an excerpt from Rethinking Family (Patreon)

"In Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s Mothers and Others, she argues that the interplay between infants’ commitment to enlist caretakers and adults’ willingness to serve as caretakers is the evolutionary basis of the human ability for mindreading, and in turn, our vast capacity for cooperation. Without cooperative breeding, our species likely would not have evolved, as resource sharing is essential to survival when raising slow-maturing, relatively-large, and very dependent young."