Mother nature : a history of mothers, infants, and natural selection

From my Amazon review in 2002:

  I liked this book. Books such as Pinker's How the Mind Works and Ridley's Origins of Virtue cover some of the same ground, but Hrdy focuses on some issues that are more from a woman's point of view. It is a welcome addition to what is out there.

  Everyone has a worldview that informs their interpretation of the evidence, and when it comes to the behavior of extinct human ancestors, the evidence is thin and the speculation is thick. Ridley seems to have a libertarian take on human evolution. Stephen Jay Gould seems to come at things from a more leftist angle. David Buss's textbook Evolutionary Psychology gives a good articulation of how to proceed in evolutionary psychology in a scientific fashion. Sobel and Wilson in their book Unto Others give a spirited defense of alturism.

  Hrdy is usually careful to avoid making a direct carry-over from the behavior of other primates to human behavior. She is pretty good at keeping the speculation fairly close to the observations. Hrdy's ideas are often just as speculative as the next theorist's, but her more feminist take is refreshing. For example, the idea that perhaps the childcare offered by grandmothers has had an impact on the human lifespan is reasonably well argued and is as plausible as other ideas. She is not as gifted a writer as Steven Pinker, but the book reads well and the perspective is worthwhile.

From 2012:

  One of the points that I did not make in the above review was that, while Hrdy is not unusual from the point of view of evolutionary biology and biological anthropology, she is unusual for a feminist. Many feminist theorists reject the application of evolutionary theory to human behavior because they feel that the gender roles that are predicted from the theory are potentially oppressive to women. Because the evidence of ancient hominid behavior is so thin, this application of evolution can be heavily colored by male bias. This book shows that you can stay within an evolutionary framework and posit pro-female scenarios. In this vein, Hrdy's books are similar to (but better than) Barbara King's 2002 Teaching Company lecture called "Biological Anthropology."

  For a good discussion of how social constructivism and evolutionary theory can coexist, read David Sloan Wilson's essay called "Evolutionary Social Constructivism" in the book The Literary Animal (2005, edited by J. Gottschall, pp. 20-37). 

Mother Nature is an extremely readable and indeed valuable book. Yet careful study reveals that it suffers fundamental flaws that deflect much of its thrust. It is readable because Hrdy brings up candidly her personal history and situation in relation to sociobiology theory, especially the competing demands of mothering and career. Unfortunately, Hrdy's personal world view is elitist (racist?--whatever is meant by "selecting a mate of good stock" and in her case apparently not Asian, Bantu, or a vigorous hybrid of one of these and Aryan, say) and inconsistent.  Her important contribution to knowledge is bringing to awareness denied/censored facts about infanticide, abandonment, and neglect. As she so aptly notes, it is not as if people did not know about these tragedies (or at least they are for most of us grievously sorrowful things seen outside the sociobiology mindset), but that virtually everyone failed to appreciate that they are absolutely monumental in extent historically, and probably ongoing still although hopefully not quite so egregiously, the same as occurred with customary cannibalism historically.  The book's gravest weakness is totally ignoring a substantial literature of criticism of sociobiology, for example, Philip Kitcher's Vaulting Ambition.  The author doesn't need to accept these--to my mind perfectly valid--criticisms, just to address them forthrightly.  At least Hrdy comes to conclude that sociobiology theory neglects or severely discounts the roles of culture and individual learning/experience.  But she does not then use this insight, which is obvious to others not trained as she was, to then question its tenets.  In short, she tries to have it both ways simultaneously, both for and against sociobiology.  The alternative is to abandon it as false and embrace instead the roughly equal roles of genes (biological evolution), culture, individual development, and contemporary behavioral contingencies that operate simultaneously, interactively.  Readers (and Hrdy) should not be confused that this alternative is actually what sociobiology theory amounts to, since after all the name combines the roots 'social' and 'biological.'  One logical implication or extension I would have liked to see, but realize that it is too much to expect, is serious advocacy of the equal rights of juvenile people.  To her credit Hrdy comes close.