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A Natural History of Men and Babies
by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
A sweeping account of male nurturing, explaining how and why men are biologically transformed when they care for babies
It has long seemed self-evident that women care for babies and men do other things. Hasn't it always been so? When evolutionary science came along, it rubber-stamped this venerable division of labor: mammalian males evolved to compete for status and mates, while females were purpose-built to gestate, suckle, and otherwise nurture the victors' offspring. But come the twenty-first century, increasing numbers of men are tending babies, sometimes right from birth. How can this be happening? Puzzled and dazzled by the tender expertise of new fathers around the world—several in her own family—celebrated evolutionary anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy set out to trace the deep history of male nurturing and explain a surprising departure from everything she had assumed to be "normal."
In Father Time, Hrdy draws on a wealth of research to argue that this ongoing transformation in men is not only cultural, but profoundly biological. Men in prolonged intimate contact with babies exhibit responses nearly identical to those in the bodies and brains of mothers. They develop caring potential few realized men possessed. In her quest to explain how men came to nurture babies, Hrdy travels back through millions of years of human, primate, and mammalian evolution, then back further still to the earliest vertebrates—all while taking into account recent economic and social trends and technological innovations and incorporating new findings from neuroscience, genetics, endocrinology, and more. The result is a masterful synthesis of evolutionary and historical perspectives that expands our understanding of what it means to be a man—and what the implications might be for society and our species.
"An outstanding examination of the history and science of fatherhood.... Revelatory scientific studies shedding light on men's biological proclivity for caring...complement the edifying history. It amounts to an invaluable deep history of dads." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"I remain fascinated by the possibilities of the evolution of the genus Homo so Sarah Hrdy's Father Time clarified much for me. Our ancestors couldn't have survived the Pleistocene without alloparenting, with fathers and other men helping to care for and provision young." —Francis Ford Coppola
"Sarah Hrdy gives us a fascinating, compellingly readable account of the new science that has revealed the deep potential for nurturance in fathers. The book is both a personal, immensely important and gripping story, and a masterly summary of equally compelling and important scientific research." —Alison Gopnik, author of The Gardener and the Carpenter
"Who better than Sarah Hrdy, known for her studies of motherhood, to delve into fatherhood. Men caring for babies or young children can be as tender and competent as women. Doing so transforms their brains to be more like the maternal brain. Hrdy's timely point is that attempts to balance gender roles in the family by no means go against human nature." —Frans de Waal, author of Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist
"No one has shaped our understanding of human motherhood quite like Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has, and now her latest book challenges us to rethink fatherhood and the future of the human family. In Father Time, Hrdy brings her expansive curiosity, humility, and deep expertise to bear on one of the questions that drive culture wars: What does it mean to be a man today? She takes readers along on a journey of discovery that challenges even her own understanding of gender and caregiving, and she demonstrates how nurturing has always been at the center of human nature." —Chelsea Conaboy, author of Mother Brain: How Neuroscience Is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood
"In Father Time Sarah Blaffer Hrdy takes readers on an accessible, compelling journey that adds important evolutionary muscle to the premise some of us have known for a while—many fathers can be and are equal partners as nurturing, emotionally nourishing parents." —Andrew Reiner, author of Better Boys, Better Men: The New Masculinity That Creates Greater Courage and Emotional Resiliency
This information about Father Time was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy is professor emerita of anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of The Woman That Never Evolved, Mother Nature, and Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding.
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