OK – if Darwin really had lessons for today’s college graduates, he’d probably have a lot to say. In coming up with the most thorough, thoughtful, and data-filled work ever completed on questions regarding the nature of life, Darwin did, in fact, come up with a set of ideas that bear on every single aspect of what it means to be human (or cat, or dog, or robin, or goldfish, or moth, or field mouse). Other intellectual approaches that try to address broad ranges of phenomena using some set of principles tend to come up relatively short.

Consider how a Darwinian approach can benefit the area of applied psychology:

Imagine, for a moment, a mental health client who’s a young adult male complaining of social problems, general frustration, and anxiety in social contexts.

A traditionally trained mental health counseling approach might, for instance, pertain to how a client’s frustrations, recent confrontational history, and social problems need to be understood in a specific family context. The client’s familial relationship history would likely be recorded and analyzed with an eye toward helping this client. Taking the cultural norms of that family into account is broad and such an approach has the capacity to help a lot of people with diverse situations. However, I must say that, devoid of evolutionary principles, this theory is a bit narrow.

Evolutionary mental health counseling would go a step farther – perhaps a great leap further. Evolutionary mental health counseling focuses on how some behavioral problem would have functioned under ancestral conditions – with a goal of possibly seeing if said behavioral problem would have had the effect of increasing reproductive success under ancestral conditions.

Such an analysis differs from the prior in that it is rooted in Darwinism. Thus, it thinks about problems in terms of Darwinian questions, to help understand (a) why the behavioral pattern evolved under ancestral conditions, (b) what factors in the situation encourage such behavior – and, perhaps, (c) what factors mobilize actions in a way that they would increase reproductive success.

An EP counselor, looking at this situation, sees things very differently from a traditionally trained counselor. The client is a single man of reproductive age – and is, at 20-some years, a prime candidate for young male syndrome (Daly & Wilson, 1983) – a time in the life of every man when he’s willing to take particularly high risks to unconsciously gain access to mates. Confrontational, risky behavior is typical from individuals in this demographic – and its ultimate goal is to try to attract mates – just as efforts among adult male caribou during mating season are designed to defeat competitors and gain access to females. The counselor works, thus, to help the client develop non-dangerous skills that are attractive to others and that help build social connections.

These two explanations for the client’s frustration and aggressive outbursts are not particularly incongruous. To some extent, they explain the behavior at different levels, with the non-EP version focusing on proximate causes (such as the immediate familial context) and the EP version focusing on distal, ultimate causes, such as how the pattern may bear on reproductive success.

Given the unmatched power of Evolutionary Theory as a tool in unlocking the mysteries of the world, it makes exquisite sense to apply evolutionary theory to academic fields with stated goals of helping others (Keller & Nesse, 2006). To the extent that the goal (helping others) is important and valued and that the evolutionary explanation opens new insights into how to move toward the goal – including implications of specific actions that can be taken, the evolutionary approach has merit.

Thus, Darwin’s lesson to the graduates is this: Don’t be afraid to apply a new way of thinking to an old problem – even if people in the field are saying “oh no, that’s not needed – really – no – really – I mean it!” In a chapter on the power of evolution, Wilson (2007) talks about “teaching the experts” – essentially arguing that students with a strong background in EvoS have cognitive skills used to make important contributions in all kinds of fields – simply because evolution often provides a new and profoundly useful way of thinking about problems. When Daly and Wilson (1988) decided to examine differential filicide rates as a function of status as a step versus biological parent, the data sorted themselves out – nearly diving like lemmings into the appropriate and predicted statistical cells. Evolutionary theory was brought in to address this issue – and the light was turned on in the room as a result.

Graduate, you’ve learned many new skills during your time in college. You’ve learned different perspectives – and you’ve learned that these perspectives don’t always go well with one another (e.g., Geher & Gambacorta, 2010). That’s fine – and I’m glad you saw that in your education. But each perspective you learned about gave you a toolbox. A unique set of ways of thinking about some set of phenomena.

Using evolutionary psychology to understand counseling psychology makes so much sense to me as I’m in a department with a strong counseling program and I’m personally very focused on EP. So I’ve recently become intrigued by applied evolutionary psychology and am currently doing a bunch of scholarship to progress the work of this field.

But I’m not that special. You can do the same. Learn about the principles of evolutionary theory. For instance, think how these ideas may help us understanding democracy – understanding how people vote and for whom they vote. Understand what kind of issues people take on. Understand what kinds of things lead to moral outrage – and why? And what is the function of moral outrage? And how common is it? And what triggers it? And what function does this behavioral pattern serve – either for individuals or, perhaps, for the broader group? This is, of course, just a sample of questions that follow from thinking like an evolutionist. Once you learn to think like an evolutionist, the number of questions to ask is endless!

I’m focusing on how evolutionary principles can help us yield new insights into different areas of inquiry – but you can progress along a different path – other intellectual paths surely have merit. How can social constructionism help explain the pieces of your world? How can hypothesis testing, learned in boring-old-stats class, help you understand the behavior of people at a small bar on a Saturday night?

How can learning about the history of the social sciences help you predict what your future might look like 10 years from now?

Thus, this post isn’t really about how Darwinism can help you better understand the world (not fully, anyway) – it’s, rather, about how the many wonderful (and even less-than-wonderful) sets of ideas you’ve been exposed to during your tenure as a student can help you understand the world beyond how you might imagine.

Darwin’s lessons to the graduates are, thus, in my mind, considerably beyond the lessons of evolution. Here is a sample of Darwin’s lessons:
1. Keep an open mind – Darwin did – and he changed the world forever as a result.
2. Collect data – don’t accept premises that have no substance behind them.
3. Realize that all the sciences and humanities are strongly interconnected.
4. A set of ideas originally designed to explain X, may well provide an exceptional explanation of Y and Z.
5. If you like intellectual approach Q, and see its predictive merit, don’t be afraid to apply Q in new domains – you may stumble upon something that no one ever dreamed of.
6. Finally, a specific implication of Darwinism for college graduates is this: Hear that robin singing in the morning? Smell the white blossoms on the natural rose bushes near the woods? See the turkey vultures soaring high – in communicative harmony with one another? Note this: The same forces accounting for these examples account for everything you see when you look in a mirror. You are part of this magnificent natural world. This insight is, for my money, what makes Darwinism a truly spiritual approach to the world. “There is grandeur in this view of life” (Darwin, 1859).

Congratulations graduates. Along with my professorial brethren, I wish you the very best in your future. Make us proud. And remember, your success is our success.

And for more information about the exciting new field of “Applied Evolutionary Psychology,” check out the Applied Evolutionary Psychology Society (AEPS – yes, from APES to AEPS)!

References:

Darwin, C (1859). On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1st ed.). London: John Murray.

Geher, G., & Gambacorta, D. (2010). Evolution is not relevant to sex differences in humans because I want it that way! Evidence for the politicization of human evolutionary psychology. EvoS Journal: The Journal of the Evolutionary Studies Consortium, 2, 32-47.

Keller, M. C., & Nesse, R. M. (2006). The evolutionary significance of depressive symptoms:
Different life events lead to different depressive symptom patterns. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91, 316-330.

Wilson, D. S. (2007). Evolution for Everyone. New York: Delacorte Press.

Wilson M, Daly M (1993) Lethal confrontational violence among young men. Pp. 84-106 in NJ Bell & RW Bell, eds., Adolescent risk taking. Newbury Park CA: Sage Press.

Wilson M, Daly M (1998) Sexual rivalry and sexual conflict: recurring themes in fatal conflicts. Theoretical Criminology. 2: 291-310.

Making Sense of Biology

Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution, Theodosius Dobzhansky (1973). The American Biology Teacher, 35(3), 125-129.

Nature Red in Tooth and Claw…

This line comes from the poem: In Memoriam A.H.H. by the English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson.  It was completed in 1849 and it is a requiem for the poet’s Cambridge friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage in Vienna in 1833. I use this line in all of my introductory lectures about natural selection.  It drives home the salient point that all individuals, and by extension species, operate in self-interest.  This expression is a six word refutation of natural theology; and at the same time an excellent illustration of the problems entailed in the naturalist fallacy.

Natural Theology held that the beneficence of the creator could be seen in the acts of creation.  This thinking goes back at least to Sir Thomas Aquinas (1225/7 – 1274), who wrote in the fifth argument of his Summa Theologie that the existence of God is proved by the order and harmony of the world that there must be an intelligent being in charge.  This view was further developed by John Ray’s The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation (1691) which relies on argument from design utilizing somewhat sound natural history.  Over a century later, Natural Theology would develop its highest form in William Paley’s Natural Theology (1803) and Bridgewater Treatises (1832 – 1840.)  These works influenced all of Darwin and all his contemporary scholars.  Indeed the structure of on the Origin of Species was designed to counter much of the thinking of natural theology. Natural Theology failed because it cannot explain adaptation. Certainly, somewhat obvious adaptations seem readily explained by “an intelligent being.”  Fish, Ichthyosaurs, Dolphins all have torpedo shapes.  This shape is hydrodynamic, so there is no challenge to Natural Theology here.  However, why create an organism whose chief adaptation, intelligence is made possible by a large head (which makes its infant more difficult to pass through the mother’s birth canal?)  Real intelligent design would have altered the infant head growth program to make birth easy, and accelerated its growth after to birth to make learning easier. Numerous other examples abound in nature of suboptimal designs, for example why not design humans with eyes in the back of their heads?  Or why design so many microbial life forms that easily infect and often kill these same humans? Attempting to unravel adaptation and organismal diversity using this paradigm quickly became unmanageable.

Closely aligned to Natural Theology is that naturalist fallacy which proceeds from the notion that “all things natural are good.”  As a corollary to this thinking, those who operate under the naturalist fallacy assume that humans would be better off if we simply left nature alone.  Certainly, if we use the current example of the oil spill going on in the Gulf of Mexico, the naturists might have a point.  British Petroleum should have understood that offshore drilling at that depth was fraught with danger.  Thus this particular accident and the damage it is producing could have been avoided if we simply did not “mess with mother nature.”  However, this line of reasoning is fallacious.  It is an example of hasty generalization and selective memory.  How about all the other oil platforms around the world that are operating without major accidents?  And even if major accidents are inevitable when drilling for oil at these depths, what is are the benefits that result from this enterprise and do they outweigh the costs?  Indeed, don’t get me wrong here, what I am not saying is that oil drilling or ongoing fossil fuel use is okay, what I am saying is that the naturalist fallacy is not the way to critique or reject this practice.

Case in point, a colleague of mine who I respect a great deal, suggested that humans should treat other animals utilizing the same ethical and moral principles that we apply to other people.  Certainly the organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) would agree with that notion.  Yet I argue that this sort of thinking flows from the naturalist fallacy, as well as anthropomorphism.  Charles Darwin remarked in The Origin of Species that if any species could be found, whose behavior solely benefited another species, than his theory of natural selection would be false.  Indeed Darwin was absolutely correct.  The vast majority of animal species are parasites and many are predatory.  Biological communities do show species associations were both species benefit (ants and acacia trees, lichens are algae and fungi, mutualism, +, +); however no species associations have ever been found which show a pattern of a species devoting its energy to the well-being of a second with no benefit coming in return.

Generally, all individuals attempt to maximize their fitness, resulting in their species increasing its abundance and geographical distribution.  This often has the impact of decreasing its competitors.  This may occur intentionally or unintentionally.  Consider the case of our hominid relatives.  Modern humans are descended from a lineage that occupied the world with other intelligent hominids.  For example, 200,000 years ago the world included the  Australopithecines, as well as H. neanderthalensis, H. erectus, and possibly a dwarf human species, Homo floresiensis, found in Java, Indonesia.  Archeological evidence exists that suggests that modern humans entered Europe around 55,000 ybp.  At that time, their skeletal dimensions suggested that they had tropical physical features, including the possibility that they retained their original dark skin.  That evidence also suggests that H. neanderthalensis had temperate/arctic physical features and the MC1R (red hair, light pigmentation gene) has been isolated from Neanderthal DNA.  Artifacts associated with both species suggest that H. sapiens was more culturally advanced.  New DNA analysis suggests that between 1 – 4% of the DNA of modern Europeans may have originated in Neanderthals¹.  This means that there had to have been some interaction between these species.  We cannot infer that the interaction was aggressive or warlike; however shortly after modern humans arrive in Europe the Neanderthals went extinct.  The hypotheses revolve around the competitive exclusion principle of ecology (Gause 1932.)  That is, two species which are very close in resource utilization cannot coexist in the same environment.  The human/Neanderthal interactions could have included direct warfare, competition for scarce resources, disease, or just chance.  Given the ice age conditions of Europe at that time, it is hard to image that there wasn’t some competition; especially since both species would have been hunter gatherers.  One model suggests that the modern human capacity for trade to augment scare resources might have given our species an edge in the competition with the Neanderthals². 

One can ask would it have been possible for modern humans and Neanderthals to have treated each other in an ethical manner. Possibly, especially when one considers that they might have been able to communicate via sign language or gestures (we do not know if Neanderthals had speech.) The FOXP2 gene is shared in both humans and Neanderthals; however the anatomy which allowed full speech did not appear until about 50,000 ybp and is never found in Neanderthal fossils³. The idea that humans might as a whole treat other species in an ethical fashion is undermined by our own history of unethical and immoral treatment of each other.  Indeed, it is argued that the domestication of animals was a key event in the creation of patriarchal societies in our species.  Certainly we do have a consistent history of ethical/moral behavior towards human outsiders; indeed such actions have been the exception and not the rule.

What has been the history of the interaction of humans with non-human species?  This is no different from the interactions of any other species in the web of life (e.g. eat or be eaten.)  For example, many large bodied predatory mammals were direct dangers to our ancestors (leopards, lions, hyenas, bears, wolves, etc.) For over 95% of our existence, these species dined on many unfortunate humans. In turn, our ancestors dined on smaller or less dangerous mammals (although one has to wonder about the sanity of the Pleistocene humans who hunted the great Mastodons!!) With the domestication of animals and the development of stable agriculture our reliance on hunting declined.  Also as our technological abilities grew (smelting of metal, development of projectile weapons) our ability to defend ourselves against large predatory mammals increased.  Ancient societies began to breed animals for food.  In modern industrial society, humans now breed animals for food on a massive scale.  For example, in 2008 the United States beef industry produced 26.56 billion pounds of beef, resulting from the slaughter of 34.4 million head of cattle! Most of this beef is consumed in the United States, that same year only 7.1% of the production was exported.  The average American pet receives more animal protein per day than that available to the vast majority of the world’s people! American pets are so well fed, that 25 – 40% of dogs and cats are obese. Thus for most of the world, as the comedian Chris Rock once exclaimed: “Don’t eat no red meat…no, don’t eat no green meat!”  Vegetarianism is a luxury that most of the world’s poor and hungry people cannot afford. Case in point, it is hypothesized that the HIV virus may have entered the human population through the practice of butchering “bushmeat” in central Africa.  Bushmeat is derived from various monkey species captured, butchered, and sold for consumption. Ironically, bush meat is considered a delicacy by some, and one recent examination of bush meat smuggled in the US has found it contaminated with a HIV-like virus.

Is carnivory a moral choice?

For the vast majority of organisms this is not a question.  As Dr. Allan Grant stated in the film Jurassic Park, “the other kind, do what they do.”  He was referring to the behavior of Tyrannosaurus rex, which evolved as a stealth/sit and wait predator and wasn’t making moral choices when it attempted to eat Lex and Tim.  Throughout the history of life, such predators had no other means of survival.  Humans evolved as omnivores.  It is hard to reconstruct Paleolithic diets; however we suspect that our ancestors ate whatever they could find including animals, edible plants, especially fruits and nuts. This fact is important in understanding how modern pseudoscientific diet fads are contributing to disease⁷.  Carnivory is not a moral choice for other animals because they do not have the mental capacity to make moral choices. In the words of another movie character, Matt Hooper: “Sharks swim, eat, and make baby sharks.  That’s all they do!” Humans on the other hand can decide that they do not wish to eat other animals.  Vegetarian diets are possible, although to remain healthy they require planning, since there are some essential amino acids that are hard to get from plants. However, is choosing to be a vegetarian or vegan a moral choice?

Moral reasoning involves making decisions about what we ought to do.  What we ought to do depends upon one’s values.  Philosophers claim that moral values are those that are worthwhile for their own sake.  Our ability to make moral value judgments results from the way our brain evolved and thus were ultimately produced by the selective pressures that made human social life and structure possible.  These selection pressures are classically thought of as kin-selection (altruism favoring closely related individuals) and reciprocal altruism (altruism that occurred between unrelated allies that benefited both parties.)  While our moral reasoning capacity evolved via genetically based selection, our moral norms evolve via cultural evolution⁸.  For example, some cultures have no problem eating dogs and cats (a practice abhorrent to Americans.)  Yet, our consumption of beef cattle is abhorrent to many Hindus.  Some Alaska Native tribes still hunt whales for cultural and food purposes.  Japan, Norway, and Iceland maintain high volume whaling industries for food consumption.  In 2005, Japan was taking 440 minke whales a year from Antarctic waters⁹.  If whale consumption is not abhorrent enough, some cultures have practiced cannibalism.  Mostly this practice had shamanist significance, although it is thought that our cousin species the Neanderthals might have eaten their old and sick for survival purposes. With all this said, when does the consumption of other species become a moral choice?

As shocking as this may sound, one species eating another is not a moral issue.  One can even argue that people eating other people is not a moral issue (so long as the human bodies involved were not murdered.)  In extreme survival situations, this has often occurred.  For example, the story which inspired Herman Melvin’s Moby Dick, is based on a real case. In 1820, an American whaling ship (the Essex, captained by George Pollard out of Nantucket, MA) was sank by a sperm whale in the Pacific Ocean.  The survivors were stranded on Henderson Island with inadequate food and water.  Eventually some took to their boats in an attempt to be rescued.  With only four men left in Captain Pollard’s boat (Coffin, Ramsdell, Ray, Pollard) they decided to draw lots to see which of them would be sacrificed to allow the others to live.  Charles Ramsdell shot his friend Owen Coffin, and the remaining three lived off his body.  After Ray died, Pollard and Ramsdell gnawed the bones of the two skeletons until picked up by Nantucket ship Dauphin 95 days after the sinking of the Essex⁹.

Might the day after arrive where carnivory might become a moral issue for humans?  Possibly, should we ever develop the technology to fully supply the proteins required for human life without the consumption of animal tissue.  One can even argue that there are moral (if not scientific) issues concerning how food production is currently achieved.  For example, is it morally wrong to feed grain to cattle so that they can be slaughtered to feed the wealthy?  I would argue yes, especially if more people can be fed with the grain you gave the cattle.  Cows are capable of converting cellulose to protein, so they don’t need to be fed grain.  There are range lands that are only suitable for growing cows, sheep, or goats.  These animals can produce protein for human populations that are protein limited.  It is inefficient to feed grain to livestock.  There are other moral concerns in food production; including how mass housing of cattle requires the use of antibiotics to maintain cattle yield. The increased yield comes at the cost of producing more antibiotic resistant bacteria, which endanger human life.  The immoral part of this process results from the profit motive associated with this means of producing meat.  These are acceptable moral reasons for criticizing the industry, but they do not amount to a moral argument for vegetarianism.

References

1. Green, R., Krause, J, Briggs, A.W….Paabo, S., A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal genome, Science 328: 710-722, 2010.

2. Horan, R.D, Bulte, E, Shogren, J.F, How trade saved humanity from biological exclusion: an economic theory of Neanderthal

Extinction, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 58(1): 1-19, 2005. 

3. Lieberman, P, The Evolution of Human Speech: Its Anatomical and Neural Bases, Current Anthropology  48 (1): 39-66, 2007.

4. http://www.ers.usda.gov/news/bsecoverage.htm

5. Laflamme, D.P, Understanding and Managing Obesity in Dogs and Cats, Veterinary Clinics of North America: Small Animal Practice 36(6): 1283- 1295, 2006.

6. Stonington, J., Bushmeat Presents Latest Food Scare: Researchers Find Strains of a Virus Related to HIV in Illegal Imports of Primate Flesh, a Delicacy to Some Africans, Wall Street Journal, April 14, 2010:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304604204575182463352698780.html

7. Lindeberg, S, Food and Western Disease: Health and Nutrition from an Evolutionary Perspective, (West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell), 2010.

8. Ayala, F.J, The biological roots of morality, Biology and Philosophy, 2(3): 235-252, 1987.

9. Gales, N.J, Kasuya, T, Clapham, P.J, and Brownell, Jr, R.L, Japan’s whaling plan under scrutiny, Nature 435, 883-884, 2005.

10. Philbrick, N, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, (New York, NY: Penguin Publishers), 2001.

There is pretty widespread agreement in the popular and academic worlds that women were made to be mothers. Picture Mother Mary, Jesus at her bosom (there were no breasts in the Renaissance images I am seeing), so designed to be a mother that she didn’t even have to participate in the act of conception to achieve her mothering perfection. There is such variation in the ways that women mother, however – from the 50s doting Donna Reed to mothers employing wet nurses and nannies to Andrea Yates, who drowned her 5 children – that one has to wonder: if mothering is so natural, why are some women so shoddy at or disinterested in it? And why do traditional societies, history, and comparative psychology contain so many examples of mothering requiring practice?

Humans possess relatively few, if any, skills that can be performed naturally, without practice. Even walking, once believe to just happen is now known to occur only after the infant has the chance to acquire other skills including balance and the coordination of upper and lower body. But walking is a skill that every normally developing infant eventually acquires, whereas mothering is not a skill that all women are willing or able to acquire – and there is much more variation in the outcome. Even still, a person can hardly think of a woman without picturing her as a mother. In fact, when men or mothers meet a married woman of reproductive age who has chosen not to have children, who among them doesn’t ask “why?” We even have many names for childless women, all pejorative (e.g. spinster, old maid).

Among hunter-gatherer groups, older sisters are often employed throughout the day to assist in childcare of younger siblings (Sear & Mace, 2008). In a Western context, we can see this practicing in the pretend play of (predominantly) girls with their dolls and accessories. Among the upper-class “founding mothers” generation of the U.S. colonies, upper-class teenage girls would often be apprenticed to new mothers to learn how to become mothers when their turns were up (Roberts, 2004). Even in other primate species, adolescent females yearn to get exposure to new infants, though humans alone among the great apes will share their very young infants with group members (Hrdy, 2009). Common chimpanzees will not share the infant until it is around 3.5 months, orangutans around 5 months – whereas in humans, it is mere minutes after birth. Women need training in all elements of parenting – from breastfeeding, which likewise does not just occur “naturally” (Volk, 2009) to dealing with a hormonal teenager. Feel free to leave a comment if you have tips about the latter!

Mothering can at times be overwhelming, especially when a mom finds herself with little to no help during most of the day. For those who have full-time careers, finding time to excel at work and raise a child can be daunting. Likewise, for mothers who stay at home with the children, dedicating yourself to the child at the expense of yourself, trying to complete daily tasks such as cooking and cleaning while tending to and entertaining a child, and trying to maintain a schedule that works for both you and the child (as in 5 am is too early, kids!) can be an exhausting challenge. This truth is inescapable.

Given the overwhelming nature of raising one of the most helpless and needy infants among primates, human mothers need others. In our modern world, we can see examples in Facebook, which has the support group Circle of Moms, where one can tag her friends who are also moms, and there are many mothers’ groups for finding playmates for mom and her child(ren) (such as the national group Las Madres). When new mothers were given support in the form of only 21 visits by RNs over the course of two years, their children benefited in many ways for at least the first 15 years of life, including cognitively (Hrdy, 2009). So, then, it is possible that when ‘others’ are around and help mothers hone their skills, both the mother and the infant benefit. In the Sear and Mace (2008) study cited above, for those infants who had older sisters to help in the childcare, they saw marked decreases in mortality. In other words, moms and infants both need moms who have help and support so that the moms may perfect their skills.

Switching from a natural mothers to practiced mothers perspective can be a real relief for modern moms. Perhaps a not so recent challenge is the feeling of isolation by being literally geographically isolated from friends and family. [I say not so recent because there are many times in history when women have been isolated from childhood friends and family by migrating due to marriage, and perhaps even woman have traditionally been the sex to migrate out of the group. I’ll save that for a future post]. Raising a human is at least the longest commitment among the great apes, if not the most challenging as well – humans are born completely helpless, unable to even cling to the mother; and require care well into adolescence. In fact, recent research suggests they need it much longer – humans don’t begin contributing as many nutritional resources as they consume until into their 30s (Kaplan, 2009). Accepting that mothering is a skill that takes practice can alleviate some of the stress of feeling like a fish out of water.

Similarly, accepting the practiced mothers perspective allows a new mother to accept help more readily. More often than not, mothers, mothers-in-law, and friends are offering help with childcare or advice because they’ve been there before and know how difficult transitioning from carrying a 25-pound bag of baby etc. in your uterus to caring for a 6-pound lump of baby can be. If a mother feels as if she should be a natural, then asking for help can be really intimidating.

So, are women natural born mothers? All signs point to no. Yes, their anatomy allows them to bear children, but that does not mean that they will be great mothers from day one, or ever. If you give a teenager a car, chances are through trial and error they’ll learn how to make it move – but that doesn’t mean that they’ll instantly be good drivers, and some might never even take the time to learn. So too, we need to remember that when it comes to mothering, perfection is not bred but requires a lot of practice.

References

Hrdy, S. B. (2009). Mothers and others: The evolutionary origins of mutual understanding. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.

Kaplan, H. (2009). Learning, menopause and the 70-year lifespan. Keynote address of the 21^st Annual Human Behavior and Evolution Society Conference, Fullerton, CA.

Sear, R. &  Mace, R. (2008). Who keeps children alive? A review of the effects of kin on child survival. Evolution and Human Behavior, 29(1), 1-18.

Roberts, C. (2004). Founding mothers: The women who raised our nation. New York: William Morrow.

Volk, A. A. (2009). Human breastfeeding is not automatic: Why that is so and what it means for human evolution. Special Issue: Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the NorthEastern Evolutionary Psychology Society. Journal of Social, Evolutionary and Cultural Psychology, 3(4), 305-314.

I am a new author in this series of blogs, please check back soon for my first post!