“Evolutionary” Analysis of Childhood Is Just Speculation
University of Central Lancashire archaeologist Brenna Hassett describes as “patently ridiculous” the fact that the average human spends at least a quarter of a lifespan growing up. But then, she reflects, humans dominate the planet.
Is There a Connection?
Her essay at Aeon aims to reveal the “evolutionary benefit” to this arrangement. In it, she reveals a number of interesting facts about human childhood as compared with the maturation of other animals.
For example, relative to other primates, humans are “largely tedious monogamists.” Only about 15 percent of primates have similar “pair bonds” (it is much more common among birds). A variety of evolutionary theories attempt to account for this. Her own take:
What does seem clear is that humans have opted for a mating system that doesn’t go in as much for competition as it does for care. The evolution of ‘dads’ — our casual word for the pair of helping hands that, in humans, fits a very broad range of people — may in fact be the only solution to the crisis that is the most important feature of human babies: they are off-the-scale demanding.
BRENNA HASSETT, “HOW TO GROW A HUMAN,” AEON, JULY 10, 2023
Hassett, author of Growing Up Human (Bloomsbury Sigma 2022), offers a number of thoughts on the hazards of human childbirth and child raising, as she seeks to account for long childhoods in an evolutionary scheme:
The answer may be in that glorious pinchable baby fat. Having precision-engineered our offspring to siphon resources from their mothers in order to build calorifically expensive structures like our big brains and our chubby cheeks, we have, perhaps, become victims of our own success. Our babies can build themselves up to an impressive size in the womb, one that comes near to being unsurvivable.
HASSETT, “HOW TO GROW A HUMAN”
And yet so many mothers and babies beat those odds that there are still people rabbiting on about a population crisis…
One striking observation Hassett shares is that human babies are breastfed for a much shorter period than that of primate apes (four to eight years) even though they stay around much longer (full human maturation takes between twenty and thirty years).
Lastly, she notes the importance in human societies of “that unlikely creature, the grandmother,” which she attributes to the evolution of menopause:
If the goal is to keep the species going, then calling time on reproduction sounds catastrophically counterintuitive, and, yet, here we are, awash in post-reproductive females. Why? Because, despite the denigration many older women face, women do not ‘outlive’ their sole evolutionary function of birthing babies. If that was the only purpose of females, there wouldn’t be grandmas. But here they are, and ethnographic and sociological studies show us very clearly that grandparents are evolutionarily important: they are additional adults capable of investing in our needy kids.
HASSETT, “HOW TO GROW A HUMAN”
Why Evolution Claims Don’t Explain Much
At this point, her “evolution” analysis completely breaks down. The fundamental problem with this kind of analysis is that we would find ourselves in exactly the same position with respect to the hard information provided if we assumed that no evolution had ever taken place.
For example, let’s assume “no evolution”: Humans are “tedious monogamists” because, to the extent that we use our unique powers of reason, we clearly see that long-term relationships are suited to our longevity (which includes and is inflated by long childhoods).
What chimpanzees or gibbons do differently is irrelevant. We don’t make decisions for them (in the wild) and they can’t make decisions for us.
Humans have comparatively difficult childbirths but that is just the sort of thing reasoning beings would notice, which is why midwifery/obstetrics was invented. Of all the species to have difficult childbirths, we are best suited to addressing the problem.
The reason there are grandmas (and great-grandmas) is that no one ate them years earlier. The reason no one ate them is most likely that most humans were aware of the relationship and feared retribution for such acts by a power that upholds the order of the universe. Honoring parents is an important feature of the religions of which we have any record and the very existence of grandmothers suggests that it is much older.
The evolutionary theorizing that so many essays like Hassett’s serve up doesn’t advance our knowledge of the topic at hand. We have no hard knowledge of how features of human life such as long childhoods and menopause developed. The theorizing merely interprets it all in an “evolutionary” light — interpretation without additional facts.
This sort of thing is thought of as science partly out of courtesy and partly out of fear of the Darwinists — who can hardly be expected to welcome an unsparing analysis of what exactly they contribute to the actual knowledge of being human.
