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Re: Bipedalism and theorizing... was Re: Morgan and creationists
Ralph L Holloway (rlh2@columbia.edu)
Wed, 10 Jul 1996 21:22:45 -0400
On Wed, 10 Jul 1996, Karen wrote:
> >:Maybe human females have enlarged breasts for trophic reasons.
> >:Human infants are the only primates that continue the high rate of
> >:intra-uterine braingrowth after birth,with the result that a one year
> >:old child has a brain twice the size of an adult chimpanzee.
> >:To grow and maintain such a large brain the child needs a large supply
> >:of high quality food:mother's milk.
>
>
>
> WEll, I don't know how true this is, but the LeLeche league that is
> dedicated to assisting new mothers in breast feeding 'technology'
> insists that the size of the breast has no bearing on the amount of or
> quality of milk produced.
I have never seen one piece of evidence that links breast size to either
amount or quality of milk, either. The "something to hold on to"
speculations are utterly without foundation. At one time I speculated
(1974) that the human female breast evolved its larger size to provide the
infant with a soft and glaborous surface, that was giving, and that it had
an important role to play in the dyadic relationship that develops between
mother and child, somehow relating to extended nurturance. That too is
simply a lot of speculation. Maybe the female breast has multiple
functions, and that sexual attraction and signalling is one important
aspect of that total function, with more importance than as any sort of
augmentation of milk.
Ralph Holloway
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