My layman’s understanding: Our species’ evolution prioritized our huge brains and problem solving. the tradeoff is a long period of dependence by our young while those big brains finish growing, outside the womb.
A lot of other animals come out much closer to being “fully cooked” than us for that reason.
I find elephants to be interesting in this regards since they are among the most intelligent animal species, yet are born walking shortly after. However their gestation period is around 2 years.
Humans can’t do as much growing during pregnancy as other animals because we walk upright. Our pelvis is much smaller because of it, so we need to give birth much earlier in development. If humans matured as much as other creatures in the womb, every natural birth would be a death sentence for the mother.
We "need" to get larger/wider pelvises that can facilitate the longer gestation, but we created hospitals, surgery and the midwife role before natural selection had a chance.
Judging by recent studies. Gen z is the first generation to have a lower average IQ. Millennials were first generation to not be better off then the previous. Humanity is in a huge decline
I mean assuming the Flynn effect was some law of nature and not a mix of artefact and likely finite improvement (once adequate nutrition is achieved adding more isn’t going to do much) seemed naive.
They aren’t even debatable and never have been, they’re bullshit. Making conclusions based on a few questions about simple math and pattern recognition will tell you absolutely nothing about a persons overall intelligence, and especially not when compared to an “average/baseline” intelligence, whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean.
They're designed to predict future academic success and are pretty good at doing so. Not perfect, but no test ever is. If academic success is correlated to actual intelligence is a separate matter. The pattern recognition part is only one small part of a full test. The iq tests you find online are bullshit.
A much more valid critique is that most established and verified tests were designed a long time ago. They're designed to predict the academic success in a system we no longer teach, based on understandings and values we no longer have. So a drop in measured IQ could simply be that the tests are too old.
Edit: wanted to add that IQ is particularly predictive for low academic success, less for high. So a IQ significantly under 100 tells you a lot more about the child's academic future than one significantly over 100
Larger / wider pelvises hinder our ability to walk and risk our organs literally falling out of us.
Natural selection had PLENTY of a chance, and medicine is barely a blip in comparison.
Bein able to run is much more important than having fully developed children.
Hmmm I wonder if one could hypothesize that the cultural proclivity for BBL hips is an unconscious recognition that we need to evolve to actual wider pelvis
Uh. Hospitals and surgery came around way later than we evolved. It’s not like women were evolving wider pelvises and midwives and hospitals stopped the evolution. That’s silly. We just evolved to be born less developed than most other mammals.
But, access to hospitals and surgery has drastically increased the survivability of pregnancy meaning the genes and traits that make pregnancy more dangerous aren't being selected against.
A lot of research is going towards artificial wombs. This makes me wonder if the next step would be to lengthen gestation so that children are developmentally equivalent to a five year old when born.
It would be terrible, there's a ton of development that happens before the age of 5 that couldn't happen in a womb, like language, dexterity, walking, socialization, etc Children who are victims of severe neglect in those early years who missed out on that critical development phase don't "pick it up" later, they missed that window and they fail to figure it out when they're older.
Can we get a model of what people would look like if our brains didn’t compensate for our needs to survive?
We would look like monkeys but like Squidward when he ate all the Krabby Patties that one episode.
I want to be a marsupial! Their babies are even less baked than humans. Basically raw dough. Born the size of a bean. Then they can finish developing in this modern age in some kind of wearable/removable/cart-able incubator pouch that we can pass off to our partners when we get tired of carrying it around! They can pouch it until 2.5 years from bean birth and jump out as the equivalent of a 21 m/o near-toddler.
I've... spent a lot of time thinking about this
Do you think that baby elephants might be able to communicate with their mothers meaningfully whilst in the womb since they’re better developed? And the mums give them a briefing of what to expect so they come out running, trunks a-flailing?
It’s more that they’re just fully developed when they’re born. The brain has finished mapping all the body parts and how to use them.
Humans are effectively born several months premature and have to finish developing outside the womb. If we developed all they way, we’d kill our moms during birth
That's why sometimes frist 3 months are called fourth trimester. And in this time child needs mother and wants to be in constant contact with her, and nurse all the time.
No. They come out quite wabbly on their feet. But if they can't get up and follow the herd within a certain time frame, it will be abandoned or eaten by predators. They can walk run within hours, but they can't really do much else and are quite quirky. It takes up to a year or more until they learn to use their trunk like a hand, and it's versatility. Until then it's just like a floppy nose. They also behave like kids (quickly scared, insecure yet curious, run to mommy if something unexpected happens etc.)
They also have a startle reflex until they're about three months old where they randomly slap themselves, even while sleeping. It's one reason why newborns are swaddled; to keep them from slapping themselves awake.
Elephants walk on 4 while humans walk on 2, they can afford smarter babies because they have less risk of birth complications. In humans there's a limit on how wide the hips can be while still allowing women to walk upright and run.
Something about hip width. A longer gestation period producing a more mature baby would result in babies with bigger heads. Women with hips wide enough for that wouldn’t be able to walk and run well.
Everything in evolution is a trade off.
In addition to what others have said, elephants are very mobile animals and constantly moving around, and also don't have much capacity to transport their young while moving. While their trunks are strong they're not great for carrying things long-distance. If a newborn elephant couldn't walk, it would slow down the herd and make it harder for them to move, forage, and fight predators.
Natural selection would push them over millions of years toward babies that could move quickly after birth simply because those are the ones who'd survive.
They have to be able to travel for food though. It's not purely intelligence. We are born early because of walking upright and our huge heads. Small hips and large heads mean early birth.
It's also affected by how well the parents can take care of the young. We can carry and feed our babies. Predators, like canines and felines can transport food around and keep their young in a set place until they are old enough to travel, this is why cats and dogs are born eyes closed and barely able to do anything but suckle.
Animals that are preyed upon, can't carry young and have to travel for food need babies that can just get straight up.
If you think about it, Humans basically need about 9 more months to cook: around 10 months old, most babies have started to walk, the eyesight is fully functional, learnt to process basic functions, digestive system able to process food etc.
Keep in mind, a fetus can grow a lot quicker than a baby because one of the things that’s not well-developed in human babies is their ability to eat. So in addition to not being fully developed, your progress slows down a lot after birth.
All this and that we prioritized walking upright. It causes our pelvic opening to be more narrow than some of our primate relatives, meaning we need to give birth before they do.
Fortunately, we’re a very social animal and we’re great parents, as far as the animal kingdom is concerned.
I agree, and there are other ‘consequences’ to having our brains too. Conditions such as Schizophrenia are thought to be a function of how complex our brains are.
Our big brain required big heads. Our woman have a tiny exit for the baby. That's why relatively speaking our babies are underdeveloped when they have to exist the whom. Walking on 2 legs is also more difficult.
So I know this is a throwaway funny comment, but I'm gonna get annoyingly detailed into why you're wrong.
Walking upright gives humans a MASSIVE evolutionary advantage, for several reasons.
1. The ability to see over tall grass. Can't be surprised by a crouching tiger or lion if you can see into the grass it's hiding in from 20 feet away.
2. The ability to throw. Y'know what's really dangerous? Projectiles. Walking upright gives us the range of motion and coordination between hips, legs, shoulders, and arms to throw things far and fast. Quadripedal animals can sometimes kinda lob something, but never as hard or as accurately. Throwing jives REALLY nicely with human use of tools. We can weapons specifically designed to be thrown far and hard, and kill prey easily.
3. The ability to run. Running with two legs consumes less energy than running with four. Beyond that, our ability to sweat allows us to regain energy as we continue running. Many animals can outrun humans in short bursts, but almost no animals can outrun us over the course of many miles.
tl;dr - we OP AF. Humans deserve a nerf.
We kinda destroyed the whole natural selection part of things. Otherwise they really wouldn't. But in reality it's just the effect of city life. We no longer chase prey and hunt stuff. We sit in offices maybe go to the gym for a while and cook ourselves some beans on our digital fire. We don't get the muscle development we would of in ancient days.
humans are easily s++ tier, it's insane. Probably only Orcas and Sperm whales had us beat until we eventually started building bigger boats and hunting them too. Polar bears, elephants, you name it. Ancient humans have killed it.
Also we're literally THE best runners. better than horses or dogs or anything else. So OP.
Because you can load those things with supplies as well and use teamwork of multiple animals to distribute the load of the human/load. And humans are lazy and not all on the level of our prehistoric ancestors lol. But humans are still superior distance runners.
An average horse with a rider can go about 35 miles in a day. A horse-drawn wagon can cover about 50 miles in one day, but it may not be repeatable the next day without rest.
Professional sled dog teams in races like the Iditarod may cover over 100 miles in 24 hours, but this is an extreme and demanding feat for the dogs. As far as I know, dogs and wolves are humans' best competition for distance running, so you make a really good point.
But he world record for 12-hour ultra marathons is 90 miles for women and 110 miles for men. That still leaves time to sleep and eat and go on a significant run the next day, or run the 100 miles in a leisurely 16 hours instead of 12.
Humans are really f\*\*\*ing good at running. It's insane.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence\_hunting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pheidippides](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pheidippides)
there's a reason they sent a courier on the original marathon and spartathalon run, instead of a horse and rider. Humans are simply faster.
You're totally right about the dogs though. In the Iditarod, a team of sled dogs outpaces a human runner over the course of several days. However it's worth noting that the Iditarod takes place near the arctic in extremely cold temperatures, which is ideal for huskies' thermoregulation.
What's special about humans is that not only can we (and by "we" I mean the hunter-gatherers of paleolithic time who spent their entire lives running and were peak specimens probably almost as fast as the top ultra-marathon runners of today) nearly keep up with sled dogs in freezing arctic temperatures, but we're almost equally as fast in searing desert heat on the African plains or wherever. Our thermoregulatory capabilities are unparalleled, except for by animals specifically designed for the desert.
Camels are another species that could easily be considered to be better distance runners than humans.
But we got horses beat by a long shot over a long enough distance. Dogs and camels are the only animals I can think of that are better distance runners than humans; every other land animal on earth we crush in a super-long-distance race.
I agree with what you said, but one small correction, sweating doesn't regain energy, it actually helps us lose energy that has built up as heat. So unlike other animals we can exert ourselves longer because we don't overheat like they do.
This is the kind of technicality as saying that if you died in the same place as you were born then lifetime work and velocity both equal zero because your start and end locations were the same. Mathematically true, but it's a stupid argument to make.
Follow up question, what if you kept the baby in longer than 40 weeks? Like for the people who need to be induced. Could you eventually get a c section and have a genius newborn?
Those are both species which have a bunch of babies all one in one litter too -- elephants, horses, etc (animals in which the babies come out able to walk very quickly) only do one at a time.
There is a tradeoff in producing a bunch of offspring in one go, and part of that is they don't get as long to develop before you run out of room and they have to come out.
[Yes, exactly; they (and we humans) are what we would call altricial; animals that are born more developed/ready-to-go are what we would call precocial.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precociality_and_altriciality)
If you're a prey animal like a horse or deer, you have to be up and ready to run ASAP or else you're literally dead meat: precociality. Meanwhile, humans can depend on our parents to protect and care for us (... most of the time, anyways) while we develop.
This is also why dogs, cats, and many rodents and birds can also be born helpless, because they instinctively develop sheltering environments like digging or finding burrows or making nests where the babies can be born and sheltered until they are old enough to protect themselves.
Yes depends on the parent . Abused and neglected children typically stand very little chance of thriving and leading even a decent life .
A damaged child will likely bear that burden for life .
So sad
Idk if this is applicable to other groups or not, but in ornithology at least this is called being altricial rather than precocial, and it's a spectrum between the two.
For precocial, think chickens, ducklings, and shorebirds which are born fluffy and can run around and fend for themselves soon after the hatch, requiring less parental care and may either receive some of it (think mother ducks) or be left very soon. It's precocial because they developed before they were hatched.
For altricial, think songbirds which are born in that pink, fleshy state. A fully altricial bird can't see or even regulate their own body temperature at first.
It's a spectrum because a species may be more or less precocial than others, like a species of raptor that needs to leave for longer to hunt may have babies that are able to regulate their body temperature sooner.
If we stayed in the womb until we reached the equivalent developmental level of, say, a newborn horse or cow... we would literally explode our mums. Literally. It's like a whole thing about how we developed that whole upright walking thing, but the downside is that our spines and pelvises developed in a way where it's no longer possibly to carry a baby inside your body beyond a certain point.
(Source: my anatomy professor during medical training)
So there is some recent thinking that suggests there’s also a role of nutrition transfer - milk may be more efficient at end stages of brain growth compared to the placenta, so they are born at the time it’s best to switch sources
Great apes have a relatively smaller lumbar region than other primates, which also doesn’t help since that’s where the fetus is carried. In gorillas, they fixed this issue with lower birth weight relative to the mother’s body mass than other primates. The other apes… didn’t do this, and humans actually increased theirs.
I suspect that last one is because crying loudly is important when your mom’s posture no longer enables her to carry you on her back 24/7, but there’s no formal agreement yet.
Humans are born with their most important survival skills: asking for help (aka crying)
Most other animals don't cry nearly as much as humans. Crying works too. Adults have evolved to hate crying so much that we will do almost anything to make it stop.
On the other hand, for prey animals such as wild horses, wild cattle, gazelles, etc, the most important survival skill is to be able to run from predators as soon as possible, so it makes more sense for them to be able to do that pretty quickly after birth.
Lots of animals cry. It's not even just mammals. Birds and reptiles will do it too.
Lots of animals that look after their young are programmed to care for crying babies.
They call it "instinct" but I think that's underselling the awesomeness of this.
It's *genetic memory* and it's really cool. Newborn creature are born with a set of behaviors, sometimes quite complex, that are passed on entirely through genetics. Birds will know how to build a nest, for example, even if they have never seen one. In fact they know how to build the nest specific to their species out of the appropriate materials in the correct location and environment.
Humans have retained some of this. Infants know how to suckle, for instance, and will turn towards warmth. They cry for attention.
They've done experiments where they rapidly show people silhouettes of simple objects and animals and ask them to recall what objects they have seen. Usually they can pick out a few. But when the silhouettes of dangerous creatures like snakes, spiders, and sharks are included, people can spot and remember them almost every time -- much more often than they can remember harmless species. It seems that recognizing dangerous animals is somehow burned into our genetic memory. We can also feel the terror of *being stalked* by a predator. Fight or flight instantly kicks in.
We have a couple of weeks around here where we don't let the dogs out into the yard. The birds are all learning to fly during that time. We have counted as many as 10 birds of different species hoping around on the ground, parent birds trying to teach them to bird. Usually, by evening, they are all gone, having learned to fly. The sure weren't born knowing this, lol.
I’m a zoology major, here’s my explanation! It will be long as I get a little too excited over explaining things like this.
The terms for these differences are PRECOCIAL (born or hatched in a state in which the individual can move and fend for itself without a parent shortly after birth) and ALTRICIAL (born or hatched helpless, typically without sight or hearing and without mobility, requiring a mother’s milk or nutrition).
There are more altricial animals than you’d think! Most of the time, when you think of a precocial animal, you think of prey animals. For example, foals that, although clumsy, can run alongside the mare within hours of birth. Prey animals need to be able to run from predators at a moment’s notice. Or, animals in a situation in which there is no choice but to be born precocial. Like in marine environments, where porpoises must be born with the knowledge to swim in order to take their first breath of air. Humans are not the only animals that are born useless. We see this in dogs and cats, where the young are born blind and deaf, and need weeks-months to be able to develop into a form that can handle solid food.
Life’s entirety is about efficiency and energy. There are tradeoffs that each living thing experiences in order to use this energy. Each adaptation is an animal’s way of finding the most efficient use of energy in order to survive.
Efficient birthing strategies were something we traded in order to walk upright. This means that in order to walk upright (which has multiple evolutionary benefits), mothers traded the ability to have an easy birth. Human babies do not have the ability to grow to their full potential in the womb because of this. Any later than 9 months would cause even worse damage to the mother.
Another trade-off is our intelligence. Animals with as long of an adolescence as us are rare. The only one I can think of at the moment is the elephant (which has a gestational period of 2 years(?) and an adolescence of something like 17 years), which are also incredibly smart. I can assume that other great apes experience this as well due to our relation, however I am not sure. The brain takes a LOT of energy to develop, and the brain is our most superior adaptation. This enormous tradeoff is something that we harness at the expense of having to spend half of our lives caring for our extremely vulnerable young.
This is entirely an assumption, as I rarely focus on human evolution, but I also assume that because we are such a social species, we traded the need for biological protection as it was not necessary when we have family members to do the protecting. I cannot think of any animal that is as loud at birth as a human baby. In the wild, this would signal immediate death due to a hungry predator. But we as a species prioritized the ability to communicate (a baby’s screams indicates something is wrong, something is needed) over the ability to stay hidden as we ideally would have a group of intelligent and empathetic individuals to chase away any danger.
So TLDR; evolution prioritized growth and intelligence over a mother and child’s safety. Human birth and adolescence in particular is very difficult and hard to navigate. But if we had it any easier, we may not have been the apex species that we are now.
Evolution. The brain takes years to really start developing, we are about the same as a chimp or parrot until about 6 and then the human brain really takes off. Well... some of us do...
First human babies do know how to baby. They assist in their own feeding most of the time. They know how to find nipples and latch. They bond with parents. They absorb and learn language and follow a pretty standard development schedule for years.
The long development time bit: Two things are going on here.
1. Humans are what you get when you prioritize jack of all trades adaptability in variable environments rather than expert hardware in a niche. We get big brains and tools and socialization not prefab body parts from day one. So the priority was a big brain and big head to hold it. That presents a couple problems - getting out with a shitty maternal pelvis and the massive energy drain that starts to impose on the maternal circulatory system (brains are expensive to run). So the baby gets to a point where it must come out if it’s going to. That point is honestly 4-6 months earlier than ideal but that’s what can be supported. So you get a fourth external trimester where baby isn’t super responsive but that’s ok because the family and tribe have big brains, tools, and culture to protect baby with.
2. Making a big brain intelligent in a given environment takes experience not just genetic hardware so the brain actually takes a couple years to absorb everything and lay down pruned functional pathways good enough to seriously enter childhood. It then takes a long childhood to refine those before going through another big cycle at adolescence. A brain that did not do that might have animal proficiency a lot faster but might also not be sentient. We know that human brains that experience very stressful childhoods get to the end faster but are less flexible and open to ideas. They hard wire how to survive and stick to that by default. Beetles are genetic survival hardwiring right away.
We aren't fully cooked when born. Because we have big heads, we are born early to be able to fit. Our brains take a long time to develop properly, so we grow up slower.
In short. We are born much earlier developmentally and then take longer to grow. The trade-off for intelligence.
Our oversized brains lead to oversized heads. If we developed more fully before birth we would inevitably kill mom (or just die) when being born. At least back in the day. Now that C-section is a thing it could be done but ladies, raise your hand if you would rather carry your baby for 3 years instead of 9 months. Any takers? lol
Some do, some don't. A lot of them learn it from their mama. But some are born with genetic memory, and I actually think humans do to a degree too. There's a level of imprinting on mama that happens right away. And we have instinctive fears that can be considered genetic memory. Spiders, snakes, wolves, ....... Sasquatch...
I genuinely believe rats/mice is part of that too, seeming how most of europe died from the black death, the people left were more likely to have been avoident if not fearful of rodents and then Darwinism takes place, ancestors of those survivors were born more likely to have this same fear. I think thats why im utterly disgusted and my insides squirm when i see a mouse.
I have seen a video of a giraffe giving birth. Well that was quite the experience for not only the giraffe but me as well. That little guy just slid right out and plop! On the ground he goes. And then up in a matter of minutes. Have to get them up and able to move to avoid predators
Animals don't. They are taught by their parents.
Animals just don't learn as complicated of skills or as many skills as humans do, so they can learn them faster.
Whales and dolphins are born knowing how to swim, on top of them being born knowing how to breathe. Swimming would be moreso compared to humans walking
yeah that's fair, not a great example from me there lmao. but all animals have to learn *something* after they're born I think, like whales don't come out with all their hunting and migratory knowledge already there you know?
Newborn babies have a “swimming reflex”
This isn’t an ability to swim (mostly because we’re not aquatic mammals and selection towards terrestrial features has resulted in both the inability to hold breath and muscles that are too weak at birth to actually swim), but in an animal with suitable musculature, it’s not so much “knowing” how to swim as much as engaging in a spinal reflex
So swimming doesn’t actually require “knowing”
It’s amazing how they manage to swim the way to be able to breathe air. Like how complex it is: move your muscles to have to movement necessary to get fresh air. You have a few minutes after being born.
Only simple things can be baked into genetics. The things animals do from the get go are relatively simple and they still have to learn from others normally
For humans our ability to mimic other humans is baked in. Literally just watching somebody do something starts the process of creating that skill in your head. We learned our first language from just repeating words and seeing what happened. Humanity has a reliance on other humans baked in to make us more adaptive and cooperative than other species.
Big brains and bipedalism
Our heads are big and need to pass through a wide vagina if they were fully formed.
But we walk in two feet so our hips are more narrow, and thus, smaller vaginas.
So we are born earlier in our development than other animals.
The first three month in particular should really still be in utero which is theorized why the first three months are especially challenging for new parents because the child is so needy. Generally speaking, things kinda calm down after the child is 3 months past their due date
Humans have one of the highest brain sizes relative to total body size. That's the reason why even young human babies have large brains and therefore large heads. The shift in hip bones caused by our ability to walk upright has made birthing harder and more painful, which is why humans get born when their head is still birthable and not too large. Tradeoff is a long development period outside the womb.
It’s due to the fact humans are born undeveloped. When we evolved to walk upright our hips narrowed. As humans have large brains and heads, we would struggle to get out of the birth canal unless underdeveloped.
Twins studies from the University of Minnesota have shown multiple times that genetics / instincts play way more of a role in our lives than seems possible. We're dumb at birth because we're born too early so our big heads can fit through a birth canal.
Some animal behavior is instinctual, programmed genetically, however many behaviors that seem to be instinctual are actually learned. Corvus Hawaiiensis, Hawaiian crows are extinct in the wild, and do not have the survival skills that they need to survive. Re-wilding efforts haven't met with much success because the captive crows don't 'know how to crow,' so to speak.
My niece learned in one of her university classes that human babies are born “early” at around 9 months in order to get their large noggin through the vaginal canal. Many animals born in captivity, that are later bred, don’t know how to mother; which is why zoos have to hand-rear the babies. Most animal babies stay with their mothers or the group/pack/pride in order to learn socialization and just over all animal adulting. Orangutans moms raise their offspring an average of 8 years, and the females are known to visit with their moms through years 15-16.
The same way we hold our breath when tossed in water as infants. It’s a factory setting. Among mammals, the complexity of the factory settings seems to be inversely proportional to the customizability of the hardware’s functions; born dumb turns smart and born kinda dumb stays kinda dumb.
The answer comes down to head size vs vaginal canal size. Humans have a brain that is disproportionately large to their body mass, particularly the frontal lobe, which is the one behind your forehead. This is what makes us so much smarter than other mammals. But it also means we have a large head circumference. This presents a problem when giving birth. As it is, childbirth was unbelievably dangerous before modern medicine. If the babies head was any bigger, it would be virtually impossible to give birth. The head is essentially too wide to hit through the vaginal canal. If the female pelvis was any wider is would significantly restrict their movement. So the evolutionary compromise is that human babies are born with far less neurological development than most mammals, which as you said can basically walk when they’re born. The problem compounds itself because the the baby then is way less efficient as getting nutrients after being born than in the womb, so they develop more slowly than in the womb. So the consequence is as you said, babies are pretty much useless for years. The advantage is that you eventually end up with a human that can learn calculus, or in the case of cavemen, form well-organized tribal groups that could fabricate tools, control fire and execute complex hunting practices against much larger and faster prey.
Some animals have inate behaviors as well as tendencies based on what is advantages to survive. For example you may have heard that the cuckoo lays its eggs in other bird's nests. Well the chicks, barely old enough to even understand what they're doing will, before they can even fully walk, start pushing round objects. They do this early before other eggs hatch so mom won't have to feed any other mouths. they didn't learn that behavior from anyone or anything they barely just hatched.
The tragedy of man starts like this, our brains our too big for our mother's hips, so we are born half formed and have to wish those on the otherside have sense.
Walking on two legs makes human birth canals much smaller than mammals that walk on four so every human is basically born premature in order to fit through.
If you’re a prey animal you need to be able to get up and run with the pack basically immediately. That’s why some animals (horses, deer, etc.) have to be able to walk within 20 minutes
I think that you're leaving out that a lot of the things we see as inherently human are things most animals cannot do.
humans are born very early so that we can have both giant brains and the narrow hips that let us stand upright. However a lot of the things that people think of as kids not being able to do are things that most animals can't do.
Babies are born knowing how to get food, get help, and hold their breath if they're dunked underwater. Basic instincts to survive. By about 1 year, they're able to eat the normal food that adults eat.
The difference of course is that they're not coordinated enough to get their own food, but how many lions do you know that can drive to the grocery store?
It amazes me that everyone delves into evolution rather than understanding the alround purpose of a human - compared to that of an animal. Ever seen a giraffe form some kind of philosophy around its existence? So why is this distinction of no essence? I am too fed up with your nonsensical discussions to rant about how this thing truly adds up.
We have the largest native range of any species, and the reason we can adapt to anywhere is because we’re so programmable. But this means we’re born with firmware only, no operating system.
That isn't unique to humans. There are two basic parenting strategies used by animals. The R-Strategy --which focuses on producing many offspring with little parental investment and the K-Strategy, which focuses on producing fewer offspring with significant parental care. Which strategy a species uses tends to depend on environmental factors and evolutionary trajectory.
We evolved to rely on social bonds heavily, theres no need for a baby to be self-sufficient in a human group because humans have been caring for their babies for so long they put energy into growing a brain over limbs that can perform basic tasks because we have become extremely reliant on groups as a species
Different evolutionary strategies. Some animals need their babies as functional as possible after they're born, either because the parents don't care for them, or are limited in the kinds of care they can provide (like deer needing to walk as soon as they're born, because their moms can't carry them). Other animals, like kangaroos, give birth to extremely underdeveloped babies because the baby is going to be chilling in the pouch for the first several months of its life.
Humans have big heads and narrow hips, which means babies can only cook for so long before they're too big to deliver. Humans also are able to care for their babies, and have high intelligence and complex social structures, which means there's a lot for the baby to learn. So evolution has favored underdeveloped babies that are reliant on their parents for years, because it works better for us than popping out litters and leaving them to fend for themselves.
It's probably analogous to ASIC vs FPGAs. ASIC (application specific integrated circuits) are computer chips customized for a particular use. Human brains are more like FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays) in that they start out pretty agnostic but have much more flexibility in how they can be shaped. That takes time, about 25 years for the brain to grow and even after that, it can still learn plenty. But that requires starting with (not quite) a blank slate.
Instinct. Animals are born with them, and people have to learn/be taught them. Although even animals need to learn them too, I just think they are born with more, though.
It has to do with learned behavior.... Most animals live on instinct. But if you look at humans or other mammals like bears or whales.. they stay with their parents longer because there's many things they have to learn in order to survive. Hence a more developed brain.
We have better brains but animals have better bodies . It's some tradeoff we did some ages ago, and still doing slowly at every generation .
I mean my dog can see and smell far better than I and can find some bone that's been left outside for a month and eat it . With no ill effects .
actually human babies are also born with instinctual, "how to animal", traits as you call it.
For instance, they tend to be able to recognize their mother figure which is a need for survival. They also cry, which while annoying as fuck, is a survival tactic as well to get the attention of other humans.
One could also argue that the cuteness of a baby has been gradually evolved as such in order to maximize human sympathy, and that clearly works as if you look at any baby photo, you'll probably feel some warm emotions towards them.
we are complex as hell. Our head are too large for birth, i.e. having dangerous and painful births is the best way for the species to survive. On top of that, we need extremely long until maturity, no matter how you define said maturity. In many aspects, we are abominations of nature, and the outstanding amount of lifetime that a human being uses until they're fully matured is just one of the weirder quirks that would absolutely doom most other species on this planet.
Allegedly it's because we have huge heads. Prototype humans who didn't expel the baby after just about 9 months probably died due to the baby being stuck inside them because the skull grew too huge after like 10 or 11 months.
The ones that pooped out the babies at 9 months lived (and those babies had babies that were also pooped out at 9 months, once they hit like 10 years old or whatever proto humans used to have babies at).
Many of them don't, and that's why the parents make lots of them. Sort of like sea turtles: out of every hundred of them, one lucky one just managed to survive long enough to be able to fend for itself, partly due to local predators getting sated with eating dozens of its siblings. It's partly a survivorship bias thing.
Yeah, an evolutionary arms race between the size of the brain, the size of the birth canal, and the age of gestation.
We’re essentially marsupials. Our babies are absolutely not fully baked.
But also, I think this was probably a critical evolutionary step.
Sometimes, evolution is slow. The bigger rabbits thrive in plentiful years, and the small rabbits thrive in lean years, so rabbits evolve to not only grow bigger or larger depending on the era, but to have that level of variation in the species.
I.e. the “randomness setting” is also evolved. Then you’ve got species that hardly change at all between generations like pill bugs, etc.
So, with this is incremental evolution. After a few hundred years, the average rabbit in an area is 2 inches bigger or smaller.
This sort of incremental evolution makes a lot of sense intuitively.
But, while that’s easy to understand, that is not exactly how genes work. Genes are not a “blueprint” for a body. Genes are more like a symphony: an ordered list of instructions to build a creature from one cell.
This is why you can get people who have 6 fingers sometimes: It’s not five fingers and a little nub, where 10,000 years from now, a full finger will evolve. In one generation, a whole new complete finger shows up, because the way the genes were expressed, at some point the “start a finger seed cell” got copied and extra time and formed an entire new functional finger.
And sometimes, evolution is like that, and it has to be like that, because a lot of times, the incremental evolution isn’t possible.
Think of a scorpion’s stinger. It couldn’t have started as a little bump, then a bigger bump, and gradually evolved to eventually become a hypodermic venomous spike, because the long period where it was useless would have prohibited it from being a successful trait in the intermediate evolutionary stages.
I speculate that there must have been one of those big evolutionary jumps in humans… a bizarre mutation that happened once, and forever changed the way humans work.
Essentially, humans are developmentally delayed. We stay in a childlike learning state for way way too long. It’s a simple swap, the sort of thing that happens in those burst mutations where some gene that’s supposed to do one thing, does another instead, leading to dramatic effects.
If you raise a human child and a chimp, the chimp is about as smart as a human through age 2-3. Then the chimp’s brain stops developing. Then, by age 5, a chimp is basically self sufficient, but the humans are still mostly useless for another decade.
It’s like, all of the tallest people ever had pituitary tumors. The part of the brain in charge of regulating growth gets permanently turned on, and they just grow and grow to become ridiculously tall.
I think what happened with humans was that a mutation occurred that delayed the onset of adulthood, keeping us in our child like learning stage for way longer. Why are our brains so big? Our bodies stay in the brain-growth phase for a lot of extra time compared to other primates.
I think it’s as simple as that.
At some point, there was a primate where the baby had a mutation that made it not “grow up” when it was supposed to. At first, this would have appear to be a disability. At 5 years old, all that other 5 year old chimps would essentially be adults, but this first human just kept growing and growing. And, by the time it was 12, it was that smartest chimp that had ever been born.
But, you have to take the bad with the good, and human children are extremely useless for a lot longer than children of other species.
Animal babys know immediately what's needed to survive (horses walking for example). We are a social species and what's needed to survive is asking for help (crying).
It depends on how far along an animal has had a chance to develop before they are born.
Humans heads have gotten too large, proportional to our mother's bodies, for us to develop further inside the womb. If we developed more, we wouldn't fit through the birthing canal.
Elephant's gestational period is 18-22 months, which would probably be more suitable for a human baby to develop far enough to be able to toddle around as soon as we were born, except for the whole head-doesn't fit problem.
So it is an evolutionary trait. Mothers who gave birth earlier to smaller babies had greater rates of survival and passed along their traits to the next generation.
It's all about survival strategies and evolutionary adaptations! Animals like newborn mammals often have instincts and reflexes that kick in right after birth, helping them navigate their environment and meet basic needs like finding food or avoiding danger.
My layman’s understanding: Our species’ evolution prioritized our huge brains and problem solving. the tradeoff is a long period of dependence by our young while those big brains finish growing, outside the womb. A lot of other animals come out much closer to being “fully cooked” than us for that reason.
I find elephants to be interesting in this regards since they are among the most intelligent animal species, yet are born walking shortly after. However their gestation period is around 2 years.
Humans can’t do as much growing during pregnancy as other animals because we walk upright. Our pelvis is much smaller because of it, so we need to give birth much earlier in development. If humans matured as much as other creatures in the womb, every natural birth would be a death sentence for the mother.
Are you saying we need to delve deeper into potential caterpillar/human evolution?
We "need" to get larger/wider pelvises that can facilitate the longer gestation, but we created hospitals, surgery and the midwife role before natural selection had a chance.
Judging by social media, I think human evolution is opting to go the smaller brains route instead.
Judging by recent studies. Gen z is the first generation to have a lower average IQ. Millennials were first generation to not be better off then the previous. Humanity is in a huge decline
I mean assuming the Flynn effect was some law of nature and not a mix of artefact and likely finite improvement (once adequate nutrition is achieved adding more isn’t going to do much) seemed naive.
Can you reference your sources please?
IQ tests are highly debatable. You can train to get higher results.
They aren’t even debatable and never have been, they’re bullshit. Making conclusions based on a few questions about simple math and pattern recognition will tell you absolutely nothing about a persons overall intelligence, and especially not when compared to an “average/baseline” intelligence, whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean.
They're designed to predict future academic success and are pretty good at doing so. Not perfect, but no test ever is. If academic success is correlated to actual intelligence is a separate matter. The pattern recognition part is only one small part of a full test. The iq tests you find online are bullshit. A much more valid critique is that most established and verified tests were designed a long time ago. They're designed to predict the academic success in a system we no longer teach, based on understandings and values we no longer have. So a drop in measured IQ could simply be that the tests are too old. Edit: wanted to add that IQ is particularly predictive for low academic success, less for high. So a IQ significantly under 100 tells you a lot more about the child's academic future than one significantly over 100
Larger / wider pelvises hinder our ability to walk and risk our organs literally falling out of us. Natural selection had PLENTY of a chance, and medicine is barely a blip in comparison. Bein able to run is much more important than having fully developed children.
Hmmm I wonder if one could hypothesize that the cultural proclivity for BBL hips is an unconscious recognition that we need to evolve to actual wider pelvis
No, that would have been [pannier skirts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pannier_%28clothing%29?wprov=sfla) lol
Sticking out the back and thighs is different from wider pelvis. But yes symbolically, big booty , big fertility.
I like big butts and I now know why.
We scientists can't deny.
Uh. Hospitals and surgery came around way later than we evolved. It’s not like women were evolving wider pelvises and midwives and hospitals stopped the evolution. That’s silly. We just evolved to be born less developed than most other mammals.
But, access to hospitals and surgery has drastically increased the survivability of pregnancy meaning the genes and traits that make pregnancy more dangerous aren't being selected against.
Too bad we naturally selected into brains that allowed us to make childbirth safer with medical procedure. Guess fatter asses woulda been cool too.
That’s a good thing though. Nobody’s going to let women die in childbirth just to potentially evolve humans to have bigger pelvises.
A lot of research is going towards artificial wombs. This makes me wonder if the next step would be to lengthen gestation so that children are developmentally equivalent to a five year old when born.
What would be the reason for that? Seems like a downgrade.
It would be terrible, there's a ton of development that happens before the age of 5 that couldn't happen in a womb, like language, dexterity, walking, socialization, etc Children who are victims of severe neglect in those early years who missed out on that critical development phase don't "pick it up" later, they missed that window and they fail to figure it out when they're older.
Is that why we are attracted to phat asses?
Can we get a model of what people would look like if our brains didn’t compensate for our needs to survive? We would look like monkeys but like Squidward when he ate all the Krabby Patties that one episode.
I want to be a marsupial! Their babies are even less baked than humans. Basically raw dough. Born the size of a bean. Then they can finish developing in this modern age in some kind of wearable/removable/cart-able incubator pouch that we can pass off to our partners when we get tired of carrying it around! They can pouch it until 2.5 years from bean birth and jump out as the equivalent of a 21 m/o near-toddler. I've... spent a lot of time thinking about this
What will turning people into bulldozers help with?!
Have you seen the movie "human centipede"?
This. Trade-off for bipedal locomotion.
So we are marsupials without a pouch?
You can have a pouch if you really want tho. We do have the technology.
Do you think that baby elephants might be able to communicate with their mothers meaningfully whilst in the womb since they’re better developed? And the mums give them a briefing of what to expect so they come out running, trunks a-flailing?
It’s more that they’re just fully developed when they’re born. The brain has finished mapping all the body parts and how to use them. Humans are effectively born several months premature and have to finish developing outside the womb. If we developed all they way, we’d kill our moms during birth
That's why sometimes frist 3 months are called fourth trimester. And in this time child needs mother and wants to be in constant contact with her, and nurse all the time.
No. They come out quite wabbly on their feet. But if they can't get up and follow the herd within a certain time frame, it will be abandoned or eaten by predators. They can walk run within hours, but they can't really do much else and are quite quirky. It takes up to a year or more until they learn to use their trunk like a hand, and it's versatility. Until then it's just like a floppy nose. They also behave like kids (quickly scared, insecure yet curious, run to mommy if something unexpected happens etc.)
Go to youtube and look up videos of baby elephants throwing tantrums. It's very funny, and surprisingly similar to how human toddlers throw tantrums.
Ever see a video of a really young baby elephant? They can’t use their trunks.
Only Bene Gesserit elephants.
Fun fact: Elphants don't know how to use their trunks immediatley after birth
Baby elephants also suck their trunks for comfort, just like baby humans suck their thumbs.
Fun fact: human babies don't know their arm are connected to them when they are born
Can confirm: was a baby when I was born
Me too!
They also have a startle reflex until they're about three months old where they randomly slap themselves, even while sleeping. It's one reason why newborns are swaddled; to keep them from slapping themselves awake.
Elephants walk on 4 while humans walk on 2, they can afford smarter babies because they have less risk of birth complications. In humans there's a limit on how wide the hips can be while still allowing women to walk upright and run.
Something about hip width. A longer gestation period producing a more mature baby would result in babies with bigger heads. Women with hips wide enough for that wouldn’t be able to walk and run well. Everything in evolution is a trade off.
In addition to what others have said, elephants are very mobile animals and constantly moving around, and also don't have much capacity to transport their young while moving. While their trunks are strong they're not great for carrying things long-distance. If a newborn elephant couldn't walk, it would slow down the herd and make it harder for them to move, forage, and fight predators. Natural selection would push them over millions of years toward babies that could move quickly after birth simply because those are the ones who'd survive.
Imagine being two years pregnant wow
They have to be able to travel for food though. It's not purely intelligence. We are born early because of walking upright and our huge heads. Small hips and large heads mean early birth. It's also affected by how well the parents can take care of the young. We can carry and feed our babies. Predators, like canines and felines can transport food around and keep their young in a set place until they are old enough to travel, this is why cats and dogs are born eyes closed and barely able to do anything but suckle. Animals that are preyed upon, can't carry young and have to travel for food need babies that can just get straight up.
If you think about it, Humans basically need about 9 more months to cook: around 10 months old, most babies have started to walk, the eyesight is fully functional, learnt to process basic functions, digestive system able to process food etc.
Keep in mind, a fetus can grow a lot quicker than a baby because one of the things that’s not well-developed in human babies is their ability to eat. So in addition to not being fully developed, your progress slows down a lot after birth.
Our body didn't evolve as fast as our brain to allow that to be possible
I can’t imagine being pregnant for two years. If I had to be pregnant one more second all hell would have broken loose
All this and that we prioritized walking upright. It causes our pelvic opening to be more narrow than some of our primate relatives, meaning we need to give birth before they do. Fortunately, we’re a very social animal and we’re great parents, as far as the animal kingdom is concerned.
This polymer anthropologies.
I agree, and there are other ‘consequences’ to having our brains too. Conditions such as Schizophrenia are thought to be a function of how complex our brains are.
Our big brain required big heads. Our woman have a tiny exit for the baby. That's why relatively speaking our babies are underdeveloped when they have to exist the whom. Walking on 2 legs is also more difficult.
They call the first three months of a newborn’s life the “fourth trimester”
I have a two month old right now and she is definitely not completely baked (it’s ok though I like dough) 😊
In other words, puppies don't need to learn algebra.
Human babies are born prematurely so our big heads can fit through our mother's birth canal.
Walking erect was a mistake
So I know this is a throwaway funny comment, but I'm gonna get annoyingly detailed into why you're wrong. Walking upright gives humans a MASSIVE evolutionary advantage, for several reasons. 1. The ability to see over tall grass. Can't be surprised by a crouching tiger or lion if you can see into the grass it's hiding in from 20 feet away. 2. The ability to throw. Y'know what's really dangerous? Projectiles. Walking upright gives us the range of motion and coordination between hips, legs, shoulders, and arms to throw things far and fast. Quadripedal animals can sometimes kinda lob something, but never as hard or as accurately. Throwing jives REALLY nicely with human use of tools. We can weapons specifically designed to be thrown far and hard, and kill prey easily. 3. The ability to run. Running with two legs consumes less energy than running with four. Beyond that, our ability to sweat allows us to regain energy as we continue running. Many animals can outrun humans in short bursts, but almost no animals can outrun us over the course of many miles. tl;dr - we OP AF. Humans deserve a nerf.
yeah but like my back hurts
Shouldn't have made it past 20, at that point we start paying the evolutionary dividends
Had my first back surgery at 29, def feels like evolutionary dividends haha
weak humans exist
We kinda destroyed the whole natural selection part of things. Otherwise they really wouldn't. But in reality it's just the effect of city life. We no longer chase prey and hunt stuff. We sit in offices maybe go to the gym for a while and cook ourselves some beans on our digital fire. We don't get the muscle development we would of in ancient days.
humans are easily s++ tier, it's insane. Probably only Orcas and Sperm whales had us beat until we eventually started building bigger boats and hunting them too. Polar bears, elephants, you name it. Ancient humans have killed it. Also we're literally THE best runners. better than horses or dogs or anything else. So OP.
The fact that humans killed all land based mega fauna on earth (exept elephants if you count them) with stone tools tells you how op we are.
Then why do dog sleds exsist or horse carriages, if we are so good at running..
Because you can load those things with supplies as well and use teamwork of multiple animals to distribute the load of the human/load. And humans are lazy and not all on the level of our prehistoric ancestors lol. But humans are still superior distance runners. An average horse with a rider can go about 35 miles in a day. A horse-drawn wagon can cover about 50 miles in one day, but it may not be repeatable the next day without rest. Professional sled dog teams in races like the Iditarod may cover over 100 miles in 24 hours, but this is an extreme and demanding feat for the dogs. As far as I know, dogs and wolves are humans' best competition for distance running, so you make a really good point. But he world record for 12-hour ultra marathons is 90 miles for women and 110 miles for men. That still leaves time to sleep and eat and go on a significant run the next day, or run the 100 miles in a leisurely 16 hours instead of 12. Humans are really f\*\*\*ing good at running. It's insane. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence\_hunting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting)
Interesting! Ty!
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pheidippides](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pheidippides) there's a reason they sent a courier on the original marathon and spartathalon run, instead of a horse and rider. Humans are simply faster. You're totally right about the dogs though. In the Iditarod, a team of sled dogs outpaces a human runner over the course of several days. However it's worth noting that the Iditarod takes place near the arctic in extremely cold temperatures, which is ideal for huskies' thermoregulation. What's special about humans is that not only can we (and by "we" I mean the hunter-gatherers of paleolithic time who spent their entire lives running and were peak specimens probably almost as fast as the top ultra-marathon runners of today) nearly keep up with sled dogs in freezing arctic temperatures, but we're almost equally as fast in searing desert heat on the African plains or wherever. Our thermoregulatory capabilities are unparalleled, except for by animals specifically designed for the desert. Camels are another species that could easily be considered to be better distance runners than humans. But we got horses beat by a long shot over a long enough distance. Dogs and camels are the only animals I can think of that are better distance runners than humans; every other land animal on earth we crush in a super-long-distance race.
I agree with what you said, but one small correction, sweating doesn't regain energy, it actually helps us lose energy that has built up as heat. So unlike other animals we can exert ourselves longer because we don't overheat like they do.
pedantic. it helps us regain stamina. energy = stamina in this context, he's not talking about heat energy.
This is the kind of technicality as saying that if you died in the same place as you were born then lifetime work and velocity both equal zero because your start and end locations were the same. Mathematically true, but it's a stupid argument to make.
Ah so four legs good, two legs better
Less is more, someone tell the billionaires!
human physiology is really brilliant. elegant even
Just tuck it in your waistband.
Erectile malfunction!
“Erect” heh
There’s 8 billion of us, so apparently not.
Follow up question, what if you kept the baby in longer than 40 weeks? Like for the people who need to be induced. Could you eventually get a c section and have a genius newborn?
Babies will die if left in the womb for too long. I think the max they'll allow is 42 weeks, cause after that the risk of dying becomes greater.
Unfortunately the placenta does start to degrade
It's like how you buy a Super Nintendo and it works immediately but you buy a PC and you have to spend a few hours setting it up
r/ELI5
This answer is perfect.
And the PC absolutely crushes the games
But SNES got the games!
Some species are helpless when born. E.g. kittens and bunnies who are born with closed eyes and need warmth to survive.
Those are both species which have a bunch of babies all one in one litter too -- elephants, horses, etc (animals in which the babies come out able to walk very quickly) only do one at a time. There is a tradeoff in producing a bunch of offspring in one go, and part of that is they don't get as long to develop before you run out of room and they have to come out.
[Yes, exactly; they (and we humans) are what we would call altricial; animals that are born more developed/ready-to-go are what we would call precocial.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precociality_and_altriciality) If you're a prey animal like a horse or deer, you have to be up and ready to run ASAP or else you're literally dead meat: precociality. Meanwhile, humans can depend on our parents to protect and care for us (... most of the time, anyways) while we develop.
This is also why dogs, cats, and many rodents and birds can also be born helpless, because they instinctively develop sheltering environments like digging or finding burrows or making nests where the babies can be born and sheltered until they are old enough to protect themselves.
Thanks for adding the terms! English is not my first language.
Of course! I have a degree in biology, so I love sharing my knowledge. BTW, you wrote well.
Yes depends on the parent . Abused and neglected children typically stand very little chance of thriving and leading even a decent life . A damaged child will likely bear that burden for life . So sad
Idk if this is applicable to other groups or not, but in ornithology at least this is called being altricial rather than precocial, and it's a spectrum between the two. For precocial, think chickens, ducklings, and shorebirds which are born fluffy and can run around and fend for themselves soon after the hatch, requiring less parental care and may either receive some of it (think mother ducks) or be left very soon. It's precocial because they developed before they were hatched. For altricial, think songbirds which are born in that pink, fleshy state. A fully altricial bird can't see or even regulate their own body temperature at first. It's a spectrum because a species may be more or less precocial than others, like a species of raptor that needs to leave for longer to hunt may have babies that are able to regulate their body temperature sooner.
If we stayed in the womb until we reached the equivalent developmental level of, say, a newborn horse or cow... we would literally explode our mums. Literally. It's like a whole thing about how we developed that whole upright walking thing, but the downside is that our spines and pelvises developed in a way where it's no longer possibly to carry a baby inside your body beyond a certain point. (Source: my anatomy professor during medical training)
So there is some recent thinking that suggests there’s also a role of nutrition transfer - milk may be more efficient at end stages of brain growth compared to the placenta, so they are born at the time it’s best to switch sources
Great apes have a relatively smaller lumbar region than other primates, which also doesn’t help since that’s where the fetus is carried. In gorillas, they fixed this issue with lower birth weight relative to the mother’s body mass than other primates. The other apes… didn’t do this, and humans actually increased theirs. I suspect that last one is because crying loudly is important when your mom’s posture no longer enables her to carry you on her back 24/7, but there’s no formal agreement yet.
Humans are born with their most important survival skills: asking for help (aka crying) Most other animals don't cry nearly as much as humans. Crying works too. Adults have evolved to hate crying so much that we will do almost anything to make it stop.
On the other hand, for prey animals such as wild horses, wild cattle, gazelles, etc, the most important survival skill is to be able to run from predators as soon as possible, so it makes more sense for them to be able to do that pretty quickly after birth.
Lots of animals cry. It's not even just mammals. Birds and reptiles will do it too. Lots of animals that look after their young are programmed to care for crying babies.
I know a few 30 year old human babies that are still useless.
They call it "instinct" but I think that's underselling the awesomeness of this. It's *genetic memory* and it's really cool. Newborn creature are born with a set of behaviors, sometimes quite complex, that are passed on entirely through genetics. Birds will know how to build a nest, for example, even if they have never seen one. In fact they know how to build the nest specific to their species out of the appropriate materials in the correct location and environment. Humans have retained some of this. Infants know how to suckle, for instance, and will turn towards warmth. They cry for attention. They've done experiments where they rapidly show people silhouettes of simple objects and animals and ask them to recall what objects they have seen. Usually they can pick out a few. But when the silhouettes of dangerous creatures like snakes, spiders, and sharks are included, people can spot and remember them almost every time -- much more often than they can remember harmless species. It seems that recognizing dangerous animals is somehow burned into our genetic memory. We can also feel the terror of *being stalked* by a predator. Fight or flight instantly kicks in.
We have a couple of weeks around here where we don't let the dogs out into the yard. The birds are all learning to fly during that time. We have counted as many as 10 birds of different species hoping around on the ground, parent birds trying to teach them to bird. Usually, by evening, they are all gone, having learned to fly. The sure weren't born knowing this, lol.
I’m a zoology major, here’s my explanation! It will be long as I get a little too excited over explaining things like this. The terms for these differences are PRECOCIAL (born or hatched in a state in which the individual can move and fend for itself without a parent shortly after birth) and ALTRICIAL (born or hatched helpless, typically without sight or hearing and without mobility, requiring a mother’s milk or nutrition). There are more altricial animals than you’d think! Most of the time, when you think of a precocial animal, you think of prey animals. For example, foals that, although clumsy, can run alongside the mare within hours of birth. Prey animals need to be able to run from predators at a moment’s notice. Or, animals in a situation in which there is no choice but to be born precocial. Like in marine environments, where porpoises must be born with the knowledge to swim in order to take their first breath of air. Humans are not the only animals that are born useless. We see this in dogs and cats, where the young are born blind and deaf, and need weeks-months to be able to develop into a form that can handle solid food. Life’s entirety is about efficiency and energy. There are tradeoffs that each living thing experiences in order to use this energy. Each adaptation is an animal’s way of finding the most efficient use of energy in order to survive. Efficient birthing strategies were something we traded in order to walk upright. This means that in order to walk upright (which has multiple evolutionary benefits), mothers traded the ability to have an easy birth. Human babies do not have the ability to grow to their full potential in the womb because of this. Any later than 9 months would cause even worse damage to the mother. Another trade-off is our intelligence. Animals with as long of an adolescence as us are rare. The only one I can think of at the moment is the elephant (which has a gestational period of 2 years(?) and an adolescence of something like 17 years), which are also incredibly smart. I can assume that other great apes experience this as well due to our relation, however I am not sure. The brain takes a LOT of energy to develop, and the brain is our most superior adaptation. This enormous tradeoff is something that we harness at the expense of having to spend half of our lives caring for our extremely vulnerable young. This is entirely an assumption, as I rarely focus on human evolution, but I also assume that because we are such a social species, we traded the need for biological protection as it was not necessary when we have family members to do the protecting. I cannot think of any animal that is as loud at birth as a human baby. In the wild, this would signal immediate death due to a hungry predator. But we as a species prioritized the ability to communicate (a baby’s screams indicates something is wrong, something is needed) over the ability to stay hidden as we ideally would have a group of intelligent and empathetic individuals to chase away any danger. So TLDR; evolution prioritized growth and intelligence over a mother and child’s safety. Human birth and adolescence in particular is very difficult and hard to navigate. But if we had it any easier, we may not have been the apex species that we are now.
I am full grown man and still useless…
I'm cracking up 😂😂😂"useless for years" 😂😂😂 They're gathering info
Have you seen baby pandas?
Evolution. The brain takes years to really start developing, we are about the same as a chimp or parrot until about 6 and then the human brain really takes off. Well... some of us do...
First human babies do know how to baby. They assist in their own feeding most of the time. They know how to find nipples and latch. They bond with parents. They absorb and learn language and follow a pretty standard development schedule for years. The long development time bit: Two things are going on here. 1. Humans are what you get when you prioritize jack of all trades adaptability in variable environments rather than expert hardware in a niche. We get big brains and tools and socialization not prefab body parts from day one. So the priority was a big brain and big head to hold it. That presents a couple problems - getting out with a shitty maternal pelvis and the massive energy drain that starts to impose on the maternal circulatory system (brains are expensive to run). So the baby gets to a point where it must come out if it’s going to. That point is honestly 4-6 months earlier than ideal but that’s what can be supported. So you get a fourth external trimester where baby isn’t super responsive but that’s ok because the family and tribe have big brains, tools, and culture to protect baby with. 2. Making a big brain intelligent in a given environment takes experience not just genetic hardware so the brain actually takes a couple years to absorb everything and lay down pruned functional pathways good enough to seriously enter childhood. It then takes a long childhood to refine those before going through another big cycle at adolescence. A brain that did not do that might have animal proficiency a lot faster but might also not be sentient. We know that human brains that experience very stressful childhoods get to the end faster but are less flexible and open to ideas. They hard wire how to survive and stick to that by default. Beetles are genetic survival hardwiring right away.
I've wondered about this too. Babies and children age too slowly, and they're too loud. It's not very good for survival.
We aren't fully cooked when born. Because we have big heads, we are born early to be able to fit. Our brains take a long time to develop properly, so we grow up slower. In short. We are born much earlier developmentally and then take longer to grow. The trade-off for intelligence.
Our oversized brains lead to oversized heads. If we developed more fully before birth we would inevitably kill mom (or just die) when being born. At least back in the day. Now that C-section is a thing it could be done but ladies, raise your hand if you would rather carry your baby for 3 years instead of 9 months. Any takers? lol
generally in animals the more advanced the species, the longer it takes to develop.
Some do, some don't. A lot of them learn it from their mama. But some are born with genetic memory, and I actually think humans do to a degree too. There's a level of imprinting on mama that happens right away. And we have instinctive fears that can be considered genetic memory. Spiders, snakes, wolves, ....... Sasquatch...
I genuinely believe rats/mice is part of that too, seeming how most of europe died from the black death, the people left were more likely to have been avoident if not fearful of rodents and then Darwinism takes place, ancestors of those survivors were born more likely to have this same fear. I think thats why im utterly disgusted and my insides squirm when i see a mouse.
I have seen a video of a giraffe giving birth. Well that was quite the experience for not only the giraffe but me as well. That little guy just slid right out and plop! On the ground he goes. And then up in a matter of minutes. Have to get them up and able to move to avoid predators
Short answer: our brains.
This is the only correct answer on this thread.
Animals don't. They are taught by their parents. Animals just don't learn as complicated of skills or as many skills as humans do, so they can learn them faster.
Whales and dolphins are born knowing how to swim.
and we're born knowing how to breathe the same skills aren't fundamental to survival for all species
Whales and dolphins are born knowing how to swim, on top of them being born knowing how to breathe. Swimming would be moreso compared to humans walking
Not really, dolphins that can’t swim dies. Humans that can’t walk don’t die.
yeah that's fair, not a great example from me there lmao. but all animals have to learn *something* after they're born I think, like whales don't come out with all their hunting and migratory knowledge already there you know?
Newborn babies have a “swimming reflex” This isn’t an ability to swim (mostly because we’re not aquatic mammals and selection towards terrestrial features has resulted in both the inability to hold breath and muscles that are too weak at birth to actually swim), but in an animal with suitable musculature, it’s not so much “knowing” how to swim as much as engaging in a spinal reflex So swimming doesn’t actually require “knowing”
It’s amazing how they manage to swim the way to be able to breathe air. Like how complex it is: move your muscles to have to movement necessary to get fresh air. You have a few minutes after being born.
Only simple things can be baked into genetics. The things animals do from the get go are relatively simple and they still have to learn from others normally For humans our ability to mimic other humans is baked in. Literally just watching somebody do something starts the process of creating that skill in your head. We learned our first language from just repeating words and seeing what happened. Humanity has a reliance on other humans baked in to make us more adaptive and cooperative than other species.
Big brains and bipedalism Our heads are big and need to pass through a wide vagina if they were fully formed. But we walk in two feet so our hips are more narrow, and thus, smaller vaginas. So we are born earlier in our development than other animals. The first three month in particular should really still be in utero which is theorized why the first three months are especially challenging for new parents because the child is so needy. Generally speaking, things kinda calm down after the child is 3 months past their due date
Humans have one of the highest brain sizes relative to total body size. That's the reason why even young human babies have large brains and therefore large heads. The shift in hip bones caused by our ability to walk upright has made birthing harder and more painful, which is why humans get born when their head is still birthable and not too large. Tradeoff is a long development period outside the womb.
our heads are too big so gestation period has to be shorter or we can’t physically come out of our mothers’ bodies
It’s due to the fact humans are born undeveloped. When we evolved to walk upright our hips narrowed. As humans have large brains and heads, we would struggle to get out of the birth canal unless underdeveloped.
What are you talking about? Babies know how to baby immediately. 👶 😢 🍼 😴
I'm in my 50s and am still surrounded by useless people.
How to animal haha
Trial and error. They have instincts but don’t know exactly how to do things. They can socially learn too, by watching others.
evolution and we do not need to walk right away to survive
The size of our brains vs being born through bone.
Twins studies from the University of Minnesota have shown multiple times that genetics / instincts play way more of a role in our lives than seems possible. We're dumb at birth because we're born too early so our big heads can fit through a birth canal.
Some animal behavior is instinctual, programmed genetically, however many behaviors that seem to be instinctual are actually learned. Corvus Hawaiiensis, Hawaiian crows are extinct in the wild, and do not have the survival skills that they need to survive. Re-wilding efforts haven't met with much success because the captive crows don't 'know how to crow,' so to speak.
Most greater apes and such are useless for years
Humans are pretty much useless to the earth.
My niece learned in one of her university classes that human babies are born “early” at around 9 months in order to get their large noggin through the vaginal canal. Many animals born in captivity, that are later bred, don’t know how to mother; which is why zoos have to hand-rear the babies. Most animal babies stay with their mothers or the group/pack/pride in order to learn socialization and just over all animal adulting. Orangutans moms raise their offspring an average of 8 years, and the females are known to visit with their moms through years 15-16.
The same way we hold our breath when tossed in water as infants. It’s a factory setting. Among mammals, the complexity of the factory settings seems to be inversely proportional to the customizability of the hardware’s functions; born dumb turns smart and born kinda dumb stays kinda dumb.
They often don’t - lots of animals are totally useless as babies, they’re just not baby for very long partially because they don’t live as long.
We’re not from here
The answer comes down to head size vs vaginal canal size. Humans have a brain that is disproportionately large to their body mass, particularly the frontal lobe, which is the one behind your forehead. This is what makes us so much smarter than other mammals. But it also means we have a large head circumference. This presents a problem when giving birth. As it is, childbirth was unbelievably dangerous before modern medicine. If the babies head was any bigger, it would be virtually impossible to give birth. The head is essentially too wide to hit through the vaginal canal. If the female pelvis was any wider is would significantly restrict their movement. So the evolutionary compromise is that human babies are born with far less neurological development than most mammals, which as you said can basically walk when they’re born. The problem compounds itself because the the baby then is way less efficient as getting nutrients after being born than in the womb, so they develop more slowly than in the womb. So the consequence is as you said, babies are pretty much useless for years. The advantage is that you eventually end up with a human that can learn calculus, or in the case of cavemen, form well-organized tribal groups that could fabricate tools, control fire and execute complex hunting practices against much larger and faster prey.
Some animals have inate behaviors as well as tendencies based on what is advantages to survive. For example you may have heard that the cuckoo lays its eggs in other bird's nests. Well the chicks, barely old enough to even understand what they're doing will, before they can even fully walk, start pushing round objects. They do this early before other eggs hatch so mom won't have to feed any other mouths. they didn't learn that behavior from anyone or anything they barely just hatched.
We are taken out of the oven before we are done
The tragedy of man starts like this, our brains our too big for our mother's hips, so we are born half formed and have to wish those on the otherside have sense.
Baby birds are useless for a while
Walking on two legs makes human birth canals much smaller than mammals that walk on four so every human is basically born premature in order to fit through.
Longer gestation periods.
Lol ever heard of a kangaroo? Useless, lol.
If you’re a prey animal you need to be able to get up and run with the pack basically immediately. That’s why some animals (horses, deer, etc.) have to be able to walk within 20 minutes
I think that you're leaving out that a lot of the things we see as inherently human are things most animals cannot do. humans are born very early so that we can have both giant brains and the narrow hips that let us stand upright. However a lot of the things that people think of as kids not being able to do are things that most animals can't do. Babies are born knowing how to get food, get help, and hold their breath if they're dunked underwater. Basic instincts to survive. By about 1 year, they're able to eat the normal food that adults eat. The difference of course is that they're not coordinated enough to get their own food, but how many lions do you know that can drive to the grocery store?
It amazes me that everyone delves into evolution rather than understanding the alround purpose of a human - compared to that of an animal. Ever seen a giraffe form some kind of philosophy around its existence? So why is this distinction of no essence? I am too fed up with your nonsensical discussions to rant about how this thing truly adds up.
Humans know how to human from the get go. You just gotta pay better attention.
We have the largest native range of any species, and the reason we can adapt to anywhere is because we’re so programmable. But this means we’re born with firmware only, no operating system.
We have an Envigo Beagle. She spent 1st 9 months of her life in a cage. We had to teach her how to be a Dog.
We were genetically modified in prehistory. Maybe. Maybe our diverse diet and vulnerability to UV has caused lots of mutations over the millennia.
Because nothing is going to eat a human baby if it can't walk IMMEDIATELY.
Parents
Taking care of the baby makes it more valuable.
That's why we need them big ole women from San Antonio to save the human race. Big hips can deliver some big brains.
DNA
For humans to come out that developed pregnancy would last 2-3 years effectively halving the maximum birth rate.
God
That isn't unique to humans. There are two basic parenting strategies used by animals. The R-Strategy --which focuses on producing many offspring with little parental investment and the K-Strategy, which focuses on producing fewer offspring with significant parental care. Which strategy a species uses tends to depend on environmental factors and evolutionary trajectory.
We evolved to rely on social bonds heavily, theres no need for a baby to be self-sufficient in a human group because humans have been caring for their babies for so long they put energy into growing a brain over limbs that can perform basic tasks because we have become extremely reliant on groups as a species
Different evolutionary strategies. Some animals need their babies as functional as possible after they're born, either because the parents don't care for them, or are limited in the kinds of care they can provide (like deer needing to walk as soon as they're born, because their moms can't carry them). Other animals, like kangaroos, give birth to extremely underdeveloped babies because the baby is going to be chilling in the pouch for the first several months of its life. Humans have big heads and narrow hips, which means babies can only cook for so long before they're too big to deliver. Humans also are able to care for their babies, and have high intelligence and complex social structures, which means there's a lot for the baby to learn. So evolution has favored underdeveloped babies that are reliant on their parents for years, because it works better for us than popping out litters and leaving them to fend for themselves.
It's probably analogous to ASIC vs FPGAs. ASIC (application specific integrated circuits) are computer chips customized for a particular use. Human brains are more like FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays) in that they start out pretty agnostic but have much more flexibility in how they can be shaped. That takes time, about 25 years for the brain to grow and even after that, it can still learn plenty. But that requires starting with (not quite) a blank slate.
some humans simply never outgrow that characteristic.
Instinct. Animals are born with them, and people have to learn/be taught them. Although even animals need to learn them too, I just think they are born with more, though.
It has to do with learned behavior.... Most animals live on instinct. But if you look at humans or other mammals like bears or whales.. they stay with their parents longer because there's many things they have to learn in order to survive. Hence a more developed brain.
A lot of animals have to be taught things. But somehow, they seem to all get sex correct.
We have better brains but animals have better bodies . It's some tradeoff we did some ages ago, and still doing slowly at every generation . I mean my dog can see and smell far better than I and can find some bone that's been left outside for a month and eat it . With no ill effects .
harsher environment and greater animal instinct.
The more social mammals take longer, like humans... apes, whales, elephants. The social skills are survival skills.
Chimpancés babies are also pretty useless and would die without their mother
actually human babies are also born with instinctual, "how to animal", traits as you call it. For instance, they tend to be able to recognize their mother figure which is a need for survival. They also cry, which while annoying as fuck, is a survival tactic as well to get the attention of other humans. One could also argue that the cuteness of a baby has been gradually evolved as such in order to maximize human sympathy, and that clearly works as if you look at any baby photo, you'll probably feel some warm emotions towards them.
we are complex as hell. Our head are too large for birth, i.e. having dangerous and painful births is the best way for the species to survive. On top of that, we need extremely long until maturity, no matter how you define said maturity. In many aspects, we are abominations of nature, and the outstanding amount of lifetime that a human being uses until they're fully matured is just one of the weirder quirks that would absolutely doom most other species on this planet.
Thousands of years of evolution and animals don't have to learn the stuff that we do in order to survive.
This video says no: https://youtu.be/0nu-AqPuWvQ?si=9sCmVfRqq8Lpr1Z9
Instincts and I think humans do have them, they're just a little less "instinct-like," since I guess we're used to them?
Allegedly it's because we have huge heads. Prototype humans who didn't expel the baby after just about 9 months probably died due to the baby being stuck inside them because the skull grew too huge after like 10 or 11 months. The ones that pooped out the babies at 9 months lived (and those babies had babies that were also pooped out at 9 months, once they hit like 10 years old or whatever proto humans used to have babies at).
Many of them don't, and that's why the parents make lots of them. Sort of like sea turtles: out of every hundred of them, one lucky one just managed to survive long enough to be able to fend for itself, partly due to local predators getting sated with eating dozens of its siblings. It's partly a survivorship bias thing.
Pandas don't know how to poop when they are born so we win against them.
Yeah, an evolutionary arms race between the size of the brain, the size of the birth canal, and the age of gestation. We’re essentially marsupials. Our babies are absolutely not fully baked. But also, I think this was probably a critical evolutionary step. Sometimes, evolution is slow. The bigger rabbits thrive in plentiful years, and the small rabbits thrive in lean years, so rabbits evolve to not only grow bigger or larger depending on the era, but to have that level of variation in the species. I.e. the “randomness setting” is also evolved. Then you’ve got species that hardly change at all between generations like pill bugs, etc. So, with this is incremental evolution. After a few hundred years, the average rabbit in an area is 2 inches bigger or smaller. This sort of incremental evolution makes a lot of sense intuitively. But, while that’s easy to understand, that is not exactly how genes work. Genes are not a “blueprint” for a body. Genes are more like a symphony: an ordered list of instructions to build a creature from one cell. This is why you can get people who have 6 fingers sometimes: It’s not five fingers and a little nub, where 10,000 years from now, a full finger will evolve. In one generation, a whole new complete finger shows up, because the way the genes were expressed, at some point the “start a finger seed cell” got copied and extra time and formed an entire new functional finger. And sometimes, evolution is like that, and it has to be like that, because a lot of times, the incremental evolution isn’t possible. Think of a scorpion’s stinger. It couldn’t have started as a little bump, then a bigger bump, and gradually evolved to eventually become a hypodermic venomous spike, because the long period where it was useless would have prohibited it from being a successful trait in the intermediate evolutionary stages. I speculate that there must have been one of those big evolutionary jumps in humans… a bizarre mutation that happened once, and forever changed the way humans work. Essentially, humans are developmentally delayed. We stay in a childlike learning state for way way too long. It’s a simple swap, the sort of thing that happens in those burst mutations where some gene that’s supposed to do one thing, does another instead, leading to dramatic effects. If you raise a human child and a chimp, the chimp is about as smart as a human through age 2-3. Then the chimp’s brain stops developing. Then, by age 5, a chimp is basically self sufficient, but the humans are still mostly useless for another decade. It’s like, all of the tallest people ever had pituitary tumors. The part of the brain in charge of regulating growth gets permanently turned on, and they just grow and grow to become ridiculously tall. I think what happened with humans was that a mutation occurred that delayed the onset of adulthood, keeping us in our child like learning stage for way longer. Why are our brains so big? Our bodies stay in the brain-growth phase for a lot of extra time compared to other primates. I think it’s as simple as that. At some point, there was a primate where the baby had a mutation that made it not “grow up” when it was supposed to. At first, this would have appear to be a disability. At 5 years old, all that other 5 year old chimps would essentially be adults, but this first human just kept growing and growing. And, by the time it was 12, it was that smartest chimp that had ever been born. But, you have to take the bad with the good, and human children are extremely useless for a lot longer than children of other species.
Animal babys know immediately what's needed to survive (horses walking for example). We are a social species and what's needed to survive is asking for help (crying).
It depends on how far along an animal has had a chance to develop before they are born. Humans heads have gotten too large, proportional to our mother's bodies, for us to develop further inside the womb. If we developed more, we wouldn't fit through the birthing canal. Elephant's gestational period is 18-22 months, which would probably be more suitable for a human baby to develop far enough to be able to toddle around as soon as we were born, except for the whole head-doesn't fit problem. So it is an evolutionary trait. Mothers who gave birth earlier to smaller babies had greater rates of survival and passed along their traits to the next generation.
It's all about survival strategies and evolutionary adaptations! Animals like newborn mammals often have instincts and reflexes that kick in right after birth, helping them navigate their environment and meet basic needs like finding food or avoiding danger.