Growing up Human by Hassett Brenna;

Author:Hassett, Brenna;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2022-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

Notes

1. Or, it might be because you’re reading this in the future timeline where gendered parental roles sound absolutely medieval, in which case, hey, how’s that time machine coming?

2. Do read Angela Saini’s Inferior and Superior if you want to know how bad scientific biases can be.

3. Darwin, C. 1871. The Descent of Man. He also allows that women are almost OK, but in a fantastically racist way: ‘With woman the powers of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation, are more strongly marked than in man; but some, at least, of these faculties are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilisation.’

4. Correctly, or incorrectly, according to your grandmother.

5. Jack of all adaptations, master of none.

6. Trivers had many *cough* insights, among them an offhand comment that human females attractive in adolescence ‘tend to marry up’ and the rest essentially get into heavy petting because that’s what they’ve got to offer. This is why a) you should probably get an anthropologist to check your evolutionary biology and b) the 1970s were such a miserable place for women in anthropology (or indeed, women in general).

7. Or, more honestly, as participants in a culture where infidelity (and discussion, dramatisation and dénouements of same) is a major theme of entertainment and/or public life.

8. While the commune sounds like fun and execution less so, they both end badly. At least they didn’t have Charles Manson in colonial Massachusetts.

9. The Trobriand Islanders Malinowski studied may not have cared about paternity in the same way as a man from a patriarchal land-holding society where reproductive success is determined by the kind of capital you get from paternal inheritance … but that doesn’t mean they didn’t know what fathers were.

10. Honourable mention here to the Swedish phenomenon of the ‘latte papa’, who spends a small fortune on ruggedly good-looking childcare accessories and lattes to drink while wearing them during his vastly generous paternal leave.

11. Yes, yes, I know, not in your grandad’s day. Uphill both ways and no grooming.

12. In the original publication, there is quite a lot of statistical ritual applied to declaring dads to be more important in societies where descent isn’t patrilineal, sexual relationships are monogamous or polygynous, boys aren’t circumcised, there is no overarching ‘boss God’, adolescent boys are socialised in the main group and where games of physical skill but not strategy are played. This is … overly restrictive. Playing chess doesn’t make you a bad dad.

13. Foraging societies that live in mostly forested areas around the Congo river are also described as Aka, BaYaka, Baika, Ba’Aka, Baka or, quite pejoratively, ‘pygmies’.

14. So-called because it is not; there is no more a hormone for happiness than there is an absolutely monogamous primate.

15. It is not, despite considerable popular assertion to the contrary, securely linked to just being a jerk. Testosterone levels are weakly linked to how humans respond to being challenged, but how you deal with that car cutting you off on the freeway is all on you, buddy.

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