Sarah Hrdy (née Blaffer; born July 11, 1946) is an American anthropologist and primatologist who has made major contributions to evolutionary psychology and sociobiology.
She is considered "a highly recognized pioneer in modernizing our understanding of the evolutionary basis of female behavior in both nonhuman and human primates".
[11] At the end of her sophomore year, she transferred to Radcliffe College, then the women's part of Harvard, in order to study under the great Mayanist Evon Vogt.
[11][2] Interested in making public health films for people in developing countries, Hrdy took film-making courses at Stanford, but was disappointed with them.
His lecture reminded her of something a Harvard professor, Irven DeVore, had said about a species of Indian monkey called langurs among whom males, supposedly because they were crowded, killed infants.
[8][1] Hrdy changed course in mid-year and entered Harvard as a graduate student in 1970 to study primate behavior so she could go to India and find out why these male Hanuman langurs were killing infants.
[1] Working under the supervision of DeVore, Trivers and Wilson provided Hrdy with an introduction to the emerging science of sociobiology—which crystallized at Harvard in the early 1970s.
Turnover in her langur troupes occurred roughly on average every 27 months leaving the usurping male only a brief window of opportunity to breed and pass on his genes.
She begins chapter one with a sentence indicating that the results of her work suggest female agency should be given a lot more credit than previously assumed.
She examines "human mothers and infants in a broader comparative and evolutionary framework,"[27] informing and forming views of mother-infant interdependence from a sociobiological viewpoint.
[31] She stresses that an ape producing such costly offspring as humans could not have evolved unless mothers had had help from others, and had been what sociobiologists term cooperative breeders.
[32] In Mother Nature Hrdy argued that apes with the life history attributes of Homo sapiens could not have evolved unless alloparents in addition to parents had helped to care for and provision offspring, "the Cooperative Breeding Hypothesis".
Other apes possess cognitive wiring for rudimentary Theory of Mind, but with cooperative rearing, relevant potentials for mentalizing would have become more fully expressed, and thus rendered more visible to natural selection.
[33][35][36] In 2014, Mothers and Others, together with earlier work, earned Hrdy the National Academy's Award for Scientific Reviewing in honor of her "insightful and visionary synthesis of a broad range of data and concepts from across the social and biological sciences to illuminate the importance of biosocial processes among mothers, infants, and other social actors in forming the evolutionary crucible of human societies.