Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

Sarah Hrdy (née Blaffer; born July 11, 1946) is an American anthropologist and primatologist who has made major contributions to evolutionary psychology and sociobiology.

She is considered "a highly recognized pioneer in modernizing our understanding of the evolutionary basis of female behavior in both nonhuman and human primates".

Sarah Blaffer was born on July 11, 1946, in Dallas, Texas.

She was a granddaughter of Sarah Campbell Blaffer and Robert Lee Blaffer, a co-founder of Humble Oil.

She was raised in Houston and attended St. John's School before enrolling in St. Timothy's School in Stevenson, Maryland, graduating in 1964.

At age 18, Blaffer enrolled in her mother's alma mater, Wellesley College in Massachusetts.

At the end of her sophomore year, she transferred to Radcliffe College, then the women's part of Harvard, in order to study under the great Mayanist Evon Vogt.

Majoring in anthropology there her undergraduate honors thesis was on the Maya demon H'ik'al published as her first book,.

Sarah Hrdy first heard of langurs during an undergraduate primate behavior class taught by anthropologist Irven DeVore in 1968.

DeVore commented on the relationship between crowding and the killing of infants in langur colonies.

After graduation, Hrdy returned to Harvard for graduate studies, with the goal of better understanding the phenomenon of infanticide in primates.

She was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and graduated summa cum laude from Radcliffe in 1969 with a BA.

Interested in making public health films for people in developing countries, Hrdy took film-making courses at Stanford, but was disappointed with them.

Instead she was inspired by a Stanford lecture of Paul Ehrlich's about overpopulation.

His lecture reminded her of something a Harvard professor, Irven DeVore, had said about a species of Indian monkey called langurs among whom males, supposedly because they were crowded, killed infants.

Hrdy changed course in mid-year and entered Harvard as a graduate student in 1970 to study primate behavior so she could go to India and find out why these male Hanuman langurs were killing infants.

Working under the supervision of DeVore, Trivers and Wilson provided Hrdy with an introduction to the emerging science of sociobiology—which crystallized at Harvard in the early 1970s.

Sociobiology's comparative evolutionary perspective would shape Hrdy's work for years to come.

Although Hrdy had initially gone to Mount Abu to explore the hypothesis that crowding was responsible for infanticide, soon she realized her starting hypothesis was wrong.

Infants were only attacked when males entered the breeding system from outside it.

This led her to what she termed the sexual selection hypothesis for explaining infanticide.

Males are eliminating unweaned infants sired by rival males and in doing so inducing the mother to resume cycling and ovulate again sooner than had she continued to lactate.

Turnover in her langur troupes occurred roughly on average every 27 months leaving the usurping male only a brief window of opportunity to breed and pass on his genes.

If the females are nursing infants, it is likely that they will not ovulate for another year.

Killing their dependent infants rendered females fertile again sooner than they otherwise would be.

Female choice is subverted, as females are put under pressure to ovulate and are forced to breed with the infanticidal males.

The Black-man of Zinacantan, published in 1972.

He accompanied her on early visits to Mount Abu, and they married in 1972 in Kathmandu.

Between 1974 and 1984, she taught for brief periods at University of Massachusetts, Boston; Harvard and Rice University, and worked as a volunteer at her daughter's daycare center until 1984 when she joined the University of California at Davis as a professor of anthropology.

She worked under the supervision of anthropology professor Irven DeVore and evolutionary biologist Robert L. Trivers and E. O. Wilson earning a Ph.D. in Anthropology in 1975.

Sarah Blaffer met Daniel Hrdy at Harvard.

They have three children: Katrinka (born 1977); Sasha (born 1982), a week before Hrdy was scheduled to present a paper at Cornell University; and Niko (born 1986).

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy now lives with her husband in northern California, where they are engaged in walnut farming and habitat restoration at Citrona Farms.

Hrdy alternated research work in India with time at Harvard until 1979.

Hrdy retired in 1996, becoming a professor emerita of anthropology at UC Davis, where she continues to be involved with the Animal Behavior Graduate Group.

In acknowledgment of her achievements, Discover magazine recognized her in 2002 as one of the 50 most important women in science.

She has been selected as one of the 21 Leaders in Animal Behavior (2009).

In 2013, Hrdy received a Lifetime Career Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution from the Human Behavior and Evolution Society.

Hrdy is a Professor Emerita of the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis.

She has also been an Associate at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University.