Sarah B. Hrdy
I have spent my entire adult life engaged in a quest to understand not just who I am but how creatures like me came to be. . . . What does it mean to be born a mammal, with the emotional legacy that makes me capable of caring for others, breeding with the ovaries of an ape, possessing the mind of a human being . . . to be a semicontinuously sexually receptive, hairless biped, with conflicting aspirations and struggling to maintain her balance in a rapidly changing world?
—Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, from Preface to Mother Nature (1999)
Today, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy is a professor emerita in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She has been elected to the California Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the sole author of five books and has co-edited several others.
She and her husband have three children and currently combine growing walnuts with habitat restoration on their farm in northern California.
Photo © 1988 Tom Zimberoff for Omni Magazine
Recent and Forthcoming Invited Lectures
July 7, 2009. Darwin and the Ascent of Man: Why humans are such hypersocial apes. Lecture to be presented at the Darwin Celebration, University of Cambridge, England.
July 10, 2009. CRASSH Seminar (long version of the above talk) at Cambridge Interdisciplinary Reproductive Forum, Cambridge, England.
July 16, 2009. Title to be announced. Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA).
September 23, 2009. How humans became such other-regarding apes. To be presented at the Charles Darwin Symposium: Shaping our Science, Society and Future, Charles Darwin University, Darwin, Australia.
October 8, 2009. Title to be announced. Seminar, Anthropology Department, University of Sydney, Australia.
November 18, 2009. Mothers and Others: The origin of emotionally modern humans. Public Lecture, Harvard University Museums, Cambridge, MA. (time to be announced)
November 30, 2009. Title to be announced. Anni Bergman Parent-Infant Training Program. New York City.
December 2, 2009. Title to be announced. Annual Lecture, Biological Anthropology Section, American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia.
On the Farm
One year we borrowed a herd of sheep to simulate long-gone elk grazing on newly planted native bunch grasses.
We put in native plant hedgerows to encourage beneficial insects near the orchards.
Deer visit the native "deer grass" planted by our neighbor, John Anderson.
Man-made ponds on the farm facilitate ground water recharge, attract wildlife, and provide a welcome respite from the summer heat.
A visiting swallowtail.
Water droplets form on young yellow lupins.
Sunflowers are rotated with wheat and tomatoes on the cropland.
As children left the nest, we kept our kennel full.
