Sarah Blaffer Hrdy > Quotes

“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.”
― Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species

“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.”
― Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species

“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.”
― Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species

“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.”
― Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies

“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.”
― Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding

“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.”
― Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding

“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.”
― Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species