Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. They just help make us people and not other primates, reports the New York Times :
In the view of the primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, the extraordinary social skills of an infant are at the heart of what makes us human. Through its ability to solicit and secure the attentive care not just of its mother but of many others in its sensory purview, a baby promotes many of the behaviors and emotions that we prize in ourselves and that often distinguish us from other animals, including a willingness to share, to cooperate with strangers, to relax one’s guard, uncurl one’s lip and widen one’s pronoun circle beyond the stifling confines of me, myself and mine.As Dr. Hrdy argues in her latest book, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding , which will be published by Harvard University Press in April, human babies are so outrageously dependent on their elders for such a long time that humanity would never have made it without a break from the great ape model of child-rearing. Chimpanzee and gorilla mothers are capable of rearing their offspring pretty much through their own powers, but human mothers are not.
. . .Our capacity to cooperate in groups, to empathize with others and to wonder what others are thinking and feeling—all these traits, Dr. Hrdy argues, probably arose in response to the selective pressures of being in a cooperatively breeding social group, and the need to trust and rely on others and be deemed trustworthy and reliable in turn.
Look at all the good that babies do. And if a scientist said they’re good, then they must be. That gets me thinking. Maybe this means that having more babies would be good for us. Maybe it means that babies are people. Maybe it means that . . . Well, I shouldn’t get ahead of myself.
