It has long seemed self-evident that women care for babies and men do other things. Hasn’t it always been so? When evolutionary science came along, it rubber-stamped this venerable division of labor: mammalian males evolved to compete for status and mates, while females were purpose-built to gestate, suckle, and otherwise nurture the victors’ offspring. But come the twenty-first century, increasing numbers of men are tending babies, sometimes right from birth. How can this be happening? Puzzled and dazzled by the tender expertise of new fathers around the world—several in her own family—celebrated evolutionary anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy set out to trace the deep history of male nurturing and explain a surprising departure from everything she had assumed to be “normal.”
In Father Time, Hrdy draws on a wealth of research to argue that this ongoing transformation in men is not only cultural, but profoundly biological. Men in prolonged intimate contact with babies exhibit responses nearly identical to those in the bodies and brains of mothers. They develop caring potential few realized men possessed. In her quest to explain how men came to nurture babies, Hrdy travels back through millions of years of human, primate, and mammalian evolution, then back further still to the earliest vertebrates—all while taking into account recent economic and social trends and technological innovations and incorporating new findings from neuroscience, genetics, endocrinology, and more. The result is a masterful synthesis of evolutionary and historical perspectives that expands our understanding of what it means to be a man—and what the implications might be for society and our species.
Awards and Recognition
- A New Statesman Best Book of the Academic Presses
- A Telegraph Best Book to Read This Summer
"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
"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."—New Statesman
"A rich journey for the reader that not only provides a greater understanding of the evolution of fatherhood but also demonstrates how...the researcher’s personal experiences...can spawn new perspectives and insights....This is a remarkable book, filled with detailed scientific information, expert interpretations of the data, and a brilliant narrative voice."—Richard Bribiescas, Harvard Magazine
"I love how Hrdy sweeps across thousands of millennia, and dozens of species. I love how she convinces us, given that widespread and million-year legacy, and given that most of all the way contemporary Aka, Hadza, and American fathers are behaving, H. sap males manifestly can parent as well as females. And I love how Hrdy weaves so much of that narrative into her personal story."—Laura Betzig, Psychology Today
"An outstanding examination of the history and science of fatherhood.... Revelatory scientific studies shedding light on men’s biological proclivity for caring...complement the edifying history. It amounts to an invaluable deep history of dads."—Publishers Weekly starred review
"A mesmerizing, masterfully written book on the transformative power of human parenting"—Kirkus Reviews starred review
"When a scientist of Hrdy's caliber gets curious about something, a deep dive into multifaceted research begins. In [Father Time], she traces the origins of male nurturing across vertebrate, mammalian, primate, and hominid evolution, up to our current moment in history. Along the way, the reader learns about reproductive strategies in various creatures, including the poison dart frog, the cassowary, the meerkat, and the titi monkey, as well as our Homo sapiens selves.... The reading is so nutrient-rich that you will want to pause, digest, reflect, delight, and then urgently read on"—Claudia Casper, Los Angeles Review of Books
"[A] detailed book. . . . [With] thought-provoking questions. . . . A fascinating read. . . . [Hrdy] makes a convincing and persuasive argument."—Glenda Cooper, Daily Mail
"Evolutionary anthropologist Hrdy sets out to demolish the still prevalent view that, with the exception of lactation and breastfeeding, women are better suited than men to nurture babies and bring up infants. She employs cultural and scientific arguments going deep into mammalian evolution to show that, given the opportunity, the male biological response to babies is virtually the same as the female."—Clive Cookson, Financial Times
"“Father Time.... picks up where Mother Nature and Mothers and Others left off. [Hrdy's] interest lies in how external forces shape what’s happening inside our bodies, and vice versa. She contends that the
emergence of more egalitarian norms of parenthood aren't just changing society; they could change the biochemical makeup of men, too.""—Hua Hsu, New Yorker
"Hrdy has over a long and much-decorated career insisted that, if we want to understand how our species came to be, we need to understand what happened in the dim reaches of our prehistory around babies, mothers and ‘alloparental others’. . . . In chasing after evolutionary levers beyond the usual Darwinian gaze (historically focused on male competition), she has not only helped to create new narratives about what ‘nature’ is, and how we came to be, but also changed the questions younger cohorts of researchers think to ask. . . . [Father Time] reads like a detective story – and [Hrdy] herself is as colourful as Sherlock Holmes."—Michele Pridmore-Brown, Times Literary Supplement
"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."—The Telegraph
"In her excellent book Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies, anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy . . . explores the question of whether male nurturing and care for the next generation is biologically pre-programmed and possible across a whole range of species in the animal kingdom, and, if so, what this might mean not only for human parental roles, but also for society itself."—Sarah Hawkes, The Lancet
“I remain fascinated by the possibilities of the evolution of the genus Homo so Sarah Hrdy’s Father Time clarified much for me. Our ancestors couldn’t have survived the Pleistocene without alloparenting, with fathers and other men helping to care for and provision young.”—Francis Ford Coppola
“Sarah Hrdy gives us a fascinating, compellingly readable account of the new science that has revealed the deep potential for nurturance in fathers. The book is both a personal, immensely important and gripping story, and a masterly summary of equally compelling and important scientific research.”—Alison Gopnik, author of The Gardener and the Carpenter
“Who better than Sarah Hrdy, known for her studies of motherhood, to delve into fatherhood. Men caring for babies or young children can be as tender and competent as women. Doing so transforms their brains to be more like the maternal brain. Hrdy’s timely point is that attempts to balance gender roles in the family by no means go against human nature.”—Frans de Waal, author of Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist
“No one has shaped our understanding of human motherhood quite like Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has, and now her latest book challenges us to rethink fatherhood and the future of the human family. In Father Time, Hrdy brings her expansive curiosity, humility, and deep expertise to bear on one of the questions that drive culture wars: What does it mean to be a man today? She takes readers along on a journey of discovery that challenges even her own understanding of gender and caregiving, and she demonstrates how nurturing has always been at the center of human nature.” —Chelsea Conaboy, author of Mother Brain: How Neuroscience Is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood
“In Father Time Sarah Blaffer Hrdy takes readers on an accessible, compelling journey that adds important evolutionary muscle to the premise some of us have known for a while—many fathers can be and are equal partners as nurturing, emotionally nourishing parents.”—Andrew Reiner, author of Better Boys, Better Men: The New Masculinity That Creates Greater Courage and Emotional Resiliency
