Crying Out Loud

Natural History, Oct, 2000 by Ellen Goldensohn

Natural historians--whether field biologists, medical doctors, neuropsychologists, anthropologists, paleontologists, or mathematically minded theorists--have a tendency to ask annoying (because difficult) questions about things the rest of us take for granted. Take the unremarkable fact that human infants have very loud cries. There's nothing to say about the phenomenon that isn't obvious, right?

But to people who habitually think about behavior in the light of natural selection, the very noisiness of babies' crying--like the noisy begging of a brood of nestlings--is a bit of a conundrum. Why would any helpless, immature organism do something that seems so likely to attract predators and squander precious energy? Doesn't it stand to reason that the neonates of all species--including our own--should be neither seen nor heard?

Well, yes--and no. In "The Uses of Crying and Begging", Bryant Furlow takes a look at "parent-solicitation displays" (scientific jargon for baby-to-parent communication) and presents new evidence that the attention-grabbing traits of the newborn and newly hatched may have evolved for reasons that are not entirely self-evident.

P.S. Some readers have written to us wondering what happened to "Universe," Neil de Grasse Tyson's popular column on astrophysics. Tyson, director of the planetarium in the new Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History, has just finished a half-year sabbatical away from our pages. He returns with "Doubling Time," a humorous meditation on the information revolution.