Instructional Video Catalog: Title Description Hrdy's lecture was entitled "How Maternal Instincts Shaped the Human Species." Children are so slow maturing and costly to rear that through most of human evolutionary history mothers needed to factor in social support and assistance from others before committing themselves to lactation and a prolonged period of care. In some times and places, this situation-dependent maternal commitment has resulted in high levels of maternal abandonment, sometimes mistaken by historians as evidence that women have lost the maternal instincts found in other mammals. As a consequence of this heritage, human infants have become connoisseurs of maternal commitment, constantly monitoring their mothers and adjusting accordingly, with profound implications for such uniquely human capacities as our ability to articulate the needs of those around us and care about them. This perspective on the evolutionary origins of compassion raises an unsettling question about the future: even if we persist as a species, will we still be human in the way we currently define the term?
Production Date: 2001
Title: " Sarah Blaffer Hrdy "
Length: 60 min.
Ordering: UNL Video checkout
Subject: History
Series Title: E.N. THOMPSON FORUM ON WORLD ISSUES
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