"Not What Nature Intended?" - A Refutation
Apr. 4th, 2009 10:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiat_knoxI write to refute this link below:-
"Single parents - Not What Nature Intended"
Meredith F. Small
LiveScience's Human Nature Columnist
LiveScience.com meredith F. Small
livescience's Human Nature Columnist
livescience.com – Sat Apr 4, 10:43 am ET
I have recently become a single mother. After 10 years of sharing child care with a man, I am now in charge of everything, and like all single mothers, I am pretty tired.
I also feel oddly unsettled - it just doesn't seem right for one person to go it alone as a parent, no matter the recent statistics showing that 25 percent of American household are now headed by single parents.
But reading anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's new book, "Mothers and Others; The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding" (Belknap Press), I realize that unsettled is exactly how I should feel because humans were simply not designed to bring up children all on their own.
The idea that we need each other goes against what has become the accepted theory about the evolution of behavior. For decades, evolutionary biologists have claimed that all organisms are basically selfish. The game of reproductive success, they have explained over and over, is won by those who are successful at passing their genes onto the next generation. As such, every animal, including humans, should be self-centered. At the most basic, the biologists say, our selfish genes compel us to stay alive, find the best mates, and have the most babies, and to always think of ourselves before others.
Hrdy, a staunch evolutionist, is the first to admit that this now traditional view of individual behavior is ready for revision. The new view, she and others claim, must include the fact that cooperation, not just competition and selfishness, is also part of our nature.
Her thesis is simple: We are social animals that need each others to survive, and so humans are born with the ability to understand how others feel (empathy), and to aid others, even if we don't share genes in common. Support for this approach comes from anthropologists who have tracked nonhuman and human primate behavior and discovered endless examples of cooperation. Neuroscientists and psychologists have also demonstrated that peoples' brains biochemically respond to others in need, and there are a thousand ways in which we act on those feelings.
Taking this idea one step further, Hrdy points out that cooperation driven by empathy was probably also instrumental to ancient patterns of child care.
As hunters and gatherers, our ancestors relied on each other, and they must have shared the care of dependent babies and rowdy children. Bands of humans probably included mothers and sisters, grandmothers, and fathers, and everyone must have played a part in the communal care of kids, just as they all played a part in getting food. Humans are experts in keeping track of networks of relationships and knowing who will cooperate and who is just a taker, and these tallies probably kept the community functioning.
Given this history, my life as a single mother is at odds with how I, and my child, are designed to operate. I am supposed to have a band of others to help out, and my child is supposed to be caught by that net of friends and kin.
With this in mind, I've decided to act on Hrdy's advice next time I am pressed, and I do know several friends, good humans all, who are clearly willing to give their time and services to co-parent with me when I need it. And this deal will work, because they know I, too, am the kind of good human who will respond and take care of their kids when they need help as well.
Meredith F. Small is an anthropologist at Cornell University. She is also the author of "Our Babies, Ourselves; How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent" (link) and "The Culture of Our Discontent; Beyond the Medical Model of Mental Illness" (link). Her Human Nature column appears each Friday on LiveScience.
Single parenthood exists all over Nature. A hell of a lot of plants don't bother with parenting at all. The fruit just drops right off the branch and lands where it may. A lot of female animals raise their young alone, a prime example being bears, because males have been known to eat cubs. (It kills off future competition).
Cuttlefish are a beautiful example of devoted single parenthood. Firstly, the males get together and cloud up the waters with their sperm. They fertilise the females by the millions. And then the females, now pregnant, just head for the depths, leaving the males to die in a vast, still, silent shoal suspended in milky seawater.
The females, get this, head for a crevice in the ground, where they lay their eggs. And there they remain. The whole time. They don't go out and hunt. They do not eat. They do not sleep. They just stand guard over their eggs, and fan them to keep the water circulating and keep the climate controlled.
The last thing the mother sees, before she expires from exhaustion, is the next generation of cuttles emerging from their tiny translucent egg spheres. And then they feast on her fresh corpse. It's a huge source of protein. Why let it go to waste?
And consider the examples of Black Widows and other spiders, not to mention their arachnid cousins, the scorpions; and from the insects, the example of the Praying Mantis springs to mind. Not many male praying mantis get to celebrate Father's Day.
And if you want another couple of examples, the Surinam Toad and sea horse score highly in the exception stakes, because it is the males of both species who look after their offspring; and there exists a species of bottom-dwelling fish where, after hatching the eggs, the male keeps the fry safe inside his mouth.
In contrast, the angler fish that you may be familiar with, that huge-jawed, needle-fanged monster from the deep with the bioluminescent angling lure? Those are all females. All of them. The males just swim around until they find a female; then they attach themselves permamently to the females and fertilise the females' eggs. Males, in the case of this species, are little more than minute, useless, blood sucking, sluglike excrecences protruding from the females' flanks likedivorce lawyers lampreys.
Nature is replete with all the signs to support, or refute, whichever viewpoint you care to make. All you have to do is just draw a chart, scrawl a pretty line and, if you turn it on its side and squint enough, you can make any graph agree with you.
Or, perhaps, you could take a lesson from Nature and discover that everything is possible, and anything can happen in Nature. Even the strange, the apparently contradictory, and the surprising.
But (and here comes the gist of my refutation) it doesn't happen on a whim. And it doesn't happen because "Nature intended it." Read my lips. Humans were not "designed" for any purpose.
Meredith F. Small
LiveScience's Human Nature Columnist
LiveScience.com meredith F. Small
livescience's Human Nature Columnist
livescience.com – Sat Apr 4, 10:43 am ET
I have recently become a single mother. After 10 years of sharing child care with a man, I am now in charge of everything, and like all single mothers, I am pretty tired.
I also feel oddly unsettled - it just doesn't seem right for one person to go it alone as a parent, no matter the recent statistics showing that 25 percent of American household are now headed by single parents.
But reading anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's new book, "Mothers and Others; The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding" (Belknap Press), I realize that unsettled is exactly how I should feel because humans were simply not designed to bring up children all on their own.
The idea that we need each other goes against what has become the accepted theory about the evolution of behavior. For decades, evolutionary biologists have claimed that all organisms are basically selfish. The game of reproductive success, they have explained over and over, is won by those who are successful at passing their genes onto the next generation. As such, every animal, including humans, should be self-centered. At the most basic, the biologists say, our selfish genes compel us to stay alive, find the best mates, and have the most babies, and to always think of ourselves before others.
Hrdy, a staunch evolutionist, is the first to admit that this now traditional view of individual behavior is ready for revision. The new view, she and others claim, must include the fact that cooperation, not just competition and selfishness, is also part of our nature.
Her thesis is simple: We are social animals that need each others to survive, and so humans are born with the ability to understand how others feel (empathy), and to aid others, even if we don't share genes in common. Support for this approach comes from anthropologists who have tracked nonhuman and human primate behavior and discovered endless examples of cooperation. Neuroscientists and psychologists have also demonstrated that peoples' brains biochemically respond to others in need, and there are a thousand ways in which we act on those feelings.
Taking this idea one step further, Hrdy points out that cooperation driven by empathy was probably also instrumental to ancient patterns of child care.
As hunters and gatherers, our ancestors relied on each other, and they must have shared the care of dependent babies and rowdy children. Bands of humans probably included mothers and sisters, grandmothers, and fathers, and everyone must have played a part in the communal care of kids, just as they all played a part in getting food. Humans are experts in keeping track of networks of relationships and knowing who will cooperate and who is just a taker, and these tallies probably kept the community functioning.
Given this history, my life as a single mother is at odds with how I, and my child, are designed to operate. I am supposed to have a band of others to help out, and my child is supposed to be caught by that net of friends and kin.
With this in mind, I've decided to act on Hrdy's advice next time I am pressed, and I do know several friends, good humans all, who are clearly willing to give their time and services to co-parent with me when I need it. And this deal will work, because they know I, too, am the kind of good human who will respond and take care of their kids when they need help as well.
Meredith F. Small is an anthropologist at Cornell University. She is also the author of "Our Babies, Ourselves; How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent" (link) and "The Culture of Our Discontent; Beyond the Medical Model of Mental Illness" (link). Her Human Nature column appears each Friday on LiveScience.
Single parenthood exists all over Nature. A hell of a lot of plants don't bother with parenting at all. The fruit just drops right off the branch and lands where it may. A lot of female animals raise their young alone, a prime example being bears, because males have been known to eat cubs. (It kills off future competition).
Cuttlefish are a beautiful example of devoted single parenthood. Firstly, the males get together and cloud up the waters with their sperm. They fertilise the females by the millions. And then the females, now pregnant, just head for the depths, leaving the males to die in a vast, still, silent shoal suspended in milky seawater.
The females, get this, head for a crevice in the ground, where they lay their eggs. And there they remain. The whole time. They don't go out and hunt. They do not eat. They do not sleep. They just stand guard over their eggs, and fan them to keep the water circulating and keep the climate controlled.
The last thing the mother sees, before she expires from exhaustion, is the next generation of cuttles emerging from their tiny translucent egg spheres. And then they feast on her fresh corpse. It's a huge source of protein. Why let it go to waste?
And consider the examples of Black Widows and other spiders, not to mention their arachnid cousins, the scorpions; and from the insects, the example of the Praying Mantis springs to mind. Not many male praying mantis get to celebrate Father's Day.
And if you want another couple of examples, the Surinam Toad and sea horse score highly in the exception stakes, because it is the males of both species who look after their offspring; and there exists a species of bottom-dwelling fish where, after hatching the eggs, the male keeps the fry safe inside his mouth.
In contrast, the angler fish that you may be familiar with, that huge-jawed, needle-fanged monster from the deep with the bioluminescent angling lure? Those are all females. All of them. The males just swim around until they find a female; then they attach themselves permamently to the females and fertilise the females' eggs. Males, in the case of this species, are little more than minute, useless, blood sucking, sluglike excrecences protruding from the females' flanks like
Nature is replete with all the signs to support, or refute, whichever viewpoint you care to make. All you have to do is just draw a chart, scrawl a pretty line and, if you turn it on its side and squint enough, you can make any graph agree with you.
Or, perhaps, you could take a lesson from Nature and discover that everything is possible, and anything can happen in Nature. Even the strange, the apparently contradictory, and the surprising.
But (and here comes the gist of my refutation) it doesn't happen on a whim. And it doesn't happen because "Nature intended it." Read my lips. Humans were not "designed" for any purpose.
