Re: [asa] The Bible does not require a Neolithic Adam!

From: jack syme <drsyme@cablespeed.com>
Date: Sun Oct 22 2006 - 20:44:19 EDT

MessageI had kidney stones once. In a sense, I gave birth to those stones. And it was extraordinarily painful. It was beyond pain.

And I have witness from a woman or two, who have both passed kidney stones and given birth, and, at least in their words, the experience was comparable.

On a slightly more serious note. Do you think that we have reached the end of our evolution? Is it not possible, short of routine caesarian sections, that human brain capacity has reached its limits?
  Concerning pain in child birth. The argument I thought I was making is that pain in childbirth is due to the ratio of the neonatal head circumference to that of the birth canal. This is one sentence out of my new pamphlet, Who was Adam. The page number is still to be determined when I finish formatting it.

  ". The human birth canal is 13 centimeters at its longest dimension and 10 centimeters at the smallest. By comparison the baby's head is 10 centimeters at the longest dimension and the shoulders 12 cm." Glenn R. Morton, Who was Adam?, Pathway Papers, 5 (Spring: DMD Publishers, 2006), page to be determined.

  That is a tight fit. Similar proportions among fossil men go back to about 2.5 million years.

  Anyone who has seen animals give birth, know that they are not entirely comfortable. Watching the contractions during the birth of a cow, or even a cat, the animal is experiencing discomfort. However, it is nothing like what we humans experience. Everytime I tell a group of women that I once broke my leg in 4 places and my foot was at my kneecap, and tell them how horendously painful it was, they always say, it can't match childbirth. And the few women who have broken their leg like that agree. Since I will never experience pain in childbirth, I can't quite be an expert on it.

  Thus, this is to say, I do agree with you that in and of itself, pain in childbirth could be said to be psychologically increased. But when one realizes that the anatomical features of the human birth which cause the pain we see today, existed two and a half million years ago, why would I need to resort to psychology or subjective feelings to say that pain increased? I have the anatomical data which shows that it was a problem back then.

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Received on Sun Oct 22 20:45:34 2006

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