11 ms·

Caesarean births 'affecting human evolution'

46 points by MichalSikora 10y ago

tn13 10y ago
Main stream journalists can not get science right. In the normal course of evolution women with narrower pelvis die a painful death while delivering a baby (or the baby dies). Thus the genes that give women a narrower pelvis do not get passed on. We can not let these women die this horrible death. This is a good outcome.
- corin_ 10y ago
  "Women with a very narrow pelvis would not have survived birth 100 years ago. They do now and pass on their genes encoding for a narrow pelvis to their daughters." and "Our intent is not to criticise medical intervention," he said. "But it's had an evolutionary effect." The article said everything you said, and more, in what way did it "not get science right"?
- throwawygybj 10y ago
  There's two sides to this coin. By allowing normally lethal genes to be passed on were likely to cause more death in the future. This is definitely something that should be screened and prevented, whether through gene editing, surrogacy, or just selecting for embryos that are either male or lack the undesired trait. Nobody has to die to voluntarily select this out of the population. The Jewish community has been on the forefront of this for a long time. On the border of eugenics I guess, but self selecting against genes that will cause suffering or death.
  - curun1r 10y ago
    Why should we avoid those genes? We have the technology to deal with the situation when it arises. What would be the problem with, eventually, all women giving birth by Caesarean? There are plenty of other instances where our advancements have likely influenced our evolution. For one, the ease at which we can today travel between continents means that there's far more breeding between different races than we've ever had in human history. Should that be stopped? We also don't run/walk nearly as much as we used to thanks to harnessing hydrocarbons...should we continue to try to select for the long-distance running abilities that helped our ancestors kill animals for food during persistence hunting? And I'm betting that certain people are genetically more predisposed to catching measles, polio or any of the other diseases for which we've developed effective vaccines...would we want to make sure that those genes don't get passed on? In short...why optimize for a world that doesn't exist? Unless you subscribe to a belief in a post-apocalyptic future where modern technology regresses and mankind is forced to live in a more primitive state, there's really no need for us to actively do anything...the magic of evolution is that it just happens naturally. Now, evolution can be an uncaring bitch to individuals, so there's plenty of reason why an individual would want to screen their offspring for certain genetic traits, but at the societal level, it's just swimming against a really strong current.
    - ominous 10y ago
      > What would be the problem with, eventually, all humans needing glasses to see, or born with cornea defects? We know how to fix that. We should optimize for a world that works, instead of one we believe we'll be able to fix forever, and constantly requires purposeful effort to work. Would you like to carry your Fix The Generalized Imbalance Pills (FTGIMP, f-gimp how we call it, as in: "Hold on love, the trekking has been fun, but know I gotta take the f----gimp") when you decide to go for a bike ride? Or will you tell me "but how many people do you know that go on bike rides for more than 10 minutes?". How many people travel the world on a shoestring? Should they stop doing that? Would you like to go to space? How large should the infirmary be? With all these things that "we know how to do" and will be required to do, if we don't get a better vessel. I agree the world has changed. But this vessel is still better when it is self sufficient to the max. Instead of long distance running, we will need low maintenance living. Requiring vaccines, failing joints, birth complications will not help. The resources are limited. It helps no one, in the long run, to make living more complex.
      - lostlogin 10y ago
        The advances you seem to think are bad lead to those who benefit from treatments being productive. They build stuff and contribute and this helps society. It helps everyone when you help those who are infirm/unwell/unlucky. But say we took the view that intervention was bad - who chooses who dies?
    - zde 10y ago
      > What would be the problem with, eventually, all women giving birth by Caesarean? It needs significantly more resources (time, labor, medication) and therefore should negatively affect host's fitness but in most developed countries it does not. NOW we optimize for a world that does not exist.
      - lostlogin 10y ago
        It requires a lot less resources than a painful death uses. It also uses less resources than a vaginal delivery that should have been a ceasar. How are we optimising for a world that doesn't exist?
- 3chelon 10y ago
  To be fair, aside from the preschool formatting of the article (one sentence per paragraph, a concerning recent BBC trend), the journalist didn't actually say anything incorrect. But she did not answer the main question that was asked: why the human pelvis has not grown wider over the years? She said that there were two opposing forces, one for larger babies (they have more chance of survival), and the other was natural selection preventing them getting too large (by killing them both in childbirth). Maybe I'm missing something, but neither of those answer the question of why the pelvis has not got larger. All I can assume is that it is (a) an evolutionary trend of men to be attracted to younger and potentially, on average, slimmer and more healthy or fertile women, and (b) cultural, since there is evidence that in historic times and possibly also in less technologically advanced societies, larger hips are considered desirable (which makes total sense in a society with no access to modern medicine). I'm sure some anthropologists will beat me up for these terrible generalisations, but in general, on average, it seems these forces may have an impact on pelvis size over generations?
  - marchenko 10y ago
    Men are indeed attracted to relatively wide-hipped women, but there is an upper limit on hip width. There is a biomechanical tradeoff between pelvic shape and locomotor efficiency. The width of the pelvis affects the energy needed for a bipedal gait, since it alters the shape of the largest bones of the lower skeleton and their associated musculature (compare the angle of the femur in men v women and imagine how it affects joint stress). So there's a three way evolutionary arms race between the needs of the large-brained infant, the need to successfully expel said infant, and the need to be able to walk and run efficiently and without musculoskeletal damage.
  - Swizec 10y ago
    > one sentence per paragraph, a concerning recent BBC trend 3 of your 5 paragraphs are a single sentence.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - 10y ago
3chelon 10y ago
It is blindingly obvious from an evolutionary standpoint that this is happening. I have thought about it a fair bit, as it has directly impacted my own family, and I've no doubt it will continue to do so in subsequent generations. I don't think it's something to worry much about, as the much broader benefits of modern medicine (namely, antibiotics) have had so much impact on our survival rate that this would pale into insignificance. Which may be borne out (pun intended) by the numbers: 3% to 3.3% or 3.6% in 50-60 years - is that statistically significant? The error there is in the same order as the overall increase, so it's hard to believe it's even measurable at this stage. Because it is so obviously going to happen, I suspect there may be some curve-fitting going on here?
- Noseshine 10y ago
  > 3% to 3.3% or 3.6% in 50-60 years - is that statistically significant? Since all births are recorded, the sample size is very large. So without having the numbers and doing any calculations, just based on that I'm pretty sure even a much smaller increase would still be statistically significant.
- mjevans 10y ago
  The growth rate is likely to be geometric.
bambax 10y ago
> Historically, these genes would not have been passed from mother to child as both would have died in labour. How do we know that? As the name implied, Caesar was born this way, a little over 2000 years ago. It's likely the procedure is much much older, too. So what timeframe are we talking about? What we didn't know how to do 100 years ago was how to save mother and child once birth had begun and the baby's head had started to go into the canal and got stuck. But humanity have known how to do caesarean birth for a very long time (there are even cases of women doing it to themselves). Also, from an evolutionary perspective it doesn't matter if the mother survives birth; it only matters whether the baby lives. So it's at best incorrect to phrase the problem this way: > Women with a very narrow pelvis would not have survived birth 100 years ago. They do now and pass on their genes encoding for a narrow pelvis to their daughters.
- 3131s 10y ago
  > Also, from an evolutionary perspective it doesn't matter if the mother survives birth; it only matters whether the baby lives. Wouldn't it though? A mother that lives can go on to give birth to more children. Not to mention that a mother's survival might affect her child's chance of survival.
  - ptaipale 10y ago
    The previous comment was probably written in an extremely patriarchal context... a king's offspring would be taken care of even if the mother died. Though even there, the chances of being stabbed in the back might have been increased without motherly protection.
- ptaipale 10y ago
  It is probably just a myth that Caesar was born this way. At the time, the mother most likely couldn't survive a section, because the resulting infections would kill anyone who had such surgery performed. And Caesar's mother lived to old age.
  - gambiting 10y ago
32h8 10y ago
Evolution is a ultimate rat race. FYI offtopic: Kid can be mingled in umbilical cord and natural birth is not possibile then. Only way is caesarean. Dont pull the baby by the head.
SocratesV 10y ago
Going to potentially be controversial, but we need (might be a strong word here) genetic manipulation with strong ethical and humanist values attached to it (and a lot more knowledge). If we are to deny natural selection its role, then we might want to still prevent people from passing on genes which effectively handicap them when they don't have access to certain facilities and technology. Prevention in this case is not eugenics, but gene manipulation/therapy. Having said this, what we most certainly don't want is genetic standardisation (good path for extinction) and even the manipulation of genes, that seem to cause "problems" (today's problems might be tomorrow's cure), needs a deep understanding of implications, which at the moment we probably don't have. P.S.: Hold the similar view regarding GMO in food.
- Grangar 10y ago
  I'm no evolutionary scientist, but haven't we as a species already denied natural selection long ago? For evolution you need physical separation. With our level of globalisation that's not going to work.
  - nitrogen 10y ago
    For speciation you need some kind of separation, which does now sometimes happen within a generation (e.g. one social group refusing to date another social group), but is very unlikely to persist across many generations. Evolution by natural or sexual selection within a single species can still occur.
  - m_eiman 10y ago
    haven't we as a species already denied natural selection long ago? No, how could we? We have influenced external pressures such as predators on our selection, at most.
  - qb45 10y ago
    > For evolution you need physical separation. With our level of globalisation that's not going to work. Global empires are nature's way to shuffle some genes around and reduce inbreeding. Then individual nations start to exploit the empire for their selfish benefit, everything falls apart and nature runs an iteration of competitive evolution for a change. Rinse, repeat. Disclaimer: talking out of my ass :)
grondilu 10y ago
Couldn't this be said about medicine in general?
- gmac 10y ago
  Yes. The better medicine gets, the feebler we all become. This is a pity, but the alternative is worse[1]. [1] https://www.quora.com/Are-we-eliminating-natural-selection-by-helping-the-poor-the-ill-and-the-weak https://www.quora.com/Are-we-eliminating-natural-selection-b...
  - grondilu 10y ago
    There is not only one alternative.
  - lostlogin 10y ago
    It's not a pity at all. Everyone who is around that wouldn't be without modern medicine imparts something to those around them. To give an extreme example, Stephen Hawking.
  - zamalek 10y ago
    What I've realized is that sapiens is the first species to fall off of the evolution gradient. The more intellectual we become, the less dependent we will be on a random optimization function. We are scared about how AI would leap ahead of biology, don't neglect that we are leaping ahead of the rest of biology because we have biological intelligence. We're just not making good use of our intelligence yet.
UweSchmidt 10y ago
Do we really need caveman-capabilities? To be ready for the day we lose our tech and have to start over? In a different context it has been discussed how we have used up our easily accessible energy and may not be able to restart civilization on this planet. So why keep lowtech genes around? Make way for large brains and large heads!
- 3chelon 10y ago
  I think maybe in the back of everyone's mind is the post-apocalyptic scenario. Which is strange, because at at that point we'd have far greater worries, such as lack of food, clean water and antibiotics.
- Chris2048 10y ago
  State/government-dependence to give birth is a worry!
gadders 10y ago
The other medical intervention that is affecting evolution is ICSI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intracytoplasmic_sperm_injection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intracytoplasmic_sperm_injecti...) iVF treatment where the man has low quality sperm. I've heard that the doctors who perform this joke that they are breeding future clients for themselves.
madaxe_again 10y ago
Flagging this story as the top comment is political. Please discuss the technicalities of this, not the ethics and politics.
- wojcech 10y ago
  > Flagging this story as the top comment is political. Please discuss the technicalities of this, not the ethics and politics. This is exactly why I find the idea of enforcing non political discussion unwise. How exactly would you discuss this without touching ethics or politics? You can go into the history of the caesarian (if you have domain knowledge), you can go into the intricacies(if you have domain knowledge) and you can talk about experiences. But notice how nothing of this is really a discussion, there is no generation of or work towards new truths. Op hinted at a very real technicality: with modern medicine, we might need to take the role of natural selection of we want to avoid an increase in congenital illnesses. The question of whether we should and to what extent is a philosophical/ethical/political one. If you ban ethics or politics, the discussion ends here. But the issue remains.
  - qb45 10y ago
    Great, HN politics on politdetox week, of all things.
- SocratesV 10y ago
  > If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Chris2048 10y ago
  Why flag the story?
- sctb 10y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13113094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13113094 and marked it off-topic.
pjc50 10y ago
Flagged for political content (eugenics, reproductive ethics).
- Chris2048 10y ago
  Do you still call chemistry "Alchemy"? Because this isn't Eugenics.
amelius 10y ago
I personally blame advertisment photography, with their models with ridiculously close-to-one waist/hip ratios.
foldr 10y ago
>Researchers estimate cases where the baby cannot fit down the birth canal have increased from 30 in 1,000 in the 1960s to 36 in 1,000 births today. This could easily be explained by doctors being more willing to perform Caesareans than they were previously. No evidence is cited that the average width of women's pelvises has actually changed, so this is all wild speculation as far as I can see. Of course, it is no surprise to see the HN crowd latching on to the idea that we should let more women die in childbirth.
fyhhvvfddhv 10y ago
Call me a sceptic.. since the invention of farming women have had little evolutionary pressure to run fast to catch food nor outrun predators. Why then haven't evolution widen the canal to reduce fatalities during childbirth? And this has been going on for much longer than caesarean procedures.
entranceright 10y ago
The way we live is very unnatural. That's why it is only logical that also our evolution is unnatural. Since we no longer have any natural enemies, we ourselves set up the rules, that decide over life and death. And these rules are wrong in many ways. You could write a whole book about it. One chapter could be devoted to the resulting overpopulation that causes a variety of problems. Instead of letting politics, medicine and capitalism dictate our evolution, we should give nature more freedom. And if we further succeed in reducing the world population to 3 or 4 billions, a certain equilibrium could be reestablished in this world. I am ready to help.
JoeAltmaier 10y ago
Humans have been evolving more in the last 50,000 years that in the previous million (by bone records). This is nothing new. Social organizations (tribe/village/town/city) have put new pressures on us to adapt to. Never mind caesarean; why do so many people need glasses? Why do so many get depressed in winter? It may all be ad-hoc sledgehammer adaptations to get (most of) us to settle down in villages and specialize. And use less calories per capita so the village thrives, even at the expense of the comfort of individuals.
aplomb 10y ago
Modern anything affects human evolution - food production, social programs, culture, etc.

46 points by MichalSikora 10y ago

tn13 10y ago

Main stream journalists can not get science right. In the normal course of evolution women with narrower pelvis die a painful death while delivering a baby (or the baby dies). Thus the genes that give women a narrower pelvis do not get passed on. We can not let these women die this horrible death. This is a good outcome.

corin_ 10y ago
"Women with a very narrow pelvis would not have survived birth 100 years ago. They do now and pass on their genes encoding for a narrow pelvis to their daughters." and "Our intent is not to criticise medical intervention," he said. "But it's had an evolutionary effect." The article said everything you said, and more, in what way did it "not get science right"?
throwawygybj 10y ago
There's two sides to this coin. By allowing normally lethal genes to be passed on were likely to cause more death in the future. This is definitely something that should be screened and prevented, whether through gene editing, surrogacy, or just selecting for embryos that are either male or lack the undesired trait. Nobody has to die to voluntarily select this out of the population. The Jewish community has been on the forefront of this for a long time. On the border of eugenics I guess, but self selecting against genes that will cause suffering or death.
- curun1r 10y ago
  Why should we avoid those genes? We have the technology to deal with the situation when it arises. What would be the problem with, eventually, all women giving birth by Caesarean? There are plenty of other instances where our advancements have likely influenced our evolution. For one, the ease at which we can today travel between continents means that there's far more breeding between different races than we've ever had in human history. Should that be stopped? We also don't run/walk nearly as much as we used to thanks to harnessing hydrocarbons...should we continue to try to select for the long-distance running abilities that helped our ancestors kill animals for food during persistence hunting? And I'm betting that certain people are genetically more predisposed to catching measles, polio or any of the other diseases for which we've developed effective vaccines...would we want to make sure that those genes don't get passed on? In short...why optimize for a world that doesn't exist? Unless you subscribe to a belief in a post-apocalyptic future where modern technology regresses and mankind is forced to live in a more primitive state, there's really no need for us to actively do anything...the magic of evolution is that it just happens naturally. Now, evolution can be an uncaring bitch to individuals, so there's plenty of reason why an individual would want to screen their offspring for certain genetic traits, but at the societal level, it's just swimming against a really strong current.
  - ominous 10y ago
    > What would be the problem with, eventually, all humans needing glasses to see, or born with cornea defects? We know how to fix that. We should optimize for a world that works, instead of one we believe we'll be able to fix forever, and constantly requires purposeful effort to work. Would you like to carry your Fix The Generalized Imbalance Pills (FTGIMP, f-gimp how we call it, as in: "Hold on love, the trekking has been fun, but know I gotta take the f----gimp") when you decide to go for a bike ride? Or will you tell me "but how many people do you know that go on bike rides for more than 10 minutes?". How many people travel the world on a shoestring? Should they stop doing that? Would you like to go to space? How large should the infirmary be? With all these things that "we know how to do" and will be required to do, if we don't get a better vessel. I agree the world has changed. But this vessel is still better when it is self sufficient to the max. Instead of long distance running, we will need low maintenance living. Requiring vaccines, failing joints, birth complications will not help. The resources are limited. It helps no one, in the long run, to make living more complex.
    - lostlogin 10y ago
      The advances you seem to think are bad lead to those who benefit from treatments being productive. They build stuff and contribute and this helps society. It helps everyone when you help those who are infirm/unwell/unlucky. But say we took the view that intervention was bad - who chooses who dies?
  - zde 10y ago
    > What would be the problem with, eventually, all women giving birth by Caesarean? It needs significantly more resources (time, labor, medication) and therefore should negatively affect host's fitness but in most developed countries it does not. NOW we optimize for a world that does not exist.
    - lostlogin 10y ago
      It requires a lot less resources than a painful death uses. It also uses less resources than a vaginal delivery that should have been a ceasar. How are we optimising for a world that doesn't exist?
3chelon 10y ago
To be fair, aside from the preschool formatting of the article (one sentence per paragraph, a concerning recent BBC trend), the journalist didn't actually say anything incorrect. But she did not answer the main question that was asked: why the human pelvis has not grown wider over the years? She said that there were two opposing forces, one for larger babies (they have more chance of survival), and the other was natural selection preventing them getting too large (by killing them both in childbirth). Maybe I'm missing something, but neither of those answer the question of why the pelvis has not got larger. All I can assume is that it is (a) an evolutionary trend of men to be attracted to younger and potentially, on average, slimmer and more healthy or fertile women, and (b) cultural, since there is evidence that in historic times and possibly also in less technologically advanced societies, larger hips are considered desirable (which makes total sense in a society with no access to modern medicine). I'm sure some anthropologists will beat me up for these terrible generalisations, but in general, on average, it seems these forces may have an impact on pelvis size over generations?
- marchenko 10y ago
  Men are indeed attracted to relatively wide-hipped women, but there is an upper limit on hip width. There is a biomechanical tradeoff between pelvic shape and locomotor efficiency. The width of the pelvis affects the energy needed for a bipedal gait, since it alters the shape of the largest bones of the lower skeleton and their associated musculature (compare the angle of the femur in men v women and imagine how it affects joint stress). So there's a three way evolutionary arms race between the needs of the large-brained infant, the need to successfully expel said infant, and the need to be able to walk and run efficiently and without musculoskeletal damage.
- Swizec 10y ago
  > one sentence per paragraph, a concerning recent BBC trend 3 of your 5 paragraphs are a single sentence.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - 10y ago

3chelon 10y ago

It is blindingly obvious from an evolutionary standpoint that this is happening. I have thought about it a fair bit, as it has directly impacted my own family, and I've no doubt it will continue to do so in subsequent generations. I don't think it's something to worry much about, as the much broader benefits of modern medicine (namely, antibiotics) have had so much impact on our survival rate that this would pale into insignificance. Which may be borne out (pun intended) by the numbers: 3% to 3.3% or 3.6% in 50-60 years - is that statistically significant? The error there is in the same order as the overall increase, so it's hard to believe it's even measurable at this stage. Because it is so obviously going to happen, I suspect there may be some curve-fitting going on here?

Noseshine 10y ago
> 3% to 3.3% or 3.6% in 50-60 years - is that statistically significant? Since all births are recorded, the sample size is very large. So without having the numbers and doing any calculations, just based on that I'm pretty sure even a much smaller increase would still be statistically significant.
mjevans 10y ago
The growth rate is likely to be geometric.

bambax 10y ago

> Historically, these genes would not have been passed from mother to child as both would have died in labour. How do we know that? As the name implied, Caesar was born this way, a little over 2000 years ago. It's likely the procedure is much much older, too. So what timeframe are we talking about? What we didn't know how to do 100 years ago was how to save mother and child once birth had begun and the baby's head had started to go into the canal and got stuck. But humanity have known how to do caesarean birth for a very long time (there are even cases of women doing it to themselves). Also, from an evolutionary perspective it doesn't matter if the mother survives birth; it only matters whether the baby lives. So it's at best incorrect to phrase the problem this way: > Women with a very narrow pelvis would not have survived birth 100 years ago. They do now and pass on their genes encoding for a narrow pelvis to their daughters.

3131s 10y ago
> Also, from an evolutionary perspective it doesn't matter if the mother survives birth; it only matters whether the baby lives. Wouldn't it though? A mother that lives can go on to give birth to more children. Not to mention that a mother's survival might affect her child's chance of survival.
- ptaipale 10y ago
  The previous comment was probably written in an extremely patriarchal context... a king's offspring would be taken care of even if the mother died. Though even there, the chances of being stabbed in the back might have been increased without motherly protection.
ptaipale 10y ago
It is probably just a myth that Caesar was born this way. At the time, the mother most likely couldn't survive a section, because the resulting infections would kill anyone who had such surgery performed. And Caesar's mother lived to old age.
- gambiting 10y ago

32h8 10y ago

Evolution is a ultimate rat race. FYI offtopic: Kid can be mingled in umbilical cord and natural birth is not possibile then. Only way is caesarean. Dont pull the baby by the head.

SocratesV 10y ago

Going to potentially be controversial, but we need (might be a strong word here) genetic manipulation with strong ethical and humanist values attached to it (and a lot more knowledge). If we are to deny natural selection its role, then we might want to still prevent people from passing on genes which effectively handicap them when they don't have access to certain facilities and technology. Prevention in this case is not eugenics, but gene manipulation/therapy. Having said this, what we most certainly don't want is genetic standardisation (good path for extinction) and even the manipulation of genes, that seem to cause "problems" (today's problems might be tomorrow's cure), needs a deep understanding of implications, which at the moment we probably don't have. P.S.: Hold the similar view regarding GMO in food.

Grangar 10y ago
I'm no evolutionary scientist, but haven't we as a species already denied natural selection long ago? For evolution you need physical separation. With our level of globalisation that's not going to work.
- nitrogen 10y ago
  For speciation you need some kind of separation, which does now sometimes happen within a generation (e.g. one social group refusing to date another social group), but is very unlikely to persist across many generations. Evolution by natural or sexual selection within a single species can still occur.
- m_eiman 10y ago
  haven't we as a species already denied natural selection long ago? No, how could we? We have influenced external pressures such as predators on our selection, at most.
- qb45 10y ago
  > For evolution you need physical separation. With our level of globalisation that's not going to work. Global empires are nature's way to shuffle some genes around and reduce inbreeding. Then individual nations start to exploit the empire for their selfish benefit, everything falls apart and nature runs an iteration of competitive evolution for a change. Rinse, repeat. Disclaimer: talking out of my ass :)

grondilu 10y ago

Couldn't this be said about medicine in general?

gmac 10y ago
Yes. The better medicine gets, the feebler we all become. This is a pity, but the alternative is worse[1]. [1] https://www.quora.com/Are-we-eliminating-natural-selection-by-helping-the-poor-the-ill-and-the-weak https://www.quora.com/Are-we-eliminating-natural-selection-b...
- grondilu 10y ago
  There is not only one alternative.
- lostlogin 10y ago
  It's not a pity at all. Everyone who is around that wouldn't be without modern medicine imparts something to those around them. To give an extreme example, Stephen Hawking.
- zamalek 10y ago
  What I've realized is that sapiens is the first species to fall off of the evolution gradient. The more intellectual we become, the less dependent we will be on a random optimization function. We are scared about how AI would leap ahead of biology, don't neglect that we are leaping ahead of the rest of biology because we have biological intelligence. We're just not making good use of our intelligence yet.

UweSchmidt 10y ago

Do we really need caveman-capabilities? To be ready for the day we lose our tech and have to start over? In a different context it has been discussed how we have used up our easily accessible energy and may not be able to restart civilization on this planet. So why keep lowtech genes around? Make way for large brains and large heads!

3chelon 10y ago
I think maybe in the back of everyone's mind is the post-apocalyptic scenario. Which is strange, because at at that point we'd have far greater worries, such as lack of food, clean water and antibiotics.
Chris2048 10y ago
State/government-dependence to give birth is a worry!

gadders 10y ago

The other medical intervention that is affecting evolution is ICSI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intracytoplasmic_sperm_injection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intracytoplasmic_sperm_injecti...) iVF treatment where the man has low quality sperm. I've heard that the doctors who perform this joke that they are breeding future clients for themselves.

madaxe_again 10y ago

Flagging this story as the top comment is political. Please discuss the technicalities of this, not the ethics and politics.

wojcech 10y ago
> Flagging this story as the top comment is political. Please discuss the technicalities of this, not the ethics and politics. This is exactly why I find the idea of enforcing non political discussion unwise. How exactly would you discuss this without touching ethics or politics? You can go into the history of the caesarian (if you have domain knowledge), you can go into the intricacies(if you have domain knowledge) and you can talk about experiences. But notice how nothing of this is really a discussion, there is no generation of or work towards new truths. Op hinted at a very real technicality: with modern medicine, we might need to take the role of natural selection of we want to avoid an increase in congenital illnesses. The question of whether we should and to what extent is a philosophical/ethical/political one. If you ban ethics or politics, the discussion ends here. But the issue remains.
- qb45 10y ago
  Great, HN politics on politdetox week, of all things.
SocratesV 10y ago
> If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Chris2048 10y ago
Why flag the story?
sctb 10y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13113094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13113094 and marked it off-topic.

pjc50 10y ago

Flagged for political content (eugenics, reproductive ethics).

Chris2048 10y ago
Do you still call chemistry "Alchemy"? Because this isn't Eugenics.

amelius 10y ago

I personally blame advertisment photography, with their models with ridiculously close-to-one waist/hip ratios.

foldr 10y ago

>Researchers estimate cases where the baby cannot fit down the birth canal have increased from 30 in 1,000 in the 1960s to 36 in 1,000 births today. This could easily be explained by doctors being more willing to perform Caesareans than they were previously. No evidence is cited that the average width of women's pelvises has actually changed, so this is all wild speculation as far as I can see. Of course, it is no surprise to see the HN crowd latching on to the idea that we should let more women die in childbirth.

fyhhvvfddhv 10y ago

Call me a sceptic.. since the invention of farming women have had little evolutionary pressure to run fast to catch food nor outrun predators. Why then haven't evolution widen the canal to reduce fatalities during childbirth? And this has been going on for much longer than caesarean procedures.

entranceright 10y ago

The way we live is very unnatural. That's why it is only logical that also our evolution is unnatural. Since we no longer have any natural enemies, we ourselves set up the rules, that decide over life and death. And these rules are wrong in many ways. You could write a whole book about it. One chapter could be devoted to the resulting overpopulation that causes a variety of problems. Instead of letting politics, medicine and capitalism dictate our evolution, we should give nature more freedom. And if we further succeed in reducing the world population to 3 or 4 billions, a certain equilibrium could be reestablished in this world. I am ready to help.

JoeAltmaier 10y ago

Humans have been evolving more in the last 50,000 years that in the previous million (by bone records). This is nothing new. Social organizations (tribe/village/town/city) have put new pressures on us to adapt to. Never mind caesarean; why do so many people need glasses? Why do so many get depressed in winter? It may all be ad-hoc sledgehammer adaptations to get (most of) us to settle down in villages and specialize. And use less calories per capita so the village thrives, even at the expense of the comfort of individuals.

aplomb 10y ago

Modern anything affects human evolution - food production, social programs, culture, etc.