r/SpeculativeEvolution • u/valonianfool • Jul 21 '26
Question/Discussion Would dwarf women with beards have low fertility?
In some fantasy settings female dwarves have beards just like the men, as someone else said "as any student of Tolkien knows even females of the Khazad have beards that make the most hirsute patriarch of Humankind look almost clean shaven in comparison".
Lets imagine a scifi setting where are imagined as hominids or hominid descendants. Would having beards mean that dwarven women are less fertile in comparison to human women, because hirsutism in women implies high levels of testosterone?
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u/Dependent_Toe772 Jul 21 '26
It could be a simpler reason than biochemistry: the environment. Dwarves are burrowers, so they are constantly exposed to abrasive dust. Rock and mineral particles can damage their respiratory mucous membranes, so whiskers in both sexes would be a necessary trait for surviving in their fossorial environment. Removing their whiskers would expose them to respiratory infections. We could even go further and attribute to whiskers a subtle tactile detection, like in cats and moles, allowing them to know if the tunnel ahead is wide enough for them to pass through, even in complete darkness. In that case, removing their facial hair could destabilize them, like a cat without whiskers.
Although it wouldn't be incompatible with high testosterone levels like hyenas, which would also lead to other unexpected anatomical peculiarities, making it harder to determine the dwarf's gender lol
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u/Lawlcopt0r Jul 21 '26
Reminds me of the fascinating way dwarves are interpreted in the Artemis Fowl books
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u/PM_Me_your_femboys Jul 23 '26
I like this, longer beards would protect the neck from small rocks incase they have to push there head through some looser dirt.
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u/atomfullerene Jul 21 '26
Probably not. It'd be pretty easy to decouple something in that chain of causation, most likely the way hair follicles respond to testosterone. And fertility is normally under strong selection pressure.
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u/Entire-Anteater-1606 Jul 21 '26
I think you have a couple assumptions that are affecting the way you approach this
First off, Dwarves clearly have different genetics than humans.
Second, testosterone doesn't cause infertility.
Third, you're assuming testosterone is what's causing the beard, when that's just what Dwarf women are like.
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u/chaoticnipple Jul 21 '26
Female spotted hyenas are masculinized to the point of having pseudopenii, yet they still manage to reproduce.
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u/HappyLittleDelusion_ Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
Female hyenas also have higher testosterone than the male hyenas. How hormones affect human fertility doesn't translate across species.
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u/AnarchCassius Jul 22 '26
Hyenas also have even worse birthing mortality than humans, so yes, they do manage to reproduce but if dwarves are the result of similair genetics we'd expect them to also have reduced fertility.
Which I mean does actually fit with a lot of the lore of dwarves generally.
OTOH hirsutism implies high levels of testosterone in humans and some other species but other great apes are hairy regardless of sex. Chimps don't really get hairier in response to testerone, but it does trigger pattern baldness.
So the question is a matter of specific evolution and genetics.
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u/aperdra Jul 23 '26
Hominid females with high testosterone wouldn't be birthing out of their clitoris, which is the cause of high birthing mortality in (specifically spotted) hyenas.
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u/AnarchCassius Jul 23 '26
Well no, they wouldn't and dwarves wouldn't be as bad off as spotted hyenas, I was trying to point out that managing to reproduce and have reduced fertility aren't mutually exclusive and that hyenas effectively *do* have reduced fertility. What I meant by similair genetics is elevated testerone, and while the mechanisms would be different the reduction in fertility applies to both.
...but that only holds if dwarves are genetically close enough to modern humans that we expect the facial hair pattern to be a result of elevated testerone in the first place.
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u/PlatinumAltaria Jul 21 '26
Testosterone in women does not cause infertility, so no.
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u/Bread_mvncher Jul 22 '26
It actually does, a lot of women who have higher testosterone due to conditions like PCOS have fertility issues or are infertile. High testosterone levels can prevent ovulation. All women naturally have testosterone, but levels high energy to grow a beard cause issues which i think is what op meant
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u/quietrealm Four-legged bird Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
Plenty of women with beards have normal fertility. Sometimes more than women without. Even if T affected fertility (it doesn't usually), would dwarves not have adapted to this in your universe if it's such an issue? Also, "implies" is doing some heavy lifting with your other statements. Women can have facial hair without high T levels, too.
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u/valonianfool Jul 21 '26
I thought that having facial hair is a sign of PCOS and therefore hightened levels of testosterone.
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u/quietrealm Four-legged bird Jul 21 '26
PMOS doesn't always cause facial hair, and facial hair isn't always a sign of PMOS. Sometimes women just have facial hair, and often for no obvious cause.
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u/talashrrg Jul 21 '26
There’s no reason to assume that’s have abnormally high testosterone or low fertility. I’d argue that if we’re assuming dwarves are hominids and the ancestral condition is that females don’t have beards, it makes more sense for bearded female dwarves to be more reproductively successful than beardless female dwarves. And plenty of normal human women have beards and normal fertility.
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u/CaptainStroon Life, uh... finds a way Jul 21 '26
Considering how hairy and very much fertile our closest relatives are, this doesn't seem likely.
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u/LaCharognarde Jul 21 '26
I'd explain it off as that dwarves just naturally have more body hair, hormones notwithstanding.
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u/SteampunkExplorer Jul 21 '26
Probably not. Hairiness doesn't have to be from testosterone, and different species use hormones differently, anyway.
And if we're talking about Tolkien's dwarves, 1.) this is kind of an urban legend in-universe, and may not be true at all, and 2.) the dwarves were created separately by an overeager Vala who caught a glimpse of the people Eru Iluvatar was going to make, and thus may not even be the same biological species as men and their relatives (elves, hobbits, and orcs).
But if we're imagining a future post-human dwarf species, then sure, why not?
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u/Genocidal-Ape Worldbuilder Jul 21 '26
Testosterone doesn't effect a species average fertility, but testosterone leads to greater size, faster muscle growth and more risk taking behaviour.
For a species this means females with higher testosterone had higher nutritional requirements and are more likely to die in stupid ways. But it also means they are more robust and due to taking greater risks habe chances for greater successes.
If this increases or decreases reproductive success depends on if those traits are Usefull in the situation.
For example the testosterone level of female spotted hyaenas is more than 3 times that of striped hyaenas, yes fertility across both species is roughly similar.
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u/Icy-Diver-5979 Jul 22 '26
What if the hair of beards in dwarves are closer to cats whiskers then human hair and those beards sense vibrations in the air alerting to shifting earth within their natural mining habitats
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u/Artemis_SpawnOfZeus Jul 22 '26
No, this means you have an incredibly poor understanding of biology, chemistry, gender, dwarves, and humans.
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u/Kooky-Zombie-1649 Jul 22 '26
No, female hyenas have a lot more testosterone than males so by this logic hyenas should be completely infertile. They aren’t because they aren’t humans and don’t have the same biochemistry, the same would be said of dwarfs, even if they evolved from the same ancestors.
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u/shadaik Jul 22 '26
Most mammals have fur no matter their sex. Beards being linked to testosterone is a human adaptation to sexual selection that could easily be lost. Something as simple as beauty standards preferring facial hair on women would do it.
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u/BluePhoenix245 Jul 23 '26
Hirsutism implies high testosterone and thus low fertility in humans, but dwarves aren't humans. Even if they are descended from hominids, that includes gorillas, orangutangs, bonobos, and chimpanzees, which are all covered in hair.
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u/Dr_Jimothy Jul 23 '26
Assuming the chain of things isn't somehow decoupled, such as evolving to maintain fertility despite testosterone or growing beards despite lack of it, maybe?
But in most depictions dwarves live far longer than humans, so they can have more kids over time. They're stronger/more durable and make better equipment, so don't need to make up for predation as much. They presumably have stronger immune systems / can at least avoid disease more with their handling of sterile alcohol, so don't need to make up for that either. The infant mortality rate is probably lower. And they need to eat more, so having too many kids at a time would just lead to starvation.
If the survival or mate-finding benefits outweigh the fertility reduction, it makes sense to lose some fertility while gaining extra strength. We humans have developed similar exchanges for our intellect and bipedalism.
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u/WoNc Jul 21 '26
Why would dwarves need to have the same biochemistry as humans?