Sarah Hrdy argues that women (1) possess a reproductive behavioral strategy including infanticide, (2) that this strategy
is an adaptation and (3) arose as a response to stresses mothers faced with the agrarian revolution. I argue that while psychopathological
and cultural evolutionary accounts for Hrdy's data fail, her suggested psychological architecture for the strategy suggests
that the behavior she describes is really only the consequence of the operation of practical reasoning mechanism(s) – and
consequently there is no reproductive strategy including infanticide as such, nor could the alleged strategy be sufficiently
mosaic to count as an adaptation. What might count as an adaptation is a ‘window’ before bonding that permits practical reasoning
about the reproductive value of infants and hence variable maternal investment, and which, contra (3) arose early in hominid
history due to a combination of increases in infant dependency and increased human abilities for conditional practical reasoning.
Keywords Cultural evolution - Infanticide - Psychological adaptations - Sarah Hrdy - Sociobiology