ABSTRACT
This book offers a rare opportunity to reconsider whether the enormous progress in scientific knowledge, in the potential for rational intervention, and in the resulting tendency to manipulate and direct biological processes are still in an acceptable balance with the laws of Nature. Whether we like it or not, human reproduction, babies’ births, and early child care that leads to good health and mental development still depend on those laws to a degree that easily escapes the attention of politicians and administrators but should never be underestimated by scientists. Baby care may be influenced by ever-changing fashions or superstitions: North American parents visit prenatal classes, and mothers listen to selected musical records during pregnancy and read texts to 2-month-old babies without asking how they themselves could have possibly developed mentally and emotionally during the dark period of ignorance two or three decades before. However, such short-lived fashionable interventions do not significantly affect the course of human processes that are based on organic forces and result from Nature’s experiments, spread over thousands of generations.
