"the presence of grandmothers was an evolutionary innovation that was important during human evolution...Grandmothers shouldered some of the energetic and care burden of their daughters' children...enabling an increase in the fertility of their daughters" a.co/d/2IzrDOh
"I HEARD ALL THEM KIDZ BACK LIVIN' AT GRANNIES!" - JOE
Kamari Copeland
my great grandmother who'll be 100 next month (on the right) & her best friend who is 102! 71 years of friendship 
https://twitter.com/Kamaricopeland/status/696925447213420544
Have You Noticed That A Higher Than Average Percentage Of The Black Female Population Has Genes That Predispose Them To Longevity (Living Longer Than The Average Female)? Have You Also Noticed That These Long Lived Back Females (Grandmothers, Great Grandmothers) Tend To Have Greater Reproductive Success (They Themselves Have More Offspring And Their Offspring Have More Offspring)? Read Below!
Have You Noticed That A Higher Than Average Percentage Of The Black Female Population Has Genes That Predispose Them To Longevity (Living Longer Than The Average Female)? Have You Also Noticed That These Long Lived Back Females (Grandmothers, Great Grandmothers) Tend To Have Greater Reproductive Success (They Themselves Have More Offspring And Their Offspring Have More Offspring)? Read Below!
While every woman's body and brain react differently in the years after menopause, for many this is a time of increasing freedom and control over our lives. Impulses are less likely to confuse or agitate us. Our survival may no longer depend on a steady paycheck, and there's less value in pretending about how we feel and more in presenting and living our passionate, real selves. Helping others and engaging in solving serious problems in the world can energize us. This is also a time when grandmothering can bring new, often uncomplicated joy. Maybe life does save some of the best for last. My sixty-year-old patient Denise, for example, had always been an independent woman focused on her marketing career, even while she was raising her two children. When her daughter gave birth for the first time, Denise ws unprepared, she told me, for the waves of love she felt for her grandchild. "I was completely swept off my feet," she said, "which I never, ever expected. I've got a million things going on in my life, but for some reason I can't get enough of this baby. And my daughter's letting me into her life in a way that she has never before. She needs me now, and I want to be there for her."
The special, supportive role that grandmothers play may be one of the reasons that evolution engineered women to live for decades after they can no longer bear children. Grandmothers, according to the University of Utah anthropologist Kristen Hawkes, may actually be one of the keys to growth and survival in ancient human populations. Hawkes argues that in the Stone Age, the extra food-gathering efforts of able-bodied postmenopausal women increased the survival rate of young grandchildren. Grandmothers' provisioning and help also enabled younger women to produce more children at shorter intervals, increasing the populations fertility and reproductive success. Even though the lifespan in hunter-gatherer societies is typically less than forty, about a third of all adult women survive past that age, and may go on to live productively into their sixties and seventies. Among the Hadza hunter-gatherer population in Tanzania, Hawkes found, for example, that hardworking grandmothers in their sixties spent more time foraging than did younger mothers, providing foor for their grandchildren and increasing their chances of survival. Researchers have found similar positive effects of grandmothers among Hungarian gypsies and populations in India and Africa. In rural Gambia, in fact, anthropologists found that the presence of a grandmother improves a child's prospects for survival much more than the presence of a father. In other words, women at menopaus, the world over, have the option to embrace the life-sustaining role of grandmother, too. (The Female Brain)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIJ3xCR-PhU
CARTA: Childrearing in Human Evolution -- Kristen Hawkes: Grandmothers and the Extended Family
"RAAAZED BY HER GRANDMOTHER" - Lil C.S. Lewis
CARTA: Childrearing in Human Evolution -- Kristen Hawkes: Grandmothers and the Extended Family
"RAAAZED BY HER GRANDMOTHER" - Lil C.S. Lewis
Webbie
Today I lost a woman I will always love RIP MINE #1 grandmother hard ass pill to swallow
SWALLOOOOOOW! GRANDMOTHERS PLAY AN ESPECIALLY VITAL ROLE IN THE FUNCTIONING AND MAINTENANCE OF BLACK AMERICAN FAMILIES. THEY ASSUME THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE FATHER AND SOMETIMES THE MOTHER*, SINCE BOTH ARE OFTEN ABSENT IN THE LIVES OF THEIR CHILDREN. *THE BLACK MOTHER MAY LIVE AT HOME WITH THE KIDS (MAY PHYSICALLY BE PRESENT), BUT SOCIALLY AND EMOTIONALLY SHE MAY AS WELL BE A MILLION MILES AWAY. BLACK GRANDMOTHERS FILL THE SOCIAL AND EMOTIONAL VOID LEFT BY THESE UNFIT MOTHERS.
Summer Mariee♏️
Thank God I didn't breast feed. Hungry ass baby lol
PERFECT
EXAMPLE OF A BLACK MOTHER. MOST OF THEM ARE UNFIT TO BE MOTHERS, YET
THEY PRODUCE ALMOST AS MANY CHILDREN AS MEXICANS (WHAT A HORRIBLE
MOTHER). SHE'S SETTING HER CHILD UP FOR LONG TERM FAILURE AND A
DISAPPOINTING LIFE (INFANTS THAT AREN'T BREASTFED SUFFER A NUMBER OF
BEHAVIORAL, PSYCHOLOGICAL, PHYSIOLOGICAL, AND PHYSICAL* DISORDERS THAT HAMPER THEM IN
BOTH THEIR EARLY YEARS AND LATER LIFE). WHY BRING A CHILD INTO THE WORLD
IF YOU'RE GOING TO FUCK UP THEIR LIFE FROM THE GET GO? SHE'S JUST
ANOTHER DUMB NIGGERETTE. (LEMME SMOKE ME ONE UH THEM NIGGERETTES MY
NIGGA!)
*LONG FACE SYNDROME IS ONE SUCH DISORDER. LET GO
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d25lcmlQT_Y
CARTA: Culture-Gene Interactions in Human Origins: Kristen Hawkes - The Grandmother Hypothesis
CARTA: Culture-Gene Interactions in Human Origins: Kristen Hawkes - The Grandmother Hypothesis
Last among sexual mysteries in this chapter, as in life, we come to menopause. Less engaging than orgasm, less obvious than breasts, menopause shares more with menstruation than its first three letters (which don't refer to male human beings, but to "month"). Like menstruation, menopause is semisecret and hormonally underwritten. It is the matching bookend to a woman's reproductive life: from menarche to menopause. And like menstruation, menopause can also be downright troublesome, substituting hot flashes for monthly cramps.
Biologists, too, are discomforted by menopause, since it presents us with yet another evolutionary conundrum. We've already noted that reproduction is the sine qua non of evolutionary success, which makes it especially perplexing that women's reproductive spigots are turned off at what seems an inappropriately early age. Most animals do not experience a prolonged life stage during which they are alive yet nonbreeding. So long as they draw breath, they typically release eggs. But women stop ovulating within just a few years of age 50, when they may still have a few decades of vigorous and for the most part healthy life ahead of them.
Men keep producing sperm into their eighth and even ninth decades. For women, it isn't even a question of making eggs, since every girl is born with all the eggs she will ever have, roughly 400; they simply have to mature and then be released. The "how" of menopause is well understood. A woman's reproductive spigot is literally turned off by a dramatic reduction in endocrine hormones, notably estrogen. But this is proximate causation. What about the "why"? Why has selection favored women whose endocrine machinery runs down when it does? What are the ultimate, evolutionary reasons?
There is no reason to suppose that age and eggs are necessarily incompatible: Female African elephants breed into their 60s and blue whales into their 90s. Not only that, but in Homo sapiens, eggs - like sperm - aren't produced de novo throughout life. Maybe that's the answer: At some point, each woman just runs out of eggs.
≠Chateau Emissary≠
Why did menopause evolve? Executive summary: younger mothers are better at mothering than older mothers.
This "explanation" turns out to be no explanation at all, however, since once again it confuses proximate with ultimate causation. If there were a reproductive payoff to reproducing in one's 50s, 60s, or 70s, you can rest assured that girls would be born with 500, 600, or 700 eggs, instead of their current 400 or so. Not only that, but women who use birth control pills - which inhibit ovulation - and who therefore only release one half to one third of the lifetime egg supply nonetheless enter menopause just like everyone else, despite having all those unused eggs, and no later than their sisters who supposedly became menopausal because they'd used up all of theirs.
More important, eggs eventually go "bad," causing the risk of genetic defects to increase with maternal age. According to the March of Dimes, for example, a 25-year-old woman has about a 1 in 1,250 chance of having a baby with Down syndrome; a 30-year-old has a 1 in 1,000 chance; a 35-year-old, 1 in 400; a 40-year-old, 1 in 100; and a 45-year-old woman is more than 40 times more likely to produce a baby with Down syndrome. Looked at in terms of actual risk, however, the data are much less overwhelming: Even a 45-year-old has a 29 in 30 chance of giving birth to a child who does not have Down syndrome! Whereas there is a genuine genetic risk to reproducing in one's fifth or sixth decade, sheer mathematics nonetheless suggests that the potential genetic payoff greatly exceeds the possible downside.
...
...Why should it matter to evolution if women kept reproducing, or trying to do so, until they died in the process? After all, this is precisely what happens among nearly all other species, which typically breed until the bitter end. It must somehow be the case that women who, having reached a certain age, desisted from reproduction actually ended up leaving more genetic descendants than those who kept on keeping on. But how?
What follows are some ideas about why natural selection might have favored early termination of women's fertility. First comes simple prudence, as negatively modeled by Jane Goodall's famous chimpanzee matriarch, Flo. Chimps do not undergo menopause, and Flo...kept breeding into advanced old age. It must have seemed a near miracle when Flo became pregnant for what turned out to be the last time, since she was obviously dilapidated in every respect. Here is the sad story, reported by the Jane Goodall institute:
Flo gave birth to at least five offspring: Faban, Figan, Fifi, Flint, and Flame. She was a wonderful, supportive, affectionate and playful mother to the first three. But she looked very old when the time came to wean young Flint, and she had not fully succeeded in weaning him when she gave birth to Flame. By this time she seemed exhausted and unable to cope with the aggressive demands and tantrums of Flint, who wanted to ride on her back and sleep with her even after the birth of his new sister. She still had not weaned Flint when Flame died at the age of six months, and at this point stopped even trying to push Flint to independence. Flint therefore became abnormally dependent on his old mother. When Flo died in 1972, he was unable to cope without her. He stopped eating and interacting with others and showed signs of clinical depression. Soon thereafter, Flint's immune system became too weak to keep him alive. He died at the age of eight and a half, within one month of losing his mother Flo.
Flo wasn't really a failure, since she produced at least three flourishing offspring. But the likelihood is that if she had been just a wee bit more reproductively prudent - if she had refrained from that last breeding attempt - she wouldn't merely have survived longer (which, after all, isn't an evolutionary payoff in itself), but so, too, would the unfortunate Flame and perhaps Flint as well. Maybe, therefore, we shouldn't speak of Flo's failure, but rather, her folly. And maybe human menopause is a way that evolution has outfitted our own matriarchs with a way to avoid Flo's folly, by forcing them to be reproductively prudent and getting their bodies to "just say no."
Even in medically sophisticated societies, a 40-year-old woman faces seven times more risk of dying in childbirth than does a 20-year-old. Hard-nosed evolutionary biologists might be nonetheless unimpressed, however, pointing out that as with the payoff of reproducing despite the increased risk of genetic anomalies, selection would still favor a woman who tried, even if she failed, simply because it would favor any who succeeded. But this omits another important consideration, somewhat valid for chimpanzees but more so for human beings: the extent to which offspring survival (and thus parental fitness) depends on parental investment in those offspring. Since children depend so heavily on their parents, human parents may well have been under especially strong selection pressure to be prudent rather than go with the Flo.
In the poker game of breeding - in which maximizing your fitness substitutes for maximizing your pile of chips - just as there is a payoff for betting successfully on one's breeding potential, there is a cost to betting too high, like Flo did. Similarly, it would be suboptimal to be too prudent and bet too low - that is, to quit breeding too soon - thereby underplaying one's hand. As in Kenny Roger's song The Gambler, "you got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away and know when to run." The prudent mother hypothesis is that menopause tells women when to fold 'em. But it's not the only game in town. Another is called the grandmother hypothesis.
The basic idea is simple enough, although hidden within is a crucially important revision in our current understanding of evolution and, indeed, of the very nature of living things. First, consider that a woman begins to experience menopause at about the time when her own children, born perhaps two decades or so earlier, are themselves likely to become parents. That is, she may well be - or is about to become - a grandmother. The grandmother hypothesis, then , is that by foregoing reproduction, especially at a time when the cost of reproductive "imprudence" is rising - higher risk of morbidity and mortality during pregnancy and childbirth along with increased prospects of genetic anomalies in any offspring actually produced - a middle-aged women might be freeing herself to contribute to the eventual success of her grandchildren. By doing so, she is actually being genetically selfish as much as altruistic, since the beneficiaries of her personal reproductive restraint include not only the grandchildren themselves but also their genes - which is to say, the grandmother's too.
The surprising fact that people, in general, feel better at 70 years than at 17 may be an evolutionary adaptation to facilitate grandparenting. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352154617300712 …
https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1196/annals.1280.008 …
It could be mere coincidence or - more likely - part of evolution's design that around the world, grandparents in general and grandmothers in particular pitch in and help out. Not only that, but those who do so typically end up with more grandchildren than those who don't. The grandmother hypothesis does not preclude the hypothesis of prudent mothering, however, since once a mother is no longer encumbered with dependent children, it makes social as well as biological sense that she would be inclined to help out with her kids' kids.
Once again, our species' unusually long period of profound juvenile dependency may also be involved, insofar as such neediness would confer a special benefit to assistance rendered by others beyond the parental pair. Consistent with this, Sarah Hrdy has proposed that humanity may well have evolved in the context of extensive cooperative parenting. And who would be more qualified and also better positioned to gain biologically as a result, than grandmothers?
Detailed studies by anthropologist Kristen Hawkes and her colleagues have found that among the Hadza, modern hunter-gatherers of Tanzania, the men hunt while the women gather and forage and (ta da!) the most energetic and productive foragers of all are postmenopausal women. A young mother, no matter how healthy and hard-working, is necessarily constrained while burdened with a baby, making such assistance nothing to sneeze at. Sure enough, Hadza grandmothers give their bounty to their children and grandchildren, whose body weights vary directly with their grandmothers' food-gathering efforts. It is doubtless significant that among the Hadza studied by Hawkes and her colleagues, every nursing mother had a postmenopausal helper.
The technical term for cooperative breeding is "allo-parenting" (allo = "other") and its likely importance in our evolution should give pause when we consider the extent to which modern Western societies - with their assumption of the "nuclear family" - make it impossible for grandparents to make the kind of social and biological contribution that might well have been crucial for 99% of our biological past. Although multigenerational households can certainly introduce their own forms of stress, it can hardly be denied that children, parents, and grandparents (perhaps grandmothers in particular) have also gained greatly from the interaction.
How much, we cannot tell. But the basic pattern, in which hard-working grandmothers contribute significantly to the success of their grandchildren, has been confirmed by other anthropologists studying other human groups. All of this makes it increasingly likely that grandmothers own their nonreproductive status to the payoffs that - at least in the past - they were able to convey, and the genetic recompense they received as a result.
An interesting twist to the grandmother hypothesis also merits our attention. It is deservedly popular to point to "win-win solutions" by which everyone in a competition - better yet, an interaction - comes out ahead. The sad reality, however, is that life is often a zero-sum game in which benefit to one participant necessitates some cost to another. The simple act of reproducing, and more important to the point successfully rearing one's offspring, is often zero sum, especially when resources are scarce. So perhaps we should consider the role of menopause as a way of minimizing reproductive competition, something particularly relevant when one individual's baby making can depress that of another.
The "competition avoidance" hypothesis argues that menopause is how middle-aged women avoid competing with younger women - by opting out altogether. Once again, they need not be doing so out of genuine altruism since those younger women who benefit are typically either the menopausal woman's daughters or daughter-in-law, so that in either case, the woman whose ovaries say "no" may well be saying "yes" to her genes, each of which is likely, with a probability of .25, to be present in her grandchildren.
According to the grandmother hypothesis, among the payoffs received by grandmothers themselves are benefits that go beyond emotional gratification and satisfied love and that include evolutionary payoffs received by the menopausal woman's genes. Taking a "gene's eye" view of evolution, natural selection does not proceed with the individual in mind, but rather, the gene. As biologist Richard Dawkins has pointed out so cogently, bodies aren't the bottom line in evolution; genes are. Bodies don't last beyond a single generation; genes do. And so, when at a certain age women forego reproducing (i.e. when they commence menopause) and also begin being helpful grandmothers, their genes are "selfishly" looking out for copies of themselves, genes "for" menopause that get projected into the future via those additional grandchildren that are benefited.
Sarah Hrdy tells of a particular langur monkey, "old Sol," who had ceased cycling and thus might have been quasimenopausal, in a sense. She was obviously decrepit and marginalized within her group, living a sad, solitary, and - it appeared - increasingly useless end of life until a strange adult male invaded the langur troop and attempted to work infanticidal mayhem. Writes Hrdy,
It was Sol who repeatedly charged this sharp-toother male nearly twice her weight to place herself between him and the threatened baby. When the infanticidal male seized the infant in his jaws and ran off with him, Sol pursued the attacker and wrested the wounded baby back. With danger momentarily past, and the wounded infant once again in his mother's arms, old Sol resumed her diffident attitude. That an arthritic old female would become marginalized with age is scarcely surprising. More curious was Sol's transformation from decrepit outcast to intrepid defender.It doesn't diminish Sol's courage to point out that by defending youngsters, some of whom may be her own grandchildren, Sol and other warrior grandmothers may literally be justifying their own postreproductive existence, or - to put it differently - their genes are acting out their own payoff.
Even then, the grandmother hypothesis is not literally proven. It seems likely, however, that menopause may serve to keep middle-aged women from reproducing at a time when their personal risk is increasing (higher mortality) and payoff is decreasing (greater danger of producing genetically defective offspring), so that these women are more fit in the evolutionary sense if they care for those children already produced (prudent mothering) as well as contributing to their own successful grandmotherhood. Even women who have no children would presumably be influenced by the same basic evolutionary pressures, since for most of our species' history, intentional childlessness was not an option. In addition, once our conceptual focus has shifted to what is presumably natural selections' focus as well - the gene rather than the individual - it isn't strictly necessary for someone to have children to receive an evolutionary benefit.
Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature. Barash, p. 64-72.
The Grandmother effect in numbers: "Having a living maternal grandmother increased the number of offspring born by their daughters by about 20 per cent. It also had a positive impact on the number of grandchildren that survived to age 15."
"the presence of grandmothers was an evolutionary innovation that was important during human evolution...Grandmothers shouldered some of the energetic and care burden of their daughters' children...enabling an increase in the fertility of their daughters" a.co/d/2IzrDOh
My grandma is having some health issues please say a prayer for her! Prayer is powerful and she needs it.
OH, ABUELA, MIJO. PRAY FOR ABUELA, MIJO. BOW YOUR HEAD, CLASP YOUR HANDS AND PRAY HARD ESE. THAN FIND YOU A CURANDERO AND HAVE HIM PUT HIS HANDS ON HER, A MAGICAL POTION ON HER, AND A SPELL ON HER.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZvxu0zVhdA
Dr. Kristen Hawkes - "Grandmothers and Human Evolution" (2013 Margo Wilson Memorial Lecture)
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/01/more_evolutiona068771.html
Dr. Kristen Hawkes - "Grandmothers and Human Evolution" (2013 Margo Wilson Memorial Lecture)
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2013/01/more_evolutiona068771.html
Carmelita Jeter
Today is my grandmother's 86th Birthday. Happy Birthday Grandma. #86#september
Have You Noticed That A Higher Than Average Percentage Of The Black Female Population Has Genes That Predispose Them To Longevity (Living Longer Than The Average Female)? Have You Also Noticed That These Long Lived Back Females (Grandmothers, Great Grandmothers) Tend To Have Greater Reproductive Success (They Themselves Have More Offspring And Their Offspring Have More Offspring)? Read Above!
"My Grand Ma Foe Hunned N Seven D Fi!" - Suga Booga #Bitch
and you know what i hate THE MOST!? women are the ones that write this shit!!!!!!!!! how fucked up it that!?!?
Because It Takes One To Know One. Most Women Understand Other Women Better Than Men Understand Women, So From This Perspective They Can Write More Accurately About Women (At Least If They're Honest With Themselves). In Other Words, Women Who Are Honest With Themselves And Not Afraid To Tell The Truth Even If It Turns People Against Them WILL WRITE THAT WOMEN ARE MORE EMOTIONAL AND LESS RATIONAL THAN MEN (ESPECIALLY WHEN MAKING DECISIONS) AND THEREFORE MORE TEMPERAMENTAL* (They Evolved To Be This Way, Even Though Most People Who Write About Women Are Unaware Of This). (Iggy, I've NEVER Heard Of You, So You're A NOBODY In My Book, But I Know One Thing About You. You Don't Know Anything About Human Evolution, Specifically Why Females Evolved The Personality Traits And Disposition They Evolved, Nor Do You Understand What Drives You Genetically And Culturally To Be A Power Bitch (I'll Give You A Hint, Though. You're Not Dependent Upon Males. You're Economically Self-Sufficient And Self-Sustaining, Which Ultimately Means You're Controlling Your Reproductive Destiny And That Empowers You). Here, Get A Dose Of This: http://www.evoyage.com/Evolutionary%20Feminism/CoreBeliefsEvoFeminism.html)
*Why Are Women More Temperamental? Because They're The Choosier Sex. They're The Sex That Incurs The Greater Reproductive Costs (9 Months Of Pregnancy And Child Rearing), So They Evolved To Be More Discriminating, More Discerning, More Fickle, More Finicky, And More Moody (All Traits That Make Them Better Mate Selectors). SELECTA!
No, I Said I Was A Liberal, Feminine, Feminist!
*Why Are Women More Temperamental? Because They're The Choosier Sex. They're The Sex That Incurs The Greater Reproductive Costs (9 Months Of Pregnancy And Child Rearing), So They Evolved To Be More Discriminating, More Discerning, More Fickle, More Finicky, And More Moody (All Traits That Make Them Better Mate Selectors). SELECTA!
No, I Said I Was A Liberal, Feminine, Feminist!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1flXTxuwPI
CARTA:Childrearing in Evolution--Sarah Blaffer Hrdy: Born Human: How the Utterly Dependent Survive
CARTA:Childrearing in Evolution--Sarah Blaffer Hrdy: Born Human: How the Utterly Dependent Survive
Working mothers are not new. For most of human existence, and for millions of years before that, primate mothers have combined productive lives with reproduction. This combination of work with motherhood has always entailed tradeoffs. Mothers either sustained energetic costs and lost efficiency by toting babies everywhere (the way baboons and !Kung mothers do) or else located an alloparent to take on the task. What is new for modern mothers, though, is the compartmentalization of their productive and reproductive lives. The factories, laboratories, and offices where women in post-industrial societies go to "forage" are even less compatible with childcare than jaguar-infested forests and distant groves of mongongo nuts reached by trekking across desert.
The economic reality of most people's lives today is that families require more than one wage-earner -- or forager. Single parents are especially hard-pressed to make ends meet. Only brief periods of prosperity or isolated blips of elite privilege have made this untrue for some people during a few periods in human existence. An expansion of the U.S. economy after World War II, for example, meant that many married women could afford to stay home with their babies. But no more. Most Mothers, even if they want to, do not have the option of staying home to care for their babies.
LACTATIN'
(Breastsis For Breakfast!)
And that's the modern rub. During the Pleistocene, women could carry their babies as they foraged or gathered firewood. Dual-career mothers still strive to balance their subsistence needs against the time, energy, and resources needed to rear their children. But the physical (if not always the emotional) environment in which these compromises must be made is considerably different from the workplace of our ancestors. In some respects, omnipresent conflicts create even more tension today than in the past, because the incentives to fix them strike mothers as optional. Outcomes are measured in terms of the personal toll -- insecurities among infants, stress in their mothers -- rather than increased mortality. Simply put, the pressures to change are less intense when children can (literally) live with the consequences.
If infants feel stressed by the separation, so do millions of working mothers. At the same time, the evolutionarily novel modern workaday world opened the door for untrammeled expression of another ancient female motivation -- striving for status, or, in the case of a forager, what one might think of as "local clout."
It is widely assumed that competitiveness, status-striving, and ambition, qualities that are essential for success in demanding careers, are incompatible with being a "good mother," who is expected to be selfless and nurturing. "There is no getting around the fact that ambition is not a maternal trait. Motherhood and ambition are still largely seen as opposing forces," states Shari Thurer, a prominent contemporary psychologist. Sociologists can document at length the "cultural contradictions" produced by women combining motherhood with jobs in the American workplace.
Under conditions of the modern world, and if we assume the old definition of mothering as an innately charitable and selfless pursuit, the point is well taken. But as I described i chapter 2, mothering in the natural world is different from the Victorian image of mothers. Mothers' work has not always been so compartmentalized from child-rearing as it is today, nor her status so separate from the prospects that a mother's offspring would survive and prosper.
Modern women may think of status as the icing on their economic cake. But once the significance of social rank is understood for such vital functions as a mother keeping another female from eating her baby (as in the case of chimps), or from keeping another female from monopolizing resources needed by her own offspring (as in the case of other cooperatively breeding mammals), the struggle for status seems more nearly a foothold on posterity than a frill. "Ambition" was an integral part of producing offspring who survived and prospered.
Establishing an advantageous niche for herself was how Flo, the chimpanzee female that Jane Goodall studied for so many years, stayed fed, guaranteed access to food for her offspring, and kept them safe from interference by other mothers. Eventually, Flo's high status made it possible for her daughter Fifi to be among the few females who would remain in her natal place to breed -- in Fifi's case, inheriting her mother's territory. Even more impressive data documenting the connection between female status and all sorts of reproductive parameters -- age of menarche, infant-survival rates, and even sex ratios of offspring -- have been compiled for Old World cercopithecene monkeys like macaques and baboons. These data strongly suggest that generalized striving for local clout was genetically programmed into the psyches of female primates during a distant past when status and motherhood were totally convergent.
Evidence for human primates is less clear, in part because husbands figure so prominently in the social status of most mothers. Yet both fiction and ethnography provide multiple examples. For example, Nisa, the !Kung woman, tells what happened when her first husband, Tashay, brought home a second wife. "I chased her away and she went back to her parents," Nisa says simply. Nisa's own mother had done the same thing a generation before. The children of this new wife would have competed with Nisa's for food provided by her husband and other community members. Nisa acted so as to maintain her status as her husband's only, primary wife. Her actions were in keeping with being a "good mother." Such women do not compete for status and reputation in the spheres that matter to men (for example, being known as a great hunter or warrior); they compete in spheres that actually matter to mothers.
Occasionally, we can detect bizarre manifestations of these old connections, as in the case of the Texas mother who hired a hit-man to murder the mother of her daughter's cheer-leading rival in order to derail her emotionally. But for the most part, status-striving by mothers seeking to enhance the prospects of their children is more subtle. Think of the womanly rivalries chronicled for early-nineteenth-century England by Jane Austen, or by Edith Wharton for the early-twentieth-century tribal life of "Old New York." In subtle, private, and scarcely perceptible ways, both mothers and their relations close ranks so as to promote and protect the marriage opportunities (which in that world meant access to resources) of young kinswomen, while locking out other young women. We tend to think of these mothers as "controlling," "pushy," "interfering" -- and I don't disagree -- but the venerable ancestry of such traits is worth considering. In their environment of evolutionary relevance, these women would have been behaving like successful mothers.
Far from "opposing forces," maternity and ambition are inseparably linked. The circumstances of modern life tend, however, to obscure the connection. This is because jobs, status, and resource defense occur in separate domains from child-rearing. At the same time, civilized mores and laws mean that mothers do not have to rely on intimidation to drive off rival mothers and keep their offspring safe from competing interests. Most mothers reading this book worry far less about famine, tigers, and infanticidal conspecifics than they worry over job promotions, health benefits, and finding adequate daycare.
For the most part, mothers striving for status in the modern workplace do so outside the home. Often working mothers are driven to pursue status interests for long hours, far from home, in ways just as likely to harm as to help their baby cope with life. The conflict, however, is not between maternity and ambition, but between the needs of infants and the way a woman's ambition plays out in the modern workplace.
In the modern world, status (whether socioeconomic or professional) is, if anything, inversely correlated with reproductive success. This is especially true for women who earn their status. Not long ago, sociobiologist Susan Essock-Vitale looked at the reproductive success of people listed on Forbes Magazine's annual listing of the four hundred wealthiest Americans. Those women who had inherited wealth had significantly more children on average than successful businesswomen who had acquired their wealth through their own efforts. This should not come as a surprise. When given the opportunity, many women value upward mobility over time devoted to rearing a family. We need only look at the grueling hours that working mothers put into jobs as lawyers, doctors, and research scientists, careers with demands as insatiable as those of children. But if our evolutionary heritage has any relevance to what we are, how can this be?
The answer is simple. In worlds where there was no birth control, and where no female was ever celibate, there was no possibility that female rank and maternal reproductive success could be other than correlated. Nature built in no safeguards to ambition run awry, as it were, to energies diverted to status ends that were not linked to the production, survival, and prosperity of offspring. Now that status and the survival of offspring have been decoupled, will there be selection against women who are especially inclined or driven to achieve? Probably, if our species survives long enough, and if circumstances in the work place don't change.
Torn between two ancient, pressing, and now incompatible urges, women are forced to make new tradeoffs. Forging workable compromises between infant needs and maternal ambition requires considerable ingenuity, self-understanding, and common sense. This is especially true in highly competitive and demanding fields. Science provides the case studies with which I am most familiar.
In 1976, the year I completed my Ph.D., an article appeared titled "The high price of success in science," written by a young molecular biologist, Nancy Hopkins, who would go on to become a leader in the field. She argued that it was not impossible for a woman in such a competitive profession -- demanding, in her case, a minimum of seventy hours a week in the lab -- to "be a successful wife and mother as well as a successful scientist." Her words were sobering and, looking back on that era of what Hopkins called "the bionic woman hard sell of the '70s," unusually honest. About the time Hopkins wrote that article, there were ten tenured women professors at Harvard Medical School; nine of the ten had no children.
Yet there were women who managed to successfully combine science with motherhood. None I know took ordinary routes. Mary Jane West-Eberhard, for example, whose ideas about the role of development in evolutionary processes I discussed in chapter 3, is legendary among women field biologists for the way she managed to combine her family and professional lives. "It's what we all do," she told me once, apropos of the extra-tough compromises field-biology requires of mothers. "We each construct our own idiosyncratic life." In West-Eberhard's case, she opted to forgo a conventional teaching position at a major university to take a research job. The position allowed the Eberhards to live in Central America, where they could afford housekeeping help, and, more importantly, where they could do research while keeping an eye on their three children -- literally, since the wasps they studied were on the roof of their house.
My own compromises took me in the opposite direction. I switched from tramping around forested hillsides, following monkeys in India, to doing research on human parents in archives in the United States, where I used part-time daycare, and along with my husband took full advantage of emerging opportunities to work less than full-time and to use fax machines, and eventually the internet, to work at home. When my third child was born, I hired a generous-hearted allomother on a very long-term basis. She lives with us still, though my youngest child is twelve, and the allomother now pursues a part-time profession of her own.
Pretty obviously, not one of us was living the same way as our ancestors. Yet we were required to resolve similar dilemmas, and so we forged new solutions for doing so -- a theme that recurs throughout this book.
Many of us at different stages of our lives desperately desire a child. Others, out of commitment to career or for other reasons, are determined to have none. Many women are certain they will never want a child, and then change their mind. Still others have babies by accident. Those who consciously decide are often making pragmatic decisions with a watchful eye on the effects upon their career, existing children, or the overall well-being of their family. Few people give much thought to the evolutionary origins of the emotions that inform such "decisions." But I am convinced we are more tightly linked to our past than most people imagine.
Whether we think about it or act "on impulse," each of us constantly makes myriad small decisions on a daily basis that in ancestral environments would have been correlated with reproductive success. Like it or not, each of us lives with the emotional legacy and decision-making equipment of mothers who acted so as to ensure that at least one offspring survived to reproduce. Prudent allocation of reproductive effort and the construction of an advantageous social niche in which her offspring could survive and prosper were linked to ultimate reproductive success.
Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection. Blaffer Hrdy, p. 109-114.
DUPLICITOUS
By the end of the twentieth century, the role of Flo, Jane Goodall's most endearing mother chimp, was expanded and recast. Flo's evident tenderness and patience were only part of the story about her success as a mother. If in this book I fail to stress sufficiently this nursing component, the reason is that I assume that it is already well known, widely described, and commonly assumed. But there are secrets to Flo's reproductive success that are less well known, less often quoted. These include Flo's ability to carve out for herself a secure and productive territory deep within the boundaries patrolled by the Gombe males. Many of these males were former sexual consorts; others were her own sons who had risen to a high rank in the fluctuating local hierarchy. Flo was as secure a female chimp could be from outside males who from time to time would raid her community, and if they could, kill not just unrelated infants but adult males and older females as well.
But Flo did more than commandeer a productive larder and keep her offspring safe. She supported her offspring politically, permitting Fifi to translate her mother's advantages into her own. At Flo's death, Fifi parlayed her mother's local connections into the inestimable privilege of philopatry, remaining in her natal place. Philopatry (which means literally "loving one's home country") meant that instead of migrating away to find a new place to live, Fifi -- like half of all females born at Gombe -- managed to stay where she was born. Fifi continued to use her mother's rich, familiar larder, and enjoy the protection of male kin.
Make no mistake, reproductively, nothing becomes a female more than remaining among kin. The advantage, Fifi began breeding at an unusually early age, and so far has produced seven successive offspring, six surviving -- the all-time record for lifetime reproductive success in a wild Great Ape female. She also holds the record for shortest interval between surviving births ever reported in wild chimps. Her second-born son, Frodo, has grown into the largest male on record at Gombe and ranks in the status hierarchy just below the current alpha male, Fifi's firstborn son, Freud, while Fanni, Fifi's third-born, holds the record for the earliest ever anogenital swelling, at 8.5 years. Thus does Flo's family prosper.
Early on, Goodall and her students noticed that when Flo approached other females, they gave nervous pant-grunts and moved out of her way. Females could be divided into those that held sway and those that gave way. What Goodall did not immediately grasp, however, was why female rank was so important. We know that, given the opportunity, a more dominant female chimp will kill and eat babies born to other females.
Over the decades, that records were kept at Gombe, at least four, possibly as many as ten, newborn infants were killed by females. When Goodall reported the first two cases of infant killing and cannibalism by another mother in 1977, the so-called crimes of a female named Passion, she, like most people, assumed that the female killing these infants must be deranged. A few sociobiologists suspected otherwise and suggested that females from a more dominant lineage were "eliminating a competitor while the infant was still sufficiently vulnerable to be dispatched with impunity."
From the 1970s onward, isolated cases of infanticide by rival mothers continued to be reported for other species of social mammals -- ground squirrels, prairie dogs, wild dogs, marmosets, some fifty species in all. Most cases were attributed either to a mineral deficiency or protein lust by a hungry female (since in some cases victims were eaten) or to mothers clearing out a niche and thereby making resources available for her own breeding efforts -- a model first proposed by sociobiologist Paul Sherman at Cornell University. As more evidence became available "the crimes of passion" were looking more deliberate than anomalous, and in species like chimps, other females were a hazard that mothers had to watch for.
Nevertheless, chimpanzees breed so slowly that it was 1997 before Goodall and zoologist Anne Pusey had collected enough data to show a statistically significant correlation between female rank and a mother's ability to keep her infants alive. This finding caused them to reevaluate their longstanding diagnosis of Passion's "pathological" behavior. When, two decades after the first cases were reported, Fifi's daughter attacked the daughter of a subordinate female, Pusey assumed it was a failed attempt at infanticide.
Mother chimps like Flo, then, were not simply doting nurturers but entrepreneurial dynasts as well. A female's quest for status -- her ambition, if you will -- has become inseparable from her ability to keep her offspring and grand-offspring alive. Far from conflicting with maternity, such a female's "ambitious" tendencies are part and parcel of maternal success.
Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection. Blaffer Hrdy, p. 50-52.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cABykBgcRKo
CARTA: Childrearing in Human Evolution--Melvin Konner:Hunter-Gatherer Childhood and Human Evolution
CARTA: Childrearing in Human Evolution--Melvin Konner:Hunter-Gatherer Childhood and Human Evolution
The perennial question "which sex to produce" can be mind-boggling, especially in such flexible primates as baboons and macaques, "weedy" species like humans are, readily adapting to diverse habitats. As in all well-studied Old World cercopithecine monkeys, baboons and macaque daughters inherit rank from their mothers. Because daughters remain nearby, it behooves a high-ranking mother to produce the sex that will benefit most from her own status, as well as bolster matrilineal interests by supporting kin (another form of local resource enhancement). In habitats like Amboseli, where food is scarce, high-ranking mothers do just this -- they overproduce daughters. The same pattern can also be documented for some populations of macaques.
Year after year, mothers in the highest-ranking matrilines consistently produce significantly more daughters than sons, while low-ranking females produce few daughters and more sons. Low-ranking females not only produce few daughters, but such daughters as they do produce are more likely to die than sons born to mothers of equivalently low rank. Based on captive studies of bonnet macaques, Joan Silk showed that whereas sons who depart their natal group can leave the disadvantages of their mother's low rank behind, daughters cannot. In her study, no daughter born to a low-ranking mother managed to produce a single surviving offspring. When competition for local resources is intense, a daughter born to a high-status mother is the right sex in the right place at that time.
Recall that among the baboons Jeanna Altmann studied at Amboseli, infants have a 25-percent chance of dying during each of the first two years of life. But if a baby is a daughter born to a high-ranking mother -- the "right sex" -- the baby's survival chances go up twofold, and are higher than survival chances for a son born to a mother of the same status. Such daughters also breed sooner. On average, mothers who get the sex right contribute an extra half-grand-offspring to the next generation. Mothers at Amboseli produce no more than seven offspring in their lives, of which on average only two survive. Given how little these baboon mothers have to show for a lifetime spent producing and carrying babies, such bonuses add up.
Generation after generation, cumulative reproductive advantages mean that mothers in these matrilineal systems compete for more enduring stakes than the isolated copulations males fight over. A male who hitches his reproductive star to a successful matriline by siring a daughter in one, secures his ticket to posterity. Similarly, if a male's mate is a subordinate female, both parents benefit from son production. Lowborn sons, like poor country boys, strike out for distant opportunities, leaving natal disadvantages behind. But in some cercopithecine monkeys like macaques, there is another reason for subordinate mothers to bias toward sons. Females from dominant matrilines maliciously harass daughters born to competing mothers, sending a not so subtle message: "We may tolerate your sons for a time, but your daughters -- who will be permanent residents --are not welcome." These bullies inflict much wear and tear on low-ranking mothers, especially those carrying daughters. Silk hypothesized that such penalties imposed upon low-ranking mothers who produce daughters has led to selection on subordinate mothers to either avoid conceiving , or avoid gestating, daughters.
Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection. Blaffer Hrdy, p. 333-334.
...Jeanne Altmann first showed that high and low-ranking baboon mothers at Amboseli differed in their probabilities of giving birth to a son versus a daughter, few knew what to make of it. Many found it hard to believe, because in order to understand what was going on one also had to take into account the social and ecological context in which each mother was operating, and to understand that baboon daughters born to low-ranking females were less likely to survive than sons were. Why? Studies of captive macaques with a similar social system provide one reason. Higher-ranking females in the same group harass mothers with daughters (the sex of offspring that will remain in the natal group and compete with her own daughters) but leave low-ranking mothers with sons alone. As a consequence, infant daughters suffer higher mortality than would sons born to mothers of the same low rank.
With the support of their mothers and other matrilineal kin, daughters born to high-ranking baboon females rise in the hierarchy and, in turn, pass on the advantages of their acquired rank (along with such perks as early reproductive maturity, and greater offspring survival) to daughters. The female baboon, like most social mammals, introduces her baby into the network of social relationships she has forged. Daughters who grow up surrounded by high-ranking kin give birth at an earlier age to offspring more likely to survive. Since baboon daughters inherit their rank from their mother, these social advantages are transmitted across generations as maternal effects, and the reproductive advantages accumulate through time in her matriline. But this strange bias in production of progeny only made sense in the light of variation between females.
Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection. Blaffer Hrdy, p. 81-22.
MORE TO COME FROM THIS BOOK. I'LL TIE IN THE FEMALE DESIRE TO ATTAIN HIGH SOCIAL STATUS WITH THE CHIMPANZEE, FLO'S, ATTAINMENT OF HIGH SOCIAL RANK (YOUR AMBITION TO ATTAIN STATUS IS THE SAME AS FLO'S.) MONEY ON THE FLO!
I'LL ADD A FEW PASSAGES FROM MATT RIDLEY'S RED QUEEN CONCERNING THE BENEFITS OF HIGH SOCIAL STATUS. YOU'LL FIND IT ALL VERY INTERESTING. I PROMISE.
Sherry Persian
I got what I need and if I want something else imma get it. Fuck what u talking about.
Fuck what you talking about!
Another
DUMB Persian. Their IQs Are Just Above Arabs, But They're Still Among
Some Of The Lowest In The World Partly Because Of Their Long History Of
Inbreeding (Cousin-Cousin Sex). Anyhow, She's Just Another One Of Those
DUMB Generation ME Broads That's Driven To Acquire Wealth And Attain
Rank (Status) By Any Means Necessary, But Has NO IDEA Why She's Driven
To Do This And NO IDEA What To Do Once She Gets It. Get Out There And
Get It Girl! Fuck What I'm Talking About!
