can postfertile life stages evolve as an anticancer mechanism?PLoS biology · 2019Article
- Current ecology, not ancestral dispersal patterns, influences menopause symptom severity.Ecology and evolution · 2019Article
- Low Evolutionary Selection Pressure in Senescence Does Not Explain the Persistence of Aβ in the Vertebrate Genome.Frontiers in aging neuroscience · 2019Review
- Intralocus sexual conflict can resolve the male-female health-survival paradox.Nature communications · 2018Article
- Caring for parents: an evolutionary rationale.BMC biology · 2018Article
- Menopause and Rheumatic Disease.Rheumatic diseases clinics of North America · 2017Review
- Why do women stop reproducing before menopause? A life-history approach to age at last birth.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Review
- A Theory for the Origin of Human Menopause.Frontiers in genetics · 2016Article
- Which Is the Most Significant Cause of Aging?Antioxidants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2015Review
- Early-life reproduction is associated with increased mortality risk but enhanced lifetime fitness in pre-industrial humans.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2015Article
- Practical Support from Fathers and Grandmothers Is Associated with Lower Levels of Breastfeeding in the UK Millennium Cohort Study.PloS one · 2015Article
- Article
- Skin cancer was not a potent selective force in the evolution of protective pigmentation in early hominins.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2014Article
- A test of the intergenerational conflict model in Indonesia shows no evidence of earlier menopause in female-dispersing groups.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2014Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Why do women cease fertility rather abruptly through menopause at an age well before generalized senescence renders child rearing biologically impossible? The two main evolutionary hypotheses are that menopause serves either (i) to protect mothers from rising age-specific maternal mortality risks, thereby protecting their highly dependent younger children from death if the mother dies or (ii) to provide post-reproductive grandmothers who enhance their inclusive fitness by helping to care and provide for their daughters' children. Recent theoretical work indicates that both factors together are necessary if menopause is to provide an evolutionary advantage. However, these ideas need to be tested using detailed data from actual human life histories lived under reasonably 'natural' conditions; for obvious reasons, such data are extremely scarce. We here describe a study based on a remarkably complete dataset from The Gambia. The data provided quantitative estimates for key parameters for the theoretical model, which were then used to assess the actual effects on fitness. Empirically based numerical analysis of this nature is essential if the enigma of menopause is to be explained satisfactorily in evolutionary terms. Our results point to the distinctive (and perhaps unique) role of menopause in human evolution and provide important support for the hypothesized evolutionary significance of grandmothers.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.