Origins
The Extraordinary New Science of Life Before Birth
by Annie Murphy Paul
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Origins
ONE MONTH
If you’re going to ponder the mysteries of our origins—who we are, and how we got this way—you could pick a worse spot than Tot Lot One Hundred Five. A small playground and neighborhood gathering place, it’s located near 105th Street in Riverside Park, a green ribbon that runs along the western edge of Manhattan, far from Central Park’s crowded zoo and carousel. On this sunny July morning, it’s a child’s garden of elemental delights: sand, mud, and water that burbles from a great stone turtle like some primeval spring. I’m leaning back on the lot’s wrought-iron fence, beholding the variety of human nature and human physiognomy on display, average age two and a half: there are the big, lumbering kids and the delicate fine-boned ones, the exuberant squealers and the wide-eyed watchers, the children running in crazed circles around the jungle gym and the ones reclining regally as pashas in their padded strollers.
My eyes alight on my own son, three-year-old Teddy, who is studiously constructing a many-turreted fort in the sandbox. Looking at his sturdy frame and his intent expression, I find myself musing once more on a familiar question. It came to me for the first time in the hospital, when I sat for hours next to my newborn’s bassinet, watching him make whimsical, arched-brow faces in his sleep like a tiny mime. It reappeared a couple of years later when my toddler son began speaking, a development as surprising and fantastical as Dr. Doolittle’s talking animals. Now here it is again, the ever-renewing riddle of parenthood: What makes you the way you are?
Other parents seem to know the answer. For one confident camp, it’s genes. “Teddy is serious but a little dreamy sometimes, like John,” says a friend of my husband, a classic absentminded professor. “Teddy got your writerly sensitivity,” says one of my girlfriends. “And your stubbornness,” adds another. It’s as if his personality traits were lottery numbers drawn at conception, numbered Ping-Pong balls already settled into their slots. For another camp, it’s all about nurture: the stimulating mobiles and the educational toys, the organic vegetables and the judiciously applied time-outs—these things, they say, make children who they are. Gazing around the playground at the parents clustered on park benches and perched on the edge of the sandbox, I imagine the two sides lining up for a rumble, getting ready to duke it out: “Genes!” “No, environment!” “Nature!” “Nurture!”
But lately I’ve begun to wonder about another source of influence, one that incorporates both nature and nurture: the conditions our children experienced while still in the womb. When I was pregnant with Teddy I felt an awareness of his particular presence, a sense that his individual development was already well under way.
From Origins by Annie Murphy Paul. Copyright © 2010 by Annie Murphy Paul. Reprinted by permission of Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Origins
For insights into our adult selves, we must go back to the womb. As Annie Murphy Paul reports, specialists in the field of “fetal origins” have found that the prenatal period is a staging ground for the rest of life, a critical period when the roots of health and illness, metabolism and stress response, and intelligence and temperament are established. She distills the latest findings in Origins.
Some of the revelations reported in the book include:
• Children whose mothers suffer severe stress or trauma while pregnant—such as babies in utero during the Canadian ice storm crisis of 1998 or in New York during 9/11—tend to be smaller and slower in school than babies not exposed to high levels of stress chemicals.
• The “bad blood” of famously degenerate families such as the Jukes and Kallikaks—used by eugenicists as arguments for sterilization—was most likely a symptom of fetal alcohol syndrome that had been passed on through generations.
• Societies that allow pregnant women to go on maternity leave for the last few weeks of pregnancy have found that those children are born with more relaxed dispositions than children whose mothers work up until birth.
On top of these findings, it is now believed by some researchers that mental illness may be determined prenatally, in which the proposed mechanism is experiences of extreme stress or malnutrition. Women living in a war zone in early pregnancy, for example, give birth to children with an elevated risk of schizophrenia. Prenatal factors may also play a part in some cases of heart disease. On the upside, pregnant women who take lots of vitamin D have children less at risk for asthma, and those who gain less than the recommended amount of weight are less likely to have overweight kids.
Origins uses top-notch science reporting to examine a dramatic shift in our understanding of how we became who we are today.
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year 2010.
Hardcover : 320 pages
Publisher: Simon And Schuster, Inc. ( September 07, 2010 )
Item #: 13-146007
ISBN: 9780743296625
Product Dimensions: 6.0 x 9.0 inches
Product Weight: 17.0 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
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