Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

It's in these social realms where they really differ.

Intersubjective sensibilities starting to emerge early in life, right along with targeted social smiles.

Brain circuitry that evolved to help babies elicit care and survive prepared our ancestors to mature into adults able to communicate and cooperate in new ways, whether constructing shelters or processing and sharing food, or eventually, one day,

collaborating with widely dispersed others in order to send robots to Mars.

Tens of thousands of years from now, assuming Homo sapiens aiensis is still around, whether on this planet or some other,

I have no doubt that they will be bipedal, symbol-generating apes, technologically proficient in ways we can't even dream of yet.

But will they still be human in the way we think of humans today, interested in the thoughts and emotions of others, eligible for mutual understanding?

That's going to depend on how, by whom or what they are reared.

Thank you.

You know, the mother-infant bond is so basic and the most powerful emotion in all of nature, I think, is an infant's desire to be close to the caretaker.

And of course, that is most often the mother because she's right there and she's nursing and so forth.

But it turns out that babies can come to love anyone if they are responsive and right there, right from birth, they attach to someone.

whoever is responsive and caretaking, and those people come to love them.

So is that a family tie?

It has to do with the context in which the emotions are elicited.

It easily could be, but would we want that?

Yes, or you could instill one in it, but I find that very scary.

What does he know about

Love and human emotions.

You couldn't pay me enough to do it.