Book Review: Father Time

Don't hate the player; hate the game theory

What makes us good and evil? What makes some men want to take care of their fellow man — or their own kids — and others, well, not? The causal drivers of active paternal care offer insights into who mankind is and how he became that way, insofar as fathering behavior is strategic — driven, at least in part, by reputational concerns. That’s eminent anthropologist, primatologist, evolutionary sociobiologist and psychologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s central claim in Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies (Princeton University Press, 2024). While credible, it leaves a lot unexplained, in part due to her central omission of the difficulties of sharing private information publicly to work the reputational effect levers without risking net harm.

As I adjust to life with two wee ones as an unexpectedly single mom, I keep revisiting the lessons of Hrdy’s Mother Nature: A history of mothers, infants, and natural selection (1999) and Mothers and Others: The evolutionary origins of mutual understanding (2009). I read both when my four-year-old was a baby (h/t José Luis Díaz Rosselló), reveling in the sociobiological story that we evolved to be cooperative breeders. Parenting is so tough, Hrdy argues, it’s supposed to take a village — and perhaps that’s how we evolved our distinct human capacity for mentalizing, or understanding our own mental states and one another’s.

It seemed to me then — lonely in pandemic lockdown and struggling after a horrible breastfeeding experience — that Hrdy was explaining my struggles. Life as a modern, Western new mom was dangerous, difficult, and isolated. She knew why. And why — contrary to the breastfeeding mafia’s preferred myth about one mother feeding one baby since the dawn of time with breastmilk and belief — it wasn’t supposed to be that way. She knew, too, exactly how sweet and winsome my precious baby was — and how incredibly resilient and emotionally intelligent he seemed to be, (as if) by design.

Then, it seems, our datasets diverged…

Unchecked Biases

Personal

Hrdy saw up-close how men like her son-in-law were engaging in caretaking more like mothers than like the fathers of old. I, meanwhile, have managed to mate with and leave two hot geniuses whose damage could not be undone. Don’t hate the player; hate the game theory.

So Father Time struck me oddly — it’s mostly a warm, fuzzy exploration of the evolutionary roots of male caregiving, filled with heartening tales and optimism. Framed in the epilogue as a way of grasping for hope for humanity in the context of witnessing climate change’s devastating impact on Northern California, and interweaving Hrdy’s own positive experiences with father figures in her family throughout her life, the book offers a heartwarming story about how men are human (i.e., social and political) animals, too — and this has positive implications for their caregiving potentialities. There doesn’t seem to be any critical self-reflection on the rose-tinted glasses ground by Hrdy’s personal experiences.

It’s not just me who’s had different personal experiences with fathers, though some of mine are definitely outliers. (I refused to visit my dad again when I was nine because he was an abusive alcoholic, and he didn’t press the point.)

Unchecked personal bias may limit Hrdy’s ability to define and explain good fathering behavior, by limiting her understanding how broad a continuum of human male behavior needs to be quantified and explained. While there’s some acknowledgment of the dark side, the book focuses on good dadding as a contemporary phenomenon. But, even here, data suggest that women still do the vast majority of, well, women’s work: childcare and related cooking, cleaning, and household logistics.

Some tables or infographics here would be helpful, full of descriptive statistics, possibly compiled in part from a thorough reading of the eHRAF on this axis. They are missing. This would be a great thesis project for an enterprising grad student.

As usual, Hrdy does overview and anecdata in a way that lets her offer unique big-picture insights. She’s a great storyteller. I just want to know more empirically about these phenomena than the book manages to convey.

To be fair, it would be next to impossible to get good data on some relevant phenomena…

Sociopolitical

Along with the inflections of her personal perspective, unreflective sociopolitical bias runs throughout the story. For instance, Hrdy repeatedly references abortion as purely and net empowering for women. This framing ignores a vast array of evidence on associated pressure (including financial), coercion, regret, and substantial possible future health risks (e.g., increased risks of suicide and mental health problems for women, as well as of preterm birth, placenta previa, and hemorrhage in future pregnancies/births). It also denies the overriding uncertainty about the net effects of liberal versus restrictive abortion regimes on well-being for women, children, and society.

Hrdy’s pro-choice bias is particularly ironic, as the book addresses infanticide extensively (e.g., p. 138-141), along with roundly acknowledging how very expensive and slow-maturing human offspring are, and how having kids can have wide-ranging social and emotional consequences for parents. But then Hrdy fails to recognize perverse incentives for men to pressure women into unwanted abortions (e.g., saving money on child support and time on parental involvement, avoiding social and emotional consequences of pregnancies that may not be mutually intended or wanted). This bias comports with contemporary left-liberal ideology promoting abortion as a human right and as medical care, and not recognizing either that it can also be a weapon that men and institutions use against women and minorities, or that societies may wish to at least try to perform net benefit-harm calculations accordingly.

Similarly, Hrdy propounds a specific left-liberal view of trans issues without acknowledging their global contestation. It’s fine to have sociopolitical perspectives and attitudes — we all do. But using academic prestige to present them as settled fact or universal norm is a serious scientific mistake.

It’s important to call this out not because Hrdy is unusual in this regard, but because bias pervades science — including bias science itself. We all have something new to see out the limits of our own perspective, because we’re all human beings limited in our understanding by our faulty cognitive-emotional hardware and sociopolitical position. This is not to say that Hrdy couldn’t have done better; the abortion and trans bits had, to me, a triumphant bumper-sticker tone. But only to say that she couldn’t have avoided the general problem, and it’s one that scientists need to face head-on instead of pretending to be above — either by being somehow correct in their biases, or by having none at all.

All this speaks to a deeper problem: not just how Hrdy sees the world, but how she explains it — and what she fails to explain…

Missing Causal Levers

If the book were purely descriptive, my main criticism would be that we want to know how often something happens, and how often other stuff happens. We don’t get that well enough for a comprehensive treatise.

But it tries to go beyond that to causally explain good fathering. We get some causal factors, but not a full picture — in part because of Hrdy’s identifiable biases. (This is where critical reflection might have helped her be a better scientist.)

So the tome winds up being weirdly thick on mechanistic story, yet thin on quantifying the full continuum of actual male behavior toward mothers and children — or theorizing about how to move causal levers to make family work (better). As a result, it plays like The Little Match Girl — beautiful, moving, and delusional about the cold.

Mechanisms

Father Time roots men’s caregiving capacities in ancient neural structures. We all have the wiring, Hrdy says; it just needs activation. Spending time with babies or children, especially in proximity to women, can do it. But if all men have the wiring, then why do so few exhibit the behavior? If we knew what the triggers were, then we might be able to design policy — or life choices — to activate them.

Show me where the levers are, and I will jump on and down on them dancing and singing the Macarena.

Fishy beginnings

Being around babies can activate limbic, endocrine, and psychosocial processes (including about attention to reputation effects) that can occasionally make men as nurturing as moms, or at least more nurturing than they might otherwise be. The physical basis for these structures seems to have come, like other key human features such as wrists and fingers, from our fish ancestors. This despite the fact that most fish (and most male mammals) don’t provide parental care.

We all have the same basic wiring — the same potential to care. “Rather than preordained to act out specifically maternal or paternal scripts, the same highly conserved neural systems and spatio-cognitive capabilities can be tapped and reconfigured for expression in either sex” (p. 1000). “Nurturing mothers,” in fact, “were evolution’s newcomers” in this fishy “remote progenitor” story (p. 88).

Eventually, as it does, the new grew old: Further down the evolutionary line, the endocrinological basis for nurturing male behavior seems to have come from female mammals. “The same molecules and neural circuits that Mother Nature originally drew upon to help make sure that mother mammals nurtured their babies have been repurposed for other relationships, and play similar roles” (p. 70), particularly when it comes to oxytocin and the formation of selective attachments. “ ‘Why build a special paternal brain,’ Katherine [Wynne-Edwards asked Hrdy in conversation], ‘when you can just (selectively) turn on parts of the same old maternal brain?’ ” (p. 80)

And so, by fish and by femme, men can be good “mothers,” too.

So why are some cold fish instead?

Diagramming Deadbeat Dads

It’s great if warm and fuzzy fatherhood, approaching and sometimes in a primary caregiver role, is arguably a latent potential in all men. That still doesn’t explain why it’s occasionally actualized, but usually lies dormant.

Hrdy recognizes this in some places, but underappreciates its import for her project, which goes wide on species but shallow on the darker sides of human male behavior toward mothers and young children. The book might be more accurately subtitled “A Natural History of Nurturing Males and Young.” It gives the comforting visions without the real warmth of explaining how to possibly close the gap between mean, median, and modal human male behavior (and worse), and the idealized examples of nurturing father figures she compiles.

This is a twofold criticism: As a richly empirically informed descriptive work, Father Time explores the latent potential for nurturing fatherhood, but fails to fully account for the broader variability and darker realities of male behavior (e.g., ignoring the coercive potential of abortion access). And, as a scientific work, that failure signals insufficient attention to causality. From a causal perspective, if you can’t explain why it doesn’t happen, then you can’t explain why it happens. What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of good (nurturing, involved, supportive, caring) dads?

Hrdy tries to answer this question, but ultimately can’t — quite possibly because the evidence isn’t able to answer it. Maybe the science is piecemeal because this is a relatively new area of study. Or because it’s not knowable. Or because her thesis (all men could be good dads, given the right conditions — the wiring is universal) is wrong.

Her efforts include identifying these conditions, which may be relevant to whether some men’s brains respond to babies more like primary caregivers (moms) or secondary ones:

• universal caregiving wiring (necessary but not sufficient)

• time spent in close proximity (necessary but not sufficient)

• possible paternity (neither necessary nor sufficient)

• dire need (neither necessary nor sufficient)

• reputational consequences of bad behavior (missing causal logics here)

Yet most men, Hrdy admits, don’t respond to these conditions as if they were causal triggers. She offers compelling anecdotes — like the West African chimp Fredy, who adopts numerous orphans (p. 147).

But they could be part of a story in which there’s just a lot of variety in nature: Most men aren’t the nurturing type. Nature, however, hedges her bets.

This probably means that some guys are not capable of being nurturing primary or secondary parents, no matter the conditions. While others fall on the other end of the spectrum, looking for fatherless kids to feed, hug, take camping on Easter, and teach trigonometry on a napkin in a Mexican restaurant (thanks, Scott).

Sure, it’s interesting to know that Fredy’s relevant brain structures seem to date in part from good fish dads, that his hormonal responses to kids are like those of good mammal moms, and that spending a lot of time in proximity to his adopted charges probably gets the same good hormonal feedback loops going as moms get with our babies. But the bigger question is why most male chimps behave quite differently, even when they spend time around kids, even when there’s mortal need.

This unsolved causal puzzle is the book’s central mystery — and its biggest weakness. If the mechanisms of nurturing male parenting behavior involve supposedly universal wiring, then the reader expects an explanation for why the behavior of interest remains exceptional. I didn’t see one.

So, if it’s not popular science (How to Find Mr. “Right, It’s My Turn to Get Up with the Baby”) and it’s not science (Why Are Some Men Good Dads?) — then what exactly is it? It is this fascinating, but not particularly actionable or testable, causal story…

There are a few other notable problems with this story. For instance, as Hrdy relates, dire need is a factor that can trigger good dadding — yet, in unsafe neighborhoods, we tend to see more deadbeats. She recognizes that some measures that increase good dadding may also make neighborhoods safer. But doesn’t explain the paradox of why, then, dire need being more common doesn’t make good dadding more common in bad neighborhoods.

The problem here seems to extend: If stress is a good dadding trigger, then why do we generally expect to see more deadbeat dads — and abusive husbands — under worse socioeconomic conditions and more stress (e.g., lockdown violence)? Is there some kind of bimodality in men’s or people’s stress responses to vulnerable people? Are there any known hacks for norming/avoiding the baddies (e.g., look for men without substance use problems), or picking the better ones (e.g., a man who already has a kid could be a better bet for making a baby than one without — because another woman already picked him)? There’s certainly a lot of literature on these sorts of questions, and while it can be critiqued, it’s odd that Hrdy doesn’t bring it in for a synthesis and application in her causal story.

Anyway, this would seem to be a paradox of great sociopolitical importance, if we consider the safety and well-being of women and children important (as I’m sure Hrdy does).

It Takes a Village — Gossiping?

Despite its shortcomings, Father Time admirably continues Hrdy’s larger research program: demythologizing traditional gender roles in evolutionary storytelling. She describes her previous books (including also her first, The Woman That Never Evolved) as part of a project to raise Darwin’s consciousness (p. 51).

She debunks the old “sex contract” — “ ‘food in exchange for paternity,’ ” in the words of Owen Lovejoy (p. 169-172). She convincingly relays Kristen Hawkes et al’s case that available calories from hunting in the Pleistocene didn’t add up (p. 190) to entirely explain how Homo erectus raised what University of Zurich anthropologists Karin Isler and Carel van Schaik call “the ‘gray ceiling,’ ” the limit on hominim brain size set by demographic viability.

In other words, male-provisioning alone can’t explain how archaic humans raised bigger-brained babies. Broad-spectrum alloparenting, including by both post-menopausal grandmothers and reputation-sensitive fathers and other men, was required (p. 173-185). It took a village. And part of that village’s role was to make men concerned about what others would think about them, with threatened reputation effects of bad behavior bolstering cooperative provisioning norms (p. 185-190).

When we talk about reputation, we’re talking about strategic behavior. And when we talk about strategic behavior, we’re talking about directed cyclic graphs (DCGs), not directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) — causal graphs that have feedback loops.

Hrdy fails to adequately account for the fact that women are subject to these feedback loops too, such that feared reputational consequences of sharing private information constrains their ability to effectively activate social pressure to push men to, well, man up. Under certain conditions (e.g., if daddy is well-liked, the family is socially isolated, and the culture says women are not supposed to speak up), this favors a defection equilibrium: if bad behavior isn’t visible, it can’t be punished, and the system tips toward deadbeat or damaging dads.

(This may sound familiar from game theory, which demonstrates how people’s best moves depend on what others are doing — and behavior only stabilizes at a different, perhaps more mutually advantageous point (equilibrium), if enough others also change. The prisoner’s dilemma is the best-known example, where cooperative behavior benefits both prisoners — while if both defect, both are punished.)

Father Time makes much of how these possible reputational effects shaped man’s evolution as a social and political animal, without modeling its failure points. That’s weird, because Hrdy presents her take on how the strategic environment shapes fathering as her unique contribution.

It also makes the book’s gaps relevant to my own research (not to mention my life): What systemic structures make good fathering more likely? What happens when equilibrium tips the other way?

Diagramming the Doting/Deadbeat Dad Equilibria

To better understand what makes good dads, we can sketch the system with the private info constraints acting on the reputational costs/benefits causal driver of nurturing male behavior that Hrdy missed.

In the first, static graph (the DAG), we saw that good dad behavior depends on support, context, and opportunity. In the dynamic one (the DCG), we see that behavior can reinforce norms — and norms can also fail to make deadbeat dads behave better, when private information can’t surface.

If bad behavior isn’t known, it can’t be punished. And if women risk backlash for sharing it, then men can defect from fathering with little or no reputational cost.

When you can’t call his mom, he can keep acting all wrong.

There are no neat solutions to this problem. But articulating it is a step.

In different but related territory, it’s well-established that reporting sexual harassment may backfire, worsening women’s social and professional status — particularly when they’re more vulnerable to begin with. The risks of reporting sexual assault appear to be similar, albeit with higher psychological stakes. We shouldn’t expect the social reality of redressing family problems to be any different.

This presents a logical problem for Hrdy’s story. One of her main points is that we evolved to care what other people think about us, and this moral reputational concern shapes men’s behavior toward women and children for the better. But she underappreciates the ways in which women may have historically been and continue to be constrained in sharing private information about men’s behavior toward women and children.

There are probably a number of possible insights here having to do with traditional versus modern societal structures, kinship versus non-kinship networks, and other variations on subtypes of private information-sharing and info-sharing-constraining ecosystems. But Hrdy didn’t draw them.

Exceptions and Expectations

Maybe it wouldn’t be so tempting to rain on Hrdy’s good dad parade if she had attended more to the dark side of man (and I don’t mean mankind). While reading, I kept thinking of the final and best-known lines of Robert Burns’s infamous dirge “Man Was Made to Mourn”:

Many and sharp the num'rous ills
Inwoven with our frame!
More pointed still we make ourselves
Regret, remorse, and shame!
And man, whose heav'n-erected face
The smiles of love adorn,—
Man’s inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn!

And the larger questions it raises: Why do some people make moral decisions that cause others great harm? Why do others make different such decisions?

From a storytelling perspective, it’s perfectly acceptable to say this is about individual variation. If you want a nurturing dad for your children, you have to find your own Fredy. Or that we don’t know, but there are some factors that seem to matter sometimes.

It’s not good science, though. It doesn’t explain, or adequately recognize our inability to explain, the disconnect between the good and the evil — the doting and the deadbeat. The disconnect between how intimate partners, in the aggregate, may treat pregnant women, and how strangers treat them: The risk of domestic violence increases considerably in and around pregnancy.

Yet, self-selecting strangers just seemed, to me, to get better. One can guess why; the psychopaths probably self-select into silence. Still, a not insignificant number of random strangers really glow with love when they see a pregnant lady — particularly, perhaps, one as spectacularly gimongous as I got with my kids.

At the end of my latest pregnancy, I was too big to go outside in the Berlin winter, having graduated from maternity pants to leggings to IKEA blanket wraps. If Sylvia Plath was “A melon strolling on two tendrils,” I was a stuffed python considering navigating the world via skateboard on my back. Is there an app for that?

Pregnancy does not bolster autonomy.

But it does something for my faith in humanity. Because, in this state, when I sat down on the curb and took a deep breath, people asked if they could do anything for me. If I looked sad, or even cried, people stopped what they were doing, and asked how they could help. If I just minded my own business and ate ice-cream, people smiled.

This got me thinking: People are not so bad, after all; and men are people. So there are men who are not so bad. Fathers who go beyond siring, to actually parenting day-to-day. Beyond the talk of care, to the practice. Beyond the apology for failing — for those who get that far — to doing better.

Just don’t try to find one with a causal digram.