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Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species[ MOTHER NATURE: MATERNAL INSTINCTS AND HOW THEY SHAPE THE HUMAN SPECIES ] by Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer (Author) Sep-05-00[ Paperback ]
Mother A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection should be required reading for anyone who happens to be a human being. In it, Hrdy reveals the motivations behind some of our most primal and hotly contested behavioral patterns--those concerning gender roles, mate choice, sex, reproduction, and parenting--and the ideas and institutions that have grown up around them. She unblinkingly examines and illuminates such difficult subjects as control of reproductive rights, infanticide, "mother love," and maternal ambition with its ever-contested child care and the limits of maternal responsibility. Without ever denying personal accountability, she points out that many of the patterns of abuse and neglect that we see in cultures around the world (including, of course, our own) are neither unpredictable nor maladaptive in evolutionary terms. "Mother" Nature, as she points out, is not particularly concerned with what we call "morality." The philosophical and political implications of our own deeply-rooted behaviors are for us to determine--which can be done all the better with the kind of understanding gleaned from this exhaustive work. Hrdy's passion for this material is evident, and she is deeply aware of the personal stake she has here as a woman, a mother, and a professional. This highly accomplished author relies on her own extensive research background as well as the works of others in multiple disciplines (anthropology, primatology, sociobiology, psychology, and even literature). Despite the exhaustive documentation given to her conclusions (as witness the 140-plus-page notes and bibliography sections), the book unfolds in an exceptionally lucid, readable, and often humorous manner. It is a truly compelling read, highly recommended. --Katherine Ferguson
Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
About the author
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
17 books128 followersSarah Blaffer Hrdy is an American anthropologist and primatologist who has made several major contributions to evolutionary psychology and sociobiology. She has been selected as one of the 21 “Leaders in Animal Behavior.”
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January 24, 2013
A feminist Darwinian! Bring it on. If you want to know about the biology of motherhood, this is the book for you. True, it's kind of long and full of scientific and anthropological detail. But it's also well written, interesting, and even funny. I really appreciated that the author is committed to understanding what it means to be a mother (and, to a lesser extent, any parent) without getting sentimental or making assumptions. At times, she shares her own anecdotes of being a mother (including being a working mother) to illustrate her points.
I didn't understand everything in this book, and I didn't agree with everything either. I'm still skeptical about evolutionary psychology, and find the near-exclusive focus on natural selection to be somewhat reductionist (Hrdy doesn't discount the impacts of culture and temperament, but doesn't spend much time on them). I either don't understand or don't agree with the whole "environment of evolutionary adaptedness" concept. Also, there were a few times when I thought she contradicted herself (but frankly I didn't really have the energy to track down the conflicting statements in such a long book). I thought some of her forays into developmental psychology were skewed toward Bowlby and attachment theory, sometimes at the expense of other important concepts.
A few of the things I learned about in this book (though there are many more):
- Mothers have always been willing to delegate care to "alloparents" (other caregivers), as long as safe care is available. (In some environments, safe care was not likely to be available, so mothers and infants have had longer-term exclusive bonds.)
- Mothers have always been ambivalent about having children, usually for good reason (e.g. if they don't have kin or "alloparents" - including fathers - to help raise the child, or if resources are scarce). There has always been infanticide (prior to availability of safe abortions), usually by abandonment/ exposure. In some cultures this has reached epidemic proportions (43% of infants baptized in 1840's Florence were abandoned!).
- Infants are cute for a reason: to convince mothers/ tribes not to abandon them. (OK, I didn't learn that from this book... I learned it from my infants.)
- Mothers have always been ambitious in their work (whether that is foraging for nuts and berries, or running experiments in a lab). One could argue, as Hrdy does, that this is for evolutionary reasons (to increase their offspring's status and therefore their chance of reproductive success), or else one could argue that it's a human trait to love useful work ("The pitcher cries for water to carry/ and a person for work that is real." - Marge Piercy), but regardless, boo-ya to those who claim working mothers are unnatural.
I didn't understand everything in this book, and I didn't agree with everything either. I'm still skeptical about evolutionary psychology, and find the near-exclusive focus on natural selection to be somewhat reductionist (Hrdy doesn't discount the impacts of culture and temperament, but doesn't spend much time on them). I either don't understand or don't agree with the whole "environment of evolutionary adaptedness" concept. Also, there were a few times when I thought she contradicted herself (but frankly I didn't really have the energy to track down the conflicting statements in such a long book). I thought some of her forays into developmental psychology were skewed toward Bowlby and attachment theory, sometimes at the expense of other important concepts.
A few of the things I learned about in this book (though there are many more):
- Mothers have always been willing to delegate care to "alloparents" (other caregivers), as long as safe care is available. (In some environments, safe care was not likely to be available, so mothers and infants have had longer-term exclusive bonds.)
- Mothers have always been ambivalent about having children, usually for good reason (e.g. if they don't have kin or "alloparents" - including fathers - to help raise the child, or if resources are scarce). There has always been infanticide (prior to availability of safe abortions), usually by abandonment/ exposure. In some cultures this has reached epidemic proportions (43% of infants baptized in 1840's Florence were abandoned!).
- Infants are cute for a reason: to convince mothers/ tribes not to abandon them. (OK, I didn't learn that from this book... I learned it from my infants.)
- Mothers have always been ambitious in their work (whether that is foraging for nuts and berries, or running experiments in a lab). One could argue, as Hrdy does, that this is for evolutionary reasons (to increase their offspring's status and therefore their chance of reproductive success), or else one could argue that it's a human trait to love useful work ("The pitcher cries for water to carry/ and a person for work that is real." - Marge Piercy), but regardless, boo-ya to those who claim working mothers are unnatural.
March 7, 2010
All human animals should read this book about real (not Victorianized) maternal nature.
Looking realistically at "mother nature:" For a human mother, the survival goal includes an evolved capability for weighing the odds for survival of her current children when faced with a competing newborn. Will she have enough resources to feed and protect the children she has as well as for the newborn given the environmental circumstances - circumstances which include the whole cultural milieu as well as her individual situation. For me the key liberating insight from the book is that "mother nature" is definitely not the sentimentalized saccharine Victorian idea of the wholly (dare I say "holy"), ever-subservient "angel in the house" mothering on mindlessly - with a smile.
In fact, "mother nature" in Hrdy's book is the evolved ability to calculate and act on the best choices for survival of our children. In the past, given no contraception or abortion, coupled with environmental exigencies, the maternal calculation involved infanticide - from quiet suffocation, to exposure in the woods, to putting the infant in that revolving baby trough in a foundling home with an 80% death rate. As Hrdy says, to be pro-life, one has to be pro-choice. And on the positive side, once mothers make the calculated decision to bear a child and devote the massive resources toward rearing her/him, then our evolved "mother nature" to enhance survival of our children can take on the maternal fierceness that we associate with our ancestral she-bear cousins.
Looking realistically at "mother nature:" For a human mother, the survival goal includes an evolved capability for weighing the odds for survival of her current children when faced with a competing newborn. Will she have enough resources to feed and protect the children she has as well as for the newborn given the environmental circumstances - circumstances which include the whole cultural milieu as well as her individual situation. For me the key liberating insight from the book is that "mother nature" is definitely not the sentimentalized saccharine Victorian idea of the wholly (dare I say "holy"), ever-subservient "angel in the house" mothering on mindlessly - with a smile.
In fact, "mother nature" in Hrdy's book is the evolved ability to calculate and act on the best choices for survival of our children. In the past, given no contraception or abortion, coupled with environmental exigencies, the maternal calculation involved infanticide - from quiet suffocation, to exposure in the woods, to putting the infant in that revolving baby trough in a foundling home with an 80% death rate. As Hrdy says, to be pro-life, one has to be pro-choice. And on the positive side, once mothers make the calculated decision to bear a child and devote the massive resources toward rearing her/him, then our evolved "mother nature" to enhance survival of our children can take on the maternal fierceness that we associate with our ancestral she-bear cousins.
October 19, 2016
This is a big book, and it requires a big review. There is so much I learned from it that I may struggle to get this review to resemble anything less than a rambling string of interesting facts and theories. But I'll try.
Written in 1999, this book explores a feministic perspective on evolutionary theory. It is an account of how both mothers and infants have shaped one another's biology and psychology over the eons in the struggle for survival. Since before Darwin published his Origin of Species, working biologists held an either explicit or implicit bias towards males. George Eliot remarked that in her day it was just a known fact that evolution could only act on the males of a species because there is so little variation among females that no selection can take place. This anti-feminist streak caused many feminists of the day to feel the need to choose between their belief in equality of the sexes, and their acceptance of the science. Those that chose to disregard the science adopted a 'blank slate' model of human nature (see Steven's Pinker's excellent book of the same name The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature), and the rest is history.
Victorian era scientists saw in nature what they wanted to see (or what they expected to see), that females were submissive, sexually reserved, and passive vessels. Their role in the world was encapsulated by just two words: gestate and lactate. Women were not considered to be multi-faceted beings with competing goals and desires (some of which conflicted with the possibility of motherhood itself), so no one bothered to test the idea that maybe women haven't always wanted to give up their entire lives for their offspring, and that such choices could have consequences for the evolution of the human species.
There are two important inventions in history that had immediate impacts upon the choices women were able (or not able) to make. The first was agriculture, which increased the amount of calories a woman could consume and thus increased her fertility. The second was reliable birth control in the 1960s, which allowed her full control over her fertility.
Women who are just barely getting by on subsistence level of calories can have their ovulation suppressed by a constantly suckling infant or baby. It is not uncommon for hunter gatherers to breastfeed up to the age of 3 or 4 years old before weaning. The invention of agriculture changed this dynamic, and unfortunately for women, it was for the worse. Birth spacing dramatically decreased from once every 3-4 years, to once every 1-2 years (or sooner). This placed enormous burdens on women as their number of immature dependents grew, and required difficult choices to be made about which infants survived and which were to be allowed to die. Mothers had to invent different strategies for playing the game of survival and reproduction compared to their forebears.
The invention of birth control 11,000 years later changed all of that. Children are now born to beings who have more choice over reproduction than at any other time in history. Whereas the last 11,000 years was largely a strategy of survival through uncontrolled hedging through quantity, the modern era is characterised by survival through quality and controlled timing. Women in modern democracies now have the same number of children, on average, as do hunter gatherers wandering the Kalahari desert, but for vastly different reasons.
The middle third of the book focuses on the biology of lactation, and takes the reader on a fascinating journey through its origin as an antibiotic secretion in our pre-mammalian ancestors (the antibiotic effects of which are still present today in the form of colostrum). There is further discussion of sexual genetic competition among a variety of species, from humans, kangaroos, and reptiles, to house flies and wasps. Have you ever wondered why mammals lick their young? You probably said 'cleaning them'. The real reason is they are sampling the bacteria on their skin to develop antibodies they then deliver through the breastmilk. This chapter of the book alone is worth the price of purchase.
At this point Hrdy introduces the concept of an 'alloparent'. An alloparent is any other kith or kin who volunteers their own time and resources for the benefit of another's offspring. Your in-laws are alloparents, as is your own sister, or the baby-sitter. The concept does a lot of work in her theory of mother-infant coevolution, especially as it relates to why infants are born so fat, why their cognitive development is so rapid, and the existence of menopause.
The last third of the book may as well have been called 'A History of Infanticide and Neglect'. It's pretty sobering reading. Of the 100 billion humans who have ever lived and died, half of them were children under the age of five. And as many as perhaps a third to a half of them died as the result of
maternal choice to terminate investment in one child over another. In some cases, this was more a matter of inexperience rather than choice. Primates have highly adaptable brains. We're capable of immense feats of learning. The flipside of such versatility is that fewer of our behaviours are genetically programmed instincts. Primate mothers in the wild have a 60% failure rate on the survival of their first-born offspring, that gradually decreases with both maternal age, and experience with other offspring of their species.
Against this backdrop of the last 2,000 years of rampant population growth and infanticide, the dynamic of maternal choice and infant manipulation of the mother takes place, and Hrdy makes her big play: a mother is the ecological niche of her infant. Like Mother Nature herself whittling away at the genes of an entire species to shape it to the environment, a mother's choices shape the evolutionary path of future human infants based on the ones she chooses to care for or allows to die. As infants are physically meek, their only 'weapons' in this fight are their appearance and their behaviour.
Why do so many babies cry for hours at time for no damn reason? Because crying babies get fed to shut them up, and quiet wall flowers are seen as 'too weak to make a sound' so are left to wither. Colicy babies exist because incessant crying was a winning strategy for infants in the fight for maternal investment across the eons. Why do babies pack on so much fat in that last month of pregnancy, right before they're about to squeeze through the birth canal? Because eons of maternal discrimination for 'fat baby = healthy baby' has produced runaway selection to the detriment of the mother, in terms of both resource investment (who do you think the baby is siphoning those fat calories from in such great numbers right before it physically parts ways?) and childbirth mortality. Human babies are 4-8 times fatter at birth than any other primate.
On some level we already know these things. We spontaneously look for features in a baby's face to match the father (as if we're trying to confirm paternity, because the baby's maternity is never in doubt). We send out birth weight with a baby announcement, because it's an instinctive gauge of how healthy she is. Even the reality of contingent maternal investment is still in us, as we tend not to refer to fetuses by name until we're past that perilous 12-week mark, or even after birth we refer to 'the baby', lest we suffer further grief if we lose them to SIDS (or something else) and we've grown too attached.
I haven't even scratched the surface of what this book offers, and could easily list another 30 interesting insights contained within its pages.
The bottom line: there's been rich evolutionary selection between mothers and their infants as they've co-evolved together on this spinning rock over the last several million years, since before we were even human, or even mammalian. Women are and always have been active strategists in the partitioning of their mental and physical resources for child-rearing, even if that meant deciding which children lived and which died (especially so). Day-care is the norm for our species, rather than a modern invention. Modern feminism needs to accept evolutionary theory rather than paint itself into a blind corner of moral dogma and bad science.
Buy this book, and you won't regret it.
Written in 1999, this book explores a feministic perspective on evolutionary theory. It is an account of how both mothers and infants have shaped one another's biology and psychology over the eons in the struggle for survival. Since before Darwin published his Origin of Species, working biologists held an either explicit or implicit bias towards males. George Eliot remarked that in her day it was just a known fact that evolution could only act on the males of a species because there is so little variation among females that no selection can take place. This anti-feminist streak caused many feminists of the day to feel the need to choose between their belief in equality of the sexes, and their acceptance of the science. Those that chose to disregard the science adopted a 'blank slate' model of human nature (see Steven's Pinker's excellent book of the same name The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature), and the rest is history.
Victorian era scientists saw in nature what they wanted to see (or what they expected to see), that females were submissive, sexually reserved, and passive vessels. Their role in the world was encapsulated by just two words: gestate and lactate. Women were not considered to be multi-faceted beings with competing goals and desires (some of which conflicted with the possibility of motherhood itself), so no one bothered to test the idea that maybe women haven't always wanted to give up their entire lives for their offspring, and that such choices could have consequences for the evolution of the human species.
There are two important inventions in history that had immediate impacts upon the choices women were able (or not able) to make. The first was agriculture, which increased the amount of calories a woman could consume and thus increased her fertility. The second was reliable birth control in the 1960s, which allowed her full control over her fertility.
Women who are just barely getting by on subsistence level of calories can have their ovulation suppressed by a constantly suckling infant or baby. It is not uncommon for hunter gatherers to breastfeed up to the age of 3 or 4 years old before weaning. The invention of agriculture changed this dynamic, and unfortunately for women, it was for the worse. Birth spacing dramatically decreased from once every 3-4 years, to once every 1-2 years (or sooner). This placed enormous burdens on women as their number of immature dependents grew, and required difficult choices to be made about which infants survived and which were to be allowed to die. Mothers had to invent different strategies for playing the game of survival and reproduction compared to their forebears.
The invention of birth control 11,000 years later changed all of that. Children are now born to beings who have more choice over reproduction than at any other time in history. Whereas the last 11,000 years was largely a strategy of survival through uncontrolled hedging through quantity, the modern era is characterised by survival through quality and controlled timing. Women in modern democracies now have the same number of children, on average, as do hunter gatherers wandering the Kalahari desert, but for vastly different reasons.
The middle third of the book focuses on the biology of lactation, and takes the reader on a fascinating journey through its origin as an antibiotic secretion in our pre-mammalian ancestors (the antibiotic effects of which are still present today in the form of colostrum). There is further discussion of sexual genetic competition among a variety of species, from humans, kangaroos, and reptiles, to house flies and wasps. Have you ever wondered why mammals lick their young? You probably said 'cleaning them'. The real reason is they are sampling the bacteria on their skin to develop antibodies they then deliver through the breastmilk. This chapter of the book alone is worth the price of purchase.
At this point Hrdy introduces the concept of an 'alloparent'. An alloparent is any other kith or kin who volunteers their own time and resources for the benefit of another's offspring. Your in-laws are alloparents, as is your own sister, or the baby-sitter. The concept does a lot of work in her theory of mother-infant coevolution, especially as it relates to why infants are born so fat, why their cognitive development is so rapid, and the existence of menopause.
The last third of the book may as well have been called 'A History of Infanticide and Neglect'. It's pretty sobering reading. Of the 100 billion humans who have ever lived and died, half of them were children under the age of five. And as many as perhaps a third to a half of them died as the result of
maternal choice to terminate investment in one child over another. In some cases, this was more a matter of inexperience rather than choice. Primates have highly adaptable brains. We're capable of immense feats of learning. The flipside of such versatility is that fewer of our behaviours are genetically programmed instincts. Primate mothers in the wild have a 60% failure rate on the survival of their first-born offspring, that gradually decreases with both maternal age, and experience with other offspring of their species.
Against this backdrop of the last 2,000 years of rampant population growth and infanticide, the dynamic of maternal choice and infant manipulation of the mother takes place, and Hrdy makes her big play: a mother is the ecological niche of her infant. Like Mother Nature herself whittling away at the genes of an entire species to shape it to the environment, a mother's choices shape the evolutionary path of future human infants based on the ones she chooses to care for or allows to die. As infants are physically meek, their only 'weapons' in this fight are their appearance and their behaviour.
Why do so many babies cry for hours at time for no damn reason? Because crying babies get fed to shut them up, and quiet wall flowers are seen as 'too weak to make a sound' so are left to wither. Colicy babies exist because incessant crying was a winning strategy for infants in the fight for maternal investment across the eons. Why do babies pack on so much fat in that last month of pregnancy, right before they're about to squeeze through the birth canal? Because eons of maternal discrimination for 'fat baby = healthy baby' has produced runaway selection to the detriment of the mother, in terms of both resource investment (who do you think the baby is siphoning those fat calories from in such great numbers right before it physically parts ways?) and childbirth mortality. Human babies are 4-8 times fatter at birth than any other primate.
On some level we already know these things. We spontaneously look for features in a baby's face to match the father (as if we're trying to confirm paternity, because the baby's maternity is never in doubt). We send out birth weight with a baby announcement, because it's an instinctive gauge of how healthy she is. Even the reality of contingent maternal investment is still in us, as we tend not to refer to fetuses by name until we're past that perilous 12-week mark, or even after birth we refer to 'the baby', lest we suffer further grief if we lose them to SIDS (or something else) and we've grown too attached.
I haven't even scratched the surface of what this book offers, and could easily list another 30 interesting insights contained within its pages.
The bottom line: there's been rich evolutionary selection between mothers and their infants as they've co-evolved together on this spinning rock over the last several million years, since before we were even human, or even mammalian. Women are and always have been active strategists in the partitioning of their mental and physical resources for child-rearing, even if that meant deciding which children lived and which died (especially so). Day-care is the norm for our species, rather than a modern invention. Modern feminism needs to accept evolutionary theory rather than paint itself into a blind corner of moral dogma and bad science.
Buy this book, and you won't regret it.
December 22, 2012
Drawing heavily from sociobiological theory and evolutionary psychology, Hrdy argues that (1) the mother at some deep level calculates the benefit/loss ratio that's involved in parental investment, and (2) the infant/child employs various evolutionary strategies to ensure maternal investment in its survival and well-being. There are no guarantees in this business. The mothering "instinct" is not unconditional and the infant's and child's sense of security is not assured. Hrdy strips the parent-child relationship of much of its romance, and she argues that this is why there's been extensive abuse, abandonment (foundling homes), and infanticide (post-birth version of late-stage abortion, used before abortion became a safer practice). Hrdy, in short, challenges the reader to look at parenting from the perspective of evolutionary theory that makes "love" conditional, calculating and colder.
There are, however, a couple of issues with her presentation. Hrdy does not describe how her perspective is consistent with her endorsement of kin selection which is a central tenant of sociobiological theory. Much of Hrdy's book is about "allomothers," a community of support that behaves "as if kin." That seems to contradict kin selection theory that has our other-regarding tendencies limited to kin relations. We know of course that non-kin allomothers (her term) extend their love, care, concern and interest to babies even when non-related. Why is that the case if they are not kin? For that matter, why did the gooslings follow Lorenz even though he was obviously not kin? Hrdy skims over these as if they are not issues. "All early caregivers become the emotional equivalents of kin," she writes, without explaining how this matches up or doesn't match up with kin selection theory. In addition to her numerous "as if kin" references, she writes about the importance of being part of a "community," but then adds without a blink that such a community is "a group of kin" without accounting for the fact that most communities today are not at all kin related. Could it be that kin selection cannot explain other-regarding, altruistic tendencies beyond the parent-child relationship? Could it be that other-giving tendencies are based on the individual's need to be part of a group for survival purposes and that genetic tendencies push the individual to the group and vice versa? Could it be that infants and children need to bond (imprint) with a caregiver, and for caregivers to do the same for dependent infants and children because that's how the group and individuals within the group were able to survive?
Another potential issue with Hrdy's presentation is the implicit assumption of her "parental investment theory" that maternal instinct expression depends on environmental circumstances. Hrdy says there's no pure genotype because genotypes always get expressed within a context. In other words, the environment modifies the genotype and this always results in a phenotypic expression. Within that framework, Hrdy states that, "I assume that mothers in the past were emotionally similar to me. But they made their decisions under different, vastly more arduous, circumstances." No doubt, there is a considerable truth here, but it does raise a question: Is it fair to say that mothers everywhere have the same "emotional make up"? How does that match up with the genetic variation within species that is the guts of Darwinian theory? How does it match up with Hrdy's various references to different, innate temperaments? Hrdy talks about differences in phenotypic expression among identical twins, but there are ample studies about how genotypic expression is remarkably the same among identical twins regardless of the environment. Could it be that some women (and men for that matter) have more of a nurturing, maternal instinct than others because of basic innate differences that are more or less independent of the environment?
As a final comment, Hrdy refers to the Harlow studies (infant deprivation of love objects) without condemnation or, at least, acknowledgement of the problematic aspects of that scientific type of approach from a maternal or paternal point of view.
There are, however, a couple of issues with her presentation. Hrdy does not describe how her perspective is consistent with her endorsement of kin selection which is a central tenant of sociobiological theory. Much of Hrdy's book is about "allomothers," a community of support that behaves "as if kin." That seems to contradict kin selection theory that has our other-regarding tendencies limited to kin relations. We know of course that non-kin allomothers (her term) extend their love, care, concern and interest to babies even when non-related. Why is that the case if they are not kin? For that matter, why did the gooslings follow Lorenz even though he was obviously not kin? Hrdy skims over these as if they are not issues. "All early caregivers become the emotional equivalents of kin," she writes, without explaining how this matches up or doesn't match up with kin selection theory. In addition to her numerous "as if kin" references, she writes about the importance of being part of a "community," but then adds without a blink that such a community is "a group of kin" without accounting for the fact that most communities today are not at all kin related. Could it be that kin selection cannot explain other-regarding, altruistic tendencies beyond the parent-child relationship? Could it be that other-giving tendencies are based on the individual's need to be part of a group for survival purposes and that genetic tendencies push the individual to the group and vice versa? Could it be that infants and children need to bond (imprint) with a caregiver, and for caregivers to do the same for dependent infants and children because that's how the group and individuals within the group were able to survive?
Another potential issue with Hrdy's presentation is the implicit assumption of her "parental investment theory" that maternal instinct expression depends on environmental circumstances. Hrdy says there's no pure genotype because genotypes always get expressed within a context. In other words, the environment modifies the genotype and this always results in a phenotypic expression. Within that framework, Hrdy states that, "I assume that mothers in the past were emotionally similar to me. But they made their decisions under different, vastly more arduous, circumstances." No doubt, there is a considerable truth here, but it does raise a question: Is it fair to say that mothers everywhere have the same "emotional make up"? How does that match up with the genetic variation within species that is the guts of Darwinian theory? How does it match up with Hrdy's various references to different, innate temperaments? Hrdy talks about differences in phenotypic expression among identical twins, but there are ample studies about how genotypic expression is remarkably the same among identical twins regardless of the environment. Could it be that some women (and men for that matter) have more of a nurturing, maternal instinct than others because of basic innate differences that are more or less independent of the environment?
As a final comment, Hrdy refers to the Harlow studies (infant deprivation of love objects) without condemnation or, at least, acknowledgement of the problematic aspects of that scientific type of approach from a maternal or paternal point of view.
December 27, 2007
"Mother Nature" changed my life, bridging evolutionary theory, feminisim, and pragmatism in a way that touched a deep core in my beliefs. In the most mundane sense this book is interesting. Whether you are an anthropology buff or a spiritualist you should read this.
July 9, 2011
This book. This frickin book. I love it. I love that it challenges our perceptions.
I don't know why human society believes that women are all programmed to want to birth and nurture the kids. Perhaps people believe it out of convenience or wishful thinking.
This book talks about mothers and babies of different species and about human mother roles historically. The other species portion is to illustrate that humans are not alone in doting over their babies and that babies are genetically programmed to be appealing to their mommas because the mommas are the ones most likely to be interested in the babe (the fathers can never be 100% certain that the offspring is his). That's why puppies and kittens are so darn cute. But alas nature is cruel and mothers will abandon children in order to save themselves and their stronger offspring. Humans are no exception.
The history of child-rearing was also very interesting. Oftentimes sad. Before birth control, women were at the mercy of their own bodies and the understanding of medicine of their times. Women in harsher environments often lost children to sickness or poverty, if they didn't die during childbirth themselves. Then when nursemaids became all the rage, women got to have even more children because they stopped breast-feeding. The result: those awful orphanages where children were abandoned in droves.
There is so much more in the book. Every moment was interesting.
I don't know why human society believes that women are all programmed to want to birth and nurture the kids. Perhaps people believe it out of convenience or wishful thinking.
This book talks about mothers and babies of different species and about human mother roles historically. The other species portion is to illustrate that humans are not alone in doting over their babies and that babies are genetically programmed to be appealing to their mommas because the mommas are the ones most likely to be interested in the babe (the fathers can never be 100% certain that the offspring is his). That's why puppies and kittens are so darn cute. But alas nature is cruel and mothers will abandon children in order to save themselves and their stronger offspring. Humans are no exception.
The history of child-rearing was also very interesting. Oftentimes sad. Before birth control, women were at the mercy of their own bodies and the understanding of medicine of their times. Women in harsher environments often lost children to sickness or poverty, if they didn't die during childbirth themselves. Then when nursemaids became all the rage, women got to have even more children because they stopped breast-feeding. The result: those awful orphanages where children were abandoned in droves.
There is so much more in the book. Every moment was interesting.
June 10, 2010
my friends will be relieved to know that i will no longer be spouting interesting facts about infanticide every 5 minutes.
February 2, 2026
viel gutes dabei, leider auch einiges schlechtes (sehr biologistische Erklärungen für patriachale Verhältnisse und ihre Auswirkungen).
January 7, 2024
Dieses Buch eröffnet ganz neue Sichtweisen auf die Einstellung von Müttern zu ihren Kindern über das gesamte Tierreich bis zurück ins Pleistozän. Es schafft Verständnis für die unterschiedlichsten Formen von Umsorgen, Investieren und Erziehen - aus Sicht von Mutter und auch aus Sicht des Jungen. Trotz Sachbuch gut und durchaus unzerhaltend zu lesen.
July 7, 2019
At 500+ pages, Mother Nature was the geekiest and least directly practical read that I undertook when I first became pregnant. It is an anthropological tome of motherhood from bees to birds to primates. Aside from the first couple chapters that discuss how the cultural view of motherhood came to be as part of a deeply patriarchal system of thinking, humans do not even make an appearance until around Chapter 9. This was a book that really helped me situate my perspective of motherhood from a species-perspective, and comforted me because it was only indirectly about my particular situation. The primary takeaway of this book for me is that mothers do not have to be wired “to be good, perfect, loving” and that anyone who tries to tell you differently is probably just propping up patriarchal systems of thinking that benefit themselves. The real message of motherhood is that throughout all the species, mothers are making very difficult choices about how to mother, and that they must do so in a calculated, logical cost-benefit analysis where they are thinking about not only how to preserve themselves, but also their other young. We as humans are not alone in this, but we are one of the only species inundated with harsh messages and social judgment about how we make choices.
This was a really comforting read that I kept coming back to even after my baby was born, and finished around 5 months postpartum.
This was a really comforting read that I kept coming back to even after my baby was born, and finished around 5 months postpartum.
December 18, 2008
If you want to scream every time some unenlightened jerk gives you some kind of "Men are from Mars" crap, then this is the book for you! Dispelling myths, bullcrap, and outright lies about the evolution of motherhood in sentient beings, I highly recommend this book.
July 25, 2011
My bible. I read this book when I was pregnant with my second child - and was convinced by Blaffer Hrdy's arguments and facts. Nature is cruel, mother is not nature. Or mother is cruel, nature is not mother? Some very controversial theses in there, but at least they make you think.
December 15, 2011
abandoned it, but an excellent read
March 13, 2019
This was a labor of love to read. It's fascinating subject and so well researched. I will say though that it can get very in depth into science that leaves the causal reader's head spinning a bit. All in all though a wonderful tome about mothers.
January 7, 2016
No spoilers, just hiding this part b/c it's about bad things happening to babies, and I don't want to drop it in my friends' feed with no warning!
Anyway, this was fascinating all over, the kind of book I frequently felt compelled to share fun facts from. The author is rightfully skeptical of so much discourse about parenting that focuses on what mothers "naturally" ought to be doing, and it's refreshing to read instead about what they have always done, on every step of the evolutionary ladder from bees to monkeys to ancient humans to modern civilization. They've always worked on things besides childcare, sought out help from others, taken advantage of whatever level of "choice" they have, and taken care of themselves without being self-sacrificing - all things that make sense from an evolutionary perspective, at least if you weren't raised in Darwin's time and projected your Victorian values all over your observations.
This was hard for me to read sometimes as a more social science-y person - shutting off my "but what about---" reaction every time I saw a biological fact that definitely has some social/cultural factors was difficult! Plenty of things that I consider important are smoothed away in an effort to write about humans at the species level. I had to tell myself pretty often "she's not denying any of that stuff, it's just not what the book is about." So, big grain of salt needed for how much any of this applies to your own life or beliefs or politics, but overall it was fascinating and eye-opening.
Anyway, this was fascinating all over, the kind of book I frequently felt compelled to share fun facts from. The author is rightfully skeptical of so much discourse about parenting that focuses on what mothers "naturally" ought to be doing, and it's refreshing to read instead about what they have always done, on every step of the evolutionary ladder from bees to monkeys to ancient humans to modern civilization. They've always worked on things besides childcare, sought out help from others, taken advantage of whatever level of "choice" they have, and taken care of themselves without being self-sacrificing - all things that make sense from an evolutionary perspective, at least if you weren't raised in Darwin's time and projected your Victorian values all over your observations.
This was hard for me to read sometimes as a more social science-y person - shutting off my "but what about---" reaction every time I saw a biological fact that definitely has some social/cultural factors was difficult! Plenty of things that I consider important are smoothed away in an effort to write about humans at the species level. I had to tell myself pretty often "she's not denying any of that stuff, it's just not what the book is about." So, big grain of salt needed for how much any of this applies to your own life or beliefs or politics, but overall it was fascinating and eye-opening.
November 11, 2009
I have long been extremely leery of evolutionary or biological explanations for differences between the sexes. Just the words, "mothering instinct" make me break out in a rash. Why? Because "biological" explanations, which are more often than not based in pure speculation, always seem to conveniently rationalize the superiority of men and reduce women to their reproductive capacity. Don't even get me started about this, you'll never hear the end of it.
Which is why this book totally rocked my world, and why I want to recommend it from the rooftops. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy looks exhaustively at the biological data regarding mothers of all species, and explodes the Victorian archetype of the sexless, submissive, and nuturing wife and mother. She finds that human mothers do have instincts, of course, but they are not all stereotypically "maternal." Rather, difficult decisions and a dose of ambivalence have always been part of what it means to be a human mother.
The best part is the way that huge amounts of not-always-straightforward biological data are presented with ease and charm. Once you've started, it is difficult to put this book down.
I recently read another book on "natural" mothering, Our Babies, Ourselves, by Meridith Small. I enjoyed Our Babies, Ourselves, and reviewed it positively here. However, I felt that it was an introduction to the ethnographical study of motherhood, and in some respects, grossly oversimplified the needs of infants and mothers. But I was intrigued, and wanted to learn more about this field. As a follow-up, Mother Nature far exceeded my highest expectations. It is simply a far superior book, and may even make me rethink my high rating for Our Babies, Ourselves.
Don't get me wrong, this book still pushed some buttons for me - okay, a lot of buttons, or was it one really big button, over and over? - but because Hrdy takes feminism so seriously, ideas that might have infuriated me from another source become genuinely "thought-provoking."
This book left me hungry to read more by Sarah Hrdy.
Which is why this book totally rocked my world, and why I want to recommend it from the rooftops. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy looks exhaustively at the biological data regarding mothers of all species, and explodes the Victorian archetype of the sexless, submissive, and nuturing wife and mother. She finds that human mothers do have instincts, of course, but they are not all stereotypically "maternal." Rather, difficult decisions and a dose of ambivalence have always been part of what it means to be a human mother.
The best part is the way that huge amounts of not-always-straightforward biological data are presented with ease and charm. Once you've started, it is difficult to put this book down.
I recently read another book on "natural" mothering, Our Babies, Ourselves, by Meridith Small. I enjoyed Our Babies, Ourselves, and reviewed it positively here. However, I felt that it was an introduction to the ethnographical study of motherhood, and in some respects, grossly oversimplified the needs of infants and mothers. But I was intrigued, and wanted to learn more about this field. As a follow-up, Mother Nature far exceeded my highest expectations. It is simply a far superior book, and may even make me rethink my high rating for Our Babies, Ourselves.
Don't get me wrong, this book still pushed some buttons for me - okay, a lot of buttons, or was it one really big button, over and over? - but because Hrdy takes feminism so seriously, ideas that might have infuriated me from another source become genuinely "thought-provoking."
This book left me hungry to read more by Sarah Hrdy.
September 11, 2013
Review also appears on my blog:
http://authorjanebnight.wordpress.com...
I really enjoyed this book. Some non fiction books can get really bogged down and beyond the understanding of someone who is only a bit familiar with the subject matter. This was not one of those books. This book was easy to understand and everything was explained in layman terms.
Being a mother but also a woman interested in women’s issues I really liked the subject matter. It also was a book that brought questions (and extrapolated answers) to the surface about the things I see in the world around me and just go “?”.
For instance, in some primates promiscuity is used to enhance the survival of infants. A female of the species will mate with males who might eventually take over her group. If she does, he is less likely to kill her offspring. Also, in some primates the males will help feed and protect children that might be theirs. As modern humans we have DNA tests and I am in no means encouraging promiscuity. But it seems to me that in out human history there were times when the people most likely to breed healthy babies were women who had many men offering some help.
Also, in a family where there are many resources and children have a high chance of survival then it makes sense to breed just a few and invest all parental resources in them. If a family has few resources and low survival rates then it makes sense to breed as many as possible so that someone will be able to add the family genes to the future. This made a lot of sense especially when I had wondered why it seemed that humans least able to care for offspring seem to breed the most.
Overall, I think this book was pretty amazing and a great read for anyone interested in mother and infant issues in primates (including themselves).
http://authorjanebnight.wordpress.com...
I really enjoyed this book. Some non fiction books can get really bogged down and beyond the understanding of someone who is only a bit familiar with the subject matter. This was not one of those books. This book was easy to understand and everything was explained in layman terms.
Being a mother but also a woman interested in women’s issues I really liked the subject matter. It also was a book that brought questions (and extrapolated answers) to the surface about the things I see in the world around me and just go “?”.
For instance, in some primates promiscuity is used to enhance the survival of infants. A female of the species will mate with males who might eventually take over her group. If she does, he is less likely to kill her offspring. Also, in some primates the males will help feed and protect children that might be theirs. As modern humans we have DNA tests and I am in no means encouraging promiscuity. But it seems to me that in out human history there were times when the people most likely to breed healthy babies were women who had many men offering some help.
Also, in a family where there are many resources and children have a high chance of survival then it makes sense to breed just a few and invest all parental resources in them. If a family has few resources and low survival rates then it makes sense to breed as many as possible so that someone will be able to add the family genes to the future. This made a lot of sense especially when I had wondered why it seemed that humans least able to care for offspring seem to breed the most.
Overall, I think this book was pretty amazing and a great read for anyone interested in mother and infant issues in primates (including themselves).
January 29, 2011
I liked this book a lot, but I found it hard to decide what the author's position was. I read it thinking it be a look at mothers from a feminist point of view - but based on hard science. It was very much based on hard science, but in the end, I wasn't sure what her point was - she seemed ambivalent about some key questions regarding a woman's role in mothering. However, all in all it was extremely interesting. it frames many of our behaviors, especially mothers and babies, in the light of evolution and how we are hardwired for certain behaviors. It made me wonder how closely intertwined Freud's view and Darwin's view really are, those deep subconscious drives that Freud was so obsessed with seems driven by behaviors we learned millions of years ago on the african savanah. anyway, it was a good read, but a lot to comprehend in one book.
September 8, 2011
Really deep and thought-provoking look at maternal ambivalence. Maybe I shouldn't have read it just weeks postpartum — or, then again, maybe that was the perfect time. It's a dense, often disturbing read, because Hrdy pulls no punches when describing maternal behavior across species, cultures, and times. But it's freeing as well, in dismantling the myth of the Perfect Mother by showing us how very conditional a mother's affections actually are. The end comes back around to describing what it is that children, in their own evolutionary wiliness, demand of us as parents, so it ends on the note of "But you should be a good mother anyway." Again, maybe it was being so recently postpartum, but the wrap-up seemed a little spare to me.
February 27, 2011
Fascinating and, at times, unsettling. The book is riveting at first, but the focus begins to wander in the latter half. While this makes for a less enjoyable read, one can only appreciate that Hrdy was unwilling to whittle the complex and competing forces under discussion into a more palatable narrative.
my favorite quote: "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 helps individuals in a particular environment to survive or prosper."
my favorite quote: "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 helps individuals in a particular environment to survive or prosper."
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March 22, 2016Perhaps my single favorite non-fiction work. Hrdy comes at the preconceptions of anthropology with guns blazing, & it is a slaughter of scientific biases. This book came into my life at the perfect time, in undergrad as I was starting to become aware of logical fallacies in the sciences, borne from real world prejudices. Hrdy attacks them at the structural level through the simple act of viewing women-- & in her other books, females of other primate species-- as worthy of as much evolutionary consideration as males, without assumptions about "maternal instincts" or the institutional misogyny of centuries of bad science. --MK
September 5, 2012
Modern Family. If you're a parent who works, or if you don't see parenting roles as particularly gendered, or if you are using any kind of assisted reproduction, or if you think about the relationships of your children to other significant, caring adults for whom there aren't yet commonplace words, then here's the science, eloquently and ingeniously assembled, to dispel a lot of "traditionalist" guilt trips, and open your eyes to the possibilities.
December 14, 2012
I LOVED this book: very thought provoking and intellectually daring. It contains many highly controversial ideas, so the easily offended should probably avoid it. However, for anyone interested in history, anthropology or parenting (in the more theoretical sense: it is not at all a 'how-to' book) the book is fascinating and completely repays the effort required (it is very long and fairly intellectually challenging). Grade: A.
May 12, 2010
What an amazing text! It engaged me wholly, making me re-examine many ideas I had already thought deeply about pertaining to culture, patriarchy, reproductive autonomy, and my own life. A read you will value forever. If you found yourself interested in the bits on primatology, pick up her earlier book The Woman that Never Evolved.
January 18, 2008
WOW! This book idolizes an amazing mother and how nature nurtures their young in a similar way! Where do we get our motherly instinct???? Nature of coarse! I will keep this book and read it again when (if ever) I become a mother!
July 6, 2008
Textbook for Anthropology course: Sex, Evolution, and Human Behavior.
March 3, 2009
This is THE baby book for anyone with even a mild interest in natural science. For very good results, pair with the BBC series "Mammals".
May 9, 2012
slam dunk
August 1, 2013
Feels like I'm reading an anthropology textbook, but without sufficient information on how it correlates to human's maternal behaviors and instincts.
August 17, 2008
A favorite from by undergraduate days. A bit heady, but fascinating information nonetheless.
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