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Why is it surprising that women are really good at giving birth? After all, the genes of the ones that weren't have not been selected for, tens of thousands of
by antisthenes 10y ago
Why is it surprising that women are really good at giving birth?
After all, the genes of the ones that weren't have not been selected for, tens of thousands of years ago.
Either way, contraception is pretty orthogonal to the actual mortality rate of women due to child birth.
- epistasis 10y agoIt's actually the opposite: Humans are not very good at giving birth. And that is surprising. Child birth is hugely dangerous for humans, and the speculation in the scientific field is that it's an evolutionary interplay between the size of an infant's skull at birth, constraints on hip sizes, and the amount of brain development that can happen as a fetus or as an infant. Tens of thousands of years is pretty short in terms of morphological development of humans. Evolution on time scales shorter than that is limited to extremely simple mutations, usually, such as lactose tolerance by adults (which has arisen multiple times independently in the past 10k years). I do agree that contraception has little impact on maternal mortality during child birth.