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Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies
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 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.
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 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.
432 pages, Hardcover
Published May 14, 2024
About the author
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
10 books104 followersSarah Blaffer Hrdy is an American anthropologist and primatologist who has made several major contributions to evolutionary psychology and sociobiology. She has been selected as one of the 21 “Leaders in Animal Behavior.”
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
August 16, 2024
I have been a long-term fan of Blaffer Hrdy’s and in particular, her work challenging male-centric views of human evolution by centring parenting and early childhood care as a driver of evolution. She has always focused, however, on the role of females in this development, grandmothers in particular as alloparents, and the role of post-birth hormones in mothers. So, learning she was working on a book looking at the role of male parenting was too interesting to pass up. Father Time is a solid look at male parenting, which does dart around on various topics, but overall presents an intriguing look at aspects of male parenting. This includes a range of animal studies, a delve into early human evolution, and studies on what happens to modern humans of various genders when they parent newborns. She focuses on behavioural studies and chemical analysis.
Findings covered include that males parent in various circumstances, that all alloparent humans get oxytocin boosts from being around newborns, and that adults will strongly bond with specific infants they care for, with or without a genetic connection to that child. Blaffer Hrdy speculates that the capacity to parent could run through an early evolved part of the brain, and that individuals within many species may have the capacity to act in nurturing ways in the right conditions, part of a flexibility. She doesn’t have enough evidence to do more than speculate however.
Blaffer Hrdy’s motivations are a little disconcerting, although some of the best parts of the book are where she mines those. She implies that a big part of her curiousity was watching her son-in-law, raised and living with different expectations to her husband, take an active parenting role. It is clear, that even before her grandchild was born, she was taking saliva samples from him, indicating a research interest so this narrative is not straightforward, but clearly the changing mores have challenged her assumptions. It is not surprising that Blaffer Hrdy would have biases - after all, her social and science worlds both assumed that nurture was associated with birthing and breastfeeding females, but for someone whose life work - whose groundbreaking life’s work is in this field, it is sobering. She interrogates this bias, and uses it to look at how this might impact other aspects of scientific enquiry. Ultimately, one of the book's great strengths is the window into the entwined personal and scientific lives of her and her colleagues.
Father Time feels more like the start of a conversation than its conclusion, and I hope there is more to come from various researchers trying to understand the complex worlds of humans and other species of parenting.
Findings covered include that males parent in various circumstances, that all alloparent humans get oxytocin boosts from being around newborns, and that adults will strongly bond with specific infants they care for, with or without a genetic connection to that child. Blaffer Hrdy speculates that the capacity to parent could run through an early evolved part of the brain, and that individuals within many species may have the capacity to act in nurturing ways in the right conditions, part of a flexibility. She doesn’t have enough evidence to do more than speculate however.
Blaffer Hrdy’s motivations are a little disconcerting, although some of the best parts of the book are where she mines those. She implies that a big part of her curiousity was watching her son-in-law, raised and living with different expectations to her husband, take an active parenting role. It is clear, that even before her grandchild was born, she was taking saliva samples from him, indicating a research interest so this narrative is not straightforward, but clearly the changing mores have challenged her assumptions. It is not surprising that Blaffer Hrdy would have biases - after all, her social and science worlds both assumed that nurture was associated with birthing and breastfeeding females, but for someone whose life work - whose groundbreaking life’s work is in this field, it is sobering. She interrogates this bias, and uses it to look at how this might impact other aspects of scientific enquiry. Ultimately, one of the book's great strengths is the window into the entwined personal and scientific lives of her and her colleagues.
Father Time feels more like the start of a conversation than its conclusion, and I hope there is more to come from various researchers trying to understand the complex worlds of humans and other species of parenting.
July 30, 2024
Father Time is the culmination of ten years of research and thinking by the esteemed anthropologist and veteran of the sociobiology wars, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. It is a comprehensive exploration of the evolutionary history of paternal care in humans. The dedication of modern fathers is often viewed as an unnatural, tenuous construction, but Hrdy argues parental care capabilities are embedded deep in our genome and can be as strong in men as women.
Inspired by witnessing the touching dedication of her son and son-in-laws as they became fathers, Hrdy began researching the biology of fatherhood, wondering if her discipline has overlooked a paternal instinct. Emerging science describing endocrinological and biopsychological changes in the fathers of infants also convinced Hrdy to dig deeper. In Father Time, she surveys paternal care across the animal kingdom and recapitulates human ethnographies of paternal care in ancestral niches to argue both that there is a latent biological substrate for paternal care and that paternal commitment in humans has been shaped by the forces of evolution. After assembling this evidence, she makes two main arguments: 1) There is almost certainly a latent capacity for the tender care that can be activated by certain conditions like proximity to infants. 2) Social selection forces rather than sexual selection alone tempered male status competition and re-direct males toward provisioning, protecting, and caring actions.
Hrdy's heterodox perspective gently rebukes both hardcore adaptionist and social constructionist theories, spooling out many interesting ideas becoming increasingly salient in the advanced world where men and women have become increasingly estranged and fertility has declined.
Extended book review at Substack
Some Notes:
-According to the Standard Cross-Culture Sample of 186 human societies just 27% report the regular presence of the father at the birth of his child.
-Among the closest great ape relations (chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, bonobos) infant care is exclusively female.
- At most 5% of the world’s 5400 mammalian species have any direct male care of babies. (Hrdy borrows the high end of an estimate from Rogers and Bales [2019] which was based on survey of 2545 species by Lukas and Clutton-Brock [2013].
-The work of Hrdy and others has shown that infanticide of unrelated infants is a primate-wide reproductive strategy. In other words, it provides a sexually selective advantage to the males that practice it.
-The Bruce Effect - spontaneous abortion subsequent pregnant females mere detection of an unknown male in her vicinity (in mice)
-Intimate Fathers by Barry Hewlett reported that men of the Aka, a group of Central African foragers, spend 50% of a day within arms reach of infants and interact with them fondly ~10% of that time. They also hold young infants (1-4 months of age) for almost a quarter of that time. This is the highest rate of paternal involvement ever recorded in an ancestral-like hunter-gatherer setting.
-Within 6 months following birth, the baseline levels of oxytocin in new fathers approaches the average levels in mothers. What oxytocin does and how exactly it does it is still poorly understood but it is correlated with affectionate contact.
-fMRI work on mothers vs fathers shows primordial regions activation in the brainstem (hypothalamic circuits) of mothers while that father response is in cortical areas of the brain (superior temporal sulcus and medial prefrontal cortex).
Inspired by witnessing the touching dedication of her son and son-in-laws as they became fathers, Hrdy began researching the biology of fatherhood, wondering if her discipline has overlooked a paternal instinct. Emerging science describing endocrinological and biopsychological changes in the fathers of infants also convinced Hrdy to dig deeper. In Father Time, she surveys paternal care across the animal kingdom and recapitulates human ethnographies of paternal care in ancestral niches to argue both that there is a latent biological substrate for paternal care and that paternal commitment in humans has been shaped by the forces of evolution. After assembling this evidence, she makes two main arguments: 1) There is almost certainly a latent capacity for the tender care that can be activated by certain conditions like proximity to infants. 2) Social selection forces rather than sexual selection alone tempered male status competition and re-direct males toward provisioning, protecting, and caring actions.
Hrdy's heterodox perspective gently rebukes both hardcore adaptionist and social constructionist theories, spooling out many interesting ideas becoming increasingly salient in the advanced world where men and women have become increasingly estranged and fertility has declined.
Extended book review at Substack
Some Notes:
-According to the Standard Cross-Culture Sample of 186 human societies just 27% report the regular presence of the father at the birth of his child.
-Among the closest great ape relations (chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, bonobos) infant care is exclusively female.
- At most 5% of the world’s 5400 mammalian species have any direct male care of babies. (Hrdy borrows the high end of an estimate from Rogers and Bales [2019] which was based on survey of 2545 species by Lukas and Clutton-Brock [2013].
-The work of Hrdy and others has shown that infanticide of unrelated infants is a primate-wide reproductive strategy. In other words, it provides a sexually selective advantage to the males that practice it.
-The Bruce Effect - spontaneous abortion subsequent pregnant females mere detection of an unknown male in her vicinity (in mice)
-Intimate Fathers by Barry Hewlett reported that men of the Aka, a group of Central African foragers, spend 50% of a day within arms reach of infants and interact with them fondly ~10% of that time. They also hold young infants (1-4 months of age) for almost a quarter of that time. This is the highest rate of paternal involvement ever recorded in an ancestral-like hunter-gatherer setting.
-Within 6 months following birth, the baseline levels of oxytocin in new fathers approaches the average levels in mothers. What oxytocin does and how exactly it does it is still poorly understood but it is correlated with affectionate contact.
-fMRI work on mothers vs fathers shows primordial regions activation in the brainstem (hypothalamic circuits) of mothers while that father response is in cortical areas of the brain (superior temporal sulcus and medial prefrontal cortex).
September 19, 2024
Loved this, such a thoughtful, creative, somewhat quirky engagement with the biological roots of “new” models of fatherhood, written by an accomplished primatologist and evolutionary biologist. And mother. Lots of speculation in here and a somewhat confusing structure but overall thought it was great.
July 27, 2024
This book is not what I was expecting, but offered intriguing insight into theories of how evolution may play a role in the involvement of men in caring for Children. I enjoyed the science explaining how men are just as capable of becoming care givers and how anyone who chooses to care for an infant biologically will change, just as mothers have been known to do.
August 2, 2024
A very interesting blend of disciplines to consider recent research regarding shifts in the male brain and endocrine system when spending extended time caring for young children. Hrdy considers anthropology, evolution, biology, chemistry, sociology and more in order to build a solid argument that societies are better for everyone when men undergo these changes and thinking through reasoning for why those societies haven't always (or even often) happened along with considering the implications of more male child-rearing in America and other modern cultures.
June 9, 2024
Los primeros capítulos fueron bastante buenos, pero en general el libro no mantuvo mi atención como esperaba. Me pareció que la autora desviaba su atención hacia temas que no estaban directamente relacionados con el tema central del libro, extendiéndose demasiado en estas secciones. Además, casi todo el contenido trataba conceptos con los que ya estaba muy familiarizado, por lo que me salté gran parte. No pude terminar los dos últimos capítulos; tal vez los lea más adelante. Para alguien con pocos conocimientos previos sobre el tema, la experiencia de lectura podría ser diferente.
June 16, 2024
This was one of my first books and really deep dive into evolutionary biology and history, so I thought it was really informative but may be old hat to more knowledgeable folks. Really, I think the message of this book that I took away is that even "nature" (especially nature!) is a lot more malleable than most people think. From gender roles to natural selection this gave me a lot of hope in American society and the dad's of tomorrow 🥹
June 23, 2024
A highly well researched book which takes the evolving behavior of males in our society and makes sense of where our society is headed. There were snipets of societal perspectives within the indigenous peoples of the Americas. I would like to have seen some comparison to the present day attitudes in Latin America.
August 10, 2024
Item was definitely written as a topic paper. Had go insight into why males started to play a more involved part in our children lives, but expected a little less science and more stories.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews