Had an interesting conversation with Jaca about post-partum depression. It seems that anomalies of this type, that directly affect the well-being of the offspring when it is as most vulnerable should have been Darwinised away throughout the evolution... and apparently they haven't, so I'm thinking that it could have served as a positive mechanism in some occasions (ex: it's a really bad year, no food, you get a kid, it's better not to care about that kid and let it die if it means that you can survive until the next year and give birth to several more kids during the good years. Sort of leaving the local maximum in order to reach a larger (local or global) maximum).
And the whole discussion was prompted by the news story of a Texas women who ate its three month old baby's brain out (literally). Weird stuff, I tell ya!
1 comment:
In most cases, women don't eat the baby's brain during post-partum. Post-partum is common and can't be classified as an anomaly , I think it's just a hormonal imbalance and usually not dangerous to infants. That's the reason it hasn't been "Darwinised away." The problem is that we usually only hear of the extreme cases, such as a woman killing her 5 children, or eating her baby's brain, etc.
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