Vol. 22 No. 15 · 10 August 2000
pages 23-24 | 3218 words
Keep me
Alison Jolly
- Mother Nature: Natural Selection and the Female of the Species by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
Chatto, 697 pp, £20.00, November 1999, ISBN 0 7011 6625 8
Sarah Hrdy is tough-minded about a tender subject. Motherhood, she says, is a minefield. Mothers love babies passionately – but not unconditionally. We have evolved as adept sociobiologists, able to calculate love. On the other side of the relationship, baby love is unconditional, indeed desperate. Babies want it all, every scrap of attention they can command, at least up to the point where the mother would be so exhausted that her failure would rebound on the baby itself. Babies cannot be physical tyrants, at their body size, so they resort to psychological tyranny: they are irresistible.
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[*] Oxford, 504 pp., £20, 31 March, 0 19 850505 1.
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Letters
Vol. 22 No. 17 · 7 September 2000
From Anne Summers
Alison Jolly's review of Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's Mother Nature (LRB, 10 August) suggests that humanists and others in dispute with sociobiologists misunderstand the sophistication of the latters' reasoning. But their objections are based on rather more than a crude misconception of the nature/nurture dichotomy. Humanists are, in the first place, sceptical of arguments which make indiscriminate forays into the disciplines of history, anthropology and sociology, and which postulate unexamined social assumptions as fact. An example of this is Jolly's assumption that human nutritional self-sufficiency is achieved around fifteen years of age, whereas an orang-utan becomes independent at eight. In both human and animal species, self-sufficiency can precede puberty and mating by several years. A human eight-year-old is intelligent, clear-sighted, fleet-footed, a good climber and manually dextrous: as fit for life as a hunter-gatherer as for industrial employment or a career as a street urchin. For Jolly to equate human nutritional self-sufficiency with puberty is both to ignore the historical record and to project the social assumptions of our own time onto the functioning of human groups which predate that record and even predate the evolution of language.
Humanists also distrust sociobiologists' tendency to explain every social and biological phenomenon in terms of genetic advantage. Anthropologists and sociologists abandoned crude functionalist arguments when they realised, decades ago, that an explanation for everything ultimately explains nothing. For example, the capacity of the human female to live for twenty years beyond the menopause poses intriguing questions, but attributing it to the genetic advantage of childminding seems somewhat facile. Other mammalian species, such as wolves, have childminding strategies in which the menopause is not implicated. The issue needs to be examined in the context of studies of group behaviour and hierarchy, and of the relative longevity of species, rather than by reasoning back from the practices of a human community which happen to fit the bill.
Anne Summers
London NW3
From Gordon Kerry
Alison Jolly notes that attempts by males to control female reproduction 'show no sign of abating'. In Australia, the Federal Government proposes to change the Sex Discrimination Act in order to restrict access to in vitro fertilisation not just to heterosexual women, but to married couples. The announcement seemed to come as news to many of the female members of the Government (who of course do not include the Prime Minister or Attorney General), not to mention its (female) Sex Discrimination Commissioner. We need more bonobos in public life.
Gordon Kerry
Sydney
