The fragility of human babies should be known to all partners. Animal cubs are able to stand and walk soon after birth, and within a few days they can run and jump normally, which is especially true for friends who spent their childhood in the countryside.
But human babies are an exception entirely, newborn babies are very fragile and have only the instinct to survive: eat, drink, and lazar, and do almost nothing else, and can not walk until they are about a year old. During this year, you need to take care of your parents.
Why are human babies so fragile compared to animal pups?
To put it simply, it is the fragility and even "stupidity" of human babies that has created human beings to become the overlord of the earth. If it weren't for the mutated gene that human babies are "stupid", the ancestor of mankind, Homo sapiens, would not have succeeded in retaining it and becoming the overlord of the earth, but instead Homo sapiens would have been replaced by other races.
Specifically, this is also the inevitable result of the long evolutionary process of human beings, and the fragility of human babies seems to be "degenerate", but in fact it is not, in order to grow more rapidly.
In layman's terms, human babies are fragile because they are "premature" babies during infancy. Of course, "premature baby" here does not refer to a baby born at 5-6 months, but to a "baby born at 9 months".
Some people may question: Isn't 9 months a full-term baby, and how can it be a premature baby?
Biological studies have found that human babies are actually supposed to stay in their mother's womb for about 22 months before they are considered full-term, but after humans walk upright, they passively let the baby be born early, otherwise they will face dystocia.
In other words, the early birth of a human baby is to cater to the price that must be paid for walking upright!
In the process of human evolution, a very critical node is walking upright, and walking upright completely liberates human hands, and it is also an important prerequisite for the continuous increase of brain capacity.
However, the great change in walking posture of human ancestors from walking on all fours to walking upright also means that the human spine and pelvis will also undergo major changes, which is manifested in the fact that after walking upright, the human legs begin to be brought inward together and level with the body, only in this way can the stability of upright walking be ensured.
But this change also means that the human pelvis will inevitably shrink, and the pelvic opening will naturally shrink with it, and the increasing brain volume of human beings will make the human head continue to grow.
As the head grows, it will be much more difficult to pass through the narrowed pelvic orifice, and the result will inevitably be dystocia.
This actually means that walking upright and increasing brain volume may seem wonderful, but in fact humans are "asking for their own extinction" unless they can make some changes to prevent dystocia from occurring, or to make dystocia as rare as possible.
And in order to survive and reproduce, human beings have indeed experienced a painful evolutionary path, in order to better allow the baby to be born and avoid dystocia, the human baby had to be born early, far from reaching 22 months of term, it was born early, only in this way, the baby's head is not so big, can be squeezed out of the transcendence mouth relatively easily.
But the process of evolution is by no means achieved overnight, it is conceivable that the ancestors of human beings must have experienced extremely dark periods, during which dystocia was almost inevitable, and the mother and child were most likely not saved.
Eventually, human beings experienced the accumulation of genetic variation, and a new way of birth emerged, that is, the baby was born early before it reached term, so as to avoid dystocia to the greatest extent. And those individuals who do not acquire genetic variation can only be eliminated by nature in the end.
Nowadays, even if the baby is born at 9 months, there is still a certain probability of dystocia, in today's science and technology is quite developed, people have various ways to deal with dystocia, but in ancient times there was almost no way, only to obey the will of heaven.
That's why human babies are so vulnerable, they should have been born a year late, and now they have to be born early, which of course will be vulnerable.
However, the fragility of human babies is not all bad, it also brings another side: extreme plasticity. How to understand it?
To put it bluntly, the brain of a newborn human baby is like a blank sheet of paper, with almost nothing on it, only the basic skills of eating, drinking, and lazing, so the human baby looks "stupid". The brain of the newborn animal cub has basically been formed, just like a piece of paper with various survival skills already written on it, and the animal cub can quickly adapt to the environment according to the information on the paper.
However, the "blank slate" of the human baby will write all kinds of "grand blueprints" as the brain continues to develop, not only to acquire basic survival skills, but also to shape richer Xi learning, memory, thinking and even abstract thinking, which animal cubs cannot have in any way.
To put it bluntly, this "blank paper" of the brain of a human baby can be designed as a drawing of a five-star hotel, and when the five-star hotel is built according to the drawings, it must be magnificent. Animal cubs are born equivalent to "thatched houses", which are very simple but have basic functions, but "thatched houses" are only "thatched houses" after all, and they cannot be compared with the completed "five-star hotels" in any case!
There is also a question, how do human babies survive in a primitive society where they live in a poor environment and cry so often that human babies are so fragile and cry a lot?
But it must be admitted that humanity does pay a considerable price for superior intelligence and upright walking, not only in terms of physical costs, but even in the face of genocide as a whole. In fact, it is also true that the ancestor of mankind, Homo sapiens, has been on the verge of extinction several times, but fortunately, Homo sapiens was lucky enough to survive.
The living environment of human ancestors is indeed very harsh, but they have the wisdom to start living in groups, and can use more and more complex tools for hunting and resisting the attacks of fierce beasts, especially after learning to use fire, animals have a natural fear of fire, and human ancestors can better protect themselves.
This may be the so-called "you can't have both fish and bear's paws", human beings have evolved a high level of intelligence, but at the same time, they have paid a very heavy price for this wisdom, and even faced the price of genocide several times.
And this just shows that evolution is not omnipotent, let alone active selection, not what you want to evolve into can evolve into, evolution is passive elimination, eliminating those mutant genes that have not adapted to the environment, and it is through this screening method that nature continues to screen out species that are more adapted to the environment.
At the same time, evolution is also random and does not have a fixed direction. Many people often ask the question: If our ancestors had not evolved superior intelligence, would they have gone extinct?
Not necessarily, because there are so many ways to adapt to the environment, wisdom is only one of them, wisdom is not the direction and goal of evolution, and even in a sense, nature actually hates wisdom very much.
And what if our ancestors didn't evolve wisdom and didn't have other ways to adapt to their environment?
It's simple, isn't it enough to perish?
It's not a big deal, after all, 99% of the species that have ever appeared on the earth are extinct, plus humans are nothing, and nature doesn't care at all.
Extinction is the main theme!
Finish!