The Birth of the Allomother (Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, PhD)

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So says the absolutely legendary Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, who is professor emerita at the University of California-Davis. A former Guggenheim fellow, she has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the California Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Her books include The Woman Who Never Evolved, which was selected by the New York Times as one of 1981’’s Notable Books of the Year, Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species, which won the Howells Prize for Outstanding Contribution to Biological Anthropology and was chosen by both Publisher’s Weekly and Library Journal as one of the “Best Books of 1999"; and Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, which is an exploration of psychological implications of humankind’s long legacy of shared child-rearing which has been awarded both the 2012 J.I. Staley Prize from the School of Advanced Research and a second Howells Prize.

Hrdy gave us the term “allomother” and by extension, “alloparent”—the pioneering idea that mutual care is the reason we’ve evolved to be the humans we are today. Through provisioning our kin and the rest of our tribes, we gave birth to modern culture and civilization today. In her brand-new book, Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies, Sarah goes deep on the structure of the brain and the way it’s turned on by engagement with babies—regardless of whether you are a woman or a man. This book is stunning and everyone should read it.

MORE FROM SARAH BLAFFEY HRDY, PhD:

Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies

Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding

Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species

The Woman Who Never Evolved

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s Website

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

SARAH:

You and I have so much in common, Elise, you're kind of Buddhist without the self abnegation.

ELISE:

I don't know what I am. I'm definitely unaffiliated,

SARAH:

But you're more precocious. You're starting younger and you had a lot of this figured out. All I had was Simon De Bois and Virginia Wolf, and I didn't read, I should have read Adrian Rich and I hadn't read her, but I didn't know what was going on. I didn't understand it. I had no clue. And you're starting out much further along. I mean books. I don't know how she does it, Bridget Schulte's that you mentioned over film. They laid it out, but when I had my first child, I still was thinking, oh, I have to be there all the time, or she's going to grow up insecure. I didn't.

ELISE:

No, I know. I know. It's getting progressively better, I think too. And

SARAH:

One of the reasons, oh no, no, don't say that because it's getting progressively better since the backlash is really picking up steam. The preface to the new edition of the woman that never evolved, that came out in 1999, pulling teeth to write it, but I wrote it. The last paragraph of that preface, which was published in 1999, was me talking to my daughters and telling them, you think your reproductive rights are safe. Don't count on it, girls. Just don't count on it. It was, you could see it coming down the pike. It's happened again and again in human history and prehistory, those tensions are not going away and they haven't, and they're coming back with vicious, vicious misogyny now.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, that's absolutely right and fair. And what is that exactly? Is that all culture or is there anything in our biology to explain? It feels like it's all culture

SARAH:

And

ELISE:

Fear.

SARAH:

No, it's a really interesting thing because some of the people I push back against the most would say it's deep in our biology. It's because we're basically chimpanzees. We're pan travel, and I'm sure that's wrong, but the reason I think that's wrong is because 6 million years have elapsed since we last shared a common ancestor with those guys, and we had the ply applies to scene in between, and it was just really hard for anybody to make it without a high degree of interdependence. Others. And food sharing was just critical. I really do believe that. And I think that the Pleistocene left us with almost a secret antidote that we don't take enough advantage of, and that's it left us. You raised the point in your book. I wrote it down, yeah. I wanted to tell you, misogyny is much older than monotheism, but you knew that addressability is a species trait and you're citing Ed Wilson, who was a very wise fellow who had some tremendous gaps. He trusted his colleagues too much, but that's okay. He's been misrepresented and tarnished unfairly. But he's the one who also said humans seek indoctrinate ability, which is very similar. And so you have to ask, why did we seek, why do we, and I think it has a lot to do with the Pleistocene and with shared caretaking and little babies having to grow up, needing to monitor who was around them, who was likely to help and kind of calculate how to ingratiate themselves. They're helpless, but they're only selectively helpless selectively. They actually

Are figuring out at a very early age, and they're using their medial prefrontal cortex to do that, and they're figuring out who's going to help me, who's not? How can I engage their preferences? How can I get them to like me? And then of course, these grow up to be little children concerned with what others think. And so they're more educatable, which is your point. And then they grow up to be adults who are very concerned about their reputations and what others think of them. And this desire to fit in, this desire to not be thought ill of ostracized to be chosen as a group mate, as a friend, as a partner that grows out of a little tiny baby wanting to be chosen as the one that someone cares for because it was competitive. You weren't the only baby there.

ELISE:

And one of the things that I thought was sort of tell me, fact, check me as I sort of explain some of the theories that you're drawing out throughout this book, father Time.

SARAH:

Yeah, thank you. Appreciate it.

ELISE:

Yeah, so I'll probably get some things wrong, but essentially your theory, which makes complete sense to me,

SARAH:

I would call it a hypothesis,

ELISE:

Hypothesis

SARAH:

Science, a theory. It's something that has been so well demonstrated over the years that it's become a theory, a hypothesis is still speculation, and you generate them so that they can generate testable predictions that you can test and see if it's worthy of becoming a theory. This is still just a hypothesis, speculation,

ELISE:

All right? This is a hypothesis, but when you go into sort of prepl the scene, when you look at chimpanzees, you look at who are the men are, infanticidal and all of these ideas of sort of the nasty brutish shorts.

SARAH:

The males are infanticidal, not the men. They're not men yet.

ELISE:

Oh, right. The males are infanticidal and the mothers hold their babies close to them for six months a year to ensure that they even can survive amongst all these males who want to destroy them. So they can make with the women.

SARAH:

And females too will eat them if they can. Other females don't forget.

ELISE:

Just wonderful. It's such a wonderful, all right. And then obviously we have the Bonobos, which are far friendlier, far more loving, not infanticidal in the same, not infanticidal at all, right? So

SARAH:

They have quite a bit of agonistic behavior. They spat, but they spat the same way women do kind of by little bickering and things. They don't kill each other. No. Has ever been seen to kill another bonobo, which is really very interesting because

ELISE:

So not homicidal

SARAH:

No. Or chimp

ELISE:

Asid. Okay. And then your hypothesis is that with the Pleistocene and mass extinction, as these apes have to get on the move and start to figure out how to survive parts of the brain, I love how you write about Mother Nature is having this cupboard and instead of adding things necessarily, certain things are already in there and they are just employed or turned on. And we start to see an evolution toward interdependence as you were just describing, and the need to not go extinct for as many. Yes.

SARAH:

Except in order to raise any offspring at all, and to maintain a viable group size, you needed to have shared care. Shared care. It all starts with the development of those children with shared care, and they have to grow up with brains able to engage with others. And that was where Mike Thomas's study, Esther Herman was the first author. It always becomes Thomas's study. But what about Esther Herman? I don't know. I don't know the answer, but I always wonder, of course, in those cases, that was the one where they had 106 chimpanzees, 105, two and a half year old children, toddlers and 35 orangutans, and they tested them for their cognitive capacities, gauging many versus few. They could use tests that Esther Herman devised a battery of tests where you don't need language and cognitive abilities like how many causation, what happens when you push something, it falls over traits like that.

And they all test in the same range, humans and other apes. And presumably that was true of our last common ancestors as well. Those were their capacities. It's a reasonable assumption when they got to socio cognition that is learning from a demonstrator how to do the same thing. Little two and a half year old humans were much better than chimps or orangutans of all ages in terms of communicating, pointing at something you're interested in chimps in the wild, almost never point. Although in captivity, if they have human allo mothers, they do. Human little children are much better at communicating. And they point all the time. I mean, you know how they'll point to something, they'll hold something out and they'll almost ask, what do you think of this? And it's just a level of inner subjective engagement that you do not see in other apes.

They don't care what someone else is thinking. And then in terms of theory of mind, that's knowing that someone else knows something different from what you know. The psychoanalyst, I use the term inner subjectivity, and I like it better because it includes the emotions. Mike Ello prefers theory of mind because he's an experimental psychologist. They want everything to be clean so that their experiments work, but they leave out this absolutely critical mess, which is emotions. And there, it's interesting because other apes have an incipient, a rudimentary theory of mind, and it, especially as Brian here showed, comes out when they're competing for food, but it doesn't come out in other contexts. Little humans are not only much better at it, but by nine months of age when little chimps are getting less interested in what someone else is thinking or their facial expressions and noises, little humans are getting more and more interested. And that is really to me, so telling, and it was just this important tip off for somebody who was already thinking in terms of shared care and cooperative breeding. And so that was what launched mothers and others, the evolutionary origins of mutual understanding. And that's what that book is about. It's about the evolutionary origins of inner subjectivity and being interested in what someone else is thinking or feeling, including thinking about you and feeling about you, which is of course setting the stage for ageability and for indoctrinate ability.

ELISE:

I'm going to make some leaps and fact check me again, but am I correct in that being a significantly different hypothesis than the standard humans learned how to behave out of fear of capital punishment and being destroyed? That was the predominant theory that we had to be out of fear turned into compliant.

SARAH:

Do you want to call it a theory?

ELISE:

Oh, sorry, a hypothesis. Hypothesis.

SARAH:

Sorry. No, no. If you want to call it a theory, I do this sometimes. The theory of original goodness

ELISE:

Amazing.

SARAH:

It's the opposite of original sin.

ELISE:

Amazing.

SARAH:

I think babies are born wanting to ingratiate themselves desperately eager to, but didn't you notice that? And if you treat 'em right, they grow up that way. But if you treat them differently, I think it was Frederick Douglas who said, we can't fix a broken man, but we know how to fix. We know how to make healthy children. I forget what exactly how he put it, but Frederick Douglas summed it up years ago. And we know what children need now. We do post boby and then the tweaks that Boby needs to make him more realistic. We understand what children need and if we supply it, we get pretty nice individuals. But when people are broken, we do not know how to fix it.

ELISE:

And I want to talk about that. I'm going to put that in a parking lot because it's really important to look at these cultures where boys and men are removed from babies. And I want to spend some time on that. Certainly. So just to complete this part of, and again, everyone needs to read this book because it's so fun and so fascinating. I have 38 pages of typed notes that in this world that you have defined for people and mainstreamed this parenting world, affiliative care women, everyone's somewhat responsible for gathering calories, not only for their direct kin, but for each other. Hunts are shared. Hunts are relatively rare, but they happen.

SARAH:

They can be a real bonanza for everybody.

ELISE:

And I loved the mention the aside of finding the Neanderthal footprints in France and people calling it the first daycare because there were many children. But yes, this idea that there was collective care, this also ties in with the grandmother hypothesis that older women endure and have so much longevity because they are responsible or somewhat co-responsible for keeping the tribe alive.

SARAH:

Kristen and I, Kristen is really one of my closest colleagues, and we have really evolved together as anthropologists. She emphasizes grandmothers more, and I emphasize an allo maternal substrate, allop parental substrates in human brains. And I think that grandfathers are very important though usually not for direct care and infancy, but they're later on if they're alive. So they have a reason to live on too. And I think that some of her pictures like the picture in mother nature of this, a woman, 60 years old, 70 years old, moving an enormous boulder. She was a great aunt. She wasn't a grandmother. All her children had died, which is normal with 50, 60% infant mortality. And the studies they've done, like Martin Kringle backs of brains lighting up when you look at cute babies. And everybody went wild, the journalists, and they said, oh, it's the maternal instinct. But of course a lot of the people in his study weren't women and they weren't even parents. Why are we so susceptible? So puppies? Well, we've got these

ELISE:

Want to take care of babies.

SARAH:

Yeah.

ELISE:

Let's talk about the allo parenting substrate because that sort of ties directly to the thesis of the book, which is you could almost say that there's a primary and then secondary or allop parental level of the brain that comes online based on the immediate needs.

SARAH:

There's the level of the brain, which it turns out men have too. That's in the most ancient limbic system, most ancient portions of the brain. It's your brainstem. This is hard one information. I really wrapping my brain in this, they don't even write in English, at least they written acronyms, amygdala, hypothalamus, hippocampus. They're down there and they're what they tell you to breathe, to stay alive, to eat and eating and nurturing, have so much to do with each other. And that came as a revelation to me, but it makes perfect sense given everything I've been learning. And then it's the newer portions of the brain that evolved in the latter part of the lysine in the frontal cortex. And I talked particularly about the medial prefrontal cortex simply because I have more information about that for infants, we don't know about the rest, but it turns out we thought that the medial premal cortex was kind of silent in infancy.

It's why you can't get a murder penalty until after 18 because we thought your brains aren't developed. Okay, well, it turns out maybe not, but the medial prefrontal cortex is already very active. And it had to do with the guy named Tobias Grossman, who I've never met, but his work has been very important to me because he was using these caps to measure blood flow near the surface of the brain, and they could put these on babies without stuffing 'em into a clanking MRI machine, which would just traumatize them. But their mother can just hold them while they wear these caps and showing that look, when they hear a mother's voice or look in her face and they're born looking for somebody, their medial prefrontal cortex is going to work very early.

Well, it's getting activated. If a trait is activated, it is then visible to natural selection. Genes are invisible to natural selection until they've been expressed in a phenotype, which is your blue eyes, your pale skin, that bracelet on your hand is now part of your phenotype. If that turned out to be good for your survival and reproductive success, there would be selection over 50 generations for wearing that bracelet. And these babies, I think began to be selected for early activation of this and for a more refined activation of this part of their brain. And this was the developmental stage babies were going through. And then of course, as they grow up, it turns out to be very valuable because cooperation was definitely the name of the game and it lays the groundwork and the term cooperative breeding. It means any species where allo parents, in addition to parents are helping to care for and provision offspring. Some people thought that what I was arguing in mothers and others was that because we were cooperative breeders, we grew up to be unusually cooperative individuals as adults. And that's wrong. Lots of cooperative breeders are extremely competitive. And don't forget, like in mere cats where a grandmother will kill another female's infant if they get pregnant and give birth even if that other female is her offspring. This is the grandmother from hell.

ELISE:

And so this maternal part of the brain, this study that you mentioned, where they were essentially as you were watching your son-in-law parent and his incredible level of attentiveness and marveling at how different things are even over the span of just a few decades and fathers just haven't really been that studied, right? There's some like Lee Getler and some understanding of rising oxytocin and the suppression of,

SARAH:

But remember that's worth noting. The decline in testosterone had already been reported in the literature. His was the gold standard study because it was of a longitudinal nature. To be fair, Lee's work, which by the way, there was a woman who was my colleague when I taught at Rice, she was studying maternal nutrition in the Philippines. She started that longitudinal study and they came along and they had those samples. And so it was a wonderful, beautiful study because they could look at these men from childhood, their testosterone levels, then could they show that men with higher testosterone was or more or less likely to marry. As a matter of fact, men with higher testosterones were slightly more likely to marry. Oh, why did it go down afterwards? It went down after they had a baby

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ELISE:

And it's interesting. I mean, this is where I'm going to just fly off the fly here, but we think about longevity and women and the fact that we tend to endure for longer, live longer, higher endurance, et cetera.

SARAH:

We do seem to be built longer. We're

ELISE:

Built to endure. And maybe men who are so longevity obsessed, I don't know if you've noticed this, but the biohacking and all this compulsiveness around extending their lifespan. I'm like, why don't you try care? Because maybe there's something in the way that women have been conditioned over our span as humans to endure because of care.

SARAH:

There was a paper published by very important brain scientist named John Alman, whose work I respect tremendously, but he was studying species who were monogamous with male care primates and humans and those without male care. And he showed that the primates with male care lived longer and they took that to mean just what you're arguing. I think though, that they forgot another variable that's very, very, very important is that where there is male care, there is less male, male competition and violence. That is a big reason why males die like flies is because they're engaging in this stuff, which is dangerous. And I don't think you can leave that out.

ELISE:

Well, that brings us to what we put in the parking lot, which is the evidence about cultures where boys are taken out of households when they are four or five and are raised and men live apart from women and babies and these highly segregated cultures. And what happens? Can you talk us a bit? But you make this stunning point about these cultures in particular, which theoretically are so engaged with this man, the hunter man, the provider man, the valiant hero, which would suggest that their primary interest is protecting babies and women. And yet these cultures prove not only inhospitable to babies and women, but deeply dangerous as well.

SARAH:

That's right. Deeply dangerous. And I didn't say that, but you're right. Yes. And look at what's happening right now. These men who are deeply dangerous to their own countries, their own people, and the whole world, Netanyahu, Putin, Trump, these men, none of them had any experience with caring for their own children. Trump bragged about not caring for his children, and he gave them money. And Gorbachev, on the other hand, was very close to his daughter and was very different view. These guys are much more interested in their status than they are in what's going to happen to their own progeny to the world. It is a level of, it's just so distressingly destructive.

ELISE:

When you look at the regime in Iran, you look throughout the Middle East, and it's just a masterclass too.

SARAH:

Those guys in Iran were raised so separated from women and children. Yes.

ELISE:

Yeah. No, and this is what happens, presumably. And the irony of this agenda of protecting the sexual decency of these girls and instead murdering them,

SARAH:

And these same girls who would've made very wonderful grandmothers, mothers, aloe mothers that could have increased the survival chances of their children.

ELISE:

And in some ways, my husband is incredibly involved. Father and I write in the book about a friend of mine who was the screenwriter and had to leave her kids with her husband when they were very young. And she was like, do not let him be the primary parent. Do not compete. And he ended up being very primary and

SARAH:

Never jealous of your au pairs or your nannies. Never,

ELISE:

Never, never. No. And I loved how you wrote about your allo parental, I can't remember her name, but how I feel about Vicky

SARAH:

Deconcha. She's been living with us now for, oh my goodness, 35, 36 years.

ELISE:

Yeah. I mean, we have Vicky, she, I think she is family and she's another parent.

SARAH:

Certainly think so.

ELISE:

It's amazing. And that's what we need. And I know many of us try and knit that together too through school communities and just being present. But as you were the one to mainstream in our culture, this idea of the nuclear family is asinine and not natural or not particularly functional.

SARAH:

Misguided.

ELISE:

Misguided. You're so kind in your book. I have to say, there are so many moments when I expected you to punch someone in the face I wanted to. And you were very kind.

SARAH:

That's adaptive. It's as a writer, very adaptive. Even this, it's not acceptable.

ELISE:

I know.

SARAH:

And look at Kamala Harris very wisely took lessons in smiling and laughing. Why? Well, she's not dumb.

ELISE:

I know. I know. And yet that's also judged, but that feels like a misfire. They need to find something else to pick on.

SARAH:

She wears high heels too, which is, again, it's bow, a patriarchy to wear high heels, but she wants to win. And maybe she's good by winning. I hope so.

ELISE:

I hope so too. And I'm excited about Speaking of that ticket, I'm very touched by Tim Walls and this idea of just watching that whole convention in contrast and his standing behind a woman. The same for Doug em h and his devotion, which seems quite apparent to his own children and to children in general, would be a very welcome relief as also a very masculine presenting hunter veteran football coach.

SARAH:

Why does your husband care? Why is he a caring father and a good father, isn't it? Because doesn't ideology enter in? He wants to be a good person. And that's his definition.

ELISE:

That's a really interesting question, and I think it's a of factors. It wasn't what was modeled for him as a child. No,

SARAH:

No.

ELISE:

And when we went to the hospital, when we drove to the hospital, we had this conversation, which I was induced. And so we had a leisurely drive to the hospital at five 30 in the morning. And he said to me, I am really concerned because I don't really feel anything

And I don't know that I will feel anything. And I was like, that might be possible. We'll just see what happens. And then whatever happened was something turned on in him and he stayed up that first night with max crying, taking videos with that bulb syringe. And I think that it's so scary, right? That first night when you don't have any experience with babies and you feel like your baby's going to die. And I think something in him truly came online. Obviously there were nurses in the other room, but in that room, I think he felt like Max's very survival dependent on his ability to attend to him.

SARAH:

Okay, let me just guess what I think may have happened. He knew it was expected of him to care of this baby. The nurses were expecting him to care for this baby. So he starts and then it ships.

ELISE:

Yes.

SARAH:

It wasn't automatic. It wasn't reflexive, but it was emergent.

ELISE:

Yes, a hundred percent. And it would've been so easy if I had, I mean, I was so destroyed that I fell asleep and he was taking care of it, but it would've been so easy for me to maternal gatekeep or insist that he wasn't doing it right or hover in some way, and I did not do that. And yeah, whatever was emergent in him to use your words, came out and then persisted. And he was much more physically available and vibrant, and he was mastering that swaddle.

SARAH:

Well, the same thing happens in women too. It's true. You're primed. Your susceptibility is lower because of the hormone changes during gestation. But again, it's emergent. It is. One thing leads to another, one day leads to another.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, it makes sense.

SARAH:

Oh, yes. I know you're interested in etymologies, and I love your E.

The term AOE mother is aloe from the Greek. Other than, and in the early years, I was studying allo maternal care and primates, but I was calling it aunties and uncles because that was the old primate term. And my mentor then Ed Wilson said, oh, Sarah, you need a more dignified term. So this was my first scientific paper care and exploitation of infants by conspecifics other than the mother. But I was still using aunties and uncles. And Ed said, Sarah, you need something more dignified. Why not aloe from the Greek other than mother? And that's when I started to use it. So in my 1975 PhD thesis, I used aloe mother and Ed by then also was using aloe parent, which he used in sociobiology, but it was his suggestion. And he was the great coiner of terms, as you know, biodiversity. We owe that to Ed and so forth. Now it's in the online dictionary, the Webster

ELISE:

Websters

SARAH:

Dictionary. Yeah. Anyway, so Alo a mother is definitely, and some people are celebrating AO Mother's Day. The Saturday before Mother's Day is ala Mother's Day. And of course, an ALA mother can be either sex, and it's very hard for people to wrap their brain around the idea of a male ala mother, but there are plenty of male ala mothers out there.

ELISE:

It's so beautiful. Wow. What a legend. And if you've never heard of Sarah, you know her work because it has penetrated the mainstream, even if her books go under read. And she's such a fun writer. And yes, it's science writing, but it is presented in such a delectable and engaging, exciting way. It's not nerd nonfiction. It is really fun while also being perfect, and I guess I shouldn't use that word perfect, but it is incredibly rigorous and substantiated while also the sort of book that will really take you on an adventure. And at the beginning as she's positing some of the questions or hypotheses she writes, anthropologists have long been aware that societies where men spend more time in contact with mothers and children are less bellicose and exhibit lower rates of violence. Social psychologists tell us that men exposed to cues from babies tend to be more other.

Regarding and generous. Might baby exposed men also come to prioritize the wellbeing of children and the planet above their own social status, or in the case of politicians, their electability. If you like today's episode, please rate and review and tell a friend.