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by bpodgursky 1416 days ago
The other kinda dumb constraint is that our heads are roughly as large as they can be and still survive vaginal delivery.
3 comments

Evolution got around that by birthing what are essentially still fetuses compared to most other non-marsupial mammalian newborns and then continuing the base development process of the brain after birth. See how a lot of other newborn animals are already walking around just minutes after being born.
Eyeballing based on my children development against other mammals, I’d say pregnancy should take about 2 years.
A lot of animals come out walking! Imagine squeezing out a 30 something pound walking toddler!
Caesarean-section removed this constraint. Since it was introduced, the number of births requiring a C-section due to size have increased:

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38210837

> number of births requiring a C-section

Slippery metric. "Requiring" seems hard to isolate vs other options like "elected to use".

Yeah. If there's an evolutionary aspect to the increase, we should expect to see c-sections as a generational phenomena, and correlated with cranium size. I wonder if that study has been done.
>... other options like "elected to use"...

Supposedly more common as a choice amongst higher income women. Hence the phrase "Too posh to push"

is it dumb?

I admittedly havent spent much time thinking about the problem, but it seems to me that the issue of getting one human out of another human is quite a difficult problem to solve.