Why marry? Because baby's have fat heads.
- Thread starter Captain
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One thing he was wrong about is death during childbirth being a human only phenomenon.
steingar
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No he wasn't. Yes, some other mammals do die during childbirth, but not at the rate we humans do so. Childbirth was the most frequent killer of women prior to the last century and still is in many parts of the world. There isn't a female animal of a naturally occurring species that does that. There may be some domestic animals that do but they've undergone rigorous selection for traits beneficial to humans and are not good representatives of wild-type populations.
Of further interest, aneuploidy (abnormal chromosome number) is far more common in humans than any other animals known. No idea why.
Someone needs to tip him off that his hair is slipping backwards and collecting behind his neck. Or is that a side affect of a traumatic passage through the birth canal?
douglas393
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douglas
Chromosomal abnormalities and death of the mother during childbirth is probably more common in the wild than anyone knows. The lack of the ability to accurately and precisely observe these issues in the wild and the ease of doing it with the human population probably accounts for some of this. In addition, assumig survival of the fittest is true, in the wild many of the genetic "deformities" that are not fatal and are treatable in the human animal are uniformly fatal without the human support system, and so whereas in the wild may not transfer from generation to generation will in the human population.
Dan Thomas
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Dan Thomas
Mine is doing that, and I was born via Caesarean Section. You'll have to find another theory.
Do male apes go bald as they age?
Dan
steingar
Taxi to Parking
No, no and no. Many endangered animals have been subjected to in vitro methods during their husbandry, their rates of gametic aneuploidy are far less than humans. Rates for all domestic animals are far lower. No one has seen an animal with more aneuploidy than humans.
I would be tempted to blame the long latency of female gametes (human eggs are held in meiosis for a decade and a half before being deployed) but elephants and large primates have similar latencies and have not been seen to exhibit human levels of aneuploidy.
EdFred
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Yeah, because passing along defective genes would never have an adverse effect on future generations.
ClimbnSink
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Greg
Quicker potential evolution of humans at the cost of more infant mortality perhaps? I don't know if people are taking this into account motherhood fatalities during childbirth had a robust spike when people started delivering in hospitals and doctors had not figured out that hand washing was a good thing.
Captain
Final Approach
The point is we humans have evolved with intelligence as our lead agent for survival. It's worked phenomaly well and we clearly rule this planet. No other species can come close to competing with us.
But that has come at the expense of a massive brain that needs to be born large and grow more after birth. That results in high birth mortality rates and a long time to mature to adult status requiring a parent to raise the child. Given the likelyhood of the mother dying the father needs to be involved.
I think it's interesting to connect our big brains to the social byproduct of marriage.
But that has come at the expense of a massive brain that needs to be born large and grow more after birth. That results in high birth mortality rates and a long time to mature to adult status requiring a parent to raise the child. Given the likelyhood of the mother dying the father needs to be involved.
I think it's interesting to connect our big brains to the social byproduct of marriage.
Well, some, but not all.
It's also our lead trait for our own destruction. Our intelligence, like our skeleton, is not yet fully evolved to reach our capacities without injuring ourselves. Same as our muscles can lift loads our spines cannot support, our technical brilliance allows us achievements our ethical thought processes do not know how to apply correctly.