Very nice piece, as a biologist turned programmer I think it nicely sums things up. Some remarks though... "Similarly, as an embryo develops in the mother's wo

Very nice piece, as a biologist turned programmer I think it nicely sums things up. Some remarks though... "Similarly, as an embryo develops in the mother's womb, its DNA is edited substantially to reduce its growth rate, and the size of the placenta. In such a way, the competing interests of the father ('large strong children') and the mother ('survive pregnancy') are balanced. Such 'imprinting' can only happen within the mother, since the father's genome doesn't know anything about the size of the mother." This is strangely worded, I think there is indeed a trade-off between size of the child and the mother surviving but the father also benefits from the mother surviving (better have breast milk available and love and care, right? Father genome?). Moreover, the fathers' genome is half inherited from a woman and is mingled with a woman's DNA every generation (most of the genome is not specifically male of female). I don't believe there is evidence that the Y chromosome solely drives this push for a larger child in the uterus, but please correct me if I'm wrong. I also think it is theoretically possible to produce a female child from two fathers by merging their genomes and supplying the child with two X chromosomes and no Y chromosome. So the statement that "the father's genome doesn't know anything about the size of the mother" is also wrong (for the used definition of "knowing"), the male genome "knows" just as much as the mother.