To Be a Baby | Hacker News Reader

To Be a Baby

seedmagazine.com

12 pointsrobg7 comments

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.

"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.

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.

You are overlooking the serendipitous positive use of what otherwise would be negative traits, which is pretty much the origin of complex traits. In other words, that babies got to grow without much hardwired control of their own bodies (and that includes thoughts) provided the opportunity for humans to grow into distinct behavioral patterns (i.e. exercise creativity), and to free themselves from what the genes predispose and then be open for what the culture demands and imprints.

Think about it: the ability to learn so much and about such breadth of subjects could, perhaps, have been made possible by the early birth imposed by pelvic changes related to upright walking. Chimpanzee babies only get one month of flexible, learn-it-all minds.

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...

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.

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...

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."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com