Babies are beautiful. My boy is very cute. And my baby nephew is clearly the handiwork of God himself. That kid is so comely that he can turn even the hardest atheist into a believer. But I am not really talking about any of that.
I mean that babies are beautiful from a design standpoint. They are such a marvel of engineering that MIT and Cal Tech would do well to offer classes on baby design to incoming freshmen. You probably know that a baby can not see clearly. Are the eyes still forming? Is that why? Nope. It is by design that a baby has blurred vision. The little one starts off only using the senses that have already been working for months. This prevents information overload in a new world. The womb has no light after all. The brain has no frame of reference to process vision at first.
A baby's smile has nothing to do with pleasure. They are programmed to smile at friendly faces to manipulate adults into paying more attention to them. Babies need attention from adults to thrive. Eye contact, familiar voices, mom's touch and smell are all part of how they learn. And we adults are ourselves programmed to give them this attention. That is - babies are cute on purpose.
My mom used to ponder out loud why it is necessary to feel pain. I know the reason. It is because of obesity and credit card debt. Heh. Didn't see that coming did you? I mean that there is no strong motivator for a person to stop spending money he or she does not have. Same with food. There is no immediate downside to over eating. Our rational self knows that it is bad, but the instinct to eat or buy all you can usually wins. Pain, on the other hand, is a powerful motivator. It demands that you immediately change your behavior. That is why babies cry too.
Baby cries are such a piercing annoyance that it actually alters our behavior. Even if you are not the parent, you strongly feel the urge to give the baby whatever it wants to shut it up. Again, this is by design. We are programmed to dislike that sound so intensely to mimic the effects of pain. Since babies can not do for themselves, nature needs a strong motivator to get others to do for them. Seeing a number on a scale or getting a bill in the mail just doesn't have the same punch.
Everything about a baby is a perfect adaptation to getting what they need from adults (well, that and learning like nothing else in this world). But there is one deficient area in a baby's design that I am reminded of every time I yank something from my son's hand. They put everything in their mouth. This is not the same kind of danger as covering wall outlets or not letting them near a swimming pool. They stick things in their mouth not out of ignorance of the world, but as part of this grand design. Even before modern civilization, babies would not have been able to procure food on their own. Babies are not able to distinguish food from nonfood by looking at it so it's not as if they are foraging like this. Why then is this trait necessary? In particular, how did babies who stuck everything in their mouths manage to survive more often throughout the ages than the ones who only did so only when they were hungry? Is sense of taste really so important to our development?
At any rate, I think this speaks volumes about the instinct of motherhood. Throughout the ages, moms have been so vigilant about preventing their children from choking on random objects that they have actually outmaneuvered natural selection.
Go moms!
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