David Haig
Some so-called “science” is done primarily for headlines – even at Harvard. I wonder if there is a correlation between headlines generated and funding received?
This time the idiot science is from David Haig – a biology Professor at Harvard. His abstract states
All these observations are consistent with a hypothesis that waking at night to suckle is an adaptation of infants to extend their mothers’ lactational amenorrhea, thus delaying the birth of a younger sib and enhancing infant survival.
From Science News:
When a baby cries at night, exhausted parents scramble to figure out why. He’s hungry. Wet. Cold. Lonely. But now, a Harvard scientist offers more sinister explanation: The baby who demands to be breastfed in the middle of the night is preventing his mom from getting pregnant again.
This devious intention makes perfect sense, says evolutionary biologist David Haig, who describes his idea in Evolution, Medicine and Public Health. Another baby means having to share mom and dad, so babies are programmed to do all they can to thwart the meeting of sperm and egg, the theory goes.
Since babies can’t force birth control pills on their mothers, they work with what they’ve got: Nighttime nursing liaisons keep women from other sorts of liaisons that might lead to another child. And beyond libido-killing interruptions and extreme fatigue, frequent night nursing also delays fertility in nursing women. Infant suckling can lead to hormone changes that put the kibosh on ovulation (though not reliably enough to be a fail-safe birth control method, as many gynecologists caution).
Of course, babies don’t have the wherewithal to be interrupting their mothers’ fertility intentionally. It’s just that in our past, babies who cried to be nursed at night had a survival edge, Haig proposes.
The timing of night crying seems particularly damning, Haig says. Breastfed babies seem to ramp up their nighttime demands around 6 months of age and then slowly improve — precisely the time when a baby would want to double down on its birth control efforts. …
Tenured Professors would seem to have little need for common sense.
What is worse than the idiot science is the fawning article by Laura Sanders in Science News.
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