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Whole-genome analysis, e.g., the presence or absence of gene families over multiple genomes, is becoming an attractive approach for extracting the bulk phylogenetic signals and exploring the pattern of genome evolution. This chapter introduces several statistical models for this purpose. These include the likelihood function, the birth-death model with lateral gene transfer, the blocks model, the equal birth-death rate model; and the constant-birth, proportional-death model.

Birth is one of the most powerful of all human experiences, yet it can also be one of the most disempowering. There are examples of societies and systems that provide women with true choice, where their desires and wishes and the normal physiology of labor and birth are honored, respected, and trusted. This chapter concerns those lighthouses and their role as beacons for those searching for philosophical and concrete ways to improve maternity care. It shows that good birth models work—they can combine the best of obstetrical care with the best of contemporary scientific research, ancient wisdom, basic common sense, and compassion to create systems of knowledge, skills, and practice which truly serve mothers, babies, and families. The chapter extrapolates the characteristics of models that do not work from the enormous body of literature written by epidemiologists, midwives, and social scientists which describes and critiques the scientific, humanistic, and economic deficiencies of contemporary obstetrics in dozens of countries.

This chapter takes an educated tour of birth models that work whose practitioners are providing optimal maternity care. It is readily apparent that all of the models presented here share a common ideology based on the fundamental notions that birth is normal and that women are its protagonists. Midwives are the most numerous primary maternity care practitioners, and have long engaged in discussion and reflection with each other and with social scientists about what it is that they do which does and does not work. So, they have continued to articulate and refine “the midwifery model of care.” All of the birth models that work described in this study incorporate aspects of both the humanistic and holistic paradigms of birth.

This chapter describes the individual paradigm shift and the options that this shift has created for the women. This “birth model that works” is a replicable model of simplicity: a doctor, a midwife, and a doula attending births in a setting of the woman's choice. The chapter discusses the initiation into the humanization of childbirth that occurred in 1986 when an event in the emergency room of the hospital directed the attention toward the critical questioning of medical assistance at birth. The scars of the contemporary technocratic paradigm related to health care can be seen in the aseptic and cold manner that people these days manage birth in hospitals. It hopes to discover a key that could open the energies which were put to sleep by the imposition of rules, protocols, and prohibitions, most of them favoring institutions and the work of doctors, and not helping childbearing women.

This chapter challenges the assumptions, still held in many postcolonial countries, that the migration and replication of a Western model of birthing is necessarily a desirable goal. It demonstrates how a group of leaders in one country, Samoa, have made considerable progress in both reconceptualizing and developing a “postcolonial” model of maternity care. Samoa's birth model integrates social systems and practitioners with professional nurse-midwives in a model of health services delivery that appears to be unique. The data collected from traditional and professional midwives show that the experience in Samoa paints a much more positive picture and demonstrates a convincing and successful transformation from colonized birthing models. The Samoan model of birth illustrates a postcolonial birth system that is developing in ways which are not only economical and pragmatic, but which also go beyond attention to physical outcomes to meet women's individual needs for good spiritual, emotional, and social outcomes of birth as well.