In 1909, students at the Lafferty boarding house on College Row formed the Apollo Club to "make their own rules, regulating meal hours, the quality of the 'Chuck,' the price of the board, table etiquette and other matters," according to the 1910 Swastika yearbook, which published this group photo and an honor roll of members in order of the amount they ate. The club proudly reported that "Harry Lane gained fifteen pounds during his first month with us." (Photo provided by the Rio Grande Historical Collections at the NMSU Library.)

Anthropologist follows career path to top of her field

Trevathan studies the evolution of childbirth. Photo by Michael Kiernan

Make no bones about it: Wenda Trevathan is shaking up the world of anthropology. Since the NMSU professor was a little girl listening to her mother's stories of participating in excavations at the Mesa Verde Cliff Dwellings in Colorado, Trevathan has been fascinated with the field of anthropology. She said she never considered another profession, and her passion for the discipline has never waned during 34 years of study and practice.

Her persistence paid off in 1997, when The Chronicle of Higher Education, a national newspaper on academia, named her among the top 15 anthropologists working today, and again this year, when she received NMSU's Westhafer Award for Excellence in Research. The Westhafer is the university's highest faculty honor.

Trevathan's research centers primarily on the evolution of human childbirth. At first glance, it seems a difficult topic, but Trevathan can mesmerize audiences ranging from undergraduate students and fellow faculty to Rotarians and Lions Club members. Her approach is a no-nonsense look at how the process of giving birth has changed through physical and technological evolution.

A crash course: Most mammals are born with about 50 percent of their brain development complete, resulting in fairly well-developed offspring. In humans, the development is only about 25 percent, leading Trevathan to believe that evolution forced a trade-off to allow humans the narrow pelvis we need to walk on two legs: To be bipedal, you have to care much longer for your offspring than other mammals, and you have to have help to bring those offspring into the world.

The narrow pelvis twists the birth canal in such a way that a woman giving birth can scarcely attend to either her own health or that of the baby on her own. She needs assistance in the critical moments of birth and shortly after. Without that assistance, the possibility of death for both mother and infant soar exponentially higher.

Trevathan theorizes that the evolutionary roots of this assistance procedure sprang from fear and apprehension, and that among our ancestors, birthing mothers surrounded themselves during the ordeal both for prote ction and emotional support.

In the modern age, Trevathan said, most human babies are born in relatively safe environme Also, for most of our evolutionary history, Trevathan said mothers and their children spent the first several years of the child's life in close bodily contact: sleeping in the same bedding, nursing frequently and virtually never leaving one another's sides. Trevathan theorizes that the lack of this intense maternal-child social contact in the modern age may be a case of evolution not having kept up with technology, resulting ultimately in higher incidents of disorders like colic, sleep disorders and even Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

Carrying her evolutionary beliefs to the political realm, Trevathan argues passionately that attempts to stop evolution from being taught in the public schools could actually endanger the human species by compromising our collective understanding of how deadly viruses like HIV and Ebola adapt to modern treatment.

"We cannot afford even a single generation of scientists and creative thinkers who lack knowledge about the process of evolution, which is responsible for the viruses that concern us," Trevathan said. "If the biomedical scientists of the future view life as fixed and unchanging, what potential is there that they will develop the tools to fight the constantly evolving organisms that threaten human health? It is not simply a matter of which human origins story to teach to our students; understanding the process of evolution may be a matter of life or death. We avoid the teaching of evolution in our public schools at our own peril."

Take a walk (courtesy of your narrow pelvis) and consider that one a while.

Jess Williams, '85, '97