Episode 54: The Obstetrical Dilemma
Origin Stories
Meredith Johnson
4.8 • 554 Ratings
🗓️ 4 June 2021
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The widely-held idea known as the "obstetrical dilemma" is a hypothesis that explains why babies are so helpless, and why childbirth is so difficult for humans compared to other animals.
The obstetrical dilemma suggests that babies are born early so their big brains can fit through the mother's pelvis, which can't get any wider due to our method of bipedal locomotion. This problem, the idea says, is solved by an evolutionary tradeoff that increases risks to pregnant mothers who must struggle to birth bigger and bigger-brained babies through narrow birth canals.
On this episode, Leakey Foundation grantees Dr. Holly Dunsworth and Dr. Anna Warrener describe their search for the evidence behind the obstetrical dilemma and they discuss the importance of the stories we tell about our bodies.
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Links
There is no 'obstetrical dilemma': towards a braver medicine with fewer chilbirth interventions
Metabolic hypothesis for human altriciality
The obstetrical dilemma hypothesis: there's life in the old dog yet
YouTube - Close up video of chimp childbirth
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Thanks
Thanks to Lynn and Larry Schafran for sponsoring this episode. We are grateful for their support of The Leakey Foundation and our educational programs.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Origin Stories, the Leaky Foundation podcast. I'm Meredith Johnson. |
| 0:14.6 | Today's story is about an idea you probably know of, even if you don't know it by name. |
| 0:22.9 | It's a story that starts in the pelvis and expands to explain just about everything. Sex and childbirth and helpless, |
| 0:30.6 | big-brained babies, upright walking, and even how societies are shaped. On this episode, we're exploring the obstetrical dilemma. |
| 0:41.2 | What is the obstetrical dilemma? |
| 0:43.1 | It is this idea that I've been grappling with for 12 years. |
| 0:48.3 | Oh, my goodness. |
| 0:49.9 | And it's this really elegant, a human evolutionary hypothesis that I think has been so popular |
| 0:56.9 | and is so elegant, people don't even realize it's a hypothesis. |
| 1:00.4 | This is Dr. Holly Dunsworth. |
| 1:02.9 | She's a leaky foundation grantee and an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Rhode Island. |
| 1:09.7 | And what I do is I do a lot of teaching of biological anthropology courses there. |
| 1:16.4 | And when I'm not doing that, I try to do research in human evolution. |
| 1:21.7 | A lot of Holly's research has centered on this idea, |
| 1:25.1 | the elegant hypothesis called the obstetrical dilemma. |
| 1:29.2 | It addresses one of the most confounding mysteries of human biology. |
| 1:33.9 | Why is childbirth such a struggle in humans compared to other primates? |
| 1:38.9 | Why is a mother's pelvis not bigger compared to the size of our babies? |
| 1:43.1 | And why do our babies seem so helpless |
| 1:45.3 | and need so much care? These don't seem like ingredients for a successful species, yet here we are. |
| 1:53.0 | Answers to all of these questions can be found in the obstetrical dilemma hypothesis. |
| 1:58.7 | And it's this idea that selection for bigger and bigger brains meant bigger and bigger |
... |
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