Ascot The History Book

This book is making me more annoying that usual. Today I told a bored friend, "Did you know that marsupials can produce two completely different types of milk from their two mammary glands? Or that high-society baboon moms are more likely to have daughters and low-class baboons are more likely to have sons, because of upward mobility within baboon troops (p 92)? Or that great-white-sharks, lacking a placenta to nourish babies while inside their mommies, EAT EACH OTHER until they are born??" This book is a wonderful cascade of bizarre and terrifying and sometimes even lovely facts about parenting in the natural world.

Natural selection is the star of the show: the crystalline (brutal) precision of genes surviving or failing-- hacking off useless appendages, dumping runts and abandoning eggs. The world of parenting is tooth and nail-- cull or be culled. Stumble upon small behavioral changes and you may completely change the likelihood of your genes' survival.

And then there's people. I loved Allport's point that 98% of human history (and all of the selective pressure that shaped our behavior, physiognomy, psychology and possibly -- dare I go so far-- culture) is as pre-historical hunter gatherers. Civilization-- what, 10,000 years of it?-- has yet to exert any evolutionary pressure on humans! So our parenting instincts, whatever they are, are best understood by understanding our pre-agricultural ancestresses. (p160).

I enjoyed that this book answers (partially) the out-of-date lacunae in The Naked Ape. How much of what we do is primate behavior? Or mammalian? Or vertebrate?

Another point I loved: precocial animals are born basically mature and independent (think a colt galloping off within an hour of being born), where altricial animals are born immature and completely dependent on their parents (think blind naked baby birds or human babies). Altricial brains are formed mostly post-partum, requiring social learning and teaching-- and making culture possible. Precocial animals are born with their instincts intact, with little learning to be done, and so can't adapt the way learning animals can. 27- "Three quarters of the human brain's development takes place in the real world, an adaptation that has given humans the ability to move into and inhabit every part of the globe and one that has demanded extraordinary amounts of parental care."

I loved seeing some of the studies-- on attachment, for instance-- that I've read about in parenting books, presented here in their original anthropological/sociological/psychological contexts. p170- "Mothers who picked their infants up promptly when they cried had, after a year, not demanding, whiny infants on their hands-- as most psychologists of the day would have expected, as respected pediatricians like Benjamin Spock warned against-- but rather infants who cried less and were more easily quieted."

Some other interesting bits:
67- "Human societies (like all animal societies) exist to make the jobs of parents easier. They exist to create stable environments in which parents can find the resources to live and work and provide for their young."

81- "There is simply no mechanism by which natural selection can act on a species as a whole. Natural selection can only act on individuals and individual behavior."

98- (When the author is three weeks past her first daughter's due date:) "For those three weeks I was in a state of suspension much as drops of moisture were suspended in the thick July air. But, of course, I was much more thundercloud than drop."

147 (Re: three baby walruses at a zoo) "They lay in their cage looking like a pileup on the interstate or a tackle of football players."

163- (re: male/female human division of labor, quoting Jane Lancaster)"With males and females specializing in obtaining food from different levels of the food chain, humans got to eat high-protein, energy-rich foods, yet they avoided the risk of starvation that most committed carnivores run. This meant that not only could males provide for their mates during the postpartum period, but males and females could also provide for their young long after weaning." Also 189: "In some hunter-gatherer societies women provide their families with 70 percent of their total calories. The food they forage is essential to their families' survival, and women are valued not just for their fertility but for their ability to provide. Much of their status, like that of men, derives from activities outside the home. Does it surprise us, then, that women in modern societies might be dissatisfied with staying home and caring for their children? Not only does this reduced role fail to utilize many women's talents but it also seems to render them less essential to their families' survival."

172- "Parents and their care become the environments in which the children develop, the finishing schools of their brains."