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Are caesarean births causing massive change in human evolution?

December 6, 2016 By Jenny Marchal

Are caesarean births causing massive change in human evolution?

The higher rate of caesareans is seeing a massive gap between small pelvis size and bigger newborns.

Opting for a caesarean is becoming increasingly popular but a new study has found that choosing this option is affecting human evolution in terms of how big babies are becoming.

C-sections are widening the gap between the small size of female pelvises and the size of newborns – almost a 10 to 20 percent gap to be precise, according to a new study led by Philipp Mitteroecker, an assistant professor with the Department of Theoretical Biology at the University of Vienna, Austria.

While the average woman’s pelvis has remained small, the size of newborn babies have increased leading to more C-sections being performed.

“Why is the rate of birth problems, in particular what we call fetopelvic disproportion – basically that the baby doesn’t fit through the maternal birth canal – why is this rate so high?” he said. “Without modern medical intervention such problems often were lethal and this is, from an evolutionary perspective, selection. Women with a very narrow pelvis would not have survived birth 100 years ago. They do now and pass on their genes encoding for a narrow pelvis to their daughters.”

Caesarean births have increased over the past decades with one in three women opting to have a C-section either as their birthing plan or during labor.

While babies seem to be getting bigger, will this human evolution one day see every birth being a C-section? Well Mitteroecker says not likely.

“The pressing question is what’s going to happen in the future? I expect that this evolutionary trend will continue but perhaps only slightly and slowly. There are limits to that. So I don’t expect that one day the majority of children will have to be born by [Caesarean] sections.”

Details of the study were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Comments

  1. entrance says

    December 6, 2016 at 10:17 am

    The way we live is very unnatural. That’s why it is only logical that also our evolution is unnatural. Since we no longer have any natural enemies, we ourselves set up the rules, that decide over life and death. And these rules are wrong in many ways. You could write a whole book about it.

    One chapter could be devoted to the resulting overpopulation that causes a variety of problems. Instead of letting politics, medicine and capitalism dictate our evolution, we should give nature more freedom. And if we further succeed in reducing the world population to 3 or 4 billions, a certain equilibrium could be reestablished in this world. I am ready to help.

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