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How many babies must be consumed?

Thu, 08/28/2008 - 20:16 — Anthony

I was speaking with Dan about kids and families and we were marveling at the fact that there are so many animal species whose young are forced to walk and run within hours of being born. It’s a survival thing of course. If they couldn’t walk soon after birth, they would become another animal’s tasty num-nums.

 
Of course with humans, our babies are perfectly edible (as far as the animal kingdom is concerned). Our kids take a year to start walking and even longer to gain an understanding of what can hurt them. The have no idea, for example, that a hungry lion is a very dangerous thing.
 
It then makes one pause to wonder. Why don’t our offspring walk and run sooner? Well in part because they don’t HAVE to learn more quickly. Survival doesn’t depend on walking and running early in life. At least it shouldn’t.   We parents ensure that the things that babies might want to run from can’t get at the babies in the first place. And so the evolutionary process has allowed our offspring to remain helpless for a longer amount of time than the rest of the species on the planet.
 
So the big questions are as follows. How many babies have to get eaten before our offspring would start walking right after birth?  Think of the savings on strollers! Eventually our species would be forced to have offspring that could walk and run immediately if we put say… starving lions in the Labour and Delivery rooms. But for how long would this be necessary? And also, would this always be necessary? Would removing the lions then mean that we would revert our evolvement back to non-walking babies?
 
And another thing, how many more babies need to be eaten so that there is also a healthy self-preservation instinct built into newborns. An instinct that would make them aware of the risk the lions pose without having to first develop to the point where we parents can teach them that lions are dangerous.
 
Come to think of it, by this method we could eventually evolve our species to the point of being nearly perfectly self-reliant. It would be purely instinctual to need nobody but yourself – from birth. Sounds like a great life. Perhaps we would then evolve away from needing to be connected physically and mentally with other humans in order to live happy lives. We could just evolve away from the concept of relationship.
 
Or perhaps the lions would just eat all the babies for generations and take over the earth.