You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Somewhere in Africa, more than a million years ago, a line of apes began to rear their young differently than their Great Ape ancestors. From this new form of care came new ways of engaging and understanding each other. How such singular human capacities evolved, and how they have kept us alive for thousands of generations, is the mystery revealed in this bold and wide-ranging new vision of human emotional evolution. Mothers and Others finds the key in the primatologically unique length of human childhood. If the young were to survive in a world of scarce food, they needed to be cared for, not only by their mothers but also by siblings, aunts, fathers, friends—and, with any luck, grandmoth...
The author dispels some of the myths about the nature of females and female sexuality, and suggests new hypotheses aboutthe evolution of women.
Sexual combat is not a monopoly of the human species. As Sarah Blaffer Hrdy argues in this spellbinding book, war between male and female animals has deep roots in evolutionary history. Her account of family life among hanuman langurs--the black-faced, gray monkeys inhabiting much of the Indian subcontinent--is written with force, wit, and at times, sorrow. Male hanumans, in pursuit of genetic success, routinely kill babies sired by their competitors. The mothers of endangered infants counter with various strategems to deceive the males and prevent destruction of their own offspring. Competition and selfishness are dominant themes of langur society. Competition among males for access to fema...
In this interpretation of the relationships between mothers and fathers, mothers and babies, and mothers and their social group, Hrdy offers a revolutionary new meaning to motherhood, and an important new understanding of human evolution.
What does it mean to be female? Sarah Blaffer Hrdy--a sociobiologist and a feminist--believes that evolutionary biology can provide some surprising answers. Surprising to those feminists who mistakenly think that biology can only work against women. And surprising to those biologists who incorrectly believe that natural selection operates only on males. In The Woman That Never Evolved we are introduced to our nearest female relatives competitive, independent, sexually assertive primates who have every bit as much at stake in the evolutionary game as their male counterparts do. These females compete among themselves for rank and resources, but will bond together for mutual defense. They risk ...
Recent field studies of a variety of mammalian species reveal a surprisingly high frequency of infanticide - the killing of unweaned or otherwise maternally dependent offspring. Similarly, studies of birds, fish, amphibians, and invertebrates demonstrate egg and larval mortality in these species, a phenomenon directly analogous to infanticide in mammals. In this collection, Hausfater and Hrdy draw together work on animal and human infanticide and place these studies in a broad evolutionary and comparative perspective.Infanticide presents the theoretical background and taxonomic distribution of infanticide, infanticide in nonhuman primates, infanticide in rodents, and infanticide in humans. I...
Sarah Hrdy argues that if human babies were to survive in a world of scarce resources, they would need to be cared for, not only by their mothers but also by siblings, aunts, fathers, friends—and, with any luck, grandmothers. Out of this complicated and contingent form of childrearing, says Hrdy, came the human capacity for understanding others.
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.
Infanticide in the natural world might be a relatively rare event, but as Amanda Rees shows, it has enormously significant consequences. Identified in the 1960s as a phenomenon worthy of investigation, infanticide had, by the 1970s, become the focus of serious controversy. The suggestion, by Sarah Hrdy, that it might be the outcome of an evolved strategy intended to maximize an individual’s reproductive success sparked furious disputes between scientists, disagreements that have continued down to the present day. Meticulously tracing the history of the infanticide debates, and drawing on extensive interviews with field scientists, Rees investigates key theoretical and methodological themes...
None