I've always thought babies were fairly ugly and completely incompetent. And I still find it amazing that our species has managed to continue perpetuating, especially when combined with the tremendously difficult and exceedingly uncomfortable experience my wife (and all women) go through. Who would ever want to produce more children like that?

This is a great piece by Anna Konnikova that explores hypothesis of why our babies are so helpless (and, to a certain degree, ugly).

A baby giraffe can stand within an hour of birth, and can even potentially flee predators on its first day of life. A monkey can grasp its mother and hang on for protection and nourishment. A human infant can’t even hold up its own head.

That’s the argument that Kidd and Piantadosi make in their new paper, published in the June issue of PNAS. Humans become so intelligent because human infants are so incredibly helpless, they argue; the one necessitates the other.