Birth and the Evolutionary Echo ✨

With my son Jack I witnessed birth recapitulating evolution, now I’m getting to see it again with our daughter: We go from idea to zygote to water-womb creature, to eventually coming out to land in the birth. Then we babies are all reptilian with basic survival instincts; we become mammalian with more feeling and self-regulation, we become primates grasping for things, hominids up on two feet, homo genus using tools and toys, and finally by the time we’re toddlers talking and singing, full homo sapiens.

Apparently this idea was first proposed by Ernst Haeckel in the 19th century. The literal truth of "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" is debated, and though I don’t really know, it seems mostly not upheld by modern biologists. Nevertheless seeing these broad strokes of human evolutionary history echoed in individual development keeps me in visceral touch with the entire evolutionary chain of existence; with primordial ancestors we all share; appreciating the whole developmental stack that shapes our meaning- and decision making even now.

With love, Jordan