An extensive account of paternal care, explaining how and why men biologically transform when caring for babies. Once upon a time, it seemed obvious that women care for babies and men do other things. However, with the advent of evolutionary science, this traditional division of labor was established: female breasts evolved to compete for position and mates, while women are specially made to gestate, breastfeed, and care for the victors' offspring. Yet, in the twenty-first century, more and more men are caring for babies, sometimes from birth. How can this be happening? Puzzled but also fascinated by the nurturing ability of new fathers across the world, the renowned evolutionary anthropologist and primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy set out to trace the deep history of paternal care and explain an unexpected deviation from what she thought was "normal." In "Father Time," Hrdy draws from extensive research to argue that this ongoing transformation in men is not only cultural but deeply biological. Men in prolonged close contact with babies exhibit responses nearly identical to those in the bodies and brains of mothers. They develop nurturing abilities that few realized men possessed. In her quest to explain how men came to care for babies, Hrdy travels back through millions of years of human, primate, and mammalian evolution, and then even further back to the first vertebrates—while taking into account recent economic and social trends and technological innovations, incorporating new discoveries from neuroscience, genetics, endocrinology, and more. The result is a masterful synthesis of evolutionary and historical perspectives that expands our understanding of what it means to be male—and what the implications might be for our society and species.
