© JOHN SLATER/CULTURA/CORBISThe late statistician George E.P. Box, who famously wrote that “all models are wrong, but some are useful,” also wrote that “science is a means whereby learning is achieved, not by mere theoretical speculation on the one hand, nor by the undirected accumulation of practical facts on the other, but rather by a motivated iteration between theory and practice.”
Richard Morton, Jon Stone, and Rama Singh at McMaster University in Ontario, in their recent article in PLOS Computational Biology (9:e1003092, 2013), present a mathematical model exploring whether menopause could evolve as a result of male preferences for younger mates. Their model imagines that early in human evolutionary history, women remained fertile well into their 70s and even 80s, but men had a strong fixed preference for mating with younger women. The older women thus remained mateless, therefore gaining little fitness by retaining fertility, and as a result, accumulated mutations that reduced their ability to reproduce later in life. The central assumptions of this model, unfortunately, appear to be false. In Box’s framework, Morton and his colleagues have excelled at theoretical speculation, but seem to ...
