Maggie's Farm

We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

Our Recent Essays Behind the Front Page

Much Sorry with Delays
Birth, Death and All That Stuff in Between
How to Honor Labor Day, Every Day
My Yom Kippur Miracle (Repost from 2010)
Good intro to fly casting
Peach update, with pie
NYC update
Easy for you to say: To the elites on mass immigration
For NYC on 9/11, Sailors' Snug Harbor
Pickled Peaches
Water Shoes
Labor Costs in U.S.
Your "identity"
Good news about The Great Courses
Uses of Hot Pepper Jelly/Sauce, Chutneys, and Jams
A Saturday Drive to Litchfield County, CT
How to Pick a Kayak
Civilized: Fruit forks and knives
Loads of kayaking on Cape Cod
Psychology Experiments' Questionable Results

Categories


All categories

Quicksearch

Links

Blog Administration

Open login screen

RSS Readers

Add to Google

Subscribe with Bloglines

Monday, December 28. 2015

Menopause Remains a Mystery


I am not sure why it is a mystery. Everything decays, wears out. Entropy is like gravity, and I doubt that humans in a natural environment were ever designed to live much past child-producing years (knees, ovaries, penile weakness, heart valves, loss of collagen, cancers, etc,). But we do, now. Most of us. 


Even Today, Menopause Remains a Mystery


Posted by Dr. Joy Bliss in Medical at 17:01 | Comments (8) | Trackbacks (0)

Trackbacks
Trackback specific URI for this entry

No Trackbacks

Comments
Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

And every time I have another birthday, it stuns me.
#1 Randy on 2015-12-28 18:00 (Reply)
Evolution is a imperfect system. It depends on chance and whatever works. There are a dozen or so physical characteristics of human anatomy that are inadequate but work well enough for us to survive. It doesn't have to make sense or be perfect to survive the test of time.
#2 GoneWithTheWind on 2015-12-28 18:07 (Reply)
The Bible says threescore-years-and-ten or if we are lucky, eighty years. So they lived to about the same age a few thousand years ago, but not many made it. Only recently has 80 come to be regarded as our due, and 100 the lucky number.

So many wish to live long. I do not. We wear out unevenly, so that until some balance is achieved, life will be impaired. Yet more than that, I find young people tiring and irritating.
#3 Assistant Village Idiot (Link) on 2015-12-28 20:40 (Reply)
And their so-called music so gol-darned loud and GET OFF MY LAWN!

Sorry, AVI; couldn't resist the set-up you gave me.
#3.1 Sam L. on 2015-12-28 20:46 (Reply)
Even my son says "get off my lawn." that's how old I am.
#3.1.1 Assistant Village Idiot (Link) on 2015-12-29 23:55 (Reply)
The approach of eternity never bothered me, but damn the recent acceleration is disconcerting!
#4 James on 2015-12-29 06:49 (Reply)
From the article: "As one recent book on primate ecology puts it: “Menopause is still considered a distinctly human trait.” That we live so far beyond our reproductive usefulness is a puzzle that was answered, supposedly, by the ‘grandmother hypothesis’. By this reasoning, human females live beyond their reproductive years because their presence benefits their children and grandchildren. One aspect of this relates to the fact that humans are no longer well-designed to give birth, because walking upright and having a large brain has led to a pelvis size which makes giving birth standing up or without help extremely difficult. Older females, then, can be useful even when they are not producing offspring."

No mystery there.
#5 locomotivebreath1901 on 2015-12-29 07:22 (Reply)
Some years ago, I heard an "authoritative" voice on menopause. The received wisdom then was that menopause was good because women would stop having babies when they were too old to look after them for the required years. As well, a menopausal woman would be available to help care for her grandbabies, which would increase the likelihood of said grandbabies surviving.
#6 Frances on 2015-12-30 00:26 (Reply)

Add Comment
(Your e-mail will not show in your comment)

By commenting on this site you agree to the site rules listed here. Email
addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for email notifications.

Quick reference guide: [i] italics [/i], [b] bold [/b], [u] underline [/u],
[url] (web address) [/url]. More tips here.

Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_.
E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications.

To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly.
CAPTCHA

BBCode format allowed
 
 
A Chris Southern Consulting website.