Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

Sarah Hrdy (née Blaffer; born July 11, 1946) is an American anthropologist and primatologist who has made several major contributions to evolutionary psychology and sociobiology. She has been selected as one of the 21 “Leaders in Animal Behavior.”[1]

Biography

Early life

Sarah Blaffer was born on July 11, 1946, in Dallas, Texas to a family that had money from oil. She was raised in Houston and attended St. John's School there. Her mother advocated Sarah's craving for higher education and to have a career; at that time, many did not feel the same.

Education

At age 18, Sarah attended her mother's alma mater, Wellesley College in Massachusetts. She chose philosophy as her major, and she took creative writing courses. In one of her writing classes, she wrote a novel about Mayan culture. This decision led to Hrdy researching folklore of the Maya. In the end, she found the research more stimulating than the creation of the novel. She loved it so much, she eventually transferred to Radcliffe College and majored in anthropology.

She graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1969 with a BA. (Her undergraduate thesis became the basis for The Black Man of Zincantan, published in 1972.)

Although she loved what she was doing, she longed to make a bigger impact on the world. To fulfill her dream, she decided to make films that would help people living in developing countries become educated on various health subjects. She took film-making courses at Stanford but found herself disappointed with the classes.

She got inspiration from one class studying the problems of overpopulation among black-faced Indian monkeys called langurs. In this class, she was taught that when numbers got too high within the troop, the male langurs would kill the babies in their group. Inspired again by new information, Hrdy entered Harvard in 1970 to obtain a PhD. Her thesis was based on the inspiration from the Stanford class and was about langur research.

Family life

Sarah Blaffer met Daniel Hrdy at Harvard. They married in 1972 in Kathmandu. They have three children:

She lives with her husband in northern California, where they operate the Citrona Farms walnut plantation.[2] She is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of California at Davis, where she remains involved with the Animal Behavior Graduate Group.

Main research

The Langurs of Abu

Sarah Hrdy first became interested in langurs during an undergraduate primate behavior class taught by anthropologist Irven DeVore in 1968. Here, a remark by DeVore regarding the relationship between crowding and the killing of infants would forever change her life. After graduation, she returned to Harvard for graduate studies, with the goal of decoding this phenomenon of infanticide in langur colonies. Working under the supervision of DeVore and the evolutionary biologist Robert L. Trivers provided Hrdy with an introduction to a newly emerging outlook on the social world—that of sociobiology—which crystallized at Harvard during the early 1970s and shaped Hrdy's enduring perspective on primatology.

Hrdy's PhD thesis tested the hypothesis that overcrowding causes infanticide in langur colonies. She went to Mount Abu in India to study Hanuman langurs and concluded that infanticide was independent of overcrowding—it was possibly an evolutionary tactic: When an outside male takes over a group, he usually proceeds to kill all infants. This postulated tactic would be very advantageous to the male langurs who practiced infanticide. Turnover in a langur tribe occurs approximately every 27 months. The male who is taking over has a very small window of opportunity to pass on his genes. If the females are nursing infants, it's likely that they won't ovulate for another year. Killing their dependent infants makes the females once again receptive to mating.

Female choice is subverted, as females are put under pressure to ovulate and are forced to breed with the infanticidal males. This is where the idea of sexual counter-strategies comes into play. Hrdy theorized that by mating with as many males as possible, particularly males who are not part of the colony, mothers are able to successfully protect their young, as males were unlikely to kill an infant if there was the slightest chance that it might be their own.

That gives an "illusion of paternity," as Trivers put it. The goal of the male langur is to maximize the proportion of his offspring and, according to Hrdy, a male who attacks his own offspring is rapidly selected against. While infanticide has been seemingly preserved across primate orders, Hrdy found no evidence to suggest that the human species has a 'genetic imperative' for infanticide.

In 1975 Hrdy was awarded her PhD for her research on langurs. In 1977 it was published in her second book, The Langurs of Abu: Female and Male Strategies of Reproduction. The controversy in the anthropology realm that her research sparked was not surprising—the classic belief that primates act for the good of the group was discarded, and the field of sociobiology gained increasing support. Many mistakenly assumed that she implied existence of an 'infanticidal gene' that could be conserved across primates. Today, her results and conclusions are widely received. Even Trivers, who once dismissed her apparently illogical convictions, admits that her theory regarding female sexual strategies has "worn well."

The Woman That Never Evolved

Hrdy's third book came out in 1981: The Woman That Never Evolved. She begins chapter one with a sentence indicating that the results of her work suggest females should be given a lot more credibility than previously thought. "Biology, it is sometimes thought, has worked against women." Here, Hrdy expands upon female primate strategies. The book is one of the New York Times' Notable Books of 1981.

In 1984 Hrdy co-edited Infanticide: Comparative and Evolutionary Perspectives. It was selected as one of the 1984–1985 "Outstanding Academic Books" by Choice, the Journal of the Association of College and Research Libraries.

Mother Nature

In 1999, Hrdy published Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species. She places a sociobiological twist on maternal instinct and places "human mothers and infants in a broader comparative and evolutionary framework," offering a new perspective on mother-infant interdependence. She discusses how mothers are continually making trade-offs between quality and quantity" and weighing the best possible actions for them and their infant. Hrdy's view is that there is no defined 'maternal instinct': It depends on a number of variables and is therefore not innate, as once thought. She also stands by her view that humans evolved as cooperative breeders, making them essentially unable to raise offspring without a helper. This is where the concept of allomothering comes in—relatives other than the mother, such as the father, grandparents, and older siblings, as well as genetically unrelated helpers, such as nannies, nurses, and child care groups, who spend time with an infant, leaving the mother with more free time to meet her own needs.

Mothers and Others: The evolutionary origins of mutual understanding

In Mother Nature Hrdy argued that apes with the life history attributes of Homo sapiens could not have evolved unless alloparents in addition to parents had helped to care for and provision offspring, "the Cooperative Breeding Hypothesis". In 2009 in Mothers and Others, she explored cognitive and emotional implications for infants growing up in what was (for an ape) a novel developmental context.[3] Instead of relying on the single-minded dedication of their mothers, youngsters had to monitor and engage multiple caretakers as well. Other apes possess cognitive wiring for rudimentary Theory of Mind, but with cooperative rearing, relevant potentials for mentalizing would have become more fully expressed, and thus rendered more visible to natural selection. Over generations, those youngsters better at inter-subjective engagement would have been best cared for and fed, leading to directional Darwinian selection favoring peculiarly human capacities for intersubjective engagement. In 2014, Mothers and Others, together with earlier work, earned Hrdy the National Academy's Award for Scientific Reviewing in honor of her "insightful and visionary synthesis of a broad range of data and concepts from across the social and biological sciences to illuminate the importance of biosocial processes among mothers, infants, and other social actors in forming the evolutionary crucible of human societies."[4]

She is a strong advocate for making affordable child care a priority.

Significant works

Books

Films

Awards

References

  1. ↑ Drickamer L. Dewsbury S. (Dec 2009) Leaders in Animal Behaviour: The Second Generation. Cambridge University Press.[1]
  2. ↑ Citrona Farms
  3. ↑ Ellison, P. T. (2009). "Book Review: A Growing Thought" (PDF). Evolutionary Psychology. 7 (3). doi:10.1177/147470490900700306. ISSN 1474-7049.
  4. ↑ http://dateline.ucdavis.edu/dl_detail.lasso?id=14730
  5. ↑ http://www.nasonline.org/member-directory/members/1646.html
  6. ↑ http://www.gsas.harvard.edu/alumni/gsas_centennial_medalists.php
  7. ↑ http://sarweb.org/?staley_2012_sarah_blaffer_hrdy
  8. ↑ http://www.nasonline.org/programs/awards/scientific-reviewing.html
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