Sarah Blaffer Hrdy was the guest scientist at Center for Family Consultation’s Midwest Symposium.
Her concept of cooperative breeding enlarged my understanding of the human capacity for understanding and nurturing one another. I found it encouraging, at this time of worries about our country and the world, to think about the evolutionary roots of our ability to cooperate. I am attaching a brief essay that was published on the CFC substack.
The extraordinary human capacity for nurturance
Stephanie Ferrera
I named this essay “the extraordinary human capacity for nurturance,” because that idea was such an important takeaway for me from listening to Dr. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, the guest scientist at the Center for Family Consultation’s 43rd Annual Midwest Symposium. Dr. Hrdy is known for her original work as a primatologist and evolutionary anthropologist. In 1999 she published Mother Nature, a comprehensive study of motherhood in humans and other species. She followed this in 2009 with Mothers and Others, in which she traces the deep biological roots of cooperative breeding and how it has led to our capacity for empathy and mutual understanding. New research on the nurturing potential of fathers inspired Dr. Hrdy to write Father Time, a Natural History of Men and Babies, published in 2024.
Dr. Hrdy finds the key to cooperative breeding in the “primatologicaly unique length of human childhood.” The idea that babies, with their appearance of helplessness and total dependency, are not passive recipients but active agents in the process of eliciting care is new to me and quite astounding. It is their very fragility that makes human infants so powerful. Hrdy writes: “The infant would need to be able to monitor and assess the intentions of both the mother and these others and elicit their assistance in ways no other ape ever needed to do before.” (Mothers and Others, 31) From birth, infants begin to engage in face-to-face gazing and reciprocal signaling with a caregiver. This is a step toward mind-reading and the ability to understand the thoughts and feelings of others, to have empathy toward others. As familiar as I am with babies, I had not considered how much is actually going on in those captivating little humans.
The concept of cooperative breeding, found in quite a few species but far more advanced in our ancestral hominins and our own species, is the defining mission of our families. Babies need more care than mother alone can give. An alloparent is an individual other than mother who cares for children. Along with fathers, grandmothers are often the first in line to help. Many members of the family are fascinated by a newborn, and in the course of childhood there will be a host of people contributing to the child’s care. Parents, and especially mothers, find themselves in the position of gatekeepers, evaluating the competence and quality of help that others have to offer. The level of maturity shapes the trust and cooperation between mother and father, and between parents and alloparents. Both Dr. Hrdy’s concept of cooperative breeding and Dr. Bowen’s concept of the family as an emotional unit highlight the importance of sustaining strong emotional connections within and across generations. The most vulnerable mother is one who is on her own, lacking family support.
How and when did cooperative breeding evolve? To find the origin of the conditions that would pressure creatures into evolving this unusual mode of keeping offspring alive, Dr. Hrdy goes back to “the Pleistocene crucible” with its harsh and unpredictable climate, predation risks, recurring food shortages and other dangers. She looks at the long line of hominins that precededmodern humans, identifying Homo erectus as one who managed to survive for 1.6 million years. “These large-brained African hominins were our ancestors, giving rise around 200,000 years ago to even larger-brained Homo sapiens. Sometime afterward, between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, these anatomically modern humans spread out of Africa, and Homo sapiens began its extraordinary expansion around the world.” (Mothers and Others, 18)
Humankind is now at a population of more than eight billion people living on a crowded planet. We live in hyperconnected societies with an almost unfathomable degree of social and economic interdependence.
As we grapple with twenty-first century crises, we would do well to remember the deeply rooted, uniquely human capacity for cooperation, empathy and nurturing that we have inherited from ancestors who faced even greater dangers than ours. Dr. Hrdy describes the expression of this capacity at its best: “To care about others requires a sense of self along with the capacity to conceptualize others as separate selves with their own mental states and feelings.” (Mothers and Others, 135) In Bowen theory, this describes a person at a high level of differentiation. Individuals and families vary in the degree to which they attain a clear definition of self and the ability to understand and relate to others as separate selves. If indeed the capacity to understand, cooperate, and care for one another have been key to our survival as a species, then it will be those qualities that we most need in a world that is becoming increasingly governed by AI.