SEED on grandmothers

Seed has a piece on the discoveries relating to menopause and its importance to the "Grandmother Hypothesis." Unlike male decline in fertility menopause is a specific and deliberate sequence of proactive processes by the female body to shut down reproductive capacity. Something like this is almost certainly functionally significant, and anthropological work which seems to show cross-cultural evidence of lower infant mortality in the presence of a maternal grandmother in the household is another important avenue in the overall program.