But there’s a certain noise that cuts me to the core, depletes my reservoir of patience, turns me temporarily into a meanie mom. I cannot handle the whine.

Our household has recently hit a period of peak whining, due, I believe, to general lack of sunshine - which increases the grumpiness of a typical almost-5-year-old - and the fact that our 7-month-old is learning how to crawl. When he goes after a toy just out of his reach and winds up scooting backward instead, his frustration manifests in that familiar, high-pitched sound that shares a frequency with my daughter’s morning plea of “Can ieeeeeeee have some miiiiiiiiilk?’’ And every time I hear it, my blood pressure rises.

Whining is so universally maddening that everyone from psychologists to eager parents have offered solutions ranging from giving kids a bowl to “pour out their whine’’ to setting up “whine-free zones.’’ How useful they are is debatable. I know some grandparents who once declared a rule for their summer house: “There is no whining on Cape Cod.’’ “But there’s whining in Natick!’’ one of their granddaughters said of her hometown, undeterred.

Bill Bentrim, a Pennsylvania grandfather who recently self-published a children’s book titled “I Like to Whine,’’ suggests reverse psychology. “Whine at the kid,’’ he told me by phone. “The little bit of role reversal and it’s astounding how quickly a kid goes, whoa, that’s really ugly.’’

It sounds reasonable. But it turns out that reason might not have much to do with it.

Whining just might be evolutionary.

That’s the theory that sprang, several years ago, from researchers at Worcester’s Clark University, led by evolutionary psychologist Nicholas Thompson. Years ago, Thompson took some tapes of babies crying and played them back, by mistake, at the wrong speed. He heard a lower-pitched noise that sounded distinctly like a grown-up in horrible pain. And Thompson, trained to think about what might have been useful for humans 150,000 years ago, had an idea.

Because of the way our throats are designed - for speech, not just barks or moos - humans are much more likely to choke than other animals, he told me. What if natural selection favored parents who constantly monitored their children’s breathing - and children whose noises sounded like respiratory distress? What if the sound of crying drives you crazy, he said, because “it’s supposed to drive you crazy’’?

More recently, one of Thompson’s doctoral students, Rosemarie Sokol-Chang, applied the same concept to whining. She picked apart the sound - a slow meter, a high pitch - and found that whining doesn’t just sound like crying. It also sounds suspiciously like “motherese,’’ the singsong voice that mothers, across many cultures, seem to use when talking to babies. It’s a way to demand attention, she posited, and deepen the attachment between parent and child. It’s even similar to the romantic “sweet talk’’ that helps young lovers bond.

And it’s massively distracting: In an experiment Sokol-Chang performed, she asked subjects to count in their heads while listening to a table saw and the sound of a child’s whine. The whining made it harder to count right.

I asked Thompson whether, once upon a time, survival was at stake: Was a whiny child likely to be in his mother’s earshot, and thus not eaten by a wild boar?

“Roughly speaking, yes,’’ he said. And while boars aren’t an ever-present danger anymore, the need to be on top of mommy’s to-do list apparently hasn’t changed in 150,000 years. In the name of research, I asked my daughter why she whined, and she answered, matter-of-factly, “Because I want attention.’’

“But isn’t that the wrong kind of attention?’’ I asked.

She looked confused.

As any kid with a demanding baby brother knows, no attention is bad attention. And when it comes to evolution, no sound is a bad sound.

“Why should this thing evolve that’s so annoying to everybody?’’ Thompson said. “The answer is that evolution doesn’t give a [salty language deleted] whether you’re annoyed or not.’’

We could whine about that, but it probably wouldn’t help.

Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com.