Author: Dana Gibson

Imagine a fur-clad hunter from 50,000 years ago stepping into a Montreal supermarket in January. The meat counter might look vaguely familiar. The fish on ice, maybe. But the rest? Aisles of glowing boxes, bags that crinkle, bottles of liquid that taste sweeter than any berry he’s ever foraged. His body, honed by millennia of…

Every time I walk through Marché Jean-Talon or one of those gleaming Metro supermarkets in Montreal, I feel a quiet, ancestral dissonance. The bins of brightly packaged snacks, the endless aisles of sugary drinks, the bread that stays soft for two weeks—none of it is inherently evil. But from the perspective of a human body…

You’re doing the dishes — encore une fois, because the dishwasher has been broken since February and you keep meaning to call the repair guy — and twenty minutes in, your fingertips look like dried prunes. You dry your hands, grab your phone, and fumble it straight onto the tile. Sound familiar? For most of…

The Ghost in the Vending Machine Walk into any supermarket and you’re basically a hunter-gatherer who’s taken a wrong turn into a shiny, bewildering cave. The shelves are packed with crinkly packages, each one a masterpiece of engineering designed to hit a pleasure button our ancestors never even had. I’m Dr. Marie-Claire Gagnon, and I’ve…

Imagine a Paleolithic forager, squatting in the afternoon sun, slowly munching a handful of wild, fibrous berries. They’re tart, seedy, and a little unpredictable—one might be sweet, the next mouth-puckeringly bitter. That was dessert. Now fast-forward to today: a modern human tearing open a shiny packet of toaster pastries, each bite a precisely calculated explosion…

Picture your digestive system as a veteran employee who’s been with the company for, oh, about two million years. It knows the job. It’s efficient. It thrived on a simple, predictable workflow: fibrous roots, leafy greens, the occasional windfall of wild honey if someone was brave enough to raid a hive. Then, practically overnight, management…

I’ve attended hundreds of births. I’ve seen the quiet, focused determination of a person in labour, the sudden, slippery arrival of a new human, and the occasional chaos that demands quick hands and a calm voice. And after every single one, no matter how routine, I’m left with the same thought: this is a spectacularly…

Watch a nature documentary and you’ll see the miracle of birth play out with almost casual ease. A giraffe calf tumbles six feet to the ground, shakes itself off, and wobbles onto its feet within the hour. A dolphin delivers its baby tail-first, and the little one immediately surfaces for a gulp of air. Even…

If you’ve ever been in the room for a birth—or had the distinct displeasure of being the one doing the work—you’ve probably asked yourself a very sensible question: why is this so absurdly difficult? A barn cat can deliver a litter in a quiet corner, purr through the whole thing, and be back on mouse…

I’ve been catching babies for over twenty years, and I still find myself, at three in the morning, staring at a fetal monitor tracing and thinking: this is a spectacularly bad design. The human birth canal is a cramped, twisted, bony labyrinth that would make a minotaur claustrophobic. A dog whelps a litter on a…

Why Human Birth Is So Ridiculously Hard: An Evolutionary Comedy of Errors By Dr. Marie-Claire Gagnon If you’ve ever witnessed a birth—or had the nerve to go through one yourself—you’ve probably asked the obvious question: why is this so absurdly difficult? A quick look around the animal kingdom makes it feel like a cosmic joke.…

If you’ve ever been in the room for a birth—or had the audacity to push one out yourself—you know it’s less a serene miracle and more a biomechanical crisis. It’s long, it’s loud, and it’s genuinely dangerous. A wildebeest on the savanna can drop a calf, lick it clean, and watch it wobble to its…