Negotiating the transition from fetal to extrauterine life is the fist crucial task on the
newborn’s developmental agenda. If this is so today, when biomedical advances
have vastly improved the chances of surviving the hazards of birth, it must certainly
have been so during the early course of human evolution, when the only “special
care unit” was provided and staffed by the caretaker. Those newborns most successful
at resolving the physiological complications surrounding birth would have
survived to pass their characteristics onto succeeding generations, so that the attributes
associated with such capabilities would have become a part of the evolutionary
legacy of today’s human newborn. Since behavior is as much a product of this
evolutionary process as any other of an organism’s characteristics, it may reasonably
be assumed to form part of the newborn’s adaptive response to perinatal
complications. Two questions arising from this perspective on newborn behavior
are examined here. Is there evidence that the newborn’s behavior contributes to the
regulation of physiological processes which may be disrupted at birth? If such
evidence exists, why should students of newborn behavior be concerned with its
role in physiological regulation?