ANTH 2170 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Laparoscopy, Menopause, Spermatid
24 Jul 2020
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Reading #1 - the egg and the sperm: how science has constructed a romance based. In all major scienti c textbooks women"s monthly cycle is described as being designed to produce eggs and prepare a suitable place for them to be fertilized and grown all to the end of making babies. Basically, menstruation is deemed invaluable: male reproductive physiology is evaluated quite differently. Yet ovulation does not merit enthusiasm in these texts either: textbooks stress that all of the ovarian follicles containing ova are already present at, birth. Thus, in marked contrast to the male, the newborn female already has all the germ cells she will ever have. Only a few, perhaps 400, are destined to reach full maturity during her active productive life. All the others degenerate at some point, in their development so that few, if many, remain by the time she reaches menopause at approximately 50 years of age.
