Why do babies sleep so long? If it is so that there body can get time to develop, why isn’t that time spent in the womb instead?
In: Biology
You may have noticed that the womb is actually inside a human being. As such, there are enormous costs and risks to keeping a fetus inside a woman’s body for a prolonged period of time. Research has shown that the burdens placed on a woman from growing a fetus are enormous, and risks go up dramatically as the fetus gets larger. The conventional wisdom is that babies are born when they’re born because there’s a tradeoff between size of the baby’s head and width of the hips. But more recent research has shown that it would be too much of a burden on a pregnant woman’s body to stay pregnant for much longer. Just too high of a cost of resources.
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