Tip For Men and Women #33: I LOVE His Gigantic Head!

“His MAIN head”, for those of you whose minds are in the gutter. Hopefully any fans of Coupling will appreciate that line.

So, we’ve been on the topic of lying recently. A while back I posted about the sperm-war theory that humans are biologically programmed to cheat on each other. Perhaps you’ve also heard about the theory of why humans have such big craniums.

You know how when you see shows on the discovery channel, and the baby horse or lion pops out of the womb and immediately starts walking around, albeit somewhat tentatively and groggily? And you know how when humans give birth, the baby basically lays around uselessly for months and months, doing little more than reacting to the environment and being waited on hand-and-foot? Well, there’s a reason for that. And the reason is that humans cease gestating in the womb too early, at a point in our pre-natal development at which we’re really not ready to come out yet. So, in a perfect world, we’d be in the womb much longer than we are.

Why?

Well, if we developed to the point at which we could pop out and start walking around and reading Plato, well our giant skulls would rip apart the mother’s birth canal, thus rendering the fertilization of the ovum by the man’s sperm a death sentence for the woman, setting aside the possibility of miscarriage and abortion. It’s very interesting to remember that not so very long ago in western societies (and still to-day in others), birth was still a very dangerous process. So now people don’t want to have kids until they’re 40 or so because they don’t want to be tied down or whatever. But imagine if having a kid carried with it a very real risk that you’d DIE IN THE PROCESS. That’s how strong the biological urge to procreate it. Fascinating!

So, evolution, clever as ever, saw fit to make sure that babies came out earlier, thus decreasing the mortality rate of women giving birth. It also saw fit to ensure that the gestation period balanced perfectly the risk of killing the mother against the vulnerability of a defenceless child, which is why we’re born after 9 months and not, say, 7.

But why, you might be asking, do humans need such large heads?

Well, one very, VERY widely accepted theory of why humans have such big heads is because they aided in our survival. That’s how we rose to the top of the food web, where we presently reside in our predator-free state of bliss. That’s not controversial at all, though, since the operating assumption of evolutionary biology is that EVERYTHING happens for a reason, viz. to aid in our survival.

So, for example, “what about variable testicle size?” I know you’re all saying. Well, that aids survival (both small ones and large ones, for all you size queens out there who are really hoping that the more, ahem, puny men out there will soon be weeded out of the gene pool).

But I digress. The real question here is why having larger heads aids our survival. Well, they house larger brains, but that only begs the question of why bigger brains help us survive?

Here’s the crazy thing: larger brains help us survive by making us better, more successful liars, cheaters, and cuckolders.

More on this to-morrow...