"Why have biologists so neglected fatherhood? Thus begins a profound new study from Hrdy, widely seen as one of evolutionary biology’s most important thinkers since Darwin. With smoothness and authority, she demolishes old ideas of essential differences between the sexes, and shows how social change is liberating men’s desire to be child-carers."

"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."

"A New Statesman Best Book of the Academic Presses"

"Father Time will change minds, but more importantly, it points the way to a different type of science, one that takes into account how culture shapes biology and doesn’t stand apart from it. . . . Hrdy is, without exaggeration, one of the most important thinkers in evolutionary biology since Darwin . . . Her beautiful writing retains as much power to astound and educate as ever."—-Angela Saini, Telegraph

"Hrdy’s writing is a joy to read. . . . Father Time will be valued by anyone interested in male care of infants and children. Hrdy’s broad, accessible writing will appeal to non-scientists, but her peers will appreciate her summary of current research on the hormonal and neurobiological aspects of male care. As a biological anthropologist focused on fatherhood and men’s investments in children, I certainly learnt a great deal."—-Kermyt G. Anderson, Nature

"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 Blaffer 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."—-Sarah Ditum, Sunday Times

★ 2024-06-08
A revolutionary look at the "mother" in men.

Hrdy is the visionary anthropologist who, with colleagues, discovered the importance of allomothering (co-parenting by groups other than the mother) to the evolution of big-brained humans. Our brains are so complex that they need years to fully mature, which could have slowedHomo sapiens’ population growth and led to extinction. However, with allomothers—often, menopausal women with time to help raise children—primary mothers could produce more children faster, ensuring survival. The work rocked anthropology, but Hrdy wasn’t done. Recently, watching her son-in-law take exquisite care of his infant, she began to wonder if she needed to redefine the termallomother. She tested her saliva, and that of her husband, for the nurturing hormone oxytocin before and during a period when they cradled their grandchild. Her oxytocin rose significantly. The shocker: Her husband’s oxytocin levels rose slowly at first, but within hours, matched hers. Soon after, the author discovered that tests for nurturing hormones, from estrogen to prolactin, delivered similar results in many men worldwide after prolonged exposure to babies. Are men as endocrinologically transformed and neurologically transformed, in both frontal cortex and evolutionarily ancient brain areas, as women by prolonged close proximity to babies? If so, does this mean men can “mother”—biologically—as well as women? Hrdy plunged into research, taking her from current labs and hunter-gathering groups back to the Pleistocene. She found the answer was, very likely, yes and yes. Together with that earlier work, Hrdy has now gone a long way to persuasively argue that humans, femaleand male, are more communal than competitive and that this quality, more than any other, has led to our primacy in the animal kingdom.

A mesmerizing, masterfully written book on the transformative power of human parenting.