Father Nature

August 12, 2024
“Although most mammalian fathers are not involved in raising their young, something special happened during human evolution that endowed men with the tendency and capacity to do so,” contends Emory University anthropologist Rilling in this stimulating debut. Noting that male chimpanzees and bonobos, Homo sapiens’s two closest relatives, are aggressive and provide little care for their offspring, Rilling suggests the paternal instinct in humans likely evolved after the species split off from its last common great ape ancestor. A prominent theory for how that happened, he explains, proposes that with the emergence of hunting two million years ago, men could boost the chances of passing on their genes by providing protein to a relatively small number of offspring, rather than siring as many children as possible. Such evolutionary pressures have selected for men who undergo certain biological changes when around babies. For instance, “human fathers who spend time with their infants experience a significant decline in testosterone,” making them less likely to pursue procreation and more likely to spend time caregiving. There’s more discussion of fatherhood in amphibians, birds, and insects than one would expect from a book ostensibly focused on humans, but the evolutionary history nonetheless intrigues. While not on the level of Sarah Hrdy’s Father Time, this competent overview of the development of dads does the trick. Illus.