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Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
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Description for Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding
Paperback. 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, grandmothers. This title finds the key in the primatologically length of human childhood. Num Pages: 432 pages, 52 halftones. BIC Classification: JHMC; JMC; JMD. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 233 x 156 x 25. Weight in Grams: 668.
“A brilliant work on a profoundly important subject. The leading scientific authority on motherhood has come through again.” —E. O. Wilson
“Thought provoking…An engaging and compelling argument [that] requires us to rethink entrenched views about how we came to be human.” —Science
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 ... Read morethousands 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, grandmothers. Out of this complicated and contingent form of childrearing, Sarah Hrdy argues, came the human capacity for understanding others. Mothers and others teach us who will care, and who will not.
From its opening vision of “apes on a plane”; to descriptions of baby care among marmosets, chimpanzees, wolves, and lions; to explanations about why men in hunter-gatherer societies hunt together, Mothers and Others is compellingly readable. But it is also an intricately knit argument that ever since the Pleistocene, it has taken a village to raise children—and how that gave our ancient ancestors the first push on the path toward becoming emotionally modern human beings.
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Product Details
Publisher
Harvard University Press
Place of Publication
Cambridge, Mass., United States
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
About Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis.
Reviews for Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy is one of the most original and influential minds in evolutionary anthropology…[Her] gracefully written, expert account of human behavior focuses on the positive, and its most important contribution is to give cooperation its rightful place in child care. Through a lifetime of pathbreaking work, she has repeatedly undermined our complacent, solipsistic, masculine notions of what women were ... Read moremeant ‘by nature’ to be. Here as elsewhere she urges caution and compassion toward women whose maternal role must be constantly rethought and readjusted to meet the demands of a changing world.
Melvin Konner
New York Review of Books
An engaging and compelling argument for an evolutionary history of cooperative offspring care that requires us to rethink entrenched views about how we came to be human…Fascinating, readable…Her thought-provoking book will interest students, specialists, and general readers alike and should focus attention on the neglected roles of mothers and others within human evolutionary theory.
Gillian R. Brown
Science
One of the boldest thinkers in her field…Her book is at once entertaining, full of apt, often colorful anecdotes, sometimes culled from her own experiences, and rich with information and case studies…A sweeping new meta-paradigm.
Michele Pridmore-Brown
Times Literary Supplement
Hrdy's lucid and comprehensively researched book takes us to the heart of what it means to be human.
Camilla Power
Times Higher Education
Another mind-expanding, paradigm-shifting, rigorously scientific yet eminently readable treatise…Overflowing with fascinating information and thinking. It's a book you read, pausing regularly to consider the full import of what you just read…Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has added another enormous building block to our thinking about our origins with this new book. Our species is lucky to have her.
Claudia Casper
Globe and Mail
Understanding the evolution of the human mind has become the holy grail of modern evolutionary anthropology and evolutionary psychology, and those who pursue it feel themselves closing in on something big. Mothers and Others is a heroic contribution to this quest…Once again, Hrdy has woven together strands of material from many sources into an elegant tapestry of insight and logic, emblazoned with her vision of who we are, and why.
Peter Ellison
Evolutionary Psychology
Our capacity to cooperate in groups, to empathize with others and to wonder what others are thinking and feeling—all these traits, Hrdy argues, probably arose in response to the selective pressures of being in a cooperatively breeding social group, and the need to trust and rely on others and be deemed trustworthy and reliable in turn.
Natalie Angier
New York Times
For as long as she's been a sociobiologist, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has been playfully dismantling traditional notions of motherhood and gender relations…Hrdy paints a picture of a cooperative breeding culture in which parenting duties were spread out across a network of friends and relatives. The effect on our development was profound.
Julia Wallace
Salon
Beginning with her opening conceit of apes on an airplane (you wouldn't want to be on this flight) and continuing through her informed insights into the behavior of other species, Hrdy’s reasoning is fascinating to follow.
Michelle Press
Scientific American
Provocative…The most refreshing aspect of [this] book is the challenge [it] offers to what we thought we already knew.
John Odling-Smee
Nature
Compelling and wide-ranging…Hrdy sets out to explain the mystery of how humans evolved into cooperative apes. The demands of raising our slow-growing and energetically expensive offspring led to cooperative child-rearing, she argues, which was key to our survival.
Alison Motluk
New Scientist
One of the essential points of Mothers and Others is that aggression and competition have been given far too central a place in the standard accounts of how our species came into being. From Charles Darwin onward, those accounts are mostly the work of men, and Hrdy points out in meticulous detail how partial and biased was their understanding of the remote past…Mothers and Others offers enormous rewards. It is not only revolutionary; it is also wise and humane.
Mark Abley
Calgary Herald
As was the case for her earlier classic, Mother Nature, Sarah Hrdy's Mothers and Others is a brilliant work on a profoundly important subject. The leading scientific authority on motherhood has come through again.
E. O. Wilson In the study of mothering, Sarah Hrdy has no peer. In Mothers and Others, we are treated to Hrdy's infectious writing, taking the reader on a tour of our evolved history as a cooperatively parenting species. The ideas are big, bold, and brain-bending.
Marc Hauser, author of Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong Boldly conceived and beautifully written, Mothers and Others makes a strong case that we humans are (or should be) cooperative breeders. It is an indispensable contribution to the debate about how and why we came to be the most successful primate of them all.
Melvin Konner, author of The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit Show Less
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