Saturday, October 3, 2009

Mothering the human ape baby

...there's been some fabulous hormonal studies, that map the hormonal response of men, which actually parallels the hormonal response of women, and you get those sort of love hormones of oxytosin and prolactin and testosterone supressed when a father is involved in parenting closely or even surrounded by the parenting process, so there is that chemical heritage...his prolactin levels go up, his testosterone levels go down...it's a remarkable potential, and it depends on the structuring of society...if you look cross-culturally, the societies that are the most war-like, that have the most fighting, are uniformly - anthropologists have known this for a long time - are the ones where you have extreme sex-segregation.

promiscuous: has sex with more partners than someone else thinks she should...assiduously maternal...it just wouldn't be prudent to rely on only one male...
babies as sensory traps...
the presence of a maternal grandmother can halve childhood mortality...
these are quotes from a conversationon between Sarah Blaffer Hrdy and Natasha Mitchell today on "All In The Mind"

It takes a village to raise a child we knew, but why? Sarah B Hardy has some amazingly insightful answers.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/allinthemind/stories/2009/2699425.htm

And the consequences to really engaging with this at a policy level is so exciting.

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

Professor Emerita
Department of Anthropology
University of California, Davis
http://www.citrona.com/hrdy/index.html

3 comments:

sarah toa said...

Sounds great, I haven't listened to it yet. I know that when man and woman fall in lust, his testosterone drops and hers heightens and vice versa for oestrogen. Makes for a level union, conducive to baby-making.
Interestingly, especially after my night as Anthropological Karaoke Observer, alcohol produces the same condition!
Unfortunately, later things go back to boring and diametrically opposed ol' normal.

chrissie said...

that's interesting, how long does it last without alcohol? what does karaoke do to the levels?

Growling Gecko said...

Very interesting and depends on the quality of the singer?