In Father Time, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s Prejudices Spoil an Otherwise Brilliant Book

Modern women have been wary of the ideas of Charles Darwin for understandable reasons. You don’t have to be capital "F" feminist to find some of the eminent Victorian’s language hopelessly archaic. Evolution, he wrote, selected for males who were not only larger and stronger than females, but more likely to” be courageous, pugnacious and energetic … [with] a more inventive genius.” He and his followers viewed males as active players in the animal and human world, competing for status, hunting game, and inventing tools, while females were passive creatures whose primary role was to produce and tend to babies. The best women could hope for was the ability to choose their mates; this was no small responsibility since the decision could spell the difference between a weak offspring or a survivor who could pass on her genes, but it was hardly an alpha-level assignment. So, yes, feminists have been soured on Darwin. If his theory is the whole story, nature itself is every bit as sexist as a Hollywood Golden Age casting director.    

Eventually and naturally, if you will, women stepped in with various counterarguments. In the 1960’s and 70’s as the field of sociobiology—a controversial discipline locating Darwinian strains in animal and human behavior—became fashionable, and as the number of women scientists grew, annoyed grad students and younger scientists proposed modifications to bring evolution into balance with modern experience. Perhaps the most prolific and best known of these Darwin reformers is the anthropologist, primatologist, writer, and minor TED celebrity, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy.

Many decades later, Hrdy is still going strong. Her latest contribution to reform Darwinism is her sixth book, Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies. More than some of her doctrinaire peers, Hrdy has a knack for making difficult scientific concepts accessible to lay readers and for using a creative but scientifically disciplined lens to analyze female behavior in the animal and hunter-gatherer world. There’s a good reason for her fame, which makes it all the more disappointing that she—perhaps even more than Darwin—is still captured by the prejudices of her own time.  

Perhaps the most stubborn irritant in Darwin’s work for some modern women was its implicit justification of the male breadwinner/female homemaker model of marriage. Women were biologically designed to make them singularly invested in caring for their young, went the original Darwin line. Males, busy trying to improve their status and spread their genes as widely as possible, were lacking such an instinct. They were fathers in a biological sense, but they had little drive to hold or nourish their infants. As a young woman, mother, and novitiate scholar—and despite her obvious brilliance and intellectual ambition—Hrdy herself fully accepted both presumptions. In the primate world, her theory implied, mothers were not just the primary parent, aside from the genetic contributions of males, they were the only parent. In the young Hrdy household, as in almost all households at the time, things were much the same. 

But with the publication of her 2009 book Mothers and Others, Hrdy introduced a more expansive view of caretaking responsibility. During the Pleistocene era, (2.6 million–11,700 years ago), homo erectus leapfrogged beyond his primate forebears and evolved to become more cooperative. For the first time, an animal began sharing food and living in small cohesive groups. Another sign of this evolutionary advance, she proposed, was the emergence of “allomothers,” who shared the tasks of infant care. Whereas chimp mothers, for example, nursed their babies for at least three or four years, alone and unprotected in the face of environmental dangers that might include violent male relatives, human mothers were able to count on others. Allomothers were not just babysitters; they increased the chances that the young would survive.

Allomothers were generally kin such as grandmothers and older siblings—almost always women. That’s why years later, Hrdy, now a grandmother herself, was astounded to watch her son-in-law cuddling, soothing, and even changing his infant daughter’s diaper, something, she explains, she had never seen any man do—not even her own relatively supportive husband. To her amazement, men like her son-in-law seemed to be evolving into full-fledged allomothers.

That probably doesn’t surprise most men and women today; there have been huge cultural and economic changes in the past half century that have led fathers to man the very nursery that was likely terra incognita for their own dads. Hrdy deepens our understanding beyond culture for understanding this shift. Male nurture is common in the animal kingdom, she observes. The trait is especially notable among fish and egg-laying birds. Sea horse fathers famously gestate eggs deposited by females in a “brood pouch” near their tail, while in some species of birds, males take turns sitting on the eggs laid by their female mates. Darwin himself had noticed that capons go even further: in addition to helping to incubate eggs, they tend to the chicks after they hatch. He reached an extraordinary conclusion for his time, though one that will be almost prosaic for contemporary young men and women, that “secondary characteristics of each sex lie dormant in the opposite sex.” 

Her central observation that men have caretaking instincts...doesn’t settle many of the intersexual tensions in modern life. Hrdy surely knows this, but that doesn’t prevent her from grabbing the baton of male caretaking and racing it straight to a post-feminist utopia.

Thanks to the findings of endocrinologists, geneticists, neurologists, and mobile technologies that make it possible to, for instance, calculate hormone levels of subjects in the wild, Hrdy is able to bring measurable scientific precision to Darwin’s guesswork. Scientists have discovered that as males spend more time around the young, their testosterone levels go down while their oxytocin levels rise, something that occurs with human males as well. This means those males become less aggressive, calmer, and more attached to both their infants and those infants’ mothers. Another less familiar hormone, prolactin, also rises in baby-attached males. Prolactin is a substance necessary for breast-feeding by mammals. Hrdy argues that similar neural circuits that appear in fish and birds lie in wait in “Mother Nature’s cupboard” and remain latent in the brains of humans. Evolution has made sure that babies will be just about irresistible—their smells, their playful clumsiness, their big helpless eyes—so that they can trigger the suppressed caretaking instincts of the fiercest gorilla and presumably even the likes of John Wayne or Rambo. 

This makes the existence of infanticide, far from uncommon in the animal world, a puzzle. Hrdy has long been fascinated by this topic that seemed so at odds with Darwinian prediction. Studying the langar monkeys of India, she discovered that it was outsider males who killed the infants of a given troop, not the potential fathers or allies in that group. Furthermore, the outsiders only attacked still-nursing babies. She concluded that the marauders were looking to impregnate females; by no longer having a baby to nurse, the mother was likely to become fertile again. Hrdy surmises that outside threats like these infanticidal males incentivized fathers to stay close to a female after mating. They had a big genetic stake in protecting both her and their shared offspring from any scoundrels. Such are the twists and turns of evolution that the horror of animal infanticide turns out to become a civilizing effect on male behavior. More generally, dangers, though often initiated by males, also “mellowed” males’ harsher instincts, and eons later, turned them into alloparents.

In other words, the threat of other animals, food scarcity, and environmental hazards turned humans into the most social of social animals. Cooperation meant safety in numbers, especially when it came to the survival of the young. Spending more time in proximity to babies, in turn, triggered the nurturing hormones and brain synapses of males. By the last quarter of the Pleistocene, humans were well on their way to becoming some of the most cooperative mammals on the planet. No other primate shares food as readily, or engages in cooperative breeding, or is as skilled at teamwork, Hrdy observes. Even unmarried males in forager societies regularly provide food for women and children who are not their own. In Hrdy’s telling, then, babies were the prime mover for the emergence of human sociality.

Hrdy’s findings are appealing to the contemporary mind and should be catnip to the host of women questioning sex roles in our own culture. But they shouldn’t get too excited. Hrdy’s central observation that men have caretaking instincts and under the right environmental conditions are capable of tending to infants and children—though undoubtedly true—doesn’t begin to settle many of the intersexual tensions in modern life. Indeed, it raises questions of its own. Hrdy surely knows this, but that doesn’t prevent her from grabbing the baton of male caretaking and racing it straight to a post-feminist utopia.  

Global politics cannot be reduced to hormones.

Despite the protection they have provided females and the young for millions of years, Hrdy concludes that the male sex is the cause of existential problems like nuclear proliferation and climate change. “Why wouldn’t the well-being of the planet and their own genetic posterity matter to power-wielding men as much as it does to me?” she asks in frustration. If more men were engaged in baby care and let their testosterone melt away, she suggests, it would change “norms around masculinity and manhood,” and the world would become safe, clean, and peaceful. 

Color me doubtful. Let’s imagine that Donald Trump had spent his twenties and thirties changing diapers and warming up bottles of frozen breast milk; and let’s suppose, further, that Hillary Clinton had become president in 2016. She would still have had to deal with oxytocin-deprived Vladimir Putin, Ayatollah Khomenei, and Xi Jinping looking for opportunities to assert their interests. And while there’s no question that females are less prone than males to physical violence, we are far from paragons of peace, love, and understanding. Women have our own ways of stirring up trouble through indirect aggression like self-promotion, gossip, damaging the reputations of competitors. Global politics cannot be reduced to hormones.

Hrdy uses her expertise to comment on family policy with equally dubious results. She proposes that “paternal certainty,” formerly thought to be crucial for ensuring male investment in their young, is not essential and reflects the “idealization of the 'traditional' post-industrial nuclear family.” It’s well known that stepfathers are far more likely to abuse their current partners’ children than biological fathers. How does Hrdy square that fact with her skepticism about the nuclear family? “More than a third of all children in the U.S. grew up in blended families,” she adds breezily, “yet the incidence of infanticide by males is low” compared to apes—afar from a reassuring conclusion.  

To downgrade paternal certainty further, she cites research showing that gay fathers are more affectionate and responsive than heterosexual fathers. If true, it’s still a spurious comparison. A minority of gay men are coupled up, and of those that are, about 10% are raising children. Given that the total gay male population is probably less than 5% of the total population of men, we are being asked to compare an extremely small, self-selected, and relatively affluent population with an enormous population of men of all classes. Treading close to parody, she goes on to a refer approvingly to a documentary film called “The Seahorse: The Dad Who Gave Birth” about a transgender man who decided to reverse his hormone treatments, become pregnant, and give birth to a baby.

Finally, I fear that Hrdy gives a misleading impression of the interchangeability of the sexes. She lingers over examples that show males in their maternal glory, while underplaying data that demonstrates the paucity of actual co-parenting. Yes, male sea horses incubate the eggs of lady sea horses, but as her own book suggests, they are the aquatic exception: only 25% of all fish species have any paternal brooding. Among mammals, as she notes, direct male care of newborns is unknown and of older babies is rare; only 5% of 5400 kinds of baby mammals get a noticeable amount of dad time. Hunter gatherer groups are similarly indifferent about male infant care. Aka men—central African foragers with the highest rate of paternal involvement discovered by anthropologists—hug and nuzzle their newborns, but they hold their one- to four-month-olds only 22% of the time; mothers do the lion’s share of keeping them out of harm’s way. 

Hrdy is right that there are considerable numbers of young fathers like her son-in-law who are fully engaged, (sorta) equal co-parents with their child’s mother. I know quite a few. But I also know that many of their wives and partners have one favorite topic of conversation: the incompetence of their spouses. Stories of men who give the wrong dose of medicine to the 3-month-old, forget to arrange for a sitter, dress the baby in a sundress in the dead of winter, or other similarly eye-rolling acts of carelessness are legion. 

At a time when scientific expertise is being put under the microscope by an increasingly skeptical public, researchers need to examine their priors with great care. The differences between men and women, fathers and mothers won’t be clarified by motivated reasoning of the sort that mars the many ingenious ideas in Hrdy’s Father Time.

Kay S. Hymowitz is the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. She writes extensively on childhood, family issues, poverty, and cultural change in America.

Editor's Note: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or views of the Institute for Family Studies.