4 ms·

A Whale of a Tale about a Science Breakthrough Ignored for Decades

1 points by webmaven 5y ago

webmaven 5y ago
> When they combined their data, they found that female short-finned pilot whales stopped reproducing around the age of 36, but still lived for about 14 years more. For the first time ever, Marsh and Kasuya had discovered menopause in a non-human animal. > Despite the breakthrough finding, which challenged our understanding of a fundamental biological process, reaction to her talk was less than positive. “The mainly male audience was quite scathing,” Marsh says. “They couldn’t believe that there would be females in a population that had stopped breeding, because the reason they were there was to breed.” Wow. Even though this was 1981, this is evidence for an intensely blinkered viewpoint in the field. This was the heyday of r/K selection theory (coined by E.O. Wilson in 1967), and it should be completely obvious that ceteceans are classic K-strategists. Given that, why wouldn't females stick around until their youngest calves reached sexual maturity (at 12-ish), especially in a highly social species? Taking the position that females' relevance ends with reproduction isn't just sexist, under the circumstances it actually seems like motivated reasoning. There are other counterarguments that can be made, but most of them (like group selection favoring more overlap in lifespans within a ship-of-Theseus pod) would be somewhat ahistorical, since this happened when acceptance of group selection was at its lowest point.
car_analogy 5y ago
> “We’ve been told that only through the grace of modern medicine—vaccines, surgery, antibiotics—are women are living long enough to experience menopause,” says gynecologist and obstetrician Jen Gunter, author of The Menopause Manifesto. I'm sorry, but I simply do not believe that "we've been told that". This was said in ~1980, when people still living remembered a time before widespread vaccines and antibiotics, and there was not a disproportionate number of men reaching old age compared to women. On what possible basis could this misperception have formed? I have never in my entire life heard that anyone used to believe women would die before reaching menopause without modern medicine, while men can reach past that age just fine. Is there a wealth of books from the time period, where grandmothers are conspicuously absent? Is there any evidence to this claim at all?
- dekhn 5y ago
  The misperception probably came about when the mean age of death increased dramatically due to the enormous drop in mortality. Because far fewer young people were dying, the mean age of death increased. But plenty of people lived into their 70s, and many lived into their 50s.
  - car_analogy 5y ago
    Possible, but that affected both sexes about equally, so using it as some kind of indicator of sexism is very dishonest.
    - dekhn 5y ago
      Well... a major reason for death during childbirth or early years was death of the mother during childbirth, so I suppose it's not completely unrelated.

1 points by webmaven 5y ago

> When they combined their data, they found that female short-finned pilot whales stopped reproducing around the age of 36, but still lived for about 14 years more. For the first time ever, Marsh and Kasuya had discovered menopause in a non-human animal. > Despite the breakthrough finding, which challenged our understanding of a fundamental biological process, reaction to her talk was less than positive. “The mainly male audience was quite scathing,” Marsh says. “They couldn’t believe that there would be females in a population that had stopped breeding, because the reason they were there was to breed.” Wow. Even though this was 1981, this is evidence for an intensely blinkered viewpoint in the field. This was the heyday of r/K selection theory (coined by E.O. Wilson in 1967), and it should be completely obvious that ceteceans are classic K-strategists. Given that, why wouldn't females stick around until their youngest calves reached sexual maturity (at 12-ish), especially in a highly social species? Taking the position that females' relevance ends with reproduction isn't just sexist, under the circumstances it actually seems like motivated reasoning. There are other counterarguments that can be made, but most of them (like group selection favoring more overlap in lifespans within a ship-of-Theseus pod) would be somewhat ahistorical, since this happened when acceptance of group selection was at its lowest point.

car_analogy 5y ago

> “We’ve been told that only through the grace of modern medicine—vaccines, surgery, antibiotics—are women are living long enough to experience menopause,” says gynecologist and obstetrician Jen Gunter, author of The Menopause Manifesto. I'm sorry, but I simply do not believe that "we've been told that". This was said in ~1980, when people still living remembered a time before widespread vaccines and antibiotics, and there was not a disproportionate number of men reaching old age compared to women. On what possible basis could this misperception have formed? I have never in my entire life heard that anyone used to believe women would die before reaching menopause without modern medicine, while men can reach past that age just fine. Is there a wealth of books from the time period, where grandmothers are conspicuously absent? Is there any evidence to this claim at all?

dekhn 5y ago
The misperception probably came about when the mean age of death increased dramatically due to the enormous drop in mortality. Because far fewer young people were dying, the mean age of death increased. But plenty of people lived into their 70s, and many lived into their 50s.
- car_analogy 5y ago
  Possible, but that affected both sexes about equally, so using it as some kind of indicator of sexism is very dishonest.
  - dekhn 5y ago
    Well... a major reason for death during childbirth or early years was death of the mother during childbirth, so I suppose it's not completely unrelated.