Menstrual Function, Menstrual Suppression, and the Immunology of the Human Female Reproductive Tract
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Analyses of menstrual function are important to our understanding of human evolution and can help to assess the risks of menstrual suppression, a practice increasingly recommended for women. Two evolutionary issues, however, are insufficiently appreciated in these analyses: the selection pressure infections pose to the human female reproductive system, and the variety of different-and possibly conflicting-immunological functions in the healthy human female reproductive and genital tract. Part of the reason why these issues are inadequately addressed is that reproduction is not sufficiently contextualized in evolutionary and immunological accounts. I argue that expanding the immunological context for menstrual function reinvigorates Margie Profet's (1993a) hypothesis that menstruation defends against sperm-borne pathogens. This expanded context also suggests that menstruation may have more than one function. Thus, until more is known about menstruation, we should proceed cautiously with regard to menstrual suppression.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".