If we take a look around the world we live in, we often get astonished by the eccentric humanity. It is fair enough to say that we are the only species that is able to read, write, experiment, and build things that may be small or huge. Our intelligence has undoubtedly also played a vital role in evolution. It has definitely helped us in becoming our better selves in a way that we are able to distinguish between right and wrong, and survive. We sure get competitive, at times, but evolution has taught us to keep up with those evolving around us to be more intelligent.
Being smart does not only contribute to self-satisfaction it also makes people more attracted to you. It is a great attribute to flaunt in your social groups, but do not over-do it or people may find you quite self-obsessed.
As simple as it may sound, the increase in brain size is responsible for our growth in brainpower. The bigger the brain size, the smarter you are. However, an increase in brain size also leads to an increase in something else, women’s pelvis size! The pelvises of pregnant women who had to give birth to big-headed babies experienced this hard-to-believe change.
Another evolutionary change that struck everyone’s minds was the research about walking on two legs. It is also debated upon, but also quite true. Walking upright requires a person to possess smaller pelvises. It led to an uneasy acceptance of women being able to run, let alone walk, and also give birth to big-headed babies. However, if the pelvises were to grow any bigger, women would not have been able to walk, at all. Since everything comes at a cost, the cost of this kind of balance was safety. Delivering a child is the most dangerous thing for a human being. Also, humans are the only primate for whom childbirth is the riskiest. Needless to quote that a lot of women die during childbirth even though we have the most modern procedures and medicines available. The fact alone justifies the need of having core intelligence for us.
This is the kind of deadlock that promotes modernization which may be considered as “innovative”. Evolution is also known to find some integral ways to get around this limitation. Babies’ skulls include some pieces that can shift during birth, similarly to make the process easier, or somewhat bearable, women’s pelvises also play its part and temporarily separate during the delivery, and that’s how space is made for the increased brain size in infancy. However, another key adaptation was in how the brain worked on its own. Evolution helped human beings learn about what they needed to learn about the world. It did not just happen to be there in their brains, naturally.
When a baby bird is born, it is capable of walking around in search of food within moments of being hatched. Similarly, baby horses start running only after a few hours of being born. A human baby stands far from this race of development. A human baby needs years of nurturing to become self-sufficient. Culturally, people tend to go overboard with parenting and they keep fostering their child until the child hits puberty. For some, it does not even stop there, the parenting period can extend until the child is leaving for graduate school.
A human brain does not fully develop until we are adults. “We are the largest brained, slowest developing member of the largest brained, slowest developing mammalian order”, says Richerson Boyd. Even if the Human baby takes the longest to become dependent on himself, he is created with a staggering capability to learn new things. If people tend to get intelligent after birth, the brain can be smaller at birth and then changing in size afterward. The brain then grows dramatically after being born.
It does not really affect a human in a negative way of being born like a blank slate, because we can pretty much adapt to anything that the world throws our way. A great example would be the babies being born in the worst environmental conditions, like a desert? A baby is capable of being adjusted in that environment, as well.
Let’s imagine if we were smart right from birth. We would have a very limited approach to different environments and conditions. Also, if we did not invest in long-term learning that our development period requires us to do, we would not be able to excel at building ourselves without taking things for granted. That is why the long learning phase of humans is quite important for us and our development to become more self-reliant.
