this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
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I don't see what's wrong with Musk's tweet, other than it's by Musk so I'm sure I'm missing some nefarious context.
Any baby born by C-section because their head is too big will move the average up, since they aren't dying during childbirth
You mean other than being completely factually wrong?
Brain size hasn’t been historically limited by the size of the birth canal, it doesn’t work like that, most growth takes place after birth. The fact that some children develop faster in the womb and require a c-section doesn’t make it true either.
The context is that he’s replying to a known pusher of eugenics. It’s not completely apparent in the post Elon replied to, but if you see enough of that user’s posts it becomes apparent.
edit: it’s also worth mentioning that sometimes a larger child is simply due to genetics from one parent. I know many very tall, large people whose mothers are very tiny, petite people. It could be considered a miracle when the birth happens naturally in those cases, but doesn’t have anything to do with the child having a larger brain. They’re just generally relatively larger than their mother.
My brother is a 6ft+ white man who married a Mexican woman that's barely 5ft tall. She wanted to do a natural birth for her first son, but he was over 9lbs and was actually tearing her apart. The pain killers weren't working, she had a bunch of infections, they had to take a vacuum to get him out and she didn't get better for at least a year.
She had another two sons with him, the second was 9.6 lbs. The third was 8lbs. They were both c-cection because she wasn't going to go through natural births again.
(And yes, all 3 boys are much taller than their peers, they all inherited my brother's tall gene the oldest is about 15 now and nearing 6ft)
They are normal kids despite their sizes.
One of my best friends in college towered over me and his mom barely came up to my chin. His dad wasn’t even a tall guy either, he just inherited some recessive genes or something. It was a pretty usual thing for him and his mom to be standing side by side and she’d say something out loud like “I have no idea how you ever came out of me.”