Abstract
Fatherhood is an often-fascinating foray into an evolutionary perspective on paternal behavior. It synthesizes existing research from the cultural and societal levels down to the hormonal. While the record of scientific evidence is not always strong or deep, the issues at hand are almost always provocative.
In Fatherhood, Peter Gray and Kermyt Anderson shine a bright spotlight directly on male behavior. Whether you are a father, mother, or child, or care about the future welfare of societies, you have to understand what is going on with men today. And to do that, you have to understand male behavior across species, cultures, and historical time. That is a tall order, and it obviously cannot be handled in a single book. The authors do their best in sampling research and packing it in. But this book sings when the authors are focused on hunter-gatherer and subsistence cultures past and present, and when they are telling the big story of how paternal behavior has shifted in the course of six million years.
It is in these chapters that sociologists will find themselves most captivated because the material will not be as familiar. In Chapter One, “Our Founding Fathers,” the authors discuss a few classic evolutionary perspectives on paternal behavior (Bateman, Trivers, Darwin) and then lay out a sweeping history of paternal behavior from Homo, through Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, and Homo sapiens. Their glimpses into early behavior reveal just how raw and brutal the behaviors of our earlier ancestors were. The punch line is that, until relatively recent times, knowing who your offspring were was a “probabilistic endeavor,” and this did not exactly prompt meaningful paternal behavior.
Paternal care was largely absent until babies were born helpless through an evolutionary process that delayed a large proportion of brain growth for the period after birth. A helpless baby meant that caregivers were necessary—with fathers included among a cadre of female caregivers. Long-term bonds with a partner were necessary but not sufficient, the authors say, to account for the eventual emergence of more significant paternal care. Fathers were more likely to stick around when babies became helpless, and they mate-guarded mothers to ensure sexual access. Because females largely chose males based on their ability to provide, the nutrient base for themselves and their young ultimately ensured their survival. Gray and Anderson note, however, that arguments that simply reduce male behavior to “showing off” or to “costly signaling” do not fit the story of greater paternal investment. If this were the case, fathers would not care about their paternity status—which they do.
Chapter Nine “The Descent of Dad’s Sexuality” addresses cross-cultural beliefs about conception and more recent biomedical understandings of conception. The authors point to persistent taboos for females who are not supposed to have sex during pregnancy or in the postpartum period, and a double standard for men, who do not have the same proscriptions on their sexual behavior and have other outlets for meeting their sexual needs. A fascinating aside relates to our species’ unique tendency to have sex in private. “When is the last time you saw a couple having sex in the grocery story or at a party you hosted? When is the last time you saw pets, animals in a zoo, or animals you saw ‘in the wild’ having sex in plain view? Exactly” (p. 195).
Chapter Ten, “Babies on His Brain,” explores emerging research on the phenomenon of couvade (in French, “hatching” or “brooding”), a cluster of symptoms that have been observed in men in conjunction with their role as fathers. Some of these symptoms may be expressed as “sympathy” during a partner’s pregnancy and postpartum period (such as poor concentration, anxiety, fatigue, and disruption to sleep). These negative symptoms may have positive effects on paternal behavior, however, if they foster a man’s emotional commitment to a partner and child or signal to the community that he is undergoing behavioral and psychological adjustments and may need support.
Readers are also introduced to new frontiers in research on the human neuroendocrine system, which suggests that fatherhood may heighten sensory functions (smell, sight, sound, and touch), thereby linking the father’s physiology with his child via neural pathways. Fatherhood may also lower testosterone (at least for fathers in long-term relationships), increase vasopressin (for fathers of very young children), and increase prolactin (for fathers who play active roles in caring for their offspring).
In Chapter Eleven, “Health and the Human Father,” Gray and Anderson explore new evidence on how “reproductive success” has both positive and negative consequences for the morbidity and mortality of men. The evidence suggests that the deleterious effects come early, when children are young (presumably because of the greater immediate press on the lives of parents when children are little), and more positive effects once children are older. It is clearly difficult, however, to separate the potential health effects of fatherhood from those of partnership or marriage, as the two are intimately enmeshed.
In the remaining chapters, sociologists will find much that is already familiar, whether Gray and Anderson are discussing marriage, fertility, paternity, stepfathering, work-family balance, or father involvement. Indeed, important sociological research is sprinkled throughout these chapters. And yet, because Gray and Anderson are rooted in an evolutionary perspective, even these topics will at times feel fresh to sociologists, who may be prompted to think in new ways about topics that are perhaps too comfortable.
The conclusion falls short in discussing important changes occurring with respect to fatherhood. It only briefly takes up issues related to “legislating fatherhood,” where the authors argue that laws to increase fathers’ involvement will be successful only if men “acknowledge paternity without dispute” (p. 250). They also point to the dangers of paternity tests, especially if children are separated from men after divorce or are from men who have been social fathers, even if they are not biological fathers. The authors also momentarily open some of the new ethical, legal, and social implications of technology to assist reproduction—whether sperm or egg donations, Viagra (which may extend older men’s reproduction), or ultrasound (which may strengthen the connection fathers feel toward children before they are born, or prompt selective abortion or sex selection). Unfortunately, the book ends abruptly on these points.
While the book is marketed as being written for a popular audience of parents and fathers—a kind of contemporary manual on fathering—it clearly is not. But it is a good, accessible, scholarly read, and it is consistently provocative as it wrestles with tough questions that are certain to forever occupy scientific inquiry into human existence.