Why the Brain Takes So Much Time and Effort

The brain’s chief job description—yours, mine, and your hopelessly adorable children’s—is to help our bodies survive another day. The reason for survival is as old as Darwin and as young as sexting: so we can project our genes into the next generation. Will a human willingly overcome self-interest to ensure the survival of his or her family’s genes into the next generation? Apparently, yes. Enough of us did hundreds of thousands of years ago that we grew up to take over the Serengeti, then take over the world. Taking care of a baby is a sophisticated way of taking care of ourselves.

But why does it take so much time and effort?

Blame our big, fat, overweight, gold-plated, nothing-else-like-it brains. We evolved to have larger brains with higher IQs, which allowed us to move from leopard food to Masters of the Universe in 10 million very short years. We gained those brains through the energy savings of walking on two legs instead of four. But attaining the balance necessary to walk upright required the narrowing of the Homo sapiens pelvic canal. For females, that meant one thing: excruciatingly painful, often fatal births. An arms race quickly developed, evolutionary biologists theorized, between the width of the birth canal and the size of the brain. If the baby’s head were too small, the baby would die (without extraordinary and immediate medical intervention, premature infants won’t last five minutes). If the baby’s head were too big, the mother would die. The solution? Give birth to babies before their skulls become too big to kill mom. The consequence? Bringing kids into the world before their brains are fully developed. The result? Parenthood.

Because the bun is forced to come out of the oven before it is done, the child needs instruction from veteran brains for years. The relatives are the ones who get the job, as they brought the child into the world in the first place.

Notes:

Babies must be born before they are ready to prevent killing the mother, thus parenting became an evolutionary strategy in humans.

Folksonomies: evolution pregnancy intelligence adaptation

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Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five

Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book: Medina , John (2010-10-12), Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five, Pear Press, Retrieved on 2011-07-27

Folksonomies: parenting pregnancy babies child development

Schemas

17 MAY 2011

Comparing Ourselves to Other Animals

Examples of authors referring to animals in nature for insights into human nature.

Folksonomies: nature evolution enlightenment science naturalism