This is, for many, a digital age, and as such it’s marked, for them, by physical isolation. So much can now be accomplished in two dimensions that it’s possible to live a fully productive academic or professional life without seeing anyone else at all in person. But we did not evolve in this kind of experience; no. In our environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, as the biological anthropologists call it, we lived in a tribe all the time — we needed to; at least for part of our lives. It was because of our brains.

Here we go, people: it’s time for that moment of congratulations you’ve been waiting for. That’s right, your brain is fucking HUGE. (We can tell we’ve liked to talk about this because there are pieces of it called “eminences,” but we’ll get to that later.) It’s so huge that it was kind of a problem for your mom to give birth to you, and so you thoughtfully arranged to be born with a skull divided into plates with spaces between them, so that it was squeezeable. And yes, those plates that incompletely covered the surface of your brain were called eminences.

As Wenda Trevathan suggests in her article “The Evolution of Bipedalism and Assisted Birth,” from Medical Anthropology Quarterly, New Series, Vol. 10, No. 2, (Jun., 1996) “.that the evolutionary transformation of a nonbipedal prehominid into
a bipedal horninid first transformed birth from an individual to a social enterprise.
With that, control over birth was also transferred from the individual giving birth to the person in attendance. In other words, selection for bipedalism set hominids in a trajectory toward the elaboration of cultural systems of authoritative knowledge about how childbirth could best be accomplished-knowledge that often inheres in the social group or in individual birth attendants more than in the mother.

Birth is a challenge for most primate species (Schultz 1949). One of the hallmarks of this mammalian order is a large ratio of brain or head size to body size. This means that the passage of the fetal head through the maternal pelvis is generally a tight squeeze. Because of this, mortality from cephalopelvic disproportion is not insignificant in primate species such as marmosets, squirrel monkeys, baboons, and macaques (Leutenegger 1981). Although the passageway is not so narrow in modem chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans (Leutenegger 1972), it is likely that the last common ancestor of humans and great apes had apelvis-neonatal head ratio similar to that of modem gibbons (Rosenberg 1992).

But modem primates still accomplish birth without assistance, so it is probable that human ancestors before 5 million years ago did so as well. Approximately 5 million years ago selection began to favor the anatomical and behavioral changes that led to bipedal walking in hominids (Lovejoy 1988). Whatever the “cause” of this new mode of locomotion (unlike that of any other animal species) or the benefits, it resulted in fundamental changes in the way birth occurred. In quadrupedal species like monkeys, the infant typically enters and emerges from the birth canal facing in the same direction as the mother, without undergoing rotation (see for example, Doyle et al. 1967; Graham-Jones and Hill 1962; Hopf1967; Kadam and Swayamprabha 1980; Kemps and Timmermans 1982; Rothe 1974; Stevenson 1976). This means that she can reach down with her hands and guide it from the birth canal, or it can crawl up toward her nipples, unassisted.

“With the evolution of bipedalism the birth canal was reoriented so that the inlet was broadest in the side-to-side dimension, the outlet in the front-to-back dimension. The relevant fetal dimensions are also perpendicular: the head is broadest in the front-to-back dimension, the shoulders in the side-to-side dimension.

This means that the human infant must undergo a series of rotations in order to pass through the birth canal without hindrance (Berge et al. 1984).

“Human infants emerge from the birth canal facing away from the mother. This position hinders a mother’s ability to reach down and clear a breathing passageway for the infant and to remove the cord from around the neck if it interferes with breathing or continued emergence. If she attempts to guide the infant from the birth canal she risks pulling it against the body’s angle of flexion, perhaps damaging nerves and muscles in the process (Trevathan 1988).

“I have argued that with the origin of bipedalism, risks of mortality from unattended birth became greater than whatever risks were associated with having thers in the vicinity of the birthing woman (Trevathan 1987). I conjecture that ancestral females who sought assistance at the time of delivery simply had more surviving and healthier offspring than those who continued the ancient mammalian pattern of delivering alone. Thus the transfer of authoritative knowledge from the birthing woman to her attendants may have begun as long ago as 5 million years. ”

A midwife is a good idea anyway, because her possession of this knowledge means that she is less likely to cut you up: “In the United States, between 50% and 80% of women giving birth for the first time are given episiotomy, said to be a “minor surgical procedure” that widens the birth canal. In reality, it is a deep tissue cut that weakens the entire perineum, an area rich with nerves and blood vessels. Surgery in this area can cause pain during sex and loss of sexual sensation for up to seven years. But it gets the baby out quicker and is easier to suture than any natural irregular tear that the mother-to-be might suffer. ”

This means that we, in Western culture, have replaced a cultural knowledge about birth passed from woman to woman with a cultural knowledge based on efficiency and disregard for a woman’s longer-term sexual health. Why do doctors get away with cutting women’s vaginas? They certainly wouldn’t get away with cutting men’s penises. We may rail against female circumcision, but if we’re cutting more than half of women during birth, we’re not much better.

I’d argue that it’s because of the lack of female solidarity. Perhaps if we lived in a society more like our environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, where women relied on one another to survive childbirth, women would have more faith in each other, and not go around suggesting to pollsters that women are not responsible or powerful enough to take on leadership positions, such as the presidential one. Don’t get me wrong; I love Obama. Here’s why. But it’s not because I don’t think that women are intelligent enough to be president: it’s because I’m inspired by Obama.

Obama speaks to us collectively and individually; he acknowledges shades of gray, he acknowledges difficult issues that we face, as a nation. I want him to be in charge because I see in him a charismatic, thoughtful, intelligent, considered leader who will take our country in a new direction.