“In Pain Shalt Thou Bring Forth Children”

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“So far as I know,” writes Carl Sagan, author of The Dragons of Eden—Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence,^a “childbirth is generally painful in only one of the millions of species on Earth: human beings.”

This is because of the comparatively large human skull, which, in turn, was required by the increase in the size of the human brain, or more particularly, of that part of the human brain known as the neocortex. The neocortex is the largest and most dominant part of the human brain. To it may be traced those characteristics which we regard as most distinctively human, including our moral sense.

The American anatomist C. Judson Herrick describes the spectacularly fast development of the human neocortex in the Pliocene/Pleistocene period: “Its explosive growth late in phylogeny is one of the most dramatic cases of evolutionary transformation known to comparative anatomy.”

Of course this increase in cranial volume required a correlative increase in the braincase or skull. Sagan notes that modern men and women have a braincase twice the size of Homo habilis, an evolutionary cousin of Homo sapiens, that went nowhere in evolutionary terms and became extinct.

At the same time that the human braincase was undergoing its spectacular increase in size, there was another striking change in human anatomy: the human pelvis was drastically reshaped to permit the live birth of the large-brained human baby. But the pelvis change was not enough to permit human birth with comfort. The human child was and is delivered with pain.

It is interesting that modern scientists connect the evolutionary development of human characteristics (via the neocortex) with painful human childbirth. The same connection is found in Genesis!

The similarity did not go unnoticed by Sagan. He writes: “The connection between the evolution of intelligence and the pain of childbirth seems unexpectedly to be made in the Book of Genesis.” Perhaps it should not be so unexpected.

In Genesis, God says to Eve “In pain shalt thou bring forth children” (3:16). This is a direct result of Adam and Eve’s having eaten of the tree of good and evil. Having eaten, they now know the difference between good and evil. They are capable of abstract and moral judgments. In short, they are fully human, not just happy animals. The price of their knowledge is painful childbirth for Eve and her descendants.

In evolutionary terms, that is quite literally what happened. For it is in that part of the brain called the neocortex where abstract and moral judgments reside. Spectacular human growth and consequent enlargement of the braincase—resulted in painful human childbirth.

“So far as I know,” writes Carl Sagan, author of The Dragons of Eden—Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence,a “childbirth is generally painful in only one of the millions of species on Earth: human beings.” This is because of the comparatively large human skull, which, in turn, was required by the increase in the size of the human brain, or more particularly, of that part of the human brain known as the neocortex. The neocortex is the largest and most dominant part of the human brain. To it may be traced those characteristics which we regard as most […]