S5 E6 - Sarah Blaffer Hrdy on ‘Rethinking our Starting Assumptions’

“I love your field. It is making such an important point about scientists who don't understand the extent to which our own upbringing impacts our starting assumptions. It's those starting assumptions that get you in trouble.”  

In today’s episode Samara Greenwood returns to interview the pioneering primatologist and evolutionary anthropologist, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, about her latest book Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies. The discussion centres on the shifts Sarah made in her personal assumptions through the process of conceiving and writing this work. The notion that men had the capacity to be expert carers of young babies was foreign to Sarah until she experienced it firsthand when her son-in-law took on the role of primary carer to her first-born grandson in 2012. This ‘lived experience’ of expert male care led Sarah not only to a new mindset, but to a new way of theorising about the evolutionary possibilities for baby-care in men. 

Relevant Links:  

• Sarah B. Hrdy | Anthropology 
• Father Time | Princeton University Press 
• Should We Expect More from Dads? | Featuring Sarah Hrdy | The New Yorker 
• How Feminism changed Primatology | Featuring Samara Greenwood | The Philosopher’s Zone 

For more on the topic of supporting men in their care of children, see our series on working fathers.  

Working Fathers Podcast Mini-Series:  

• Working Fathers Mini-series. Ep 1 - Where's Dad? 
• Working Fathers Mini-series. Ep 2 - What Gave Rise to the Breadwinner? 
• Working Fathers Mini-series. Ep 3 - Are Fathers Free? 
• Working Fathers Mini-series. Ep 4 - Give Dads a Break 
• Working Fathers Mini-series. Ep 5 - What's Next?
   

Thanks for listening to The HPS Podcast. You can find more about us on our website, Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook feeds.

This podcast would not be possible without the support of School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne and the Hansen Little Public Humanities Grant scheme.

Music by ComaStudio.
Website HPS Podcast | hpsunimelb.org

Transcript

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy on ‘Rethinking our Starting Assumptions’  

Transcript 

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy: “I love your field, and I think it's making such an important point about scientists, who take pride in [our] objectivity but don't understand the extent to which our own habitus or our own upbringing impact our starting assumptions. It's those starting assumptions that get you in trouble.”  

Samara Greenwood: Hi and welcome to The HPS Podcast. I am Samara Greenwood, returning to the pod as guest interviewer. Today I am talking with the pioneering primatologist and evolutionary anthropologist, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, about her latest book – Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies.  

Sarah’s scientific work first became prominent – and controversial – when she published her theory about the evolutionary advantages of infanticide in groups of langur monkeys in the 1970s. On realising that female agency and female evolutionary strategies were not being treated seriously by many, she then wrote the equally famous book The Woman that Never Evolved.  

In her recent work, Sarah has centred her attention on the important role played in infant care by those who are not the mother. In fact, it was Sarah who popularised the term ‘allomother’ – meaning ‘other than mother’ – to examine the co-operative rearing of young across many mammals, including humans. Her current book centres not only on the role of fathers, but of men more generally, in the care of babies. 

As our podcast is about all things History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science, I focused our discussion on the shifts Sarah made in her own thinking, in her own founding assumptions, about the possibilities for men in caring for babies, throughout the process of conceiving and working through her scientific project. 

As you will hear, Sarah grew up in a particularly patriarchal environment - born into a wealthy Texan oil family and later entering a very male-dominated scientific domain at Harvard. The concept that men had the capacity to be expert carers of young babies remained completely foreign to her, until she experienced it firsthand when her son-in-law took on the role of primary carer to her first-born grandson. This personal experience then led Sarah to a whole new line of research on the evolutionary possibilities for care in men, with the evidence she found shifting her thinking even further. 

I think this is a wonderful example of the ways in which changes in society, and personal experiences of those changes, can help us realise the limited views within which previous scientific work was conducted. This can open us up, first, to viewing scientific problems from new perspectives and, second, to eventually producing more accurate, and more rational, scientific theories. 

Samara Greenwood: Welcome to The HPS Podcast, Sarah, we are thrilled you could join us today. 

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy: Well, I'm thrilled to be part of it. 

Samara Greenwood: To start, we would love to hear the backstory to your career, how did you end up in sociobiology with that particular focus on gender roles and parenting? 

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy: Without any prior planning! 

I was at Wellesley, a women's college, where my grandmother and my mother had gone, and I wanted to be a novelist. I was working on a novel about women of Maya descent, and I thought, ‘Oh, if I am writing about these people, I really should learn something about the ancient Maya.’ So, I transferred from Wellesley to the women's part of Harvard, Radcliffe, to study with the great Mayanist, Evon Vogt.  

The novel never got written, but I ended up writing a book - a structural analysis of Mayan myths. I really enjoyed working on this, but I did not want a career in academics and I didn't want to go back to Central America to work because I had spent enough time in Guatemala and Chiapas to know that if you go on working in that part of the world, you're going to want to become a revolutionary, because the Indians were being treated so badly, and I knew that I was temperamentally unsuited to be a revolutionary. 

But, to graduate from Radcliffe, I had had to take some kind of science course. I had chosen primate behaviour and one of the first courses on primate behaviour taught in the United States was being taught by a newly admitted professor there, Irven DeVore. There wasn't even a textbook. But I remember this one thing, it was just stashed away in my personal cabinet of curiosities, about these monkeys that supposedly, because they were crowded at very high population densities, had sunk into a situation where males were lashing out and attacking and killing infants. So, these reports of infanticide were due to population density. I thought, 'Oh my goodness, I’m going to go to India. I'm going to study these monkeys. It will be a case study in how crowding produces social pathology.'  

The summer after my first full year in graduate school, I went to India. Well, by the end of my first field season, I realized, ‘My hypothesis is wrong. These monkeys in town are at very high densities and the males are completely tolerant of babies. They only get upset when one of these all-male bands is roaming around and getting too close for comfort and then the males get very agitated.’ 

Then, while I was there, one of these all-male bands ousted the resident male and took over the group. Even though this is what I had first come there to study, I couldn't believe it when one day, I went and there was a new male there and there were no infants. That was just the beginning of realising, ‘My hypothesis is wrong. I need to rethink this.’ 

I got back to Harvard and over in biology what was being called, 'a new science of sociobiology' was brewing. [This involved] evolutionary perspectives, taking into account history and looking for patterns and then comparing across species. This was very familiar terrain to me because I had been doing the structural analysis of myths, and it's a way of using logic to make sense of things. But! You have to do all your homework first and you have to be willing to speculate. This was all just happy making to me and I loved it. 

There was a very brilliant young graduate student there [Robert Trivers] who was co-teaching some of Irv DeVore's courses for him over in anthropology. He was talking about sexual selection, Darwin's theory of sexual selection, and this ‘new’ idea from Darwin made a lot of sense, and it made sense of what I was seeing. 

As I would eventually figure out, in the case of infanticide males were eliminating the offspring of a previous male in order to end lactational amenorrhea (which is when a female is no longer ovulating, as she's nursing an infant) so the new male could breed [with the females] sooner. These males were basically eliminating the last choice that female had made, so it was a more extreme form of sexual selection. 

There was just one problem, which was I had been so innocent of feminism growing up, but it was seeping into my awareness. This was the early seventies, and it was obvious to me how androcentric field primatology was at that time. When they were looking at parental behaviour over in my field, they were just looking at what the males were doing, and they had just assumed that one female was just like every other female. She was just reproducing and making a baby all through her life and they were leaving out so much that was going on in females. 

When I wrote my PhD thesis on langurs, a lot of it was about male reproductive strategies, and infanticide as a male reproductive strategy, adaptive for the males who succeed at it. I realized while I was doing this work though, that females were doing an awful lot that was being left out. You see, the female counterstrategy to infanticide was flexible sexuality, so they could meet with multiple males to manipulate the information about paternity. That way it's not promiscuous in my view, it's just assiduously maternal. It's a way to keep their babies alive when a new male comes in. 

But the interesting thing was when the reviews of The Langurs of Abu, my monograph, came out, all the reviews were about the male reproductive strategies, and I thought, ‘Wait a minute, I was very careful to do half and half, males and females.’ That book was published in 1977. In 1981, I published a book called The Woman That Never Evolved, and it was all about female reproductive strategies, on purpose. It was saying, ‘Look, if you're going to review this book, you're going to have to deal with female reproductive strategies.’ 

Going back to your main point, I did not become an academic on purpose. I got interested in particular things. I wanted to find out why these males were killing infants. Then I got interested in what females were doing and writing about that. By this time, I was writing books, and I was an academic. 

Years ago, there was a volume two of Leaders in Animal Behavior: The Second Generation. Volume one had been all men. In this one, they included about half women. What was so fascinating, Samara, was reading the intellectual autobiographies of these men and these women. The men's careers were all lockstep. They went undergraduate, graduate school, postdoc, tenure track job. But the women were just all over the place. It was this eccentric hodgepodge of piecing together. My chapter there was titled 'Myths, Monkeys and Motherhood, A Compromising Life' because I had made all these compromises.  

Samara Greenwood: One constant across you career seems to be your willingness to propose theories that highlight and challenge some deeply held scientific assumptions, particularly male-centric and individualistic assumptions you found evident in evolutionary theorising. Did you consciously set out to be provocative? 

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy: I've betrayed every culture, you know. I betrayed the patriarchal culture I grew up in, and then later I betrayed my Harvard Sociobiological indoctrination. At some level, subconsciously, I was from a very early age [resistant], without knowing what patriarchy was.  

Samara, there were these men who wanted to control my life. They wanted to tell me how I would live, how I would dress, how I would be educated, who I would marry. The reason I eloped was I was going to be disinherited from marrying my husband.  

So, I think it had to do with a female resistance early on, but I didn't know what patriarchy was. I remember it was a young firebrand of an historian, Catherine Clinton, who was studying patriarchy in the south and slavery. She was explaining to me the patriarchal mindsets at Harvard and how male dominated Harvard was. 

When I got to Harvard women were still not allowed in the undergraduate library, it was just boys. The year I graduated from Harvard, there was not a single woman professor there.  

Of course, anthropology was congenial to women, and Evon Vogt was very congenial and supportive in every way possible. Women in anthropology had a history by then - Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, all that. It was a very good place for me to be. But as I got closer to the natural sciences, I had male professors who were kind of hoping I'd fail, you know? But I didn't understand it. I was Irv DeVore's first female graduate student. That wasn't easy. But I think things got better and he had subsequent students that I think did not have the same experience I did. 

Samara Greenwood: Today we're discussing your most recent book, Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies. 

Now, I understand the inspiration for this work was quite personal as you were struck by the changing role of fathers in your own family over several generations. Could you tell us a bit about how that personal experience led you to this line of research? What was the pattern in your family? 

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy: One reason I think I write books instead of articles about this is because I need different starting assumptions to get to where I'm going. I needed different starting assumptions in Father Time. I needed to start out with, for sure, my own biases, because I had been so blind for so long. I had bought into what basically had been Darwinian paradigms, derived from his own very patriarchal mindset that males compete for females, and females are just taking care of the babies. 

Well, of course, growing up in Texas - I was born in 1946, right at the edge of the baby boom - I grew up in a very conservative, patriarchal, also quite racist part of the country in South Texas. Growing up I had never so much as seen a man change a diaper, and only occasionally hold a baby.  

Caring for babies was women's work. It wasn't just because they were the breast feeders, because in my tribe women didn't breastfeed, it was considered déclassé. That would be something poor women did, but these [wealthy] women had nannies.  

I didn't know anything about feminism, and I didn't know any feminists. I did know that caring for babies was women's work, because I had never seen anybody other than a woman caring for a baby. Not necessarily the mother, but it would be another woman. 

When I got to Harvard that actually was the expectation. One of my mentors, Bob Trivers, went on to become an associate professor at Harvard. After I finished my degree and was unemployed, I did a kind of informal postdoc with Trivers. So, I was Trivers's postdoc.  

When a journalist and a photographer named Georgia Litwack was doing an article for the Boston Sunday Globe Magazine, she went to interview my postdoctoral advisor. [Trivers] had the misfortune to tell her exactly what everybody thought back then, which is, 'Well, in my view, Sarah ought to spend more time taking care of her babies so that this baby will grow up to be a healthy child and less time on her work.'  

Of course, Professor Trivers back then had children that he was ignoring! He was consumed by his work, but my work was...  

This, of course, got prominently published. Bob, I'm sure he regretted it years later, It still comes back to haunt him, that he said this. It gets repeated everywhere. 

But, at the time I wasn't angry. I was worried that he might be right, because - as an anthropologist and a primatologist - I would of course have read John Bowlby on attachment. Here's my dog-eared copy of On Attachment still right above my desk. And, I wanted to be a different mother than my own mother had been. I wanted my children to grow up more secure than I had grown up. 

But it didn't take me too long after I bought Katrinka home from the hospital to realise how ambivalent I felt about being on call 24/7 (every minute of the day or night I was on call for this baby) because I was ambitious and I wanted to go on writing. 

I [went on to have] three children and my husband Dan, I think, was a very good father for his time. But, when our third child was born, I was teaching. No one mentioned parental leave or paternity leave, certainly not that. Dan was working at the hospital. He was an infectious disease specialist. He set up a tent in our backyard in Davis, California, because he said, 'Well sweetie, that way at least one of us will get a good night's sleep,' because I was breastfeeding. You know, that's the secret in my feminist closet, this tent in the backyard. But it's what I expected. 

Samara Greenwood: I was really interested then, that part of this research was you revisiting your own mindset that was steeped still to some degree in this patriarchal kind of binary thinking. What was that process like as you came to realise that you did need to change your assumptions? 

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy: Now we're coming up to 2014, when my first grandson was born, and my daughter taught at a private school with a very illiberal parental care policy.  

[Her husband Harry] was teaching. He was an assistant principal, then at Hunter College High School, one of the really top public high schools in New York. They had a wonderful union with wonderful parental leave programs. Plus, he's a super conscientious guy and he had built up all this sick leave over the years he had worked there. He negotiated a year off to take care of his new baby while his wife could continue working full-time with just this minimal parental leave that she had. 

So, I arrived and there he was. He was so tender and so involved, you know. I remember, Harry was at the sink washing his baby, his hairy arms and this tender, rose petal soft baby skin. And he would get up at the night, and I was there to help, and I was astounded. 

I then started to find out about all these bootcamps being set up in countries all over the world to teach men how to change diapers. Why were these men interested in learning how to change diapers? Why did they want to do this? 

I was aware that there was there was a lot of direct male care in other mammals and primates. I also knew of this very strange literature, it goes way back to the early 1960s, of sensitization. You could have a very infanticidal strain of house mice where a male, if he encountered a strange infant pup, would just immediately, reflexively, savage it and kill it. But, if you would introduce pup after pup to this male, after a while, he would quit killing them and care for them instead. 

I already had the title of the book, by the way, even before I started to write it. Father Time, because I knew that [male mammals] who spent a lot of time in intimate proximity to babies were becoming more nurturing. Males that were around babies enough would start to protect them and keep them warm. This would lead to the evolution, in a species like voles that my friend Sue Carter was studying where the males care for babies, they actually would evolve over time more receptors to oxytocin in their brain, so they're going to become more susceptible to babies. [Later] the hotshot neuroscientists take it over and they find these amazing things. They find you take a gene from a prairie vole, and you put it in a meadow vole, and you can make that meadow vole more monogamous and more nurturing. Whoa, this is a new ballpark! 

But the same thing happens if you take puffer fish genes and you put them in a prairie vole; it will start to make the equivalent of fish oxytocin. Well, come on, this is just too weird for words! 

I was already aware of the work, from 2000, of these wonderful women who wanted to be studying bi-parental care in rodents but couldn't get funding for it. This was Katherine Wynne- Edwards and Anne Storey in Canada. So, they decided to look at humans and passed around a form in the Lamaze class and got all these already pretty motivated - they were self-selected to be interested - males to sign up, and they agreed to be monitored after the baby was born. Even after they were holding baby dolls with blankets that smelled like newborn babies, used baby blankets, and watching videos of babies struggling to get on a nipple to get breastfeeding going, they had already shown that prolactin goes up and testosterone goes down in these males. 

Then in 2014, the same year that I'm there with my son-in-law and his new baby, I actually starting to do a little proof of concept study in my own family. During the family vacation the year before, I started taking everybody's saliva samples and sending them to Lee Getler to look at the testosterone and sending them to Sue Carr to look at the oxytocin.  

Well, the study was a mess, and it was just so little, and I couldn't really control my protocols. My children didn't always do what I told them to do. But anyway, Dan and I were very religious about our protocols, and we spit in their tube at all the right times. Anyway, our samples were really interesting in one respect, and that was oxytocin. 

So, when I get to my daughter's house, I fly across the country from California and I get in a taxicab at LaGuardia, and I go to their brownstone in Harlem. Just before the taxi arrives, I spit in this little polyethylene team. As soon as I get to Katrinka's house, I put it in the icebox and then I hold my grandson for two hours and it's just delirious. He's so soft and so warm and he just smells so good. I smell the little hex smell on his scalp. Then I spit again and put that in the freezer. There was this like 63% jump in my oxytocin levels. Not unexpected, but I was the grandmother, I wasn't a parent. This is very important later. 

Then Dan gets there a week later, and even before I let him in the house, I say, 'Spit here sweetie.' He has to sit there and hold the baby for two hours. There's a little jump in his oxytocin levels, but nothing much. Second day he holds the baby for two more hours and it goes up, just by accident, the same amount as mine! Oh, that was proof of concept! What was it a proof of concept of? It was a proof of concept that you don't have to be a parent in order for this to happen. 

I was already starting to speculate. So, I'm dealing with these human potentials and I'm imagining them. This is, I'm building these imaginary worlds and I'm moving in, but it's taking me into new places. It took me to where I could understand, in a way I could not understand before, what was happening with my son-in-law and then my own son.  

I'm not saying this is easy. These dads are exhausted too. If I were writing Father Time now, if I were to change one thing about that book right now, I would put in a longer paragraph about how much social support the men caring for babies need, just like mothers. Mothers need social support big time, but so do fathers, and so do male allomothers. Raising human children, a single person can't do it. 

I couldn't write an article about this because I had to explain where I was coming from. I needed to explain my initial biases and why I wasn’t going with my initial biases, because I knew that was what all my readers already thought. Then I needed to explain what I had seen around me in the 21st century in my own family. 

Well, females are doing a lot of other things, but guess what? Males have potentials to do other things too. 

We don't understand the extent to which our own habitus or our own upbringing impact our starting assumptions. It's those starting assumptions that get you in trouble and we leave out so much.  

Samara Greenwood: That is all fantastic. I wanted to thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Sarah. 

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy: Well, I've enjoyed it and, Samara, I thought your questions were just excellent and I like your perspective. 

Samara Greenwood: I am Samara Greenwood, thank you for joining me on The HPS Podcast. 

I want to thank Sarah for being so open in sharing her experiences with me. The image of scientists being ‘at their best’ when they divorce themselves from their personal backgrounds is still strong. But, as feminist epistemologists have been explaining to us for some 50 years, there is a better way to do good science.  

That is to be continually open to self-reflection on who we are, where we come from, and how that plays out in the assumptions we bring to our work - the questions we ask, and the ones we don’t, the evidence we seek out, and the data we neglect, and the very mindset we bring to what is possible, and what is impossible, in the natural and human worlds we study.  

If you enjoyed this episode, I highly recommend you visit the series we published on the podcast called ‘Working Fathers’. This is a special five-episode mini-series which explores the varied roles fathers place in contemporary Australia and how policy can better recognise, value and support men caring for young children. Links to all episodes can be found in the show notes. There you will also find links to the transcript of today’s episode, as well as to our website and social media feeds, including our active community on Bluesky. 

Finally, thank you to the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne as well as the Hansen Little Public Humanities Grant Scheme for their ongoing support of the podcast. 

Thank you and see you again next time.