The Illusion of God's Presence by John C. Wathey

Author:John C. Wathey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633880757
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2015-12-08T05:00:00+00:00

Figure 3. Is this a beautiful young woman turned away from you, or an old lady in profile? Image from an anonymous German postcard, ca. 1888.153

Figure 4. If you cannot make sense of this image, reading the word “dog” in this caption may help. Photographed by Ronald C. James, ca. 1965.154

Finally, there is something unusual about the way humans care for their infants that has relevance here. Human offspring are among the most costly to raise to self-sufficiency in the whole of the animal kingdom, yet our hominin ancestors produced them at double the reproductive rate of other great apes. This partly explains the rapid dispersal of our species during the Pleistocene, but it also means that ancient human mothers were incapable of raising their children alone.155 Unlike our closest cousins among the great apes, human mothers do not hold their infants all the time. We can see this in hunter-gatherer cultures where babies are nearly always held, but not always by their mothers. Grandmothers, fathers, aunts, and older siblings routinely help out when mothers need to search for food or juggle multiple children.156 Sociobiologist Sarah Hrdy argues that this strategy of cooperative breeding has been at work in our hominin ancestors for hundreds of thousands of years, possibly all the way back to Homo erectus, and that it has deeply affected the mother-infant bond in humans.157

It has made a human mother's commitment to her infant more conditional than that of a chimp or bonobo mother, because a human mother must evaluate her prospects for support from others in providing for her baby. If those prospects look poor, and especially if her infant is small and sickly, she may do better by abandoning it, thus conserving resources for her other children while waiting for better times. Such behavior is almost never seen in other apes but is well documented in hunter-gatherers and other mammals that practice cooperative breeding. In humans, the decision to abandon an infant usually occurs within a brief period after birth. Once lactation and suckling begin, hormonal and neural transformations in the mother's brain normally push her into total commitment.158

Presumably this state of affairs also exerts selective pressure on the physical, behavioral, and cognitive attributes of neonates. This may explain why human babies are born fatter than other primate newborns, and why some young infants seem to cry excessively: both may be signals of the infant's health and vigor.159 More to the point, however, it is one more reason—and an especially compelling one for the neonate—why human newborns are innately sensitive to social cues and endowed with knowledge of social primary reinforcers. In the aboriginal human condition, a newborn must make an emotional connection with its mother immediately after birth because failure at this increases the risk of abandonment.

Beyond those risky first days lie other special challenges that favor a sensory system biased with the expectation of a mother's presence. The demands on aboriginal mothers required that they sometimes put their infants down or, more likely, hand

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