Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The grandmother hypothesis is a hypothesis to explain the existence of menopause in human life history by identifying the adaptive value of extended kin networking. It builds on the previously postulated "mother hypothesis" which states that as mothers age, the costs of reproducing become greater, and energy devoted to those activities would be better spent helping her offspring in their ...
The grandmother cell hypothesis is an extreme version of the idea of sparseness, [22] [5] and is not without critics. The opposite of the grandmother cell theory is the distributed representation theory, that states that a specific stimulus is coded by its unique pattern of activity over a large group of neurons widely distributed in the brain.
Hawkes, an expert in human evolution and sociobiology, is the author of several studies on the “grandmother hypothesis,” which asserts that many of the characteristics that distinguish us from our ape ancestors are thanks to the thoughtful care of our mothers' mothers. [4]
The Grandmother hypothesis suggests that menopause was selected for humans because it promotes the survival of grandchildren. According to this hypothesis, post-reproductive women feed and care for children, adult nursing daughters, and grandchildren whose mothers have weaned them.
The disposable soma theory of aging posits that there is a trade-off in resource allocation between somatic maintenance and reproductive investment.Too low an investment in self-repair would be evolutionarily unsound, as the organism would likely die before reproductive age.
Finally, Williams' 1957 paper was the first to outline the "grandmother hypothesis". William's formulation stated that natural selection might select for menopause and post-reproductive life in females (though not explicitly mentioning grandchildren or the inclusive fitness contribution of grand-parenting).
"The grandmother hypothesis is meant to explain why menopause, rare in mammal species, arose in human evolution" In actuality, the Grandmother Hypothesis purports to explain why menopause had been maintained, not why it arose. Mid-life infertility occurs because female animals run out of oocytes.
The hominoids are descendants of a common ancestor.. Homo sapiens is a distinct species of the hominid family of primates, which also includes all the great apes. [1] Over their evolutionary history, humans gradually developed traits such as bipedalism, dexterity, and complex language, [2] as well as interbreeding with other hominins (a tribe of the African hominid subfamily), [3] indicating ...