Competition among female women probably contributed to hidden ovulation

Human females rely on tools such as mapping, test strips, or portable technology to identify periods of fertility. Some animals, such as baboons, undergo physical changes during ovulation. How did fertility get noticed so hard in humans?

For nearly half a century, the evolution of hidden ovulation in female women has been explained as helpful in ensuring male partners to raise and support children. A study released on January 25 in Nature Human Behavior doubt this long-standing idea. A team of evolutionary scientists using agent-based computer models showed that hidden ovulation might have evolved to enable females to hide their fertility status from other females.

“The study of human evolution tends to look at things from a male perspective, and even adaptations specifically for women – such as their social behavior and hidden ovulation – are seen in terms of how men form them. This study disputes the idea that the role of female sociality is to better protect male partners and their resources; our calculation model shows that female sociality is much more than securing male investment, ‘said Athena Aktipis, associate professor of psychology at Arizona State University and senior author. on the sheet, said.

Out with the old, in with the new

The idea that women evolved to hide ovulation for men to encourage them to help with children, called the male investment hypothesis, has been proposed as a way to understand why female women do not advertise ovulation. This hypothesis has for decades been the predominant explanation for female sociality and hidden ovulation, although it has undergone few empirical tests and has so far not been formally modeled.

But women do not just interact with men. They are interacting with each other, sometimes collaborating and other times in conflict.

“I have been wondering about the male investment hypothesis for years, and because you can not reason with an oral hypothesis, I started working on testing it,” Aktipis said. “At the same time, I was working on female sociality, and it struck me that women could have been aggressive towards other women who had ovulatory indications, which could then create an advantage to hide ovulation.”

The team of evolutionary scientists tested the idea that female conflict is the evolution of hidden ovulation, which they call the female rival hypothesis, using an agent-based computational model. Evolutionary adaptations in humans occur on the time scale of many generations, making it difficult to test whether traits can develop. Computational modeling enables researchers to test ideas that are difficult to test in the real world.

In agent-based computational models, an agent represents an individual whose behavior can be programmed and analyzed. Each agent follows a specific set of rules and can interact with other agents and with the environment. In the model developed to test the hypothesis of female rivalry, male and female agents followed rules that determined their movement, reproductive behavior, and attractiveness.

The male agents varied in terms of their debauchery. Promiscuous men did not cooperate with women to help raise subsequent children, while male agents who were not promiscuous stuck to sharing resources and supporting future children.

Female drugs had physical indications indicating when they were ovulating, or that ovulation was hidden. The female agents can also attack each other.

The female and male agents interacted with each other and were given opportunities to form parenting partnerships. The model supports the hypothesis of female rivalry by showing that women who hide ovulation perform better. They had more children, avoided aggression between women and women and managed to form parental relationships with men.

“Work in the social sciences tends to assume that male cognition and behavior are the standard. But women repeatedly face some unique challenges – especially in their interactions with other women. This work is partly due to “We take this idea seriously. We do it, I think we will learn more, not just about the female mind, but about the human mind,” said Jaimie Arona Krems, assistant professor of psychology at Oklahoma. State University and first author on the page, said.

The research team also used the model to test the hypothesis of male investment by performing scenarios that do not allow women to take on each other. But in this scenario, there was no clear benefit from hiding ovulation, suggesting that hidden ovulation in women might not develop as a result of interactions with men, but rather as a result of interaction with other women.

“This work is a necessary shift in thinking about the development of human women. Female sociality and other adaptations are not just about securing men, although they have long been the underlying assumption about the purpose of female social behavior,” said Aktipis.