Each generation of humans adds to culturally shared banks of knowledge - and this cultural knowledge is growing at a stunningly exponential rate

“Life is a unitary phenomenon, no matter how we express that fact.” Evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis

"We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality." Martin Luther King Jnr

Humans think collectively. This has given us our breathtaking evolutionary edge. An evolutionary perspective on human development shows us why it's important to use the latest science and technologies to help with the complex breastfeeding and lactation problems faced by 21st century women.

The evolutionary perspective underpinning Neuroprotective Developmental Care or the Possums programs contrasts with some old-fashioned ideas about what might be 'natural' in the life of a breastfeeding woman and her baby.

The way we live as 21st century Homo sapiens has developed out of three hundred thousand years of accumulated cultural knowledge (which has developed out of two million years of our Homo ancestors' cultural knowledge about tool use, which has developed out of 3.7 billion years of the evolution of life on Earth). Cultural knowledge has been handed down intergenerationally and also cross-culturally because of Homo sapien's stunning capacity for symbolic communication. Cultural communication of knowledge and the development of technologies now shape humans much more than the ancient genetic codes held in our DNA.

Humans have broken free of the constraints of natural selection

Once, species needed to change the shape of their bodies through natural selection to alter the way they interacted with the environment. This could take hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. But Homo sapiens has exploded the limitations of natural selection, using tools, technologies, and accumulated cultural knowledge to change the way we interact with the environment, and the environment itself - now on a planetary scale.

Our biological gift for symbolic communication is a stunning evolutionary leap in the 13.8 billion year history of the Universe. Our human capacity to extend our brains into an extraordinarily powerful interaction with the environment - without having to wait for the biological or anatomic changes of natural selection - makes us the Earth's singular superspecies. Today, we emerge out of the scientific and industrial revolutions of our past few hundred years reeling in the midst of iterative knowledge explosions. This unfathomable acceleration of human power shapes not just our own lives, but the life of every living creature on Earth, and the future of our planet.

Breastfeeding difficulties arise out of healths system and sociocultural disruptions, not because an individual woman 'fails'

An evolutionary perspective on the nature of our humanness demonstrates why cultural support is uniquely fundamental to a woman and her baby's experience of birthing and breastfeeding, relative to all other mammals and primates. Yet we humans are still deeply confused about how to best manage our extraordinary intellectual and technological powers in a way that protects our relationship with our own bodies and with the planet Earth.

The contemporary environments in which humans begin their lives provide many biological and sociocultural disruptors to neurohormonal synchrony between parents and infants, including to breastfeeding. If breastfeeding isn't working for large numbers of women and their babies, this is a serious sociocultural problem, not the fault of any individual woman or her baby! Every woman and her breastfeeding baby have the right to receive the very best kind of knowledge and tools (or interventions and technologies) our species can provide.

This is what I have aimed to offer you in Possums Breastfeeding & Lactation - a research-based way forward which is stripped bare of ideology, unnecessary medicalisation, and overtreatment, yet based in the very latest interdisciplinary sciences. I'm giving this contribution my best shot, with the help of a tiny if passionate team, despite multiple systemic obstacles!