Dr. Paul Turke
Appearances
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
I was listening to one of your podcasts was Peter at T and he talks about slow death and long death. And, uh, you know, the slow death wasn't, wasn't there. You, you were relatively fit and then something got you. So you weren't a burden on everybody, uh, back, back in the day like that. And, and so even, even for males, you know, you, you brought up a good point. Um,
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Yeah, I think it puts a lot of stress on children. It also... You know, the human brain, the child's brain, is very malleable, very undeveloped when baby first appears on the scene. And when we change the environment, the early environment— that children are reared under, we sort of miss, I think some of the cues that lead to, uh, uh, normal development.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
You know, they might not be taking care of the children, rocking them to sleep and doing things like that quite as much as grandma did. But just the male being around held together, helped to hold together kinship networks and helped to transmit knowledge that had been accumulated. You know, like where the watering hole doesn't go dry when we're hunting for such and such and so on.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Males could be contributors also. And if they weren't busy getting beat up by younger males because they were competing for the females, sort of dropping out of that game and being helpful in other ways probably was adaptive for them too and a route to indirect reproduction.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Probably the biggest one is in one of the big themes in my book is that we used to live embedded in kinship networks. Um, so we had lots of different, uh, helpers contributors, uh, helping us to raise our children that, you know, there are situations now where one parent, usually a mother gets stuck with three kids in a, in a home. And, um,
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Well, I think that covers it in terms of the sort of the sociology of it, but we're out of alignment with, in terms of infectious disease exposures and things like that, with you know, with our daycare centers and so on, stuff like that. Kids, uh, experience different degrees of, of illness, uh, uh, different types of germs, different, uh, uh, immune system, developmental trajectories and so on.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Um, and, and again, kind of, I touched on this a few minutes ago, but just, uh,
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
I think it predisposes sometimes to some of the, you know, not super severe mental illnesses, which I think come more from, you know, genetic and broken brain type, what I call broken brain type phenomena, but just some of the altered inputs from not carrying our children around all day long or having our parents carry them around. talking to them all day.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
So those sort of early inputs are quite altered by the social structure that we now live in.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Up to a point, especially anxiety. I mean, you can't live without anxiety. If I could give kids a pill to make them never feel anxious, then that probably wouldn't be good for them. I mean, if you're walking down a path in the woods and you see mama grizzly bear with her cubs and you don't feel a little bit anxious about taking the next step forward, that's probably not very adaptive.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
So we need to feel anxiety, but we need to learn how to deal with it because there are all kinds of anxiety-producing situations that we have now that we didn't used to have, especially for teenagers. You know, they're living in a virtual world a lot of the time and they're –
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
You know, they're thrown into middle schools with, you know, 200 other kids their same age without support of Ken all day long and that sort of thing. And that creates... anxiety situations that we don't need to eliminate per se. We need to learn to deal with them.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Now humans, if anything, we're, you know, we're, we're flexible. We, we can adapt to a lot of different things. So it's not, uh, uh, the end of the world, but if we're, but if we're trying to optimize, you know, we're, we're sort of off the optimum if we're, um, uh, Under those sorts of stressful situations.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Yeah, well, I think that it is having very supportive kin who love you all around that can sort of take you aside and say, all right, that's not that awful of a situation and explain things to you. But I'm always struck by... And it's not always a bad thing, but I'm struck by the wide range of options that our teenagers face now.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
When I was doing field work on EFOLIC, which is not a hunter-gatherer society, it was a horticultural society, but it was pretty primitive, pretty isolated in a technological sense. And those kids growing up knew what they were going to do.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
You were going to be, you were going to fish, you were going to build canoes, you were going to, you know, weave mats to build roofs for the house and you were going to take care of kids. And, you know, that was about it. There weren't just this huge range of options. And again, I think it's great that we have this huge range of options. You know, you and I wouldn't be able to do what we do if,
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
we were living in that situation. But it also presents so much uncertainty to these kids. They sometimes just don't know where to go. And then they retreat into a virtual world and they don't know who to... You know, they don't have people around all day that they can talk to about it. They don't have older kids who have been through it necessarily to model after and so on.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
So it's pretty disruptive. ADHD, I think, is a little different from anxiety. I think what I tell kids, and I may not be completely capturing the whole spectrum of it, but I tell kids that I was 5'6 back in the day, and I've since shrunk, and if the whole world were a basketball court, I wouldn't be very well adapted to it. And now in school, when we send kids to school,
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
we funnel them all through, you know, through the same funnel. And so we, we kids who are, you know, a little bit shy, quiet, they're not active, active learners. They pay, they're good at paying attention, that kind of thing. They get overvalued, but the kid who's a more active learner who would rather run around outside and learn things that way, they, they're not quite as able to.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Um, but back in the day, um, In the place of scene and in existing traditional societies, there's room for kids to do, you know, if you're an active learner, well, you go out hunting. If you're an active learner, you make the arrowheads. You know, there's all kinds of roles for kids that they could fill. What are your thoughts on daycare? On daycare. Yeah. Well, I think well-run daycares can be
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
good in the sense that they can mimic the alloparental situation where you have multiple committed individuals. And, you know, and especially if they're like, I think like in the Montessori settings, they'll have more of the like, you know, three-year-olds with four-year-olds with five-year-olds and so on. I think those can have certain advantages. But what I don't like about daycares is that
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
And I think that has implications for happiness and healthiness and, you know, just emotional well-being, that sort of thing. And even things like ADHD, potentially depression. the more spectrum-y things on the altruism spectrum, all of that can be affected, I think, by, uh, this mismatch, uh, environment, stressful, broken homes, the step-parents, like you say. Um, so, um, I, I,
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Well, first of all, many of them are just overcrowded. You've got, you know, the caretakers are overwhelmed and they can't give the kids as much attention as they want. But it's the infection that's there. I mean, we live up north here in Michigan where it's cold six months out of the year and the virus is hit and, you know, parents...
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
They have their kids in daycare, and three days out of five, they've got to keep them home because they have a fever or something and all of that. So there's a lot of infection risk that you have to deal with that you wouldn't have had to deal with, again, during ancestral times.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
there was just no safe place to put a baby other than in a caretaker's arms, you know, during the places scene and before that.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
I don't know of any data. It'd be an excellent study for somebody to do. And maybe somebody has. If they have, I don't know. But I think it's way down. And things like, you know, plagiosephaly, the flattening of the head. When kids are held, you're always switching arm to arm, different positions. And same thing when, you know, with co-sleeping, you know, doing it safely.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Kids, parents, parents would, you know, mom would sort of curl around baby. They'd be in different positions and so on. We can just see now that like six, I think one out of six kids in the U.S. gets these head flattening conditions called plagiocephaly, and it's from not being educated. carry this from being flat on your back.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Exactly. And then the related condition is torticollis where you get this neck tilt. And then you got to send them for physical therapy to try to straighten it out. So those are easily seen things, things you can notice.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
But I also wonder if we have all these sensory issues that come up in kids now, sensory integration disorders and so on that tend to... If they're extreme, they can put them on the autism spectrum and so on. And I'm just wondering if...
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
You get different sounds, sights, smells, orientations, and so on that when you're being carried around and talked to constantly, as opposed to stuck in a corner in some kind of little device or carrier, if that doesn't impact the development of communication. uh, you know, our, our, our sensory, uh, machinery up there in the brain.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Well, co-sleeping was the rule. I mean, they didn't have soft beds and things like that and heavy comforters. it mostly would have been done on mats or on firmer surfaces. And it would be generally mom would curl around the baby. The term that's thrown out there now is it's called breast sleeping. There've been videotapings of how moms just sort of instinctively curl around baby and then
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
you know, pat her on the head while they're not even awake and baby has the breasts available and can go from side to side. So in my view, you know, I mean, that's the way we always slept. There were no separate rooms or beds or anything like that. So it's not co-sleeping that's dangerous. It's co-sleeping dangerously that's dangerous. You know, if you're trying to do it on a couch or something,
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
I don't know if you want to go into it, but there was a group of evolutionary psychologists, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, who did early work on step-parenting, and they found that... step-parents tend to be, I mean, most step-parents are great.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
where baby's head can get wedged in the pillows or the cushion. That can be dangerous. But I think Japan is a good case in point. Co-sleeping is generally the rule there. And they have half the SIDS deaths and half the mortality rate that we do. So it's not co-sleeping per se. I think it's co-sleeping unsafely that is the problem.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
And I think co-sleeping has some advantages in terms of development. And it's... You know, this gets me in trouble with or at odds with the American Academy of Pediatrics. And I understand. I mean, they're speaking to a national population and they have to be talking to people who
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Maybe they live in an impoverished situation where they don't have safe bedding or maybe dad's an alcoholic and if he hops in bed, that does put baby at risk and all these things. So I sort of understand their position, but just coming out as they do hard stance against any co-sleeping, I disagree with.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
And a lot of the European countries are coming around to that view too, that it's okay to do it as long as you're being careful.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Carried, exactly. Yeah, yeah. I know. I just spent a week off with the grandchildren, one of them six months, and I just kept saying to myself, why won't you let me sit down?
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
I think probably it has something to do with that. I mean, certainly being carried and being in close proximity, I think babies feel anxious when naturally just feel anxious when they, when they don't have that proximity. I'm not quite as sure about, uh, you know, why, why they want us to be expending the maximum amount of calories carrying them about and rocking and bouncing. But, uh,
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Um, you know, what, what you just hypothesized there or speculated is that they, that's sending them signals that they're being held, that they're being cared for, you know, that, uh, that could, it could be something as straightforward as that.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
You know, of course they step in, they help, they're wonderful, but statistically there's more likelihood of abuse or neglect coming from the step-parent, you know, it's the old Cinderella thing. And so, you know, the more our environment is altered from what we used to have where there were always three or four people. So if grandma was a bad apple, you know, there were other people to step in.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Yeah, well, toddlers wake up at night because they want to check in with mom and dad, I think. And they don't have as much incentive to, they don't have to get up and do anything in the morning. And so they're free to satisfy their whims that way. As far as throwing food and tantrums if they don't get their way, Well, there are a couple of things.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Throwing food, especially vegetables and new foods. I think that... toddlers, once you're mobile, you have this natural aversion to just putting anything in your mouth. Unlike when you're, you know, four months old, you'll put anything in your mouth.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
But as you get more mobile, if you're, you know, just crawling about or toddling about the campsite, if you're willing to put everything in your mouth, that's probably not going to be good for you. So you hand a six-month-old a stalk of broccoli, they'll eat it. You hand a And I think that makes some good adaptive sense.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
As far as tantrums go and just being very, very needy, I think I don't really... know what the adaptive explanation is for that. But I do think that they just cognitively, they're not very empathetic yet. They can't really put themselves in another individual's position and say, well, mom is busy right now. She can't carry me around even though I want to be carried around.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
And, you know, and so they just want what they want. And, you know, at one moment they might want to give you a kiss and the next moment they want to hit you over the head or something. It's just because they, they, I, I don't think they've got it all, all figured out yet. You know, they, they're, they're still learning how to be social.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
I mean, they're, they're, they're much better at it than say a chimpanzee would be at a similar age, but it's a long learning process in humans learning. I mean, we're, we're the hyper-social species, right? That's, that's how we've prevailed is we, we know how to get along in groups and we're reciprocate with one another. And it's a long lesson for kids to learn sharing.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
It's not an easy concept, but it takes a long time to learn it. And that's why a lot of alloparents, a lot of help, and taking a long time to do it is very important.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
We know it's the best way to go, and it has numerous advantages for baby and mother. You know, it helps establish a proper microbiome. It helps protect you early on in life when your own immune system is still getting up and running. Protects you, especially from diarrhea illnesses, which used to kill a lot of babies back in the 60s. In traditional societies, there's some evidence.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
But if it's just a broken home and just one mom or one dad, you know, that can increase the amount of abuse and things like that that go on. So, yeah. That was very influential early work in evolutionary psychology, and some people got upset about it where they're saying, oh, my God, because it's natural, does that mean it's okay for step-parents to abuse kids?
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
I don't know how solid it is, but there's some papers that I've read suggesting you get four to five extra IQ points if you're breastfed for a long period of time versus just imbibing in formula. There's some evidence that the microbiome interaction with the immune system and the nervous system can help reduce risks of developing mental angst problems, depression, and so on later in life.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
And then, of course, for mom, moms reduce their risk of breast cancer from breastfeeding. No way. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Wow. And there's a really cool study. It seems to be pretty empirically sound. It was very surprising to me. It's in evolutionary medicine and public health from a couple of years ago showing that moms who breastfeed their babies have a lower incidence of developing early dementia.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Yeah. How much is that selection? There may be some correlate there.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Yeah, right. Yeah. So I don't know. But yeah, multiple, multiple benefits from it. And unfortunately, you know, we don't grow up with it. We... And it's very smart. I have some very smart parents in my practice. And, you know, they're surprised when I tell them babies are designed to breastfeed for a couple of years and they don't know about breastfeeding and they come in.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
from the hospital, even if they've talked to a lactation consultant with their spreadsheets and so on, baby's done this, baby's had so many poops and so many voids and blah, blah, blah, and they're all uptight and milk's not coming in yet and somebody's telling them they have to supplement and it all just interferes with breastfeeding. You have to relax. It just happens.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
There's no breastfeeding failure in traditional societies. It's very, very rare. Because everybody sees it happen. They know how to do it. But I think it's less than 50% of U.S. babies are still breastfeeding at six months.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
And a lot of them don't even get that far into it because they worry about the initial weight loss or they worry about the jaundice that develops when you're getting a little bit dehydrated and stuff. Breast milk's not there yet, and it's not washing out bilirubin and so on. And they start introducing formula. And then baby says, oh, well, this is easier.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
And learns to prefer the bottle over the breast. And so more often than you might think, both baby and mom end up giving up nuts for them.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Yeah, I mean, I think C-sections obviously can be life-saving and are necessary in some circumstances. But I just think that in some birthing centers, they're just a little bit too cavalier about it. You know, mom's got something coming up or the doctor's got a vacation. You know, it's just... You know, you're at 40 weeks now. Let's not let it go too long.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Let's just do a C-section, that kind of thing. Or let's induce, same sort of thing. So mom and baby have evolved a really good communication system for when baby is supposed to come. And we're not always really good at estimating what the exact conception date is. We know that because, you know, some babies are conceived now through artificial insemination.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
And we know then when they are conceived. And we know that we're a little bit off when we're estimating using ultrasounds and when mom thinks her last period was and so on. So I think they're overdone, basically, is the short answer there. They're life-saving, wonderful interventions, if done appropriately and much more sparingly than they are done now. Same with inductions. I agree.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
And, you know, of course, that doesn't make sense. That's the naturalistic fallacy. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's almost the opposite. It's the idea that, you know, hey, if you're going to be a stepparent, just be forewarned that there's some going to be emotional challenges for you. And it could be a little bit harder than, you know, and that sort of thing.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
just don't love to hear ah you're you're 41 weeks and uh everything looks good but uh maybe we should just induce you right now well well if everything looks good i i always want to wait a few more days you know so um have you got a have you got a perspective on uh epidurals is there any insight there
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
I'm not a real expert in that, but what I've been told by my moms and people that have them is it can interfere a little bit with pushing and getting the baby out. And so then that increase your risk of some doctor saying, oh, we better do a C-section here, that kind of thing.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
You know, that's a good question. I don't know the answer to that. You would think that would be a good idea. I mean, it's easy for me to say, you know, don't do epidurals. But, I mean, my daughter and daughter-in-law were able to do it. And, yeah, I guess they're pretty tough, but probably no tougher than the average. Do C-sections interrupt lactation?
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
I think so because, again, there's this fine-tuned timing mechanism between when baby should come and when nursing should start, but also mom's sore. I mean, it's a surgery, and mom doesn't feel quite as good, and it's just harder for mom to get things going and be quite as committed and diligent to it when you're recovering from a surgery. I mean, I could see...
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
You know, that if I had to do some type of child care thing, obviously not breastfeeding, but I had just had a hernia surgery or something, I might be less reluctant to carry out my duties in that situation. So I think it probably does interfere some.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I haven't experienced too many people who've done it, and I haven't run into any problems. But yeah, there certainly can be problems. It's a sort of a mismatched kind of thing. It's a not very novel sort of thing. So we would expect there could be some problems there that crop up.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Yeah, I think so. Like I said, people come in with their spreadsheets and I have to tell them, forget about counting the number of dirty diapers and all of those things. And people, you know, they come in with... Yeah, they've had C-sections. Yeah, it's been over-medicalized. And it's just a much more stressful kind of thing than it is most likely in a more natural setting.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
I think midwives often get people to relax. There's also a home birth trend, which... You know, I mean, I see the reasons for it. And when it works, it works. But it's also more risky, you know, if something because things do go wrong in modern medicine, you know, like like again, like you're right.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
previous podcast with peter atia we're good at uh fast fast deaths we're good at avoiding those if something goes wrong you want to be there you want an obstetrician there who has a scalpel on hand if you need it um yeah so so anyway yeah what have you come to believe about the current demographic transition these declining birth rates that we're seeing
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
So we would hope that would remedy the situation, not excuse it.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Yeah, well, that's sort of what my early interest was as a graduate student. When I went off, I went to Penn State and worked with an anthropologist named Napoleon Chagnon. And he was very much into evolution. He was a cultural anthropologist who was becoming an evolutionary anthropologist. Then I followed him in Northwestern my second year and I had to figure out something to do.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
So I would go into the library and I got interested in demographic transition. And there was not a really good explanation in my mind for why people in modern settings had decided all of a sudden, you know, they'd switch from we want to have as many babies as we can to we want to have just a couple or in some cases none.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
And the prevailing ideas out there, the prevailing theory was coming from economists and economic-minded demographers. And their thought was, well... In traditional settings, after you pay this little upfront cost, kids become assets. They make you wealthy, basically. And especially they take care of you and things like that. And so there's no reason to limit reproduction in traditional settings.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
But because they lived in modern settings and they probably had kids, they knew kids were expensive in modern settings. And so they were arguing that we would limit the consumption of children, expensive goods, it's likely we would limit the consumption of all other expensive goods. But that didn't make sense to me from an evolutionary point of view.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
First, I didn't trust their data because they would go into these traditional societies and ask hunter-gatherers, why do you want to have so many children? And that would be like asking, you know, why do you breathe? And so I think I thought they probably teased out the answer they wanted, but, you know, I have no way of knowing that.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
But what really troubled me was it didn't make sense from an evolutionary point of view that we had kids in order to eventually economically exploit them. Again, going back to this idea that we had lifespans, maximum lifespans as long as the other apes, and then they gradually increased and doubled because we were doing things useful for our children.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
That sort of idea didn't jibe with the idea that, you know, once they became 20 or 30 and we were 50 or 60, that, you know, we were just going to kick back and let them take care of us. I always felt it was going to be the other way around.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
And that's my early work contributed to the grandmother hypothesis and contributed to what we now consider to be the right explanation for why life spans doubled. But this notion that wealth flows switched, right? As modernization occurred, and that's what made us not want children, didn't make full sense to me.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Now, it does make sense that children, of course, became more expensive as we left traditional settings and stuff, but they were always expensive. They never really gave us more than we gave them, except in terms of life satisfaction, maybe. So my explanation is just that, that we don't have kinship networks anymore anymore. that help spread out the costs of rearing children.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Costs get concentrated on mom and dad. Mom and dad say, you know, this is hard work. We love these kids, but we're only going to have one or only going to have two. And some people look around and say, oh, my friends over there are struggling. I'm not having any.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
So I think it has a lot to do with the demise of extended kinship networks and that help in the concentration of care responsibilities on the decision makers.
Modern Wisdom
#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Well, the big one that I worked on has to do with food allergies, childhood food allergies. Back in the 90s, And it was officially codified by the American Pediatric Society in 2000 or 2001, I think it was, that you delay, delay, delay when it comes to the introduction of the eight or nine most allergenic foods.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
And I mean, first of all, that evolution aside, that just never made sense from an immunological point of view. It just, I don't know how they came up with that idea because once the immune system is able to cause destruction, which starts in utero and is present in a big way, even shortly after birth, you have to have proper tolerance mechanisms.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
It's not like you can wait until you're three years old to learn not to attack your own liver. So, why they thought waiting until you're three years old to introduce peanuts is really beyond me. But the evolutionary angle there, if they had been more attuned to how we lived during the Pleistocene and before that, we were immobile pretty much as a species. We didn't. We grew up in...
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
and died in the same ecosystem, basically, generation after generation. So what that meant was that while you were inside mom and she was eating, you were getting exposed to food antigens. When she was breastfeeding you, you were getting exposed to food antigens. When you first started eating foods yourself, you were getting exposed to food antigens.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
And those food antigens were the very same ones that you were going to get exposed to for the rest of your life. And so they eventually learned Not through thinking about it theoretically in any way, but just by going, oh, my goodness, food allergies are soaring. And, oh, look, they're not allergic to peanuts in Israel because they feed children early on.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
They call them bambas, which are peanut butter containing nuts. And so people started looking, well, maybe we made a mistake here. Maybe we should introduce things early. And so they eventually did some studies and found out that that was true.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
But if you thought about the way people always ate, you would be introduced to all the foods you would ever eat, all the allergens, all the antigens that you would ever encounter early on. And your immune system would learn to tolerate them. And so it never made sense to say, let's not introduce things until you're older. So I think evolution-mindedness could have helped us to avoid that problem.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
But I mean, I think there are others. I think... evolution, mind in this can help us to understand what's a healthy diet. It can contribute to that. I mean, I know from listening to you, you're interested in that. It turns out there's a Really cool study that was done with fruit flies by Michael Rose and his group. Grant Rutledge was a grad student or a fellow who worked with him.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
And what they did was they changed up the diet that the fruit flies had evolved to eat. They had been eating for thousands of generations. They had been eating apple rot. And then they brought them from that area, which I think was on the East Coast, to Michael Rose's lab in UC Irvine. And they didn't have rotten apples, I guess, so they fed them bananas doused in high fructose corn syrup.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
And what they found was that after about 40 generations, Flies had adapted to that new diet to accommodate it really well while they were young. But even after 100 generations, they hadn't adapted to accommodate that new diet when they were old. Right. The most parsimonious explanation for that is that, number one, selection is most powerful early in life.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
And number two, most genes have their effects confined to certain ages. So that if a mutation comes along that allows a young fly to better digest a banana or Or if a mutation comes along that allows an old fly to better digest the banana, potent selection would accumulate for the young fly. Weak selection would not accumulate for the old fly.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Uh, grandparents, uh, Well, first of all, we used to live about as long as the other apes, you know, up to about 6 million years ago. And the way we sort of extended our reproductive viability, most likely, especially for grandmothers, if menopause was ancient as we think it was, it was by caring for children.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Is this why kids tolerate modern diets better than grandparents do? Exactly. Exactly. That's right. So beyond a certain age, you know, maybe 50 or so, maybe earlier, you should lay off the Pancakes and donuts like that. I mean, nobody should be eating too much of that stuff, but you can certainly, kids can do it. They can tolerate it much.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
They can tolerate a grain heavy diet much better than say somebody my age. That's so interesting. It's because of that.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Yeah. You can apply that also, that line of reasoning to infectious disease. And I did that in an article shortly after the pandemic got going. Crowd diseases, you know, came on board once we started settling down and living in crowds, moving indoors and so on. Things like, you know,
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
as long as those diseases had certain commonalities, like they relied on crowding and, you know, maybe aerosol breathing in aerosolized virus, that kind of thing, young immune system should evolve more quickly to be able to adapt to those crowd diseases than, uh, old immune systems, uh, would. And, um,
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
And there's an evolutionary biologist that I've talked to who works with fruit flies who's interested in maybe trying to test that idea. But it's a little more complicated with immunology than it is or with infection than it is with diet because it's... We have a very potent adaptation immunologically that helps us when we get a little bit older to fight diseases, and that's immune system memory.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
So very, very young children often don't do as well with infections.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Exactly. But when you're talking about a brand new virus that's just jumped into the The population- No one has any potential. Memory doesn't count anymore. And then you should expect the young to have, again, there have to be commonalities. And there are four other coronaviruses out there that passed through over the last 10,000 years. You would expect young people to have evolved-
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
adaptations to deal with those infections to a better extent than old people, just as you would expect it for diet.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Yeah. I mean, obviously, it's just a terrible problem in our society. Yeah. And like you said, it can start early. And I mean, I think largely comes from a mismatch. We used to have to work harder for our foods and exert ourselves. And calorie-dense foods were not as available. So we developed a taste for those.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
So reproducing indirectly, taking care of the kids we've already reproduced and helping them. And one of the big ways we help them is by taking care of their children. And so there's been this long running history of reproducing. grandparents and babies and children and grandchildren interacting and helping one another. And I think it's good for both sets.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
And now that we don't have to work hard to get the calories and we still have the taste for them, many people overdo it. And they get their kids on that wagon quickly, too, where they're overconsuming. And then there's also just foods that nobody's had time to adapt to. There's stuff in the center aisle of the grocery store, you know, the trans fat laden things and all that.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
People, soda pops and those kinds of things that people bring into their house. And so it's a daunting problem, though. You can explain it to people. It's easy to get. It's not easy to understand that mismatch. But getting people to, you know... be more active and avoid some of those foods is just a hard thing. I dread it when I've got a 10-year-old who can't hop up onto the exam table.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
He already weighs 130 pounds and you know his parent sits down on the bench in the room and you know they're they weigh 300 pounds i mean what what can i do you know i i i if i could take the kid home with me you know maybe i'd have a chance but um it's just it's a really really hard problem uh to solve but um I think it's just so, so such an important thing.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
I mean, especially our, I mean, it's a problem in kids, but it's especially a problem in, uh, you know, as people get older and, um, you know, I, I don't know what the number is, but so many of our healthcare dollars get spent keeping people who've abused themselves, uh, you know, for five, six decades alive or, you know, trying to keep them partially alive at least.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
And I mean, I think most of our healthcare dollars get spent trying to keep somebody alive for the last three months of their lives and that kind of thing. Is that right? I think so. And, uh,
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
it's not that I'm against helping people when they're older, but if people would help themselves when they were younger and avoid some of these problems, all those healthcare dollars could be shifted to young people and daycares could be better. And then the mom stuck at home with three kids and no help. I mean, we could reallocate a lot of these things as a society if people were just
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
more responsible, but it's a tough problem, isn't it?
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
I mean, I think so. You know, I think antibiotics are wonderful inventions and lifesaving, but they're certainly overused. And so that leads to the evolution of resistance and stuff. But the big category that I think is overused are the psychotropic medications, you know, putting teenagers on drugs.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
multiple antidepressants and ADHD medicines and so on, I'm always happier to start with changing behaviors, modifying behaviors, start with some counseling, start with some explanation, explaining to kids that it's natural and okay to feel anxious. Have you heard about the smoke detector principle? Of course.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Right, right. So anxiety sort of operates that way. We get anxious and there's just so many things out there now to get anxious over. We have to learn to deal with it rather than take a pill to try to eliminate it. So I think there's a lot of overuse. And of course, the SSRIs that are used so commonly don't, probably work as well as sustained exercise does over the long run.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
And, you know, but it's a lot easier to take a pill, you know, and people often choose the easier way. And there's a lot of pressure, you know, from the television and other media telling you if Take this antidepressant and if that doesn't work, maybe another one will make you happier. So I think, yeah, I think it's overused.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
When I was younger doing field work, I was interested in what the grandparents were doing and how they were helping and, and that sort of thing. And, uh, as I got older and became a grandparent, I was, I still was interested in the other stuff, but I became more interested in why we do it.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
And I think having an evolutionary perspective can, you know, which includes something like the smoke detector principle can help us to sort of pull back on some of those things. And of course, these old people we talked about who are unhappy because they aren't taking care of their grandkids and they're unhappy. their SSRIs, well, move closer to your grandkids. I think that'll work better.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Well, you would allow parents, mothers to be in contact with their babies more. And they're doing that to some extent. You would be, you know, you would be introducing breast milk as early as you can. You would be
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
It's very different from how things used to work back in the day. And it puts a lot of stress on everybody, children, but parents, parents also. So that's a big thing. Kids, when they would go out to play and run around, they would... be in sort of mixed age groups.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
I mean, I saw – I don't know how common it is, but when I was a resident in the NICU, you know, I saw babies who were induced or made to come early who then had breathing difficulties and ended up in the ICU and on ECMO, of all things, because of, you know, kind of stupid errors like that. And so I think – just trying to...
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
being less cavalier about in inductions and C-sections would, would help change the, uh, the complexion of, of NICUs, but just allowing more parental contact, you know, they, they, they have that. And, and there, and I think there's movement towards that.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
There's good information that they're trying to, uh, the problem is it comes slower than I would expect because they, they have to wait for a study, uh,
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Cause it's hard work, you know, come home at the end of the day, sometimes after there's been arguing and fighting, but, um, yeah, you know, it really makes my life happier and more fulfilled. And I think we sort of have an epidemic of unhappy grandparents, at least in the U S and I think in other parts of the world too. And, uh,
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
to show it over and over again before they, you know, before they'll intervene in a way that's, and that makes sense if it's dangerous intervention, but if it's an intervention like let mom hold her baby more, it doesn't seem like it's that dangerous to me.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
We might not have to, and it might make sense from an evolutionary perspective, we might not have to wait for six multicenter studies to be done in order to conclude that that's a good idea. So, again, when it's a dangerous, potentially dangerous intervention, you want to have all those multicenter studies done. But doctors, in my opinion, for good reasons, are a little bit leery of theory.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Nobody wants their patients A doctor that's dreaming up a treatment for them in the shower the morning before, that's just, you know, kind of a wild speculation. Evidence is a good thing, but it can be overdone too. Doctors just, you know, medical students, they're just not taught evidence. the same way graduate students are in other scientific disciplines.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
And of course, I'm partial to evolutionary theory and I really wish that it made its way into the licensing exams and it made it into the pre-med programs and all that. I was thinking about when I got into medical school, I had already had a PhD and I was teaching at University of Michigan And they let me in, which was great, but they said I had to go take an organic chemistry course.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
So I went to the local community college and took that. And I've never really had to know any organic chemistry in anything I've ever done as a pediatrician. But rather than that, or at least in addition to that, I'd love to see pre-med programs include evolutionary biology courses. And I'd love to see continuing medical education include more evolutionary biology.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
And I'd really love to see more evolutionary biology undergraduates decide to go to medical school. That would be a real boon to the discipline.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Yeah, if it's badly applied. I mean, there's this whole – it's been a ways back now of social Darwinism and so on where – so people can misunderstand and think that it's all about –
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
calling the weak and sick from the population and doing things like... I did an interview years ago for one of the science magazines where the interviewer, a real nice woman, wanted me to make clear that as a Darwinian pediatrician, I was in favor of taking care of the weak and the sick also.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
You know, because she thought Darwinism implied that, you know, some people might think that that's not the case. So, I mean, I think done poorly, social Darwinism can creep in. Evolutionary biologists, if you hang around in those circles, you'll often hear them say evolution is – or the theory is descriptive, not prescriptive. And it is. It's up to you.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
You know, sitting on the beach, having your pina colada or golfing or whatever can be fine, but you get a lot more satisfaction over the long run, I think, if you're useful, if you're helping people. Yeah.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
But in a little sense, in evolutionary medicine, we – kind of violate that in the sense that we'll say things like, uh, we, you know, we, we might prescribe letting that fever go because fever is an involved adaptation that helps you to, uh, fight your illness.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
So, so we're being, I mean, we're not forcing your, anybody's hand, but we're giving advice that says, uh, avoid the trans fats, uh, let the fever go, let the, you know, those kinds of things. So we're being a little bit prescriptive, I guess.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Right. Right. No, you're right. Yep. And without recognizing that some of them are defenses. If it's normatively bad, feeling sick with a fever is normatively bad. And so doctors exist to fix things and make you feel better. And so we tell you to take... You know, the old saying, not in pediatrics, but the old saying for adults was take two aspirin and call me in the morning, right?
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
And we don't give aspirin to kids, but the idea is the same. We often tell them, take your ibuprofen or your acetaminophen, you'll feel better. And there are roles for those things. It's not like you can never use them, but it's, yeah, like you said, fixing things often makes things worse.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Yeah, I mean, the book's available on Amazon. It's called Bringing Up Baby, An Evolutionary View of Pediatrics. They can go to my website. Anybody who wants to ask me a question about their child, they can call my office. How amazing. I'm always interested to talk to people about pediatrics. evolution and child rearing.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
I'm fortunate to have so many wonderful parents in my practice who sometimes I feel like I might be boring them with some information, but then they come back to me and they say, wow, that's really cool. And I ran into a woman in the grocery store the other day who read my book and she says, I didn't know you were so funny.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
I try to put a few jokes there, you know, to keep people's interests and so on. So, yeah. So it's been exciting for me to write the book and to have people like you and Rob notice it. And I'm very grateful for being able to talk to you. I've been watching your podcast. My son has been a big fan for a long time.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
They're they're very, you know, happy. I mean, it's just sort of a truism. If you talk to a grandmother or grandfather and ask them, you know, what's it like hanging out, having the opportunity to hang out with your kids? It's the best thing, best thing ever. You know, they and again, you know, they're there. The nice thing about being a grandparent is you're not 24-7 either.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
You can do some of the other things like golf or hang out on the beach or whatever, but you have more flexibility. But yeah, there's this draw. People just sort of naturally realize that that's the... way to go. And that's why I'm concerned about some of our younger generation that, you know, they're good people, a lot of like the young eco-warriors and so on.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
So they would have, if you were a three-year-old, you'd have a seven-year-old there to learn from, and you might be helping a two-year-old. And so the sort of the independent child stuff would be different. So those are two of the big ways that we've lived in. We live now sort of in a mismatched environment.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
I read online them saying things like, well, the last thing the world needs is more children. Well, you know, that you make that decision early and then it's hard to, hard to reverse that, you know? And I think, I think it comes back to bite a lot of them. Um, but I also think kids are important. I think kids are, uh, going to be the problem solvers.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Uh, you know, we have a lot of problems that the, the world faces, the planet faces and so on. And it's, it's not going to be, um, your dog, I mean, I love dogs, don't get me wrong, but it's not going to be the dog who's going to figure out new ways to, you know, solve global warming problems or whatever. It's going to be our children.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
So, and the problem with it is, is you make that decision in your 30s and 40s and then you're 50 and you might start to say, oops, and then it's kind of late, you know, but one of the good things is that Natural selection never had to be more specific than it needed to be to solve the problem.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
So because we were embedded in these kinship networks and people like sex and when babies came, they tended to be pretty, you know, sensitive. willing to care for them and love them and want to nurture them, that led naturally to reproductive success. But very few of us just walked around back in the places scene saying, I want to have children. I want to have children because we...
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
those other two things led to having children. And so I don't think early on as young people, we think those things. So it's easy sort of to be led off track and say, yeah, I don't want to have kids. It's not a good thing to have kids for various reasons. And whatever, and then suddenly think, oh, it's too late. Maybe I should have gone in the other direction.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
So I worry about some of the younger generation doing that. But what I was starting to get at, though, is because natural selection is not all that specific is You can probably make yourself happier and build a fulfilling life even after you've not had your own children and grandchildren just by helping. Because we feel good about helping. We feel good about being relevant.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
So I would encourage people out there to help. even if they don't have children to, you know, to maybe, uh, do something that's helpful for them. And I think they'll feel happier, happier for it. And maybe that's the pediatrician coming out in need.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
I think there's reason to believe that menopause is pretty ancient, that it started to happen right after the split from the other hominoid apes. So basically, selection stayed stronger for longer because we were doing things helpful, increasing our reproductive viability later in life. But selection, for some reason, didn't push... ovulatory function to later and later ages.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
And I think the reason is, is because it was more adaptive to stop at a certain age because children were becoming, you know, more helpless, more altricial is the word. And, uh, their, their, their period of dependency lasted a lot longer.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
Yeah. Um, so women stopped reproducing directly in, in their forties because as children were becoming more and more needy, uh, and, uh, The chances of them surviving and being successful, if you died before they were 10 years old or so, became very, very, very low. And so it became adaptive to stop and nurture the last child that you had maybe when you were 40 years old. And then...
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
So that would keep natural selection stronger to later ages that need to reproduce indirectly by helping children you already had produced. That held off the ravages of old age. And so the whole thing just kept increasing so that eventually we live long enough to take care of our children's children. And so the grandmother hypothesis sort of explains that.
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#938 - Dr Paul Turke - How Modern Parenting Got It All Wrong
why we live to later and later ages, but also why we don't directly keep reproducing during that time.