Why are you posting this on HN? Crawl back to your cave.
Why do women have periods when most animals don't?
31–40 of 68 posts
Re: Why do women have periods when most animals don't?
#32tl;dr: What we know for sure: foetuses produce hormones to keep the endometrial tissue from thinning. Once a zygote has implanted, the mother's hormones are thus no longer in control of whether her uterus will support its growth or not. Menstruation, when it happens, forcefully cleans out implanted zygotes, returning the uterine hormonal balance to normal. What we guess that that implies: menstruation is a side-effec…
The problem with that theory is I don't know of any women who are actually able to miscarry at will. A garbled version of that theory got some politicians in hot water with the whole "during rape, their body can shut it down" comment.
It doesn't have to be "at will", our bodies do a lot of processing without us being consciously aware of it. I think it is well within reason that the body may detect an abnormal embryo and respond to it.
Re: Why do women have periods when most animals don't?
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Downvoted but you have a point. Why is there no moderation with regards to topical content on HN? Why should HN be a place for pop-sci articles and repostings from the likes of the Economist, LA Times, BBC, etc. r/startups has more content pertaining to - you know - actually starting a technology business than HN does. HN lately reads like newsclippings sent to me by my grandma.
Why is there no moderation with regards to topical content on HN? As per the posted policy when I joined HN, this would have been topical. (It has changed since.) "Anything that would be interesting to hackers." I don't mind at all if the occasional pop-sci article comes by, so long as they don't all do so unfiltered. Ironically, this comment and the one it replies to are distinctly against the moderation policy, as…
> It has changed since.
How? I don't recall any change. Or are you referring to Startup News, the predecessor of HN?
Re: Why do women have periods when most animals don't?
#34tl;dr: What we know for sure: foetuses produce hormones to keep the endometrial tissue from thinning. Once a zygote has implanted, the mother's hormones are thus no longer in control of whether her uterus will support its growth or not. Menstruation, when it happens, forcefully cleans out implanted zygotes, returning the uterine hormonal balance to normal. What we guess that that implies: menstruation is a side-effec…
The problem with that theory is I don't know of any women who are actually able to miscarry at will. A garbled version of that theory got some politicians in hot water with the whole "during rape, their body can shut it down" comment.
It's not in the control of the conscious mind. It is controlled by the body (or, you might say, by an evolutionary adaptation instantiated in the linkages of hormonal pathways in the brain.)
Note that miscarriage and spontaneous abortion are separate things. Miscarriage happens because the foetus dies in the womb, or the womb is ruptured, and the mother's body detects this. Any other cause is spontaneous abortion—effectively "something the mother['s body] did."
In humans, at least the experience of the emotions of extreme stress, and extreme fear, can cause spontaneous abortion. In a number of other animals (with a large subset of those being the ones that menstruate), there is the Bruce effect[1]: when the detection by the vomeronasal organ of an unfamiliar male's pheromonal signature precedes/causes spontaneous abortion.
Re: Why do women have periods when most animals don't?
#35[deleted]
Re: Why do women have periods when most animals don't?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
> To non-native speakers: apostrophes are for possession, not plural. You could easily repeat that for plenty of native speakers. It's one of the most common mistakes in written English.
Isn't it sad? It's such a frustrating mistake. There's a bar that we drive past frequently that does it with everything. They're "Now accepting application's" and their "Burger's are $2" Sad.
Since I moved to Missouri, I've been upset by a similar grammatical error: quotation marks used for emphasis. You would expect, say, all-capitals or an underline or italics, but you instead see 'Come taste the "best" burger in Missouri,' which is awful.
In New York, where I grew up, that use of quotation marks is called "scare quotes": quotation marks in all cases signal that you're detaching a text fragment from its context; with scare quotes you detach a phrase which reads just fine in that context to either bring focus to the phrase (like when you're defining it) or to indicate that the phrase itself is somehow problematic (like when you want to criticize the phrase, e.g. 'these "businessmen" are stealing our money,' where you're implying that they are either not truly men or not truly doing business per se.)
When you say that you have 'the "best" burger', to me it sounds like you're implicitly adding at the end, 'well, at least, it's the best at being an awful burger.'
Re: Why do women have periods when most animals don't?
#37Weird thing for hacker news
Downvoted but you have a point. Why is there no moderation with regards to topical content on HN? Why should HN be a place for pop-sci articles and repostings from the likes of the Economist, LA Times, BBC, etc. r/startups has more content pertaining to - you know - actually starting a technology business than HN does. HN lately reads like newsclippings sent to me by my grandma.
Your objection, and the answer to it, are coeval with the site itself. Take a look at PG's original announcement of Hacker News:
https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html
Of course we do moderate topical content on HN. But an article on the history of hypotheses about menstruation is hardly topical.
Re: Why do women have periods when most animals don't?
#38> It seems the list of animals that menstruate is quite short: humans, apes, monkeys, bats and elephant shrews. What do these seemingly disparate animals have in common? My unfixed female dogs have periods. So either the article is poorly written, or they are ignoring animals that don't fit the theory.
Before my dog was fixed, we had to buy little doggie diapers once a year so she wouldn't bleed all over the house.
I am, therefore, a little confused over the article.
Re: Why do women have periods when most animals don't?
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with that theory is I don't know of any women who are actually able to miscarry at will. A garbled version of that theory got some politicians in hot water with the whole "during rape, their body can shut it down" comment.
It's not in the control of the conscious mind. It is controlled by the body (or, you might say, by an evolutionary adaptation instantiated in the linkages of hormonal pathways in the brain.) Note that miscarriage and spontaneous abortion are separate things. Miscarriage happens because the foetus dies in the womb, or the womb is ruptured, and the mother's body detects this. Any other cause is spontaneous abortion—eff…
That is a poor explanation given that extreme stress is known to have all sorts of physiological effects and is noted to negatively effect reproductive success in numerous species. But not all those species menstruate as noted by the article.
Re: Why do women have periods when most animals don't?
#40Weird thing for hacker news
Downvoted but you have a point. Why is there no moderation with regards to topical content on HN? Why should HN be a place for pop-sci articles and repostings from the likes of the Economist, LA Times, BBC, etc. r/startups has more content pertaining to - you know - actually starting a technology business than HN does. HN lately reads like newsclippings sent to me by my grandma.
> HN lately
What you call "off topic" has been very much on topic for HN for a long time. The guidelines clearly say what is on topic, and it's more than "start up stuff".
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
That sentence has been in their since, well, ages.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080616133301/http://ycombinato...