Dear Theists

[Ronkonkoma]

Ha! I like this answer. Gave you a rep for it.

Though I know the Pope has recently stated that evolution is a reality that is "necessary" to Catholic doctrine, I would like to point out that the reason  the brain of the baby has to grow like it does is because we are (more than any of our cousin species) born neurologically premature. As our ancestors shifted from the splayed-leg gait still used by the chimpanzee to a bipedal gait, the pelvic bones "rotated" forward to allow our feet to point in the same direction when standing, a necessary adaptation for long-distance walking/running while upright. (Chimps can "dash" briefly on two legs, but it's tiring for them to do so because their feet point outward from the centerline.) We were bipedal for quite some time before the brains of the late Australopithecus began to enlarge to form the first Homo habilis, and the narrowing of the birth canal due to the change in hip location placed an "upper limit" on how large our heads could be at birth. As a result, we were born increasingly premature, there being a strong selection pressure (because the mothers would die in childbirth, killing both) for those born with the late-development genes. The architecture for the mother-child bonding you described was already there, as we see in chimp mothers with their young, but with the increasing dependency of premature neurological development, it made the mother-child bond more important and, evolutionary biologists hypothesize, led to the pressures that caused us to move away from the "free love" chimp model of sexuality and begin to form monogamous family units.

I find greater beauty in that overall picture than I do staring at a picture of one mother with one infant.

Thanks for the rep Boss!

That's kind of what I tell moms during their well infant visits - "we humans are not like horses that can run as soon as we are born." They always seem to love it. Then I tell them about mutual gaze interactions. And the transmission of joy between mothers and infants, in a way that is EPIGENETIC.