Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and the Shaping of the Species: A History of Mothers, Infants and Natural Selection (Paperback)

Motherhood, she declares, is anything but the simple mythology of unrestrained devotion. Across all Nature, mothers and their offspring wage ongoing competition. The issue is resources. Infants, all infants, demand as much as a mother can give, and more. Mothers have to support their infants, but inevitably are occupied with other responsibilities, not the least of which may be the infant's siblings. There are others beyond the mother-infant tie to which she must respond. If her species is male-dominated, she may face his abuse. Worse, she may be confronted by invasion by an outside male. In some species, that spells the doom of her infant. Hrdy has studied this and related aspects of motherhood among many species, and expresses her own shock at the discovery of primate infanticide.

Mothers must maintain many elements in balance, with but a gentle pressure on the scale resulting in disaster. Family size, role in the family and in the group, location, changing conditions, all contribute to the complexity surrounding a mother's relationship with her offspring. In humans, this complicated arrangement carries the added burden of a wholly dependent child. Even monkey young can cling to a foraging mother. Human babies must be carried. In our evolutionary past, this condition made the pair vulnerable to predators. Hrdy coins the phrase "alloparent" applied to another option - allocating care of the baby to someone else. In the modern world, of course, we call it "day care." Allomothers exist in many primate species, however. "Care-giving" isn't just an urban condition.

"Allomothering" historically has led to some disreputable practices, from child slavery to outright abandonment. Hrdy cites horrifying statistics for infants abandoned at foundling homes. Still, we have no reason to doubt her numbers. Orphans, like other prisoners, are a forgotten element in civilized society. There's another side to allomothering among humans. What to do with women who are no longer able to bear children - the uniquely human phenomenon known as "menopause"? Hrdy's response typically focuses on evolutionary roots. Women no longer hindered by their own offspring are ideal care-givers. With their experience and wisdom, they readily handle child care and other activities. The "granny" evolved in humans in large part due to infant dependence, Hrdy stresses. It was a significant step in forming the human community.

Hrdy's free-flowing style and ready wit make this important book highly readable and informative. She's done, or drawn on, a wealth of research to produce it, presenting riches of information without resorting to pedantry. It's an extraordinary accomplishment, deserving your fullest attention, your gender notwithstanding. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

In evolutionary terms especially, the book says very little. While the author clearly understands Darwinian Evolution (Chapter 2 is one of the best summaries of Darwin I have read), there is a lack of understanding of the subtlety of modern evolutionary arguments that makes the majority of the remainder of the book confused and conflicting. There is no consistent evolutionary framework in which the arguments of the book rest. Studies and examples are plucked from various fields but there is little examination of the contexts in which they were made, and the philosophies in which they were born, and this creates a lack of perspective.

Don't get me wrong - the individual examples that the author presents are extremely interesting. Reading this book I have come across many studies that I had no prior knowledge of - the authors awareness of Anthropology and Primatology (with a seventies bias) is vast. But this is a very big book for the six questions outlined in the preface, and many of the examples do little to clearly expand on these main questions. It's a shame that the questions that the author asks are often more interesting than the answers she gives.

I am in full agreement with the book's opening premise that there is a male bias in scientific thought, but this book does very little to redress the balance. There is no new science here and very little evidence presented to back up the authors claims. I lost count of the number of times that I read the words "probably", "perhaps" and "my own guess is". Readers wanting a more up to date and clear cut treatment of the evolutionary history of our species would do better to read Matt Ridley's "The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature" and draw their own conclusions.