[scotty79]

On the other hand if infants were this fragile to be long term affected by something like that humanity would survive 3 generation tops.

At some point synaptic prunning comes and the child is rid of nearly all indignities it suffered up to that point.

[giraffe_lady]

Plenty of adaptively useful, maybe even optimal behaviors can negatively affect enjoyment of life. The world we live in isn't the one we evolved for, and behaviors and adaptations useful in our evolutionary past can be painful or detrimental to individuals and society now.

Selective pressure is no longer meaningfully applied to our species, so we won't further adapt to our situation except intentionally and at our own hands.

Also btw just because people forget their memories before a certain point doesn't mean they are rid of all the effects. Research on this is fraught and delicate, but very young children who suffered trauma are known to carry some consequences of it across that memory boundary. Which at least establishes that it's not a perfect reset and we should still be careful about what experiences we expose very young children to.

[scotty79]

Sure, severe abuse can have lasting impact, but we are talking about babies crying for a bit. Kids have a thousand innane reasons to cry. Having thousand and one doesn't make that much of a difference.

For all concerned, I don't have kids and I don't intend to.

[gsinclair]

“prunning” and “innane” — too many ens!

[scotty79]

Thanks. Sorry. I'm not a native speaker and autocorrect is fickle.

[unity1001]

> On the other hand if infants were this fragile to be long term affected by something like that humanity would survive 3 generation tops.

The infants that were this fragile eventually selected themselves out of the gene pool by neglectful parents, or by behavioral disorders causing them to not be able to reproduce as much as others. Which is why almost every baby cries.

[feet]

There's a lot more than synaptic pruning going on during the neurological development of infants such as migration of cells

[scotty79]

I meant synaptic prunning that happens much later. At few years of age.