Father Time
A Natural History of Men and Babies
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- $30.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hrdy (The Woman That Never Evolved), an anthropology professor emerita at the University of California Davis, provides an outstanding examination of the history and science of fatherhood. For insight into the evolution of human paternity, Hrdy studies primate fathers, noting that while male chimpanzees brutally murder any baby they didn't sire, owl monkeys will nurture other males' infants as if they were their own. Crediting the evolutionary success of early humans to their communal social arrangements, Hrdy cites studies of contemporary hunter-gatherer groups that indicate prehistorical men, though able to take down big game, remained dependent on caloric plants gathered by women. Mutually beneficial gender roles emerged in which men provided protein for the community's children in exchange for access to foraged tubers and nuts. Tracing the development of fatherhood through the modern era, Hrdy contends that the rise of agriculture and livestock privileged the status of aggressive men who defended their property, producing patriarchal societies that only in the past several decades have started trending toward more equitable divisions of child-rearing. Revelatory scientific studies shedding light on men's biological proclivity for caring (close association with a newborn has been found to produce in men the same elevated levels of oxytocin seen in women) complement the edifying history. It amounts to an invaluable deep history of dads.
