Carole Hooven, Ph.D.

But most of them just die.

So maybe there's some selection process there.

There's an overproduction because for females, there's so much that goes into the production of each egg and time and energy and each egg...

that you produce is gonna limit your ability.

If it takes a long time, that means you can only have like eight or 10 or however many kids over a lifetime.

So they're very valuable.

So we were talking about testes and sperm, testes being not so well protected, but the eggs are extraordinarily well protected if they're made early and then just stored, I think.

They resume meiosis, of course, when they are ovulated.

So maybe there's this store and then there's a selection process that goes on throughout life.

It could be.

Again, this is a teleologic BS discussion.

I don't know.

I don't know.

It is a super interesting question and I should know more about it, but it does, I think, illustrate the reason why we have different strategies.

It's because the time and energy that females have

have to put into reproduction.

Imagine we're living as hunter-gatherers.

There's no birth control.

We're not going through life getting our periods over and over and going to Whole Foods and having a job.

We're having kid after kid after kid.