Forthcoming Lecture
May 23, 2024, Kaufmann Theater, American Museum of Natural History, New York. https://www.amnh.org/calendar/james-arthur-lecture
Why do humans take such an interest in what other humans think—and what other humans think about them?
Why are we eager to cooperate and share from an early age?
Such prosocial emotions laid the groundwork for bipedal apes in the line leading to the genus Homo to develop unprecedented levels of cooperation and food-sharing. But to get there, our ancestors must have already been more other-regarding, in this sense already “emotionally modern.”
In this 93rd James Arthur Lecture, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, evolutionary anthropologist and primatologist and author of Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies, will highlight the role infancy played in the evolution of big brains and our distinctively human prefrontal cortex, drawing on new information from behavioral ecology, developmental psychology, and social neuroscience.
Recent Lectures/EventsJune 7, 2021, Unsiloed Podcast, Episode 16. Sarah Hrdy - Alloparenting and Allomothers: Learning How to Parent from Mother Nature. Listen
September 5, 2018, The Attachment Parenting Podcast, 15. Alloparenting: Bring Back the Village! with Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. Listen
May 6, 2017, Lecture at Emory University. For a more detailed treatment of lecture topic click PDF of essay Development Plus Social Selection in the Evolution of "Emotionally Modern" Humans, from: Childhood: Origins, Evolution, and Implications. (2016) Edited by Courtney Meehan and Alyssa Crittenden. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico. School for Advanced Research, pp. 11-44.
September 9-11, 2016, Power & Care: A Mind & Life Dialogue with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Brussels, Belgium.
May 24, 2015, Presidential Scholar Address 41st Annual Convention of Association of Behavioral Analysis International, San Antonio, Texas
May 11-15, 2014, Adv. Seminar "Costly and Cute: How human newborns shaped human evolution" organized by Wenda Trevathen and Karen Rosenberg, SAR, Santa Fe. More information available online.
April 27, 2014, Awards Ceremony at National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C. Award
Feb. 21, 2014, Born Human: How the (almost) utterly dependent survive. For CARTA Symposium "Birth to Grandmotherhood: Childrearing in Human Evolution", Hotel Auditorium, Institute of the Americas, UC San Diego. Click here for full text of lecture "Development Plus Social Selection in the Evolution of 'Emotionally Modern' Humans"
Recent Articles for General Readers
For those interested in the role females played in evolutionary processes, as well as the role that women evolutionists have played in broadening Darwinian theories to include both sexes, 2013 was a banner year. Check out links to the Foreword I wrote for the Oxford University Press volume Evolution's Empress, edited by Maryanne Fisher, Justin Garcia, and Rosemarie Sokal Chang as well as my brief preface to the December 5 special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B devoted to "Female competition and Aggression" compiled by Anne Campbell and Paula Stockley. Then get hold of the entire book/special issue. See also the wonderful Sept.-Oct. issue of Evolutionary Anthropology, (click here for Table of Contents of Volume 22, Issue 5 as well as PDFs of Joan Silk's introduction along with summaries of the contributions by primatologists, Jeanne Altmann and myself written by Joan Silk, Susan Alberts and Carel van Schaik.
2010 Myths, monkeys and motherhood: A compromising life. In Lee Drickamer and Donald Dewsbury (eds.), Leaders of Animal Behavior: The Next Generation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Available online. [PDF]
2009 Meet the alloparents. NaturalHistory (April):24-29. Available online.
2009 High Five with Sarah Hrdy (Paleolithic Art). Forbes.com, edited by Hana R. Alberts. Available online. Cucutini Figurine. Photo © Dan Hrdy
2008 Darwinism, Social Darwinism, and the “Supreme Function” of Mothers. Anthro Notes 29(2):10–14. American Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution.[PDF]
2008 Cooperative breeding and the paradox of facultative fathering. In Robert Bridges (ed.), The Neurobiology of Parental Care, pp. 405–14. New York: Academic Press. [PDF]
2007 Daddy dearest: What science tells about fatherhood, with Mary Batten. Time Magazine (June 18):60–61. Available online.
2001a Maternal Love and Ambivalence: The Pleistocene, The Eighteenth Century, and Right Now from The Past, Present, and Future of the Human Family. The Tanner Lectures in Human Values delivered at University of Utah (2000) [PDF]
2001b On Why it Takes a Village: Cooperative Breeders, Infant Needs, and the Future from The Past, Present, and Future of the Human Family. The Tanner Lectures in Human Values delivered at University of Utah (2000) [PDF]
Some Old Favorites
· · My first article, written for Ed Wilson's 1972 Seminar on whether there could be a science of sociobiology?: 1976 The care and exploitation of nonhuman primate infants by conspecifics other than the mother. In J. S. Rosenblatt, R. Hinde, E. Shaw, C. Beer (eds.), Advances in the Study of Behavior 6, pp. 101–58. New York: Academic Press. [PDF]
· · Only co-authored article with Dan, on inverse relationship between rank and female reproductive value: 976 Hierarchical relations among female Hanuman langurs (Primates: Colobinae, Presbytis entellus), by S. Hrdy and D. Hrdy. Science 193:913–15. [PDF]
· · My favorite essay, written for the only specifically feminist workshop I ever attended: 986 Empathy, polyandry and the myth of the coy female. In Ruth Bleier (ed.), Feminist Approaches to Science, pp. 119–46. New York: Pergamon. Reprinted in Janet A. Kourany (ed.), The Gender of Science, pp. 171–91. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education/Prentice-Hall, 2002; reprinted in Elliott Sober (ed.), Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology, pp. 131–59. Cambridge: Bradford Books of MIT Press, 2006. [PDF]