Written by Australian doctor Rachel Heap, aimed at anti-vaxxers explaining the risks of neglecting to vaccinate children
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@makemedreamtonight
Written by Australian doctor Rachel Heap, aimed at anti-vaxxers explaining the risks of neglecting to vaccinate children
If we went home from our 9 - 5 jobs with 3 - 4 hours of extra work every day, we’d lose our minds. But we do it to high school kids and see absolutely no problem with it.
“Closeted people don’t face homophobia/transphobia” like take a wild fucking guess why they’re in closet in the first place buddy
Cave woman would have not known about the menopause until the life expectancy increased. Maybe there is another human hormonal change that we are not aware of as we have not reached the particular age it happens.
Totally incorrect! Actually, the fact that human females live past their reproductive life span is responsible for a great deal of human evolution, especially the ways in which we differ from our close ape relatives. This is called the Grandmother hypothesis.
Let me explain.
So the idea that human life expectancy has increased due to modern advancements is a myth. The average life span has certainly increased, however this is not because humans live longer (we have always lived to around 70-90yrs), but because infant mortality has decreased. In other words, modern medicine and abundant access to resources have decreased how how many children die, therefore increasing the average years humans live past birth.
So, Humans have known about menopause since the beginning, and it’s actually a huge part of our evolutionary history. Other apes do not live past their reproductive life span, as their bodies degrade shortly after ceasing to be fertile- evolution is all about how many offspring can be produce after all. Its generally a waste of resources to continue feeding adults who cannot reproduce when fertile adults and children are competing for those same resources.
So the fact that human females live for upwards of 30yrs past fertility was considered an evolutionary paradox. The key is that humans are really smart (sort of). We require a very long time to develop our brains, and so our infants are completely useless- unable to evan walk for a year, much less feed or protect themselves until middle childhood. They require a lot of attention and caring for, constant vigilence, not to mention hours spent teaching them basic survival tasks.
As a result, humans developed cooperative childraising systems, in which members outside of the child’s immediate family are responsible for caring for the young. However, if all the adults are busy raising their own children, no one would ever care for anyone else’s, except the older, not-yet-fertile children (who do assume childrearing roles, but are still developing and therefore are not good at it.) As a result, the females who stayed alive past their reproductive life span, no longer responsible for their own children, were able to care for the children of their children, allowing for their genes to be passed down more successfully. This creates a positive feedback system in which females lifespan progressively increases, since the older the grandmother, the more children the mother is able to have, and the more successfully they will be raised to adulthood, passing on the genes for long life to their children in turn.
This effect however decreased with subsequent generations: it’s less economical to have a grandmother AND a great grandmother taking care of the young. The payoffs aren’t high enough to push our lifespans even higher.
Tldr; humans have always had unusually long lifespans BECAUSE menopause occurs, and this is an integral aspect of our evolution, causing us to be as intelligent and adaptive as we are.
Even better, one of the ways we know about the grandmother effect is because you also see it in orcas! They can live to 80, but generally stop breeding in their 30s. There are three known species that have this kind of menapause– us, orcas and the Short-Finned Pilot Whale (also another very social species).
There’s a really nice explanation on this article:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jan/15/killer-whales-explain-meaning-of-the-menopause
When I talk about human lifespan lengthening, I am always referencing this. It appears now that I could have been more specific, as it now seems apparent that some people could have misinterpreted my point.
Look back through history any time you like and you will see that there are many instances of people living well into their old age. It simply wasn’t common because health couldn’t be maintained with the contemporary technology. Go back to all the known documents that can be confirmed. Marcus Aurelius lived to 59. Look up Old Tom Parr, and you will see that even during the Medieval and Renaissance, people lived quite long if they survived diseases. There are accounts from parts of Asia- China and Japan that detail the lives of very aged humans in the centuries even before 1100.
Thank you for allowing me to clarify
(Simon, this is me mostly responding to the people above you. :] )
I hate the grandmother hypothesis. It is one of my least favorite evolutionary theories, and every time it comes up in class I just have to get argumentative. So here’s why I dislike the grandmother hypothesis. It could be right, but I don’t think it is ‘cause it makes a couple of leaps of logic that we simply have no proof for. So here’s why I dislike it and why I think it is, at best, only partially correct.
1, It’s sexist. It was conceived in the 50s and 60s, a time when primarily male biologists and anthropologists very much were assuming gender roles always have been what they were in these mens’ time. There is no proof that this is the case (those with a uterus obviously have always been the ones who give birth, but the responsibility of childcare varies widely from culture to culture and we have no evidence of gender roles - or even evidence of gender at all - in early hominins when this would have been evolving.), as culture doesn’t survive fossilization and gender is cultural. It’s both naive and intellectually dishonest to make that assumption. Especially given that there’s evidence that women have always been more integral to food production and procurement than men (at least in hunter-gatherer societies and societies recently enough deceased for some culture to survive.). The grandmother hypothesis was and is deeply influenced by the cultural attitudes of them men who came up with it because they couldn’t conceive of a “use” for women past child-related functionality. Of course there’s likely always been some kind of division of labor, but evidence that correlates with gender grows thinner and thinner the further back you go and there’s absolutely no reason to think that men couldn’t have been considered equally important to child rearing. But I’ve read enough work from the time period to know that it never even entered the mind of male scientists that men assisted in child rearing. Their culture influenced their scientific work. They just didn’t see women.
2. It asks the wrong question. The question SHOULD be, why are humans so long lived, in general? Humans are the longest lived land mammal. The only ones that come close are some other primates that are kept in captivity. Many men are impotent, but no theory is necessary to explain why they are “allowed” by nature to live past their usefulness in breeding because men are assumed to have more than one, singular use. If the male role in hunter/gatherer is assumed to be hunter (which I don’t personally assume, but for argument’s sake.), then their usefulness comes to an end when they grow too old to effectively hunt (especially for a pursuit predator - although early anatomically modern humans used a variety of hunting techniques. My favorite of which is chasing large animals off cliffs and collecting their corpses at the bottom.), but no one asks “why do men live past their usefulness” because they are assumed to have other uses. Actually, elderly humans don’t have a whole lot of physical uses when it comes to the evolutionary necessities of procuring food and breeding. But they do have one really important use, and it’s all related to that damned big brain of ours. The elderly know things. For a species whose survival and evolution was almost entirely dependent on our social groupings, social bonding, and ability to use tools and solve puzzles, the elderly are an indispensable social and intellectual resource. They also are a good resource to handle tasks that aren’t physically intense - and that doesn’t necessarily include child rearing. Child rearing is, or definitely can be, physically intense. They also are important in community organization and social bonding - cornerstones of human evolution and even modern human societies.
3. If the real question here isn’t “why do women live past menopause” but “why are humans so long lived”, then an additional question would be “why do female humans cease fertility so early in their lifespans?”. Well, the answer might be pretty easy: metabolism. For a very long time, the size of a baby was thought to be limited by the size of the mother’s pelvis - something that can only get so big in a habitually bipedal species. So the theory went that being bipedal made our babies come out “undercooked”. However, recent theory suggests that it’s actually due to the mother’s metabolism and NOT the birth canal or pelvis size. Now, if that’s correct, then it makes sense for a metabolically slowing human to lose the ability to do something that’s such a heavy metabolic load. Making sperm and ejaculating isn’t a tax on the body, but growing a baby is. To me, from a biologic POV, this makes a LOT more sense than “they live long to take care of the babies”. And, we must assume that men and women live approximately equal lifespans (when social factors as controlled for - like men not liking to seek medical treatment and being socially expected to engage in risk-taking behavior.) because that’s the lifespan of the species. It makes no sense to, in humans, ask why the females don’t die off halfway through our average lifespan. We just don’t have the kind of drastic sexual dimorphism necessary to justify that kind of difference. Humans aren’t angler fish or spiders or praying mantises. Our sexual dimorphism just isn’t that pronounced.
4. It completely ignores the biological presence of LGBT individuals. Same-sex sexual relationships are found in almost every species, which suggests some kind of evolutionary purpose to them. Let’s say that proponents of the grandmother hypothesis are correct, and child-rearing plays a role in the extended lifespan. They’re STILL wrong to assume it is gender-based or sex-based. Enter the “gay uncle theory”. Which…I’ll just let you guys go read the article, because it talks about gender swapping to fill required roles and no-binary genders and altruism in kin groups. So if all of these grandmothers are taking care of the kids, why evolve same-sex partnerships and same-sex behaviors?
Anyway this is why I dislike the grandmother hypothesis thanks for coming to my Ted Talk. Always question this kind of stuff, because a LOT of what is considered to be settled evolutionary science relies heavily on gender-based division of labor that was assumed by those who wrote it - almost entirely men - and probably wasn’t correct (ex - stone tools are often assumed to be made by men, but that’s actually probably not correct. One of my profs pissed off a whoooole lot of male scientists by presenting them with both qualitative and quantitative evidence that in some modern stone tool users it’s entirely women who procure and make the tools.).
You’ll notice I did not say I agreed with it?
I was simply clarifying what I’ve said in the past about lifespans.
Oh, and presenting people with anthropology to read about. Hypotheses are meant to be tested. One cannot do this without exposure.
https://archive.org/details/DontBeaS1947
Here’s the whole video. It’s called “Don’t Be A Sucker” and it’s 17 minutes long.
don’t just scroll past this actually watch it, it’s only 2 minutes long. If you re-recorded this today word for word with modern actors and places, it wouldn’t even look out of place as a PSA
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley plan to announce the withdrawal at the State Department in Washington at 5 p.m., the people said. They asked not to be identified discussing a decision that hadn’t yet been made public.
The 47-member council, based in Geneva and created in 2006, began its latest session on Monday with a broadside against President Donald Trump’s immigration policy by the UN’s high commissioner for human rights. He called the policy of separating children from parents crossing the southern border illegally “unconscionable.”
The U.S. withdrawal had been expected. National Security Adviser John Bolton opposed the body’s creation when he was U.S. ambassador to the UN in 2006…
The move comes as the Trump administration is under intense criticism from business groups, human rights organizations and lawmakers from both parties over its recently imposed decision to separate children from parents who enter the U.S. illegally.
It’s also due to the fact that the Trumpites are pissy that the UN keeps trying to formally condemn Israel’s decades-long persecution of the Palestinian people.
THIS IS FUCKING REDICULOUS
Underrated kink stuff: casual bdsm. Watching a film together but the sub is gagged and bound. Playing boardgames but the sub has a vibrator strapped to them. Cooking dinner but the sub has a plug in their ass and their nipples are clamped. Hanging out together reading a book or something but the dom has their hnds between the sub’s legs. The possibilities are endless.
Yaaaasssss 🙌🏼🙌🏼🙌🏼
My favorite kind of bdsm 😩😩😩😩
on all levels except physical i am asleep rn
Pluto in 8K resolution. We’ve come a long way from when Pluto looked like this.
sixpenceee.com/tagged/science
Fuck I love pluto
Beauty vlogger Nabela Noor has a message for fat-shamers: “Yes I’m fat, and I’m fashionable”
follow @the-movemnt
Hannah Alexander - http://neverbirddesigns.tumblr.com - https://www.etsy.com/shop/neverbirddesigns - http://www.redbubble.com/people/neverbird - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChouZJ5VI49OnRAMlYKZCXA - https://instagram.com/hannah_alexander24
Vincent Bal uses ordinary objects to complete his work! More art posts here: sixpenceee.com/tagged/art
We all wish superpowers existed but in reality humans can’t even handle different skin colors
This video is beyond iconic and nobody can tell me otherwise
Nemuriale Sleep Aid Puppy
Sometimes you might be feeling a bit stressed and wish you could have a proper sleep, but whatever’s worrying you won’t let you get proper rest! Well, the good people of Nemuriale have developed this fantastic device for people just like you who’ve been having trouble dropping off or just want to calm down for a bit. Just turn on the Nemuriale device and it will continue to let out a gentle beat for 20 minutes which is designed to get your breathing and heartbeat rhythm back in line so you’ll feel nice and relaxed. This super-cute version comes with an adorable puppy cover resembling a Miniature Stafford. Perfect for use at home or while travelling, the Nemuriale and this super-cute little cover are sure to make your sleepy times as relaxing as possible.
I wish this came in cat
it totally does
*grabbies hands*
@daddyslittlecookiemonster
Gimmie puppy pleaseee?!
Oh me gosh I wan both
your 5 most recent emojis describe your aesthetic
💛😊✨😙😄
☀️💞🍯🐻🌻
🌻💞🖍😒💕
☺😢🍼😱👻
🙈💖💗😧😄 I don’t know what this says about me XDD
🎮🌿🐰🐇📻
(I like video games, im vegan, and i like music!)
💜💙💚💛❤ welp. Im gay alright.
🐙🌸🌹🍑🍨 aesthetic???
😂😭💖💕😝
👍😇🐳😛🔫
Oh whale ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
😶🖕😂😙🌸
Hahaha