Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

University of California, Davis | UCD · Department of Anthropology

This book provides a cutting-edge overview of emotion science from an evolutionary perspective. Part 1 outlines different ways of approaching the study of emotion; Part 2 covers specific emotions from an evolutionary perspective; Part 3 discusses the role of emotions in a variety of life domains; and Part 4 explores the relationship between emotion...

According to the Cooperative Breeding Hypothesis, slow-maturing apes with the life history attributes of those in the line leading to the genus Homo could not have evolved unless male and female allomothers had begun to help mothers care for and provision offspring. The unusual way hominins reared their young generated novel phenotypes subsequently...

According to the Cooperative Breeding Hypothesis, apes with the life-history attributes of those in the line leading to the genus Homo could not have evolved unless male and female allomothers had begun to help mothers care for and provision offspring. As proposed elsewhere, the unusual way hominins reared their young generated novel phenotypes sub...

Leading thinkers from a range of disciplines discuss the compatibility of power and care, in conversation with the Dalai Lama. For more than thirty years, the Dalai Lama has been in dialogue with thinkers from a range of disciplines, helping to support pathways for knowledge to increase human wellbeing and compassion. These conversations, which beg...

Until recently, evolutionists reconstructing mother-infant bonding among human ancestors relied on nonhuman primate models characterized by exclusively maternal care, overlooking the highly variable responsiveness exhibited by mothers in species with obligate reliance on allomaternal care and provisioning. It is now increasingly recognized that ape...

A New Paradigm Emerges Mother mammals are guaranteed to be on hand at birth, and after months of gestat-ing, are hormonally primed to respond to infantile signals. Maternal commitment to young is the best single predictor of their survival. No wonder mothers have played a key role in evolution. For two hundred million years, till the very recent di...

Humans are a product of evolution. To understand the relationship between mothers and infants we need to understand how evolution has shaped this relationship, and to identify the challenges that ancestral mothers and infants faced. Modern society defines mothering as caring for children, but for ancestral women mothering encompassed everything tha...

According to the cooperative breeding hypothesis, apes with the life history attributes of Homo sapiens could not have evolved unless alloparents in addition to parents had helped to care for and provision offspring. In this chapter, I explore the psychological implications for infants developing in social contexts where contingent nurture was elic...

Biologists today absorb evolutionary perspectives in worlds very different from that inhabited by Charles Darwin while he was writing The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). Women then did not attend universities or participate in formal scientific meetings. It was 1945 before a

This was a powerpoint presentation for a plenary address delivered at that meeting. See the attached essay on Development plus Social Selection on which it was mostly based. Best wishes, Sarah

Research on wild primates was still a relatively new endeavour in the USA when I entered graduate school in 1970. Courses on primate behaviour were primarily taught in anthropology departments. I was drawn to the field because Japanese researchers had reported that adult male monkeys sometimes killed infants in a species of South Asian monkey known...

Despite sharing a recent common ancestor, humans are surprisingly different from other great apes. The most obvious discontinuities are related to our cognitive abilities, including language, but we also have a markedly different, cooperative breeding system. Among many nonhuman primates and mammals in general,cooperative breeding is accompanied by...

All primates share a deep evolutionary legacy of positive and negative male involvement with infants. Under some conditions, prolonged exposure of males to cues from helpless infants produced opportunities for Natural Selection to favor even more costly and exclusive care directed at infants likely to share genes with them by common descent. In a h...

According to the Cooperative Breeding Hypothesis, allomaternal assistance was essential for child survival during the Pleistocene. This breeding system — quite novel for an ape — permitted hominid females to produce costly offspring without increasing inter-birth intervals, and allowed humans to move into new habitats, eventually expanding out of A...

Although there is no questioning the heroism of those who “rebel against the selfish replicators” their task seems very nearly insurmountable. I question whether anyone can formulate a broadly acceptable moral system that will not in some respects be constrained by the legacy of generations spent as selfish and kin-selected replicators.

Scientists from different disciplines, including anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, pediatrics, neurobiology, endocrinology, and molecular biology, explore the concepts of attachment and bonding from varying scientific perspectives. Attachment and bonding are evolved processes; the mechanisms that permit the development of selective social bonds...

Scientists from different disciplines, including anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, pediatrics, neurobiology, endocrinology, and molecular biology, explore the concepts of attachment and bonding from varying scientific perspectives. Attachment and bonding are evolved processes; the mechanisms that permit the development of selective social bonds...

According to Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, males compete among themselves for access to females, and then females choose the one best male. As Darwin put it, the female “with the rarest exception, is less eager (to mate) than the male....” The female generally “requires to be courted; she is coy, and may often be seen endeavoring for a long...

Around the world polygynous marriage (one man, several women) is vastly more common than polyandrous marriage (one woman, several men), and women tend to be more cautious about entering into sexual relationships than men are. Such patterns are often assumed to reflect essential differences between the sexes. However, the same dichotomy between "ard...

Dear Alice, I do not have a digital version of Mother Nature. However it is available as a paperback or in an Audible version, as well as available Used, through Amazon. Best wishes, Sarah Hrdy

Sociobiologists and feminists agree that men in patriarchal social systems seek to control females, but sociobiologists go further, using Darwin’s theory of sexual selection and Trivers’s ideas on parental investment to explain why males should attempt to control female sexuality. From this perspective, the stage for the development under some cond...

Sociobiologists and feminists agree that men in patriarchal social systems seek to control females, but sociobiologists go further, using Darwin's theory of sexual selection and Trivers's ideas on parental investment to explain why males should attempt to control female sexuality. From this perspective, the stage for the development under some cond...

In a highlighted text box (Random Samples, 19 July, p. 315), the headline “‘Sociobiology’ to history's dustbin?” is placed over a photograph of E. O. Wilson. The “news” is thin: a specialist journal has changed its name. Sociobiology was originally envisioned as the comparative,

In many species of monkeys and apes, sexual solicitations of males by females are more facultative and opportunistic than generally realized. Although female sexual solicitations peak at midcyle, solicitations and copulations are not necessarily confined to the days just around ovulation. Human female sexuality, and the physiological underpinnings...

A historical survey of the inheritance practices of farming families in North America and elsewhere indicates that resource allocations among children differed through time and space with regard to sex bias and equality. Tensions between provisioning all children and maintaining a productive economic entity (the farm) were resolved in various ways,...

Although thresholds for maternal investment may be set by evolved motivational processes, adjustments in parental investment are consciously calculated to achieve economic and cultural as well as biologically-based goals. Maternal decision-making is played out in specific demographic, ecological, and cultural contexts where maternal options are als...

We analyze the legacies of 1538 testate decedents from Sacramento, California 1890- 1984. Spouse and/or children received an average 92% of the estate. The few women who were survived by a spouse more often excluded their husbands in favor of their children than did husbands exclude wives. We explain this difference in spousal treat- ment in terms...

Abstract Early studies of primate social behavior were distorted by observational, methodological, and ideological biases that caused researchers to overlook active roles played by females in the social lives of monkeys. Primatology provides a particularly well documented case illustrating why research programs in the social and natural sciences ne...

Biologically based behaviors are viewed as highly situation dependent, constrained, and shaped by local history and environments. This perspective is illustrated by tracing through time changes in the patterning of parental behavior toward sons vs. daughters. Although it is assumed that decisions about parental investment are rooted in evolved pred...

Analysis of 645 conceptions by captive rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) with known reproductive histories indicated that maternal age and parity had little effect on the sex of progeny. There was, however, a slight indication that high-ranking females produced a higher proportion of daughters and relatively fewer sons than did low-ranking females....

Human disturbance of habitat has important consequences for the demography, the morbidity, the behavior, and ultimately the survival of non-human primates. This paper is an effort to define, qualitatively, the potential influence of humans on monkey habitats and behavior in South Asia. Four variables are proposed and scored on a fourpoint scale. Th...

Infanticide among animals is a widespread phenomenon with no unitary explanation. Although the detrimental outcome for the infant is fairly constant, individuals responsible for infanticide may or may not benefit, and when they gain in fitness there may be considerable variation in how they gain. Sources of increased fitness from infanticide includ...