<!-- bryant-content-generator:start --> # The human female is the primate with the highest... > The human female is the primate with the highest rate of maternal infanticide on the planet, and the reason is neither madness nor a fall from grace but the size of the bill. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, who first explained why langur males kill infants, spent the second half of her career explaining why human mothers do: it takes on the order of thirteen million calories to raise one child to self-sufficiency, no primate infant is more helpless for longer, and no primate mother is more dependent on other hands to get it done, so **maternal love in our species evolved as conditional investment** rather than as a reflex, with a window after birth in which the mother's nervous system prices the infant against her resources, her partner, her other children, her rank and her prospects before the bond hardens. The ethnographic record reads accordingly. Among the precontact Ache of Paraguay roughly one child in ten was killed, the defective, the twin, the one born too close to the last, and children whose fathers died were killed at elevated rates by adult men who had no intention of feeding another man's offspring. In the shantytowns of northeastern Brazil, mothers let their weakest infants die of thirst and called it letting go, and did not weep. Across the foraging and agricultural societies Daly and Wilson surveyed, infanticide clustered around the same conditions everywhere: uncertain paternity, deformity, bad timing, no partner, no helpers, and the mother's own youth and poverty. The foundling wheels of Paris and Florence, the exposure ledges of Rome, the stepfathers under whose roofs a child is dozens of times more likely to die, and the young unpartnered mothers who in every dataset carry the highest risk are not a rogues' gallery. {{Infanticide is not a break in human motherhood. It is one of the settings on the dial, and the dial has been there since before the species had a name.}} **Source:** [[books/Chimping Out|Chimping Out]] ## Share on Social Media ``` “The human female is the primate with the highest rate of maternal infanticide on the planet, and the reason is neither madness nor a fall from grace but the size of the bill. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, who first explained why langur males kill infants, spent the second half of her career explaining why human mothers do: it takes on the order of thirteen million calories to raise one child to self-sufficiency, no primate infant is more helpless for longer, and no primate mother is more dependent on other hands to get it done, so maternal love in our species evolved as conditional investment rather than as a reflex, with a window after birth in which the mother's nervous system prices the infant against her resources, her partner, her other children, her rank and her prospects before the bond hardens. The ethnographic record reads accordingly. Among the precontact Ache of Paraguay roughly one child in ten was killed, the defective, the twin, the one born too close to the last, and children whose fathers died were killed at elevated rates by adult men who had no intention of feeding another man's offspring. In the shantytowns of northeastern Brazil, mothers let their weakest infants die of thirst and called it letting go, and did not weep. Across the foraging and agricultural societies Daly and Wilson surveyed, infanticide clustered around the same conditions everywhere: uncertain paternity, deformity, bad timing, no partner, no helpers, and the mother's own youth and poverty. The foundling wheels of Paris and Florence, the exposure ledges of Rome, the stepfathers under whose roofs a child is dozens of times more likely to die, and the young unpartnered mothers who in every dataset carry the highest risk are not a rogues' gallery. Infanticide is not a break in human motherhood. It is one of the settings on the dial, and the dial has been there since before the species had a name.” — Bryant McGill https://bryantmcgill.com/passages/passages-human-female-primate-before-species-name ``` <!-- bryant-content-generator:end -->