Sarah Blaffer Hrdy Quotes

Yet, as I will make clear, any Pleistocene woman who relied on looks alone to pull offspring through was not likely to be a mother very long or leave descendants.

One reason television is such a perilous medium is that even infants less than two years old imitate what they see on the screen, yet what appears there is determined by what happens to appeal or to sell rather than by what behavior helped individuals in a particular past environment to survive or prosper.

A woman predisposed to be a mother can learn to love any baby, while a mother not so disposed does not even learn to love her own.

Living in this niche therefore requires both individual and collective creativity, intensive cooperation, a tolerance for strangers and crowds, and a degree of openness and trust that is entirely unmatched among our closest primate relatives. Compared to fiercely individualistic and relentlessly competitive chimpanzees, for instance, we are like goofy, tail-wagging puppies. We are almost painfully docile, desperately in need of affection and social contact, and wildly vulnerable to exploitation. As Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an anthropologist and primatologist, notes, it is remarkable that hundreds of people will cram themselves shoulder to shoulder into a tiny airplane, obediently fasten their seat belts, eat their packets of stale crackers, watch movies and read magazines and chat politely with their neighbors, and then file peacefully off at the other end. If you packed a similar number of chimpanzees onto a plane, what you’d end up with at the other end is a long metal tube full of blood and dismembered body parts.6 Humans are powerful in groups precisely because we are weak as individuals, pathetically eager to connect with one another, and utterly dependent on the group for survival.

current sociobiologists and primatologists, such as Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, maintain that loving motherhood is not automatically programmed into the female of our species but is an extremely complex equation of genetic, evolutionary, emotional, and social factors aided by powerful hormonal influences

current sociobiologists and primatologists, such as Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, maintain that loving motherhood is not automatically programmed into the female of our species but is an extremely complex equation of genetic, evolutionary, emotional, and social factors aided by powerful hormonal influences.

Just because humans have become "advanced" enough to vaccinate their young, write histories, and speculate about our origins, this does not mean that evoutionary processes have ceased to operate.

After all, "the" human species is no more static than other species are. If our environment changes (or, more pertinent in the human case, as we transform our environment), we change with it.

My unexpected finding is that inside every man there lurk ancient caretaking tendencies that render a man every bit as protective and nurturing as the most committed mother.

Just because humans have become -advanced- enough to vaccinate their young, write histories, and speculate about our origins, this does not mean that evolutionary processes have ceased to operate.

For years, female-female aggression among primates was ignored or minimized. According to the anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, this occurred partly because male-male competition was even more “startling and overt,” but also because “persistent conflicts between females are often more subtle . . . [the] competition is indirect. Two animals who are not even touching or looking at one another may nevertheless be in competition if one of them occupies a place or consumes a resource that would benefit the other.

Scientists focused only on the nuclear family miss the central role of alloparenting in our species.* Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, author of Mothers and Others, laments, “Infant-sharing in other primates and in various tribal societies has never been accorded center stage in the anthropological literature. Many people don’t even realize it goes on. Yet…the consequences of cooperative care—in terms of survival and biological fitness of mother and infant—turn out to be all to the good.