Father Time: Why Men are Born to Nurture

Becoming a dad is the start of an extraordinary adventure in a man’s life — but it’s also a biological transformation, the scale of which was unimaginable, just two decades ago. Today, scientists from a wide range of disciplines are exploring this emerging field of research and their discoveries are astonishing. By diving into our evolutionary past, this fascinating scientific investigation uncovers long-overlooked bonds between human males and their infants and asks if these ancient legacies can take on new meaning today and reshape the very fabric of our human societies.

Over the past fifty years, men in Western countries have nearly quadrupled the time they devote to childcare. Today, scientists from a wide range of disciplines are exploring this growing field of study drawing on neuroscience, bioacoustics, primatology, anthropology, and evolutionary biology. We now know that men undergo real physiological transformations when a child is born. American biological anthropologist Lee Gettler is leading multi-scale studies on hormonal changes in fathers. Not only does testosterone decrease when men become fathers, but those who spend the most time caring for their children show the lowest levels.

While science has been slow to recognize these astonishing shifts in human fathers, they’ve been documented in the animal world for years. Back in the animal world, poison dart frog dads studied by American neurobiologist Lauren O’Connell, help us understand how the opioid system functions in the brains of fathers. Meanwhile, the owl monkeys observed by Argentine anthropologist Eduardo Fernandez Duque demonstrate how the environment shaped these primates’ social organisation and the benefits of involved fathers for species survival.