Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy was born in 1946 in Dallas, Texas. She studied anthropology at Harvard University, where she also earned her doctorate, and was influenced there by evolutionary biologists such as Edward O. Wilson and Robert Trivers. She spent much of her academic career at the University of California, Davis.

Hrdy first gained scholarly recognition through her fieldwork on Hanuman langur monkeys in India, reflected in her book The Woman That Never Evolved (1981). Drawing on behavioral observations, she challenged the prevailing assumption that females in nature were passive creatures who merely selected among competing males, showing instead that competition, aggression, and complex sexual strategies among females also played a central role in evolution.

Among her most significant intellectual contributions is the theory of "cooperative breeding," elaborated in detail in Mothers and Others (2009). Contrary to the common view that child-rearing in the human species is primarily the biological mother's task, Hrdy argued that throughout human evolutionary history, shared care of children by others besides the mother — fathers, grandmothers, older siblings, and other group members — played a vital role, and that this pattern laid the groundwork for the evolution of humanity's distinctive empathetic and social capacities.

In another book, Mother Nature (1999), Hrdy examined maternal instinct and the evolutionary conflicts between the interests of mother and offspring, showing that maternal behavior, contrary to the romantic view commonly held, is always subject to complex evolutionary calculations and trade-offs. Hrdy's work has had a profound impact on feminist anthropology and the evolutionary biology of sex, making her one of the most influential critics of the traditional male-centered view in evolutionary biology.