Baby Wars: The Dynamics of Family Conflict

by Robin Baker, Elizabeth Oram

Even the happiest families endure periods of intense conflict and emotional strife. Read this eye-opening book and find out why. What does evolution have to do with morning sickness? With the stressful sound of a baby's cry? With sibling rivalry and adolescent rage? With child abuse? Everything, says Dr. Robin Baker, whose best-selling Sperm Wars illustrated the day-to-day Darwinism of human sexual life. Now Dr. Baker teams up with journalist and children's books author Elizabeth Oram to do the same for parenthood and family life. They look at a variety of instantly recognizable family situations and offer evolutionary explanations for common, often traumatic, events--explanations that not only make clear the genetic roots of family conflicts but that reveal, in many cases, their wider reproductive purpose. Highly provocative yet profoundly persuasive, this compelling book sheds light on the darkest secrets of family life and brings them out into the open where they can be addressed with honesty and without judgment.

Genres: Evolution, Nonfiction, Psychology, Science, Biology

Paperback

First published October 1, 1997

About the author

Also published as R. Robin Baker

Reviews

[Barbara · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ich gebe gleich zu, dass ich hiervon nur die ersten Kapitel gelesen habe, wobei es nicht uninteressant war, aber eben nicht die richtige Entspannungslektüre, die ich zur Zeit brauche.

Auf der Rückseite steht zu lesen:
Der Krieg der Spermien geht weiter ...
Obwohl wir glauben, uns nach einem ruhigen, harmonischen Leben zu sehnen, sind kriegerische Kräfte in uns unerbittlich am Werk. Robin Baker und Elizabeth Oramerhellen provokativ und äußerst überzeugend die dunklen Seiten des Alltags, wie sie selbst in den glücklichsten Familien vorkommen.
Warum leiden Frauen während der Schwangerschaft an Übelkeit? Warum rivalisieren Geschwister ständig miteinander? Weshalb kann das Schreien eines Babys so unerträglich für uns sein? Weshalb gibt es überhaupt soviel Streit in der Familie?
Baby Wars deckt den tagtäglichen genetischen Wettkampf im Bereich des Familienlebens und der Elternschaft auf. Anhand einer Reihe so unterhaltsamer wie symptomatischer Alltagsszenen, die mit Hilfe der neuesten evolutionsbiologischen Erkenntnisse analysiert werden, zeigen die Autoren, was und warum Menschen etwas tatsächlich tun, nicht, was sie denken, sagen und fühlen.

[Yuanyuan Zou · Rating 4 out of 5]

也是挺好读的书，是在Virginia，住在westmore的时候读的呢，书总是能在各种地方留下记忆。围绕孩子讨论了家庭相处的各种奇葩方式。读了很久了，到现在还记得乱伦的那个家庭的故事。

[TheMan · Rating 4 out of 5]

sens

[Lois Bujold · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good follow-up to the same author's very enlightening Sperm Wars, which I recommend strongly. Sperm Wars covers what happens before conception; Baby Wars takes up the rest of the story, from pregnancy through death, with as many permutations as can reasonably be crammed in. Baker and Oram use the same winning formula of presenting a fictional scenario illustrating the bio-evolutionary principles about which they will then give you the proper lecture in the ensuing pages. I am very susceptible to evolutionary biology's just-so stories; a little more in the way of supporting data or references would have made me more confident that it wasn't all just cherry-picked -- theory should flow from data, not the other way around -- but I suppose the authors (or their editor) were going for the broadest possible audience, and didn't want to scare them off with excessive footnotes. (Though I suspect they could have supplied them.) In any case, due to the intrinsic interest of the subject and the deft presentation, I found it as riveting as a novel (more so, in fact, than a good many novels), and read it in a day.

Both Sperm Wars and Baby Wars are from the late 90s; I'd love to know what new things biology, molecular biology, and reproductive medicine have uncovered in the last 15 years to modify the subject, because those sciences have been moving really fast since the turn of the millennium.

Ta, L.

[C · Rating 1 out of 5]

They lost me when they suggested women feeling it was the right time for them to conceive felt an urge to cheat on their partners and their bodies could decide to miscarry if the conditions for a potency were not there anymore. This Darwinist approach of reproduction is not about parenthood and doesn't sound scientifically based to me. Plus the book is not convenient to read with no summary of topics nor index. Stay away!

[Antti · Rating 3 out of 5]

Old-school evolutionary psychology at its best. Omitting references is a problem, so it has a feeling of fiction.

Anyways, a Prophecy, not for results we have for families and or individuals, but for causes that has caused the institution called marriage to collapse like in 2016 we see