[cake_crumb]

"The result is having a profound impact on the gene pool. The smartest women do not have any kids, pretty much capping how smart women in general can be."

I'm considered fairly smart. I have three children.

There are a LOT of female FReepers who will gladly disillusion you on that point.

On the point of heat, I'm of childbearing age still, and go into 'heat' once a month. It's just the normal ovulation cycle. Using your cavewoman/man analogy, most likely, women go into heat more often in order to keep their males interested, and AROUND. If he takes off, it's quicker and easier to catch another male to help raise the kids, because human children take the longest to grow into adulthood.

[dark_lord]

And on an interesting technical note -- did you know that in hunter-gather societies the women tend to go about 4 or 5 years after giving birth before ovulating again? Here's why -- it turns out that the women tended to breast feed the kids up to about age 4 or so. Because the hunter-gathering lifestyle did not bring in sufficient calories for the women to breast feed and commence ovulating again, they didn't. This tended to keep the birthrate way down for hunter-gatherers. However, once people started planting crops and herding, their calories increased a whole lot. Response - ovulation kicked back in quicker, population boom.

[wardaddy]

Good lord that post you replied to was utter crap wasn't it?