As a parent, Elizabeth Preston was familiar with parenting literature. But as a science writer, Preston also wanted to explore parenting from the perspective of evolutionary biology, or “humans as animals.”
And so her new book The Creatures' Guide to Caring: How Animal Parents Teach Us That Humans Were Born to Care tells us “how we got here in the context of all the other animals on Earth that are doing similar things or different things.”
In a recent What We’re Reading interview Preston explains how humans are hardwired to care.
“So every mammal has a caring mother. But in humans and in some other species, it seems that we've evolved to care for our kids in a cooperative group. And we can see that legacy in the ability of both fathers and people who aren't related to a baby at all to start caring for the baby.”
Her research for The Creatures' Guide to Caring resulted in surprising instances of male species taking on the role as main caregiver. For example, Preston notes that for the minority of fish that care for their young, it’s almost always the male. In particular, the midshipman fish who builds the nest on shore, attracts the female, then guards the eggs for months.
Preston explained, “It's very intense … But he's very exposed, literally exposed. He's on the shore. He can be completely dry when the tide goes out. He can get eaten by a seagull. He may have to fend off other males who are trying to get his nest space. So it's this very intense parenting role, and it's entirely done by the dad.”
Among the many examples of animal behavior in The Creatures' Guide to Caring, one that really stands out to Preston is the gharial, a crocodilian found in Asia. The females lay their eggs together and along with a territorial male guard all the hatchlings, regardless of parentage.
Preston said, “I just love that example because we don't think of reptiles usually as social animals. We think of somebody has a snake in their terrarium and it just kind of sits there. But even reptiles can have these very interesting social lives and these really intense forms of care.”
Preston hopes that these examples from the animal kingdom help to show how we have evolved to care for our young cooperatively. She explained “We all have that caretaking equipment in our brains…It doesn't matter whether you have kids of your own, you are a caretaker to other humans around you. And that I think this equipment for caring, this incredible empathy that we have compared to other animals, this incredible ability to cooperate is really at the foundation of our whole society.”
Learn more about Elizabeth Preston’s The Creatures' Guide to Caring here.
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