basically like. why do women just have breasts all the time when to my knowledge the only purpose of them is to feed children. why don’t they go away like other mammals’ when you haven’t had a child.
In: Biology
They kind of do. Breasts are made up of connective tissue, fatty tissue, and the “important part” that is the glands and ducts actually used to produce, store, and expel milk. Those mammary glands don’t fully develop until pregnancy. [Source on that](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32816256/#:~:text=Most%20pregnancies%20cause%20the%20areola,glands%20to%20become%20more%20prominent.) Women often see their breast size increase noticeably due to the increased volume of mammary glands, plus some extra fat. But like primates, women can still breastfeed fine with small breasts as long as that mammary tissue can develop.
The breast that you see on a woman when she’s not far along in a pregnancy is mostly just fat. Like most of the weird things about humans, it was likely a random mutation that caused some women’s bodies to put extra fat on their breasts, and those women went on to have enough living children for the genetic mutation to propagate. It became a secondary sex characteristic AFTER it proved to be a not-harmful/ maybe helpful mutation, otherwise it would’ve died out from kinky males mating with women whose children wouldn’t survive well enough. I’d wager the extra fat helps women survive pregnancies and breastfeeding
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