June 29, 2005

Synchronization of Periods

I was recently wondering what the evolutionary advantage to the fact that when multiple women live together or spend lots of time together, their periods become synchronized. I e-mailed a mailing list of evolutionary psychology professors, and here are their responses:

Never made any sense to me in that harem set ups are hard to defend when all come into receptivity at the same time but that's assuming that the male hangs around. If male in and out quickly then can impregnate more females at one visit.

Otherrwise the reason for most mammals is that it is predator protection with more offspring at once and predator can't eat them all.

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I’m also not a professional scientist of any kind…. But I am a woman so that’s an easy question. Everyone gets PMS at the same time and thus they avoid having to put up with PMS in their midst all month long.

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I think, as a poet and a woman, "evolutionary advantage" is a competitive phrase that does not really suggest what
the humanities said all along. Synchrony, the music of the spheres, harmony of the universe. The reason it happens
with women's periods is Physics, and has to do with the greater mass and gravitational attraction. Tides work on larger bodies of liquids,
and effectively, tides are what synchronized women's periods are. The fact that any individual woman's monthly cycle imitates (but
without greater mass does not harmonize, synchronize, or connect with) the moon shows that the more connectivity,
the better.

I have found lots of these lovely synchronizations: the angle of the earth's axis of rotation is 23 degrees and we have 23 paired chromosomes, 23 bones in our back, and our days are not exactly 24 hours but something over 23 hours. The sun is 23 x 4 million miles
away. All this counting together is pretty, a coincidence, like gongs, like the way male and female voices join in singing, soprano, alto, tenor bass... those musical scales are also connected in various pleasing patterns...

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This question came up a year ago. Here's a link to the final post in the thread:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary-psychology/message/30421

Posted by Morgan at 10:04 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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