Look, I know I have a big head. If you’re sneaking a look at my photo right now, go ahead. See how my head fails to squeeze between the margins?

Expand it by about 100 and you have about the measure of it; a vast, fleshy beach ball that even a stocky neck struggles to tether to my body. (My child’s father has a big head, too. More on this later.) But I don’t have a big head about it, or at least I didn’t used to. The lot of the cranially well endowed has been a sad one: the paper hat others enjoy from Christmas crackers, even when eased carefully on my outsize noggin, is always doomed to tear.

All that is about to change. British scientists have just confirmed a link between head size and intelligence. Their findings reverse decades of fierce scientific argument. And, what’s more, it has provoked me to set forward a new theory in which natural selection is superseded by man — more specifically by the modern Caesarean section — to create an unprecedented breed of big-headed humans. Listen pinheads, I know this is hard for you, but stay with me.

Back to the burdens of bigheads. I am not just talking about my own similarity to the browbeaten Charlie Brown, although a hairdresser did once advise me, in all kindness, to grow a fringe to cover my domed forehead, saying: “If I could grow my hair long enough to cover my big bottom, I would.” Until recently the fashionable scientific thinking is that we are numbskulls, that all the extra we carry up top is just excess baggage.

This was as a result of the failure to prove a link between quantity and quality of mind. The Victorian fad for phrenology and their more distasteful obsession with calibrating criminal or racial traits through head measurements came to nothing. Jonathan Swift had one of the biggest brains ever measured, while Anatole France, the 19th-century French author, had one of the tiniest brains on record, half the size of Swift’s. Einstein had a small brain. All three were brilliant, only Swift had trouble buying hats.

When children draw pictures they often depict people with larger heads than is realistic — possibly because the mind is what makes us ourselves. Controversy over the link between head size and IQ raged over the 20th century but was, for the most part, dismissed as simplistic as a child’s drawings.

Until now. In the latest issue of Paediatrics there is a study that plots the head size of more than 600 babies, at birth and regular intervals thereafter, against IQ. The findings are startling. The bigger a baby’s head at birth, the more intelligent he or she turns out to be. An even better predictor of later intelligence was how much a baby’s head grew before the age of one.

Late pregnancy and early infancy are the best growing seasons for brains: after that, growth slows down drastically. British researchers are now redirecting their efforts on how best to help a baby’s head grow, as if it were a prize marrow.

This set me thinking. If a baby’s head size is linked to intelligence, it will have been naturally limited by the difficulty of childbirth.

Throughout human history, if the baby’s head was too big for the mother to push out, then one or both or them died. Then came along one of the greatest medical inventions of all time: the Caesarean.

I should at this point declare an interest. When I came to give birth, I thought my generous childbearing hips would ease the ordeal. I failed to foresee the problem related to my — and the father’s — other ample genetic inheritance. Two days of pushing later I was finally sliced open, in what I think of not as my daughter’s birthday, but as the day that I was saved from dying. “That one was never coming out!” exclaimed the surgeon, as she handed me a creature resembling the life-size face of John Prescott, with feet.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: what a frickin big head, banging on about Mr and Mrs Big Head and the whole Big Head family. I know, I know, but what can I do about it? Lobo-suction? The point is, the rise in Caesareans has for the first time freed humankind, or those with access to Western medicine, from the space restrictions of the birth canal. Caesareans increased last year to a rate of nearly one in four of all births in Britain, up from one in 33 in the 1950s. Despite all attempts to reduce unnecessary surgery, the rise in operations may in small part be due to babies getting bigger. Birth weight has been rising over the same period as Caesareans.

Would it not be fascinating if this rise in surgical births introduced an artificial quirk into human evolution? That all those millions of big-bonced babies previously killed while stuck in the birth canal are now being given a chance of life — and possibly a bright life at that?

When we imagine the classic (super-intelligent) alien, it has a gigantic head. Could we eventually evolve into something like that?

It is, of course, just a theory. If there are any egg-headed scientists reading, I would appreciate your thoughts. But for all the negative publicity Caesareans receive, I would like to sing their praises. Not just for saving lives, but for the possibility that man has found a way to improve on nature. If that was to change the shape of the human race to make us more big-headed, maybe that is deservedly so..

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