I agree, female breasts should be viewed through evolutionary theory with hesitation. What does the research say on how the changes in diet/nutrition over the past few centuries affected the female breast size?
Wouldn't one reason to mate with a well-fed, breastfeeding woman be that she is likely to already have a man caring for her and her children? If you mate with her, then you can get him to invest in your child for you.
re: . That way, having sex with a woman because early pregnancy gave her ballooning breasts seems like a very bad idea indeed.
Why should only investing in your own children be an evolutionary advantage?
Consider two groups of closely related individuals. In one group the males only invest in children who are known to be theirs. In the other group, the males invest in all of the kids in the group. If more children are successfully reared in the second group, then this is a winning strategy ... 'if we all work together we can raise more kids'.
From a woman's point of view, having every male member of the group somewhat invested in raising the children you have already made the huge investment in bringing to term is a major win.
After reading over the article again and following through the comments, I think it's worth organizing a clear response to this idea.
If I read this correctly, Tove is saying humans are unusual: adult females have breasts regardless of pregnancy status. This appears to have been a sexually selected trait. What is the explanation? Tove considers and rejects five hypotheses:
1. Extra buttocks,
2. Fat stores,
3. Handicap,
4. Age Indication, and
5. Fertility.
I don't really think these five explanations truly deserves to go to the garbage dump of ideas at https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/the-order-of-thoughts . Some are better than others, though. #4 doesn't make sense early on, and I never considered #3 even particularly reasonable for male traits. But #1, #2, and #5 have some merit. Clearly, breasts do echo buttocks. Clearly, breasts are fat stores which may be useful. And females with breasts were at least able to become pregnant at one time. But Tove advances a different explanation:
6. MILF hypothesis. "[A]pe males have a strong preference for females who have already given birth and have the experience to raise an infant successfully....One clear marker of female self-reliance is if she is both breastfeeding and fertile."
This isn't perfect. If it were, then I think we would expect nulliparous chimpanzee females to already show breast development. Still, it does seem reasonable to think that as more maternal investment was required in childrearing, at least some males may have pursued a successful strategy of pursuing lactating females for the reasons you cite. In a similar vein, I also want to mention one other thing that I think is going on:
7. Femininity hypothesis. Signals like smaller hands and feet, high voices, and smaller stature all confuse femininity and youth. Long, lustrous hair and dark lashes do slightly better to signal femininity, but full breasts on an otherwise slender individual signal femininity very cleanly.
I don't think that #7 is actually the explanation any more than #6, though. Mammary tissue may be effective at signalling feminine sex and the ability to raise an infant successfully, in more modern humans, hip girth is a cleaner signal of both things motherhood, which doesn't also signal depressed fertility, as swollen breasts do. So what's the solution?
What I actually think is this: In the beginning, ancestral humans weren't particularly attracted to breasts and didn't form pair bonds. However, they had some mental modules related to breasts that could be co-opted to promote pair bonding.
Early hominins were likely to be slightly interested in breasts because of the ideas mentioned previously: Breasts reminded ancestral males of buttocks, they were useful fat stores, they signaled healthy femininity, and proved that a female was an experienced breeder.
As evolution progressed, gestation times lengthened from around 227 towards 280 days ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/13646623/ ), fetuses increased in weight from 4 towards 7 pounds, and the period of infant helplessness extended towards a full year. Throughout this process mothers became extremely vulnerable for a longer and longer period. Initially this time of vulnerability may have only a been a month or two, but in the later stages of evolution it corresponded to something like the onset of the third trimester all the way to the end of the child's first year after birth. During this period, mothers and their offspring required provisioning and protection to ensure the father passed on his genes. Thus it wasn't enough for males to mate and wander away; a successful male would mate and stay. The period of greatest vulnerability would likely be exactly the time when her breasts were largest: immediately after birth.
Male hominins were already slightly interested in breasts for the reasons cited earlier. And some were likely more interested than others. As maternal vulnerability increased, those males who became excited when their partners showed signs of pregnancy would stay. Male sexual attraction to the partner would provide an incentive to provision and protect the offspring. Breasts were an excellent signal to a male that he ought to be attracted to the female who has them - particularly if she showed signs of being his particular mate (by smiling, making eye contact, and so on). When the period of vulnerability ended, the breasts went away, and he lost interest.
Probably it was only most recently, in the later stages of evolution, that females would develop and maintain breasts outside of pregnancy. With the emergence of culture, children required training and guidance, and they did better if the father never really lost interest in their mother at all. This stage never really completed in modern humans; divorce rates today peak between the 4th and 8th year. But the breasts, and human male interest in them, are still there.
Call it 8. The Paternal Provisioning Hypothesis: Mommies and babies need dad around to make them apple pie.
"Male sexuality is infamous for being superficial and stupid. But is it that stupid?"
Oh my goodness yes. Haven't you noticed how Pavlovian male sexual response is? A male full of prostate fluid is really just wandering around hoping to find an appropriate place to make a deposit. Whatever signal he's primed to respond to - the scent of musk, swollen genitals, a flicking of the tail feathers, a high frequency yowl, whatever - he'll respond.
Of course the great apes are decidedly visual in orientation, not only blessed with trichromatic vision but (in the hominins, at least) a highly sensitive link from visual stimuli to erotic response. I've heard that some people are so easily excited by the sight of hairless globular fatty tissue that they respond orgasmically to mere computer images, without the need for any fertile female in sight. And personally, I'm quite at peace with the idea that I'm aroused by a well-developed decolletage even though it isn't *actually* a shapely behind. Slightly more embarrassing is the admission that you got me to write two whole paragraphs on the subject displaying an opening image that isn't even of you!
TL;DR: Yes, YES, Desmond Morris was right, and male sexuality really is that stupid.
After much deliberation I have decided to add an opinion to this article (the total lack of comments on this blog might have influenced my decision). I guess you could call it a defense of Desmond Morris, although it is more of a variant of your own theory.
The presumption of this opinion is that the earliest hominids were "savanna chimpanzees", that is chimpanzees in a biological and social sense but who had migrated out on the savanna. The barren conditions of this new habitat should have meant that the early hominids were more sparsely populated than its forest dwelling cousins. The savanna also gave some new possibilities for long distance viewing.
In practice this could have given a situation where early hominids were as promiscuous as chimpanzees. But the scattered groups made it much more difficult to assess possible mates. A chimpanzee male who saw another chimpanzee in the distance might not be entirely sure if the other was a male (danger) or a female (mating opportunity). And if it was a female in high grass there would be no way to know if she was fertile.
That is, unless she had enlarged breasts due to breastfeeding. Even though breastfeeding chimpanzees have smaller breasts than a corresponding human female the breasts should still be an identification aid for other chimpanzees. Early hominid males could therefore have preferred to approach breastfeeding females since they were possibly fertile and at least not another male. If this gave the breastfeeding females an advantage in the mating game it would only be a matter of time before non-breastfeeding early hominids developed breasts and the chase was on.
As a bonus theory the chimpanzee on the savanna presumption could also help explain the human lack of visible estrus. The high grass and sparse population would have made it meaningless to signal estrus through the genitalia. The lower population densities might also have pushed early human males in the direction of more active fathers. If you only rarely find someone to mate with it makes sense to invest more in that particular partner and your common offspring.
Most probably there is no one single factor that explains early humans or the female breasts. But some factors are clearly more plausible than others.
I agree, female breasts should be viewed through evolutionary theory with hesitation. What does the research say on how the changes in diet/nutrition over the past few centuries affected the female breast size?
Here's a theory:
http://www.lloydianaspects.co.uk/evolutionaryTheories/whyWomenHaveBreasts.html#mainSection
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcrxNBlqrbM
Wouldn't one reason to mate with a well-fed, breastfeeding woman be that she is likely to already have a man caring for her and her children? If you mate with her, then you can get him to invest in your child for you.
re: . That way, having sex with a woman because early pregnancy gave her ballooning breasts seems like a very bad idea indeed.
Why should only investing in your own children be an evolutionary advantage?
Consider two groups of closely related individuals. In one group the males only invest in children who are known to be theirs. In the other group, the males invest in all of the kids in the group. If more children are successfully reared in the second group, then this is a winning strategy ... 'if we all work together we can raise more kids'.
From a woman's point of view, having every male member of the group somewhat invested in raising the children you have already made the huge investment in bringing to term is a major win.
After reading over the article again and following through the comments, I think it's worth organizing a clear response to this idea.
If I read this correctly, Tove is saying humans are unusual: adult females have breasts regardless of pregnancy status. This appears to have been a sexually selected trait. What is the explanation? Tove considers and rejects five hypotheses:
1. Extra buttocks,
2. Fat stores,
3. Handicap,
4. Age Indication, and
5. Fertility.
I don't really think these five explanations truly deserves to go to the garbage dump of ideas at https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/the-order-of-thoughts . Some are better than others, though. #4 doesn't make sense early on, and I never considered #3 even particularly reasonable for male traits. But #1, #2, and #5 have some merit. Clearly, breasts do echo buttocks. Clearly, breasts are fat stores which may be useful. And females with breasts were at least able to become pregnant at one time. But Tove advances a different explanation:
6. MILF hypothesis. "[A]pe males have a strong preference for females who have already given birth and have the experience to raise an infant successfully....One clear marker of female self-reliance is if she is both breastfeeding and fertile."
This isn't perfect. If it were, then I think we would expect nulliparous chimpanzee females to already show breast development. Still, it does seem reasonable to think that as more maternal investment was required in childrearing, at least some males may have pursued a successful strategy of pursuing lactating females for the reasons you cite. In a similar vein, I also want to mention one other thing that I think is going on:
7. Femininity hypothesis. Signals like smaller hands and feet, high voices, and smaller stature all confuse femininity and youth. Long, lustrous hair and dark lashes do slightly better to signal femininity, but full breasts on an otherwise slender individual signal femininity very cleanly.
I don't think that #7 is actually the explanation any more than #6, though. Mammary tissue may be effective at signalling feminine sex and the ability to raise an infant successfully, in more modern humans, hip girth is a cleaner signal of both things motherhood, which doesn't also signal depressed fertility, as swollen breasts do. So what's the solution?
What I actually think is this: In the beginning, ancestral humans weren't particularly attracted to breasts and didn't form pair bonds. However, they had some mental modules related to breasts that could be co-opted to promote pair bonding.
Early hominins were likely to be slightly interested in breasts because of the ideas mentioned previously: Breasts reminded ancestral males of buttocks, they were useful fat stores, they signaled healthy femininity, and proved that a female was an experienced breeder.
As evolution progressed, gestation times lengthened from around 227 towards 280 days ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/13646623/ ), fetuses increased in weight from 4 towards 7 pounds, and the period of infant helplessness extended towards a full year. Throughout this process mothers became extremely vulnerable for a longer and longer period. Initially this time of vulnerability may have only a been a month or two, but in the later stages of evolution it corresponded to something like the onset of the third trimester all the way to the end of the child's first year after birth. During this period, mothers and their offspring required provisioning and protection to ensure the father passed on his genes. Thus it wasn't enough for males to mate and wander away; a successful male would mate and stay. The period of greatest vulnerability would likely be exactly the time when her breasts were largest: immediately after birth.
Male hominins were already slightly interested in breasts for the reasons cited earlier. And some were likely more interested than others. As maternal vulnerability increased, those males who became excited when their partners showed signs of pregnancy would stay. Male sexual attraction to the partner would provide an incentive to provision and protect the offspring. Breasts were an excellent signal to a male that he ought to be attracted to the female who has them - particularly if she showed signs of being his particular mate (by smiling, making eye contact, and so on). When the period of vulnerability ended, the breasts went away, and he lost interest.
Probably it was only most recently, in the later stages of evolution, that females would develop and maintain breasts outside of pregnancy. With the emergence of culture, children required training and guidance, and they did better if the father never really lost interest in their mother at all. This stage never really completed in modern humans; divorce rates today peak between the 4th and 8th year. But the breasts, and human male interest in them, are still there.
Call it 8. The Paternal Provisioning Hypothesis: Mommies and babies need dad around to make them apple pie.
"Male sexuality is infamous for being superficial and stupid. But is it that stupid?"
Oh my goodness yes. Haven't you noticed how Pavlovian male sexual response is? A male full of prostate fluid is really just wandering around hoping to find an appropriate place to make a deposit. Whatever signal he's primed to respond to - the scent of musk, swollen genitals, a flicking of the tail feathers, a high frequency yowl, whatever - he'll respond.
Of course the great apes are decidedly visual in orientation, not only blessed with trichromatic vision but (in the hominins, at least) a highly sensitive link from visual stimuli to erotic response. I've heard that some people are so easily excited by the sight of hairless globular fatty tissue that they respond orgasmically to mere computer images, without the need for any fertile female in sight. And personally, I'm quite at peace with the idea that I'm aroused by a well-developed decolletage even though it isn't *actually* a shapely behind. Slightly more embarrassing is the admission that you got me to write two whole paragraphs on the subject displaying an opening image that isn't even of you!
TL;DR: Yes, YES, Desmond Morris was right, and male sexuality really is that stupid.
After much deliberation I have decided to add an opinion to this article (the total lack of comments on this blog might have influenced my decision). I guess you could call it a defense of Desmond Morris, although it is more of a variant of your own theory.
The presumption of this opinion is that the earliest hominids were "savanna chimpanzees", that is chimpanzees in a biological and social sense but who had migrated out on the savanna. The barren conditions of this new habitat should have meant that the early hominids were more sparsely populated than its forest dwelling cousins. The savanna also gave some new possibilities for long distance viewing.
In practice this could have given a situation where early hominids were as promiscuous as chimpanzees. But the scattered groups made it much more difficult to assess possible mates. A chimpanzee male who saw another chimpanzee in the distance might not be entirely sure if the other was a male (danger) or a female (mating opportunity). And if it was a female in high grass there would be no way to know if she was fertile.
That is, unless she had enlarged breasts due to breastfeeding. Even though breastfeeding chimpanzees have smaller breasts than a corresponding human female the breasts should still be an identification aid for other chimpanzees. Early hominid males could therefore have preferred to approach breastfeeding females since they were possibly fertile and at least not another male. If this gave the breastfeeding females an advantage in the mating game it would only be a matter of time before non-breastfeeding early hominids developed breasts and the chase was on.
As a bonus theory the chimpanzee on the savanna presumption could also help explain the human lack of visible estrus. The high grass and sparse population would have made it meaningless to signal estrus through the genitalia. The lower population densities might also have pushed early human males in the direction of more active fathers. If you only rarely find someone to mate with it makes sense to invest more in that particular partner and your common offspring.
Most probably there is no one single factor that explains early humans or the female breasts. But some factors are clearly more plausible than others.