[Siddarth1977]

> 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.

[toxik]

”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.