9/13/2023 0 Comments Human baby vs chimpanzee baby![]() First, and rather importantly, babies do get born more often, instead of stuck on their way out, and as a bonus less frequently kill their mothers whose small pelvic girdles have not kept pace with the increased brain and therefore cranium size of human primates. Get the babies born before they’re fully developed and two good things result. ![]() Why human babies look like that is the result of neoteny: the retention of fetal characteristics after they have emerged from the womb. There may be other reasons why we don’t kill our babies (though, of course, some do) but simply the sight of them goes some way to quelling or at least helping us to control our helpless rage at their helpless rage. Think of that terrible cooing noise people make over strange (and not especially beautiful) infants in their prams, or the fact that the vast majority of us do not shake our babies till their brains turn to butter when they cry so hard that it actually causes us pain in the solar plexus. Think Mickey Mouse without the ears, or your child’s favorite soft toy. Babies’ and toddlers’ eyes, which hardly grow and so, as it were, are already adult-sized, appear very large in the still expanding face. Babies also have a rounded cranium, bulging forehead and high, prominent cheekbones above a diminishing lower face and receding chin, rather than the slanting, lower brows and longer face with jutting jaws of adults. They have an exceptionally large head in relation to their body, and exceptionally shorter legs and smaller feet, compared to adults, who become the opposite: small heads on a sizeable torso and long legs with relatively large feet. Infants and toddlers, you will have noticed, are not just smaller than adults, but proportionally different. These qualities are evolutionarily necessary because, after all, babies are quite hard work. And according to Konrad Lorenz, there are certain qualities of newborn human babies that cause human adults to respond (as a result of hormone surges, he suggests) with affection and therefore bond with them, rather than carelessly leave them lying around the house or cave. ![]() Not even so much baby mice or baby bears, but human babies. The great advantage over real live creatures that my Three Bears had in common with Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse, aside from not needing to be fed or produce droppings, was neoteny. Mickey and my ursine family looked only glancingly like a mouse or brown bears, and much more like babies.
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