Adaptive Value/function
The phenomena of menstrual synchrony could serve several purposes depending on the mating and birthing cycles of a particular species. It could perhaps set the context for group mating (such as in lions) or serve to facilitate male sexual performance because of the increased presence of receptive females (rats), and could also help to ensure pregnancy.
Read more about this topic: Dormitory Effect
Famous quotes containing the words adaptive and/or function:
“The shift from the perception of the child as innocent to the perception of the child as competent has greatly increased the demands on contemporary children for maturity, for participating in competitive sports, for early academic achievement, and for protecting themselves against adults who might do them harm. While children might be able to cope with any one of those demands taken singly, taken together they often exceed children’s adaptive capacity.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“Philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know.”
—Susanne K. Langer (1895–1985)