More Thoughts from Michel Odent

More thoughts from Michel Odent.

Dr. Odent discoursed on the new super-brainy Homo Sapiens.

Babies born vaginally must be able to fit, squeeze, through their mother’s pelvic bones. Before the advent of relatively safe Cesarean birth, mothers with babies whose heads were too large and babies with  mothers whose pelvises were too small, died. Now, there is no reason for a woman or her baby to suffer through a vaginal birth. With Cesarean deliveries so safe, all babies could be born in this manner.

With no restriction on head size, might our brains grow even larger? Odent believes, and his evidence is compelling, that it is quite possible. However, there seem to be myriad problems, consequences, if you will, of being born with the “simplified techniques of Caesarean (Odent, Michel. Childbirth and the Future of Homo Sapiens. London: Pinter & Martin, 2013. Print.)”. One of these, since many cesarean births would be elective without a trial of labor, would be a lessened, eventually lost, ability to love.

It seems that while these new super-brainy Homo Sapiens would have superior intellectual intelligence, they would be lacking in emotional intelligence.

Some might be familiar with the aphorism, “Use it or lose it.” Odent mentions that as women are not given the opportunity for oxytocin to play its part, they may lose the ability to produce it. Since it plays such a big part in every aspect of our lives having to do with love, would we lose the ability also to breastfeed? To care four our offspring? To have sex/make love?

While I was reading this, two things came to mind. One was a story I began writing when I was in high school and which I never finished. In it, on the planet where the story begins, people are grown from test tubes. There is no pregnancy; there is no birth (don’t ask me how, I never got that far; I was 14 or 15). Once to the point of being able to live outside whatever the means of gestation was, people were assigned dormitories. Each was presided over by a male and a female and each had one or two boys and the same number of girls. Sex was not a part of life. Although people had physical characteristics of being male or female, it meant nothing.

The main characters, a boy and a girl from the same dormitory, somehow found reading material introducing them to sex. Please remember at the time I knew very little of the actual mechanics myself. My main characters thought they would experiment and before they got very far, were arrested and schedule to have their memories wiped and to be sent off to another planet in the galaxy to live.

I was planning on having the memory wipes be unsuccessful and thus allow them to discover how different life could be but never got that far.

The second is the 2002 version of The Time Machine which I only recently finished watching (after I read Childbirth and the Future of Homo Sapiens, actually). It has two classes of humans. One looks much the same as we do and one has been adapted to more efficient hunting (and these are actually further divided into more selective/specialized castes). Wouldn’t it be fun or interesting to change that a bit to humans who look like we do today and who have emotional stability as well as humans with much larger heads/brains and who have no empathy but are super intelligent?

Food for thought.