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We are a profoundly caretaking species.
In fact, it might be the defining characteristic of human evolution, or
one of the two or three singular shifts in our evolution,
in becoming who we are today. It took some female evolutionary theorists and
primatologists to start to bring this to our attention, like Sarah Blaffer Hrdy,
that we are this profoundly caretaking species. But, interestingly, you may not
know this, but this was Charles Darwin's thesis about human nature as well.
Darwin, in 1871, wrote the Descent of Man, his first book about human beings.
He, as Adam Gopnik has argued, was--and I don't know if
you know this--he was a beloved dad of a really rambunctious group of children.
Engaged with his kids a lot... And a defining event in Darwin's life was that
one of his most beloved daughters died. And he nursed her to her death at age 10.
And out of that, Darwin started to have these deep insights about the place of
suffering in human experience, and the place of compassion. And it led him to
write that sympathy will be increased through natural selection for these
communities, which include the greatest number of the most sympathetic members,
would flourish the best. And in this passage, Darwin says,
Sympathy is our strongest instinct--stronger than self-interest and
the maximization of self-interest... Forgotten by evolutionary science for
quite some time... Well, why, who could,
how could you make the case that sympathy is our strongest instinct?
Well, it has to do with one of the most profound changes in human evolution,
which is the dependence of our children, our offspring. This is a little bonobo.
Isn't he cute? Isn't that great? I'd trade that bonobo for my teenage
daughters right...no, sorry. [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER] And this is a chimpanzee.
I love my daughters, so... Oh my god, I'm being videotaped and I just said that.
Scratch that... Okay. [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER] [LAUGH] This is a chimpanzee,
little baby chimpanzee. What are they doing that's unusual for offspring,
babies? They're eating by themselves. Average human nurses their,
around the world, nurses their babies four years, average mom... What else are they
doing that's unusual? They're sitting up. Right? Most babies at this age,
like, you sit them up and they go, Watch out, man, my head's really big...
Woo! [IMPACT SOUND] You know? [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER] Well, it took a while for
evolutionists to appreciate this, but what, you know?
As we started to walk upright on the African savanna,
our pelvises narrowed, right? And our birth passage narrowed.
As we developed these wonderful abilities with language and music and
symbolic representation, we got these big cortexes, which we're about to talk about,
and our heads got bigger. And what that means is that our babies,
as you all know, are born profoundly premature, and
dependent upon people to take care of them, right? Our babies, compared to
these offspring, are the most vulnerable offspring on the face of the Earth,
taking 7 to 49 years to reach the age of independence, right?
[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER] And, I always say that as a joke, but then half of you
are going to come to me during break and say, Are you sure it's 49? My son's 56,
he's still living in the basement. [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER] And, you know, and
when my daughter recently told me, I figured out, Dad, what I want to be.
And I was like, Great, what is it? She's like, I want to be a writer.
And I was like, I'm going to be paying your bills for 60 years.
Right? [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER] Unless she's as good as Robert Sapolsky... So, but, that,
as Sarah Blaffer Hrdy and other people have argued,
that simple fact changed everything. It rearranged our social structures,
building cooperative networks of caretaking. And
then it rearranged our nervous systems. We became this super caregiving species.
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