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Caesarean births 'affecting human evolution'

bbc.com

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Re: Caesarean births 'affecting human evolution'

#41

Post by wojcech »

madaxe_again wrote: post #33

Flagging this story as the top comment is political. Please discuss the technicalities of this, not the ethics and politics.

> Flagging this story as the top comment is political. Please discuss the technicalities of this, not the ethics and politics.

This is exactly why I find the idea of enforcing non political discussion unwise. How exactly would you discuss this without touching ethics or politics? You can go into the history of the caesarian (if you have domain knowledge), you can go into the intricacies(if you have domain knowledge) and you can talk about experiences.

But notice how nothing of this is really a discussion, there is no generation of or work towards new truths.

Op hinted at a very real technicality: with modern medicine, we might need to take the role of natural selection of we want to avoid an increase in congenital illnesses. The question of whether we should and to what extent is a philosophical/ethical/political one.

If you ban ethics or politics, the discussion ends here. But the issue remains.

Re: Caesarean births 'affecting human evolution'

#42

Post by lostlogin »

ominous wrote: post #30
curun1r wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should we avoid those genes? We have the technology to deal with the situation when it arises. What would be the problem with, eventually, all women giving birth by Caesarean? There are plenty of other instances where our advancements have likely influenced our evolution. For one, the ease at which we can today travel between continents means that there's far more breeding between different races than we've ever…

> What would be the problem with, eventually, all humans needing glasses to see, or born with cornea defects? We know how to fix that. We should optimize for a world that works, instead of one we believe we'll be able to fix forever, and constantly requires purposeful effort to work. Would you like to carry your Fix The Generalized Imbalance Pills (FTGIMP, f-gimp how we call it, as in: "Hold on love, the trekking has…

The advances you seem to think are bad lead to those who benefit from treatments being productive. They build stuff and contribute and this helps society. It helps everyone when you help those who are infirm/unwell/unlucky. But say we took the view that intervention was bad - who chooses who dies?

Re: Caesarean births 'affecting human evolution'

#45

Post by bambax »

gnud wrote: post #15
bambax wrote: post #7

> Historically, these genes would not have been passed from mother to child as both would have died in labour. How do we know that? As the name implied, Caesar was born this way, a little over 2000 years ago. It's likely the procedure is much much older, too. So what timeframe are we talking about? What we didn't know how to do 100 years ago was how to save mother and child once birth had begun and the baby's head ha…

Things I learned from QI: The word Caesarian does not come from Caesar, but from Cadere, meaning to cut.

Well I stand corrected but so should you: Caesar was named this way because it was said one of his ancestors had a Caesarian birth.

Re: Caesarean births 'affecting human evolution'

#46

Post by qb45 »

wojcech wrote: post #41
madaxe_again wrote: post #33

Flagging this story as the top comment is political. Please discuss the technicalities of this, not the ethics and politics.

> Flagging this story as the top comment is political. Please discuss the technicalities of this, not the ethics and politics. This is exactly why I find the idea of enforcing non political discussion unwise. How exactly would you discuss this without touching ethics or politics? You can go into the history of the caesarian (if you have domain knowledge), you can go into the intricacies(if you have domain knowledge)…

Great, HN politics on politdetox week, of all things.

Re: Caesarean births 'affecting human evolution'

#47

Post by qb45 »

bambax wrote: post #45
gnud wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things I learned from QI: The word Caesarian does not come from Caesar, but from Cadere, meaning to cut.

Well I stand corrected but so should you: Caesar was named this way because it was said one of his ancestors had a Caesarian birth.

Wiki says it's an ancient urban legend.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Julius_Caesar_(name)#The...

Re: Caesarean births 'affecting human evolution'

#48

Post by foldr »

>Researchers estimate cases where the baby cannot fit down the birth canal have increased from 30 in 1,000 in the 1960s to 36 in 1,000 births today.

This could easily be explained by doctors being more willing to perform Caesareans than they were previously. No evidence is cited that the average width of women's pelvises has actually changed, so this is all wild speculation as far as I can see.

Of course, it is no surprise to see the HN crowd latching on to the idea that we should let more women die in childbirth.

Re: Caesarean births 'affecting human evolution'

#49

Post by ptaipale »

gambiting wrote: post #13
ptaipale wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is probably just a myth that Caesar was born this way. At the time, the mother most likely couldn't survive a section, because the resulting infections would kill anyone who had such surgery performed. And Caesar's mother lived to old age.

People have performed all sorts of surgeries for thousands of years, and while yes, the percentage of them getting infected and resulting in death was probably very high, it doesn't mean that every single surgery ended that way - in the end, people have been amputating limbs or getting wounded on the battlefield and surviving without any sterilization. So while it's rather unlikely, it's possible that Caesar's mother…

True, but deep wounds in the abdomen are much, much more difficult regarding infections than e.g. limb amputation. Surviving that was very extremely unlikely. Roman law said that the child must be cut out of a dead mother's womb, to bury it separately, but by that time the woman was dead or dying.

As far as I could find, the earliest written source claiming Caesar was born with C-section is from about 1000 years later.

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