Human being are remarkably social and empathetic, at least for the most part. How did this occur? One popular theory is that we evolved to understand each other in order to cope better with competition and conflict.
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy in her forthcoming book, Mothers and Others, disagrees. For her the key comes with the human infants’ extreme helplessness, which has produced selective pressures for socially connected adults and adorable babies.
The discussion of the book by Natalie Angier in today’s NY Times is worth reading, IMHO. As she notes,
Human beings evolved as cooperative breeders, says Dr. Hrdy, a reproductive strategy in which mothers are assisted by as-if mothers, or “allomothers,” individuals of either sex who help care for and feed the young. Most biologists would concur that humans have evolved the need for shared child care, but Dr. Hrdy takes it a step further, arguing that our status as cooperative breeders, rather than our exceptionally complex brains, helps explain many aspects of our temperament. Our relative pacifism, for example, or the expectation that we can fly from New York to Los Angeles without fear of personal dismemberment. Chimpanzees are pretty smart, but were you to board an airplane filled with chimpanzees, you “would be lucky to disembark with all 10 fingers and toes still attached,” Dr. Hrdy writes.