
To Be a Baby - robg
http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/to_be_a_baby/
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pj
_It doesn’t make tremendous evolutionary sense to have these creatures that
can’t even keep themselves alive and require an enormous investment of time on
the part of adults. That period of dependence is longer for us than it is for
any other species, and historically that period has become longer and longer._

 _The evolutionary answer seems to be that there is a tradeoff between the
ability to learn and imagine — which is our great evolutionary advantage as a
species — and our ability to apply what we’ve learned and put it to use. So
one of the ideas in the book is that children are like the R &D department of
the human species. They’re the ones who are always learning about the world. _

This couldn't be farther from the truth, well... perhaps it could, but it is
not the truth, nonetheless.

The evolutionary reason that human children are so helpless at birth is
because the hole through the female pelvis got smaller to support walking on
two legs. This need for a stronger pelvis, combined with the relatively larger
head of the human baby, prevented full development of the baby before birth.

All human babies are therefore born premature. Other similarly sized babies
throughout the animal kingdom take a year or more to be born and they are born
able to walk and care for themselves.

~~~
jerf
"The evolutionary reason..."

Whoa, whoa, whoa. _The_ evolutionary reason? That's not how it works. If
elongated childhoods wasn't worth walking on two legs, it would have gotten
selected out. The two issues, and a complex of others, can't be considered in
isolation.

Moreover, our "learning" phase isn't just delayed by a month or three months,
we have childhoods that are ten years or more delayed. That isn't explained by
any conceivable birth issues. The usual explanation is that we've traded
instincts for the ability to learn the behaviors in a non-instinctual manner,
which is inherently slower, but far more flexible.... but that's hardly "the"
reason either.

~~~
pj
Perhaps I should have said, "A better evolutionary explanation for helpless
babies is..."

Babies began being born prematurely _after_ humans started walking upright. It
was after these helpless babies were born that we evolved the ability to care
for them. This may have compounded the issue, because perhaps intelligence was
required to care for them. Thus the babies were born with even larger heads
and on and on.

Babies can't reproduce, but if the organism does not live long enough to
reproduce, the babies aren't born at all, so walking upright is more important
than being born able to walk and care for themselves. Some hypotheses suggest
that walking upright allowed us to cool our heads and resist heat stroke when
trees disappeared in Africa. Large brains were actually radiators disipating
heat, and containers for backup neurons when some failed due to running down
prey and the extreme heat of desert climates. Thus, babies born with larger
brains had more heat resistance and backup neurons, thus more likely to reach
fertility.

It is my prediction, that in the future, all babies will be born by c-section.

------
pchivers
_Seed: You describe children as being “useless on purpose.” What do you mean
by that?_

Obligatory Onion article:

[http://www.onion.demon.co.uk/theonion/other/babies/stupidbab...](http://www.onion.demon.co.uk/theonion/other/babies/stupidbabies.htm)

 _A surprising new study released Monday by UCLA's Institute For Child
Development revealed that human babies, long thought by psychologists to be
highly inquisitive and adaptable, are actually extraordinarily stupid._

------
HSO
Conventional Western notions of a childhood full of play and exploration are
relatively recent (if we're talking evolutionary time-scales here). True,
babyhood is obviously not "useful" in the sense of work. But in poorer or,
dare I say more "primitive" cultures, children are expected to earn their keep
by helping out where they can. They are made to work. In Dickens's books, for
example, one doesn't get the sense of innocent childhood. Children there are
treated like incomplete and weaker adults. Perhaps the distinction between
babyhood and childhood should be made clearer...

~~~
rue
I am not sure how much of humanity's history can be gleaned from Dickens
books, good as they are...at most they tell us that in a certain part of the
world, in a certain period, some children in certain classes of society were
made to "earn their keep." And we all know how well the 1800's went for social
justice.

Undoubtedly children have participated more in livelihood in the past; helping
with the fields, milking the cows and whatnot. Simultaneously nothing suggests
that children never played, or even that they played any less than they do
now, or that play was frowned upon somehow (generally, individual idiocies
aside.) There are certainly drastic differences between cultures, but there
are very few -- that I am aware of -- that completely or nearly so did away
with "childhood."

