Podcast appearances and mentions of Sarah B Hrdy

Women from different species, including humans, who had better help and support have better chances of survival. What can we learn from mother nature? Sarah B. Hrdy professor emerita at the University of California Davis, and Associate in the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology at Harvard talks about her books: Mothers And Others, The Woman That Never Evolved, and Mother Nature.Listen to Greg and Sarah as they discuss allomotherhood and alloparenting, foundational concepts that ensured humans will continue to survive and evolve. As humans, we often neglect the fact that there is so much to learn from mother nature, the animals, and relate them to our society. Tune in to the end and learn how shared care, concern for others, and the intense need to socialize and be cared for became key to human survival. Sarah talks about how these concepts relate and is evident in society and modern issues like daycare, women empowerment, birth control, and familial unit setup. Episode Quotes:On language and grammar pushing the human race forward:“Grammar is really a tool for helping someone else understand what you're saying. Much about humans is about helping others. Understand what we're thinking and feeling.”Why is great daycare important for modern parenting and empowering more women and families?“Even though I think an extended family is often in many ways going to be advantageous over most daycare in the United States. A good daycare is really a gift to mothers and children growing up, and to fathers. But for so long, our debate has been over well, are we going to have Mothercare or daycare? When in fact the debate should have been, how do we make daycare better?” Thoughts on modern housing and architecture:“There's an additional problem which is architecture and the way our housing is designed. Everybody wants to be in these independent houses. I noticed years ago when I was at UC Davis that the graduate students who were living in student housing but had young children were actually better off than the ones who were in their independent apartments.”On how to really empower young women:"We're not providing them with the sex education and birth control they need. To me, this is like sending someone up into an airplane without pressurizing the cabin. It's just wrong. And I'm disgusted that some of the institutions I'm most involved with they put women's career opportunities top of the radar. They really want women to have equal pay and so forth."Show Links:Sarah B. Hrdy UC Davis ProfileCitrona FarmThe emergence of emotionally modern humans: implications for language and learningOrder Book - The Woman That Never Evolved (2nd Edition)Order Book - Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual UnderstandingOrder Book - Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species

“Do men need to cheat on their women?” a Playboy headline asked in the summer of 1978. Their not-so-surprising conclusion: Yes! Science says so! The idea that men are promiscuous by nature, while women are chaste and monogamous, is an old and tenacious one. As far back as Darwin, scientists were churning out theory and evidence that backed this up. In this episode, Annie and Elah go back to the 1970s and 1980s, when feminism and science come face to face, and it becomes clear that a lot of animals—humans and bluebirds included—are not playing by the rules.   GUESTS Angela Saini, author of Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong Patricia Adair Gowaty, professor emeritus at UCLA, editor of Feminism and Evolutionary Biology.   FOOTNOTES Sarah B. Hrdy is an anthropologist, feminist, and a major figure in this chapter of science history. In this book chapter she addresses the myth of the “coy female” and reviews the relevant scientific happenings of the 1970s and 80s, especially in the primatology sphere. Angus John Bateman’s 1948 paper about fruit fly mating and reproductive success, popularized by this paper from Robert Trivers in 1972. Bateman finds that males have more reproductive success the more females they mate with, and that females don’t benefit as much from mating with multiple males. Patty Adair Gowaty found holes in Bateman’s study. Bateman didn’t know exactly how many sexual partners his fruit flies had because he didn’t watch them. Instead, he counted up how many offspring they made. Unfortunately, a lot of them had harmful mutations and died—skewing his numbers. Not only do they not meet Mendelian expectations, but in Bateman’s data, he consistently counts more fathers than mothers—which can’t be right, since every baby fly has one mother and one father. Patty found that eastern bluebird females successfully raise offspring without help from their male partners. Patty and Alvan Karlin found that eastern bluebird babies aren’t always related to the parents raising them. True “genetic monogamy,” where bird couples only have sex with each other, appears to be the exception, not the rule in passerines. Polyandry—where females have sex with multiple males—has been found most of the species studied! In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, a psychology study at Florida State University found that most men, and no women would accept a sex invitation from a stranger. In this more recent Germany study, 97% of the women expressed interest in sex with at least one strange man, but only when researchers promised to arrange a (relatively) safe encounter.  Btw, Patty tells us bluebirds don’t actually have sex in the nest, so having sex “outside the nest” is the norm. We were using the expression figuratively, but worth noting. The nest is really for storing the babies.   CREDITS This episode was reported and produced by Elah Feder and Annie Minoff. Our senior editor is Christopher Intagliata. Fact checking by Robin Palmer. I Am Robot and Proud wrote our theme. All other music by Daniel Peterschmidt.

“Do men need to cheat on their women?” a Playboy headline asked in the summer of 1978. Their not-so-surprising conclusion: Yes! Science says so! The idea that men are promiscuous by nature, while women are chaste and monogamous, is an old and tenacious one. As far back as Darwin, scientists were churning out theory and evidence that backed this up. In this episode, Annie and Elah go back to the 1970s and 1980s, when feminism and science come face to face, and it becomes clear that a lot of animals—humans and bluebirds included—are not playing by the rules.   GUESTS Angela Saini, author of Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong Patricia Adair Gowaty, professor emeritus at UCLA, editor of Feminism and Evolutionary Biology.   FOOTNOTES Sarah B. Hrdy is an anthropologist, feminist, and a major figure in this chapter of science history. In this book chapter she addresses the myth of the “coy female” and reviews the relevant scientific happenings of the 1970s and 80s, especially in the primatology sphere. Angus John Bateman’s 1948 paper about fruit fly mating and reproductive success, popularized by this paper from Robert Trivers in 1972. Bateman finds that males have more reproductive success the more females they mate with, and that females don’t benefit as much from mating with multiple males. Patty Adair Gowaty found holes in Bateman’s study. Bateman didn’t know exactly how many sexual partners his fruit flies had because he didn’t watch them. Instead, he counted up how many offspring they made. Unfortunately, a lot of them had harmful mutations and died—skewing his numbers. Not only do they not meet Mendelian expectations, but in Bateman’s data, he consistently counts more fathers than mothers—which can’t be right, since every baby fly has one mother and one father. Patty found that eastern bluebird females successfully raise offspring without help from their male partners. Patty and Alvan Karlin found that eastern bluebird babies aren’t always related to the parents raising them. True “genetic monogamy,” where bird couples only have sex with each other, appears to be the exception, not the rule in passerines. Polyandry—where females have sex with multiple males—has been found most of the species studied! In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, a psychology study at Florida State University found that most men, and no women would accept a sex invitation from a stranger. In this more recent Germany study, 97% of the women expressed interest in sex with at least one strange man, but only when researchers promised to arrange a (relatively) safe encounter.  Btw, Patty tells us bluebirds don’t actually have sex in the nest, so having sex “outside the nest” is the norm. We were using the expression figuratively, but worth noting. The nest is really for storing the babies.   CREDITS This episode was reported and produced by Elah Feder and Annie Minoff. Our senior editor is Christopher Intagliata. Fact checking by Robin Palmer. I Am Robot and Proud wrote our theme. All other music by Daniel Peterschmidt.

Mechanisms Underlying Behaviors That Obey the Golden Rule (Donald Pfaff); How Humans Became Such Other Regarding Apes (Sarah B. Hrdy); Tribal Social Instincts and Human Cooperation (Peter Richerson) Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 21109]

Mechanisms Underlying Behaviors That Obey the Golden Rule (Donald Pfaff); How Humans Became Such Other Regarding Apes (Sarah B. Hrdy); Tribal Social Instincts and Human Cooperation (Peter Richerson) Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [Science] [Show ID: 21109]