To find the BBC article on research on c sections and evolution a bit off?

[bummymummy77]

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I find it a bit off. Yes it's science and cold hard fact but for some reason the tone got to me a bit.

And this is coming from someone who had a home birth and is very anti unnecessary interventions.

I can imagine it making women who've had c sections feeling like shite.

Seemed to me a little like the way it was worded is added to the quiet drip drip of c section stigma.

I mean, we've evolved past having enough body hair to survive in caves and eat raw meat, we treat cancer and intervene medically to save 1000's of lives daily.

At the same time I find it interesting and obviously most research will benefit mankind in some way.

What are other's views on it?

There is a film idiocracy that suggests that evolution will favour those with low intelligence. Professional women often concentrate on a career and have fewer children than long term benefit claimants.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy

At the moment ethics committee ban eugenics in the uk. IVF and embryo can only be used to prevent major genetic disease. Designer babies are illegal.

In an industrial, scientific, and technological age, where food and shelter building infrastructures are socialised, where medical intervention occurs to supplant the folly of individual actions and choices, and where the instant intelligence of the individual is not as important to survival, then likewise the individual IQ is not as important to reproductive fitness, and given the energy costs and other sundry disadvantages of high IQs, the average IQ of such societies should go down as an unneeded “luxury”.

And then intelligent machines will take over.

More seriously, I'm not convinced. IQ is very much affected by nutrition and education.

And I'm not sure that professional women are necessarily of higher intelligence. :)

Many professional men also marry trophy wives (of, supposed, lower intelligence), so, who knows?

There may be a slight effect on the average IQ, but we'll always have geniouses to get us forward.

eastpregnant

Don't men have larger heads than women usually?

Do their larger heads make them more intelligent? I don't effing think so

I've got a massive head but am horrendously thick 😳

They aren't just looking at this locally but globally too. In some countries such as the USA and India for example most women who use hospitals are given cesarians to limit liability. Consequently if this carries on then more women with narrow birth canals will be born into populations. Nobody's suggesting we let them die, but I think the research could be used to develop better tests. For example women with the problem could be identified and offered planned c-sections as vaginal birth might not be suitable.

Que sera sera. You only have to look around at the mess, chaos and destruction in the world to know human beings are not remotely as clever as we like to tell ourselves we are. Perhaps we are all just too big headed in every sense! Besides, a large head is not always a sign of good health and intelligence, particularly at the point of birth.

Don't they have a really high C-section rate in South American countries as well?

Yes Cavemum. Same reasons

If a big brain is so brilliant, we ought to listen more to the elephants.

It's true that head size doesn't strictly match intelligence. It's mostly about the folds and cell connections.
Plus, IQ is very much shaped by environment.
Although, it depends on what we consider as intelligence. Emotional and social intelligence can be as important as what is measured by IQ.

Just looked up some stats published in January this year but based on 2013 data.

Current average rate of C-Sections is 28%.

Top 3 Countries
Turkey - 50.4%
Mexico - 45.2%
Chile - 44.7%

USA comes in at 32.5% and UK on 23%.

The lowest 3 rates were:
Iceland - 15.2%
Israel - 15.4%
Netherlands - 15.6%

Interestingly 4 of the 6 countries with the lowest C-section rates were Scandinavian/Northern European.

Link to data here. C-section data on page 114.

DailyFail1

But I thought that even if you identify the issue before birth and reduce the number of emergency C-sections those genes are still getting passed on either way - unless the mother and/or baby don't survive.

I don't think it's worthless research though just because it identifies a problem we don't have a solution to, or because it upsets people. It's important that we try and understand the scale of the problem.

A big head's a big head. Nothing to do with the article which specifically mentioned big babies and shoulder dyscalpa (?) in the data they're looking at. That can be caused by women being Overweight, gestational diabetes, but it's also due to a narrow birth canal which is a genetic issue.

I'll just throw epigenetics into the middle of the discussion.

Some genes are imprinted so that differences of expression can be passed on from mother to child. It's thought that obesity is one such characteristic, if I'm not mistaken.

As I said earlier, confounding factors should be accounted for. I don't know if the original paper did that. The author may not have factored those properly.

Mamushka - True but these women and their babies still die or get severely disabled due to delays in identifying the problem. Currently the only way identification occurs in some places is when a womans first baby gets stuck.

After some more Googling I've found the Brazilian rates which are not in that study.

Their country-wide rate is 45% according to WHO, but in private clinics the rate is more like 85%.

One of the reasons given for the high rate is that Drs in private hospitals are often paid "per birth" rather than an hourly rate.

Well, I'm not aware of anyone identifying a link between countries with high Caesarean rates and countries with an unusually high number of geniuses.

This is from the paper

Note that these are predictions about the actual disproportion rate, not Caesarean section rate, which has increased much more rapidly for other reasons; the obstetric literature typically considers the actual disproportion rate constant.

What does that bit about obstetric literature mean? Obstetric literature is saying disproportion rate is constant but some theoretical biologists are saying oh no it isn't? Silly doctors

"Nature has no incentive to make humans smarter."

You are looking at ths totally the wrong way.

"Nature" is not a conscious, independent decision maker.

But natural selection does favor the more intelligent and resourceful animals, who get to survive in larger numbers & propagate their genes.

It is not a coincidence that our species is getting smarter and our heads are getting larger.

Any anthropology museum will have skull specimens showing this to be true.

"I don't think it's worthless research though just because it identifies a problem we don't have a solution to, or because it upsets people. It's important that we try and understand the scale of the problem."

Where is the problem, though? I don't see a problem.

More babies with big heads and their mothers are surviving, which is a good thing. And these babies will go on to have big-headed babies of their own, which means more CSs could be needed in the future.

So what? I don't see what the problem is.

What does that bit about obstetric literature mean? Obstetric literature is saying disproportion rate is constant but some theoretical biologists are saying oh no it isn't? Silly doctors

I think it means that in the obstetric literature it is assumed that the disproportion rate is constant. Not that it has been measured and the biologists disagree.

Reading the actual article, they created a model that seems to fit the data well, and in which there is a weak selection pressure towards larger baby heads, which means that there will always be a fairly high disproportion rate.
Based on the model, the authors do predict that a high C-section rate will drive the disproportion rate up (10-20%). They haven't yet tested that hypothesis. But journalists, as usual, are already jumping to conclusions.

Lweji

Thank you for mentioning allele frequency.