Overview

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 realised 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.

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9780691238777

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Reviews

"""An outstanding examination of the history and science of fatherhood.... Revelatory scientific studies shedding light on men’s biological proclivity for caring...complement the edifying history. It amounts to an invaluable deep history of dads."" * Publishers Weekly starred review *"

"""An outstanding examination of the history and science of fatherhood.... Revelatory scientific studies shedding light on men’s biological proclivity for caring...complement the edifying history. It amounts to an invaluable deep history of dads."" * Publishers Weekly *"

"""A New Statesman Best Book of the Academic Presses"" ""An outstanding examination of the history and science of fatherhood.... Revelatory scientific studies shedding light on men’s biological proclivity for caring...complement the edifying history. It amounts to an invaluable deep history of dads."" * Publishers Weekly starred review * ""Both cultural norms and evolutionary science have long held that caring for babies is primarily the woman’s domain. But when the anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy noticed that the role of fathers was changing, her research led her to discover the profound biological and social implications of a nurturing masculinity."" * New Statesman * ""a rich journey for the reader that not only provides a greater understanding of the evolution of fatherhood but also demonstrates how...the researcher’s personal experiences...can spawn new perspectives and insights....This is a remarkable book, filled with detailed scientific information, expert interpretations of the data, and a brilliant narrative voice.""---Richard Bribiescas, Harvard Magazine ""I turned to [Father Time] seeking validation and found something much better: the complete destabilization of my concept of paternity.""---Dan Piepenbring, Harper's Magazine ""[Sarah Bluffer Hrdy] is a rare science writer who combines mastery of her field with warm, readable prose. . . . Her life’s work has been to reinvent the way we think about ourselves, and to disentangle gender myths from the more flexible truths about human behaviour.""---Sunday Times, Sarah Ditum"

"""A New Statesman Best Book of the Academic Presses"" ""An outstanding examination of the history and science of fatherhood.... Revelatory scientific studies shedding light on men’s biological proclivity for caring...complement the edifying history. It amounts to an invaluable deep history of dads."" * Publishers Weekly starred review * ""Both cultural norms and evolutionary science have long held that caring for babies is primarily the woman’s domain. But when the anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy noticed that the role of fathers was changing, her research led her to discover the profound biological and social implications of a nurturing masculinity."" * New Statesman * ""a rich journey for the reader that not only provides a greater understanding of the evolution of fatherhood but also demonstrates how...the researcher’s personal experiences...can spawn new perspectives and insights....This is a remarkable book, filled with detailed scientific information, expert interpretations of the data, and a brilliant narrative voice.""---Richard Bribiescas, Harvard Magazine ""I turned to [Father Time] seeking validation and found something much better: the complete destabilization of my concept of paternity.""---.Dan Piepenbring, Harper's Magazine"

Author Information

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy is professor emerita of anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of The Woman That Never Evolved, Mother Nature, and Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding.

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