Covariation of fetal skull and maternal pelvis during the perinatal period in rhesus macaques and evolution of childbirth in primates

A large brain combined with an upright posture in humans has resulted in a high cephalopelvic proportion and frequently obstructed labor. Fischer and Mitteroecker [B. Fischer, P. Mitteroecker,Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.112, 5655−5660 (2015)] proposed that the morphological covariations between the skull and pelvis could have evolved to ameliorate obstructed labor in humans. The availability of quantitative data of such covariation, especially of the fetal skull and maternal pelvis, however, is still scarce. Here, we present direct evidence of morphological covariations between the skull and pelvis using actual mother−fetus dyads during the perinatal period ofMacaca mulatta, a species that exhibits cephalopelvic proportions comparable to modern humans. We analyzed the covariation of the three-dimensional morphology of the fetal skull and maternal pelvis using computed tomography-based models. The covariation was mostly observed at the pelvic locations related to the birth canal, and the forms of the birth canal and fetal skull covary in such a way that reduces obstetric difficulties. Therefore, cephalopelvic covariation could have evolved not only in humans, but also in other primate taxa in parallel, or it could have evolved already in the early catarrhines.

Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites

In this paper, Winnicott proposes that at the centre of each individual is an area not to be exploited or invaded in analysis and in ordinary life. He writes that there is a right not to communicate alongside the fundamental need to do so, which Winnicott links to the fantasy of being found. The individual is an isolate who can engage in object relations so long as he cannot be fully ‘found’. Winnicott bases this proposition on the illusion of the early infant, that out of helpless dependence he has ‘created’ the actual mother/object. This early engagement with reality is as valid as all explicit communication and may be the source of artistic and cultural creativity. He detects in the artist the co-existence of the need to communicate and the need not to be found. Clinical examples illustrate his thesis.

The Image of the Mother in the Poetry of Mahmoud Darwish

In Arab culture the mother comes closer than any other image to representing womanly perfection. The word ‘mother’ has no negative connotations in that culture, in contradistinction to ‘woman’. A woman who attains the status of mother thus obtains a kind of legitimacy in the male-oriented societies of the Middle East. Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish describes the relationship he had with his mother in childhood as equivocal. He thought that his mother hated him; however, when he was arrested for the first time in Israel, at the age of sixteen, he came to feel that he was her favourite son. As a result of this relationship in childhood Darwish in his poetry gave expression to his lost childhood happiness and used it to compensate for the historical and political circumstances which encompassed him at every stage of his poetic career. The image of the mother in Darwish's poetry can be divided into five parts: his actual mother, the communal mother, mother earth, mother as cultural identity, and mother as poem.

Two Roman Rites

I. It has long been a standing puzzle why the women at the festival of Mater Matuta (the Matralia, June 11) prayed, not for their own children, but for their sisters' offspring. The attempts to connect it with any sociological phenomenon are purely absurd, and would not have been noticed but for their association with one or two famous names and the complete ignorance of non-European systems of relationship prevailing among the scholars of an older generation. There is no system under which a woman is closer akin to her sister's children than to her own; for under father-right a nephew or niece is further off than an own child, and if the system be pushed to the most logical and most absurd extremity, so as to make a child kin to his father only, not his mother, then he is also no kin to his mother's sister; under mother-right, which Rome never had in any form whatsoever, the mother is still nearer kin than the maternal aunt; while if ever there was, anywhere in the world, a classificatory system so pure and rigorous as to make no distinction between the actual mother and any other woman of the same age-class, then mother and aunt were in the same degree of kinship to every member of the younger generation. No ritual explanation I know will bear investigating. Yet the fact is handed down to us on good authority, probably that of Verrius Flaccus, the most likely common source for Ovid and Plutarch.