Molly Webster

When Darren and his colleagues did a study of these killer whales, they found that the whales that had postmenopausal grandmas around, like Granny... Whales who aren't having babies of their own anymore.

Right.

Okay.

When those ones were still around...

The young had higher chances of survival than the whales who had no grandmas or even had grandmas who were premenopausal.

Does that make sense?

So the grandmas who couldn't have babies anymore were more helpful than the grandmas who were still having babies.

Right.

And this actually gave like a lot of support to an idea that people have been thinking about in terms of humans, actually, for a while.

The grandmother hypothesis.

I feel like I hear a lot about the grandmother hypothesis, but I'm not even sure I know how it works.

Yeah, right.

But it's basically what we just learned with the whales.

There's something that makes a lot of, I'll just say as a person with a two-year-old child, like makes a lot of sense to me.

Like, you know, like my mother is just like incredibly helpful and useful.

I mean, that's data point of one.

It's not scientific, but we feel how this is like makes some amount of sense to be true.

So this hypothesis is just like your evolutionary purpose is to be a mom, even if you are no longer being a mom.

Yeah, I mean, that's kind of the cultural takeaway.

That's like what most of us think of, if you've ever heard of this before.