Keep me: natural selection and females
Alison Jolly, 10 August 2000
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.