Female Supremacy Articles - Page 6

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Perls and Fretts believe that longer life means survival of the fittest, and women, evolutionarily speaking, are more fit than men. The longer a woman lives and the more slowly she ages, the more offspring she can produce and rear to adulthood. Therefore, evolution would naturally select the genes of such women over those who die young.

Long-lived men would also have an evolutionary advantage over their shorter-lived brethren. However, says Perls, "studies of chimps, gorillas, and other species closely related to humans suggest that a male's reproductive capacity is actually limited more by access to females than by life span. And because men have not been involved in child care as much as females, survival of a man's offspring, and thus his genes, depended not so much on how long he lived, but on how long the mother of his children lived."

In their studies of centenarians, Perls and Fretts found that a surprising number of women who lived to be 100 or more gave birth in their forties. These 100-year-old women were four times as likely to have given birth in their forties as women born in the same year who died at age 73. A study of centenarians in Europe by the Max Planck Institute of Demography in Germany found the same relationship between longevity and fecundity.