Binding: Hardcover
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.
Title: Father Time A Natural History Of Men And Babies
Author(s): Hrdy Sarah Blaffer
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Barcode: 9780691238777
Pages: 432 Pages, 37 B/W Illus.
Publication Date: 5/14/2024
Category: Human Biology