Why Grandparents Made Us Live So Long — with Dr. Paul Turke

Dr. Paul Turke calls himself the world’s first Darwinian paediatrician. Before medical school, he spent months doing fieldwork on the tiny Micronesian atoll of Ifaluk, studying cooperative childcare and kinship networks. He then became a paediatrician and has spent the last 25 years treating kids by asking why, not just how. He is the author of Bringing Up Baby: An Evolutionary View of Pediatrics.We get into the grandmother hypothesis and what Paul actually saw in Micronesia that pointed him towards it; why modern mobility, isolation and poor health can weaken the kinship networks humans evolved to rely on; and the uncomfortable truth about “getting all the childcare bugs over with early”. We also cover co-sleeping and sleep training, a theory linking reduced holding of infants to later sensory issues, teen anxiety, screens, Australia’s social media ban, and why evolutionary explanations for health and behaviour still get pushback inside medicine.