eli5: Why do women only have their period/ are fertile for approximately 50 years if they’re born with millions of eggs?

Question

I’m an uneducated man on this subject. Please don’t judge. I thought women release a single egg every cycle normally and that would add up to about 600 eggs in a lifetime, if that were the case. Thanks for the knowledge!

In: 1

Answer 1

Because we evolved from animals that released millions of eggs in their lifetime and thousands at once. There is no evolutionary pressure for you to produce fewer eggs even though we evolved to produce very few offspring.