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Comment by Siddarth1977 | Hacker News Reader

Siddarth1977

What? Of course maternal instincts exist and are distinct. The differences in reproduction are the most fundamental basis of sex differentiation in animals.

In some mammals, fathers have literally no contact with their offspring while mothers care for them for years (eg, bears). In others, the mother and father both remain as part of a pack, but the mother does all of the direct care and the father is doing hunting or protection. In some, the father may have a minimal role in early life but then become more involved later as their offspring learn to hunt or fight.

The social construct of both parents having equal and identical roles in parenting at all stages of child development is very new and very culturally unique to Western, industrialized and affluent societies. Across all primates and all evidence of pre-industrial humans, maternal and paternal roles were very different.

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Actually, there are many species who share the burden of child rearing equally. It is often a matter of resource availability, if food is scarce, males become aggressive and patriarchal structures emerge more prominently, and vice versa. Human history has been harsh, so it is not surprising that our ancestors tended to that type of society.

So, it is simply not true “across all” anything. I will forego badly parroting what actual experts say, so instead I recommend Robert Sapolsky’s lectures on this in his biology courses at Stanford. They’re available on YouTube.

I also notice you just vaguely referred to various animals in instead of humans, which is curious.

My position here, to be clear, is that there are gender differences in personality and phenotype, but they are mostly inconsequential for child rearing in a resource-rich society, ie, both genders are equally competent parents. Individual variation outweighs gender differences.

> I also notice you just vaguely referred to various animals in instead of humans, which is curious

Intentionally so, because humans are animals and that's an imaginary distinction. Modern western society likes to pretend like we're these abstract minds that are attached to bodies. We're not, we're primates, only a tiny bit different than our ape cousins.

If you want to stick to humans, for about 99.9999% of the 315,000 years humans have been around, no mother was pumping breastmilk and sticking it in the refrigerator so that the father could do the 4am feeding.

Your comment is essentially putting a causal arrow backwards. Biology and nature would have us behaving in far more strongly differentiated gender roles. Contemporary western social norms and modern technology allow us to go against that nature. "Maternal instincts" are as real and fundamental as any other survival instinct humans or any other animal experience.

”We’re basically monkeys” is a bad argument when monkeys share child rearing duties IF they have resource abundance, as do other animal species. Pair bonding is a term to search for here, this is a really well-studied question. I again don’t want to parrot experts badly. Sapolsky is again a great popsci level resource here. Interestingly, parental investment is also correlated with long reproductive cycles such as humans. It makes sense I guess.

But please don’t let “human is just smart monke” turn into some naturalist fallacy wherein men must be manly because we were made so. We weren’t, but given a stressful environment, we CAN turn out that way.

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