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Sinha, A. (1998). Knowledge acquired and decisions made: triadic interactions during allogrooming in wild bonnet macaques, Macaca radiata. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci, 353(1368), 619–631.
Abstract: The pressures of developing and maintaining intricate social relationships may have led to the evolution of enhanced cognitive abilities in many nonhuman primates. Knowledge of the dominance ranks and social relationships of other individuals, in particular, is important in evaluating one's position in the rank hierarchy and affiliative networks. Triadic interactions offer an excellent opportunity to examine whether decisions are taken by individuals on the basis of such knowledge. Allogrooming supplants among wild female bonnet macaques (macaca radiata) usually involved the subordinate female of a grooming dyad retreating at the approach of a female dominant to both members of the dyad. In a few exceptional cases, however, the dominant member of the dyad retreated; simple non-cognitive hypotheses involving dyadic rank differences and agonistic relationships failed to explain this phenomenon. Instead, retreat by the dominant individual was positively correlated with the social attractiveness of her subordinate companion (as measured by the duration of grooming received by the latter from other females in the troop). This suggests that not only does an individual evaluate relationships among other females, but does so on the basis of the amount of grooming received by them. Similarly, the frequency of approaches received by any female was correlated with her social attractiveness when she was the dominant member of the dyad, but not when she was the subordinate. This indicated that approaching females might be aware of the relative dominance ranks of the two allogrooming individuals. In logistic regression analyses, the probability of any individual retreating was found to be influenced more by her knowledge of her rank difference with both the other interactants, rather than by their absolute ranks. Moreover, information about social attractiveness appeared to be used in terms of correlated dominance ranks. The nature of knowledge acquired by bonnet macaque females may thus be egotistical in that other individuals are evaluated relative to oneself, integrative in that information about all other interactants is used simultaneously, and hierarchical in the ability to preferentially use certain categories of knowledge for the storage of related information from other domains.
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Müller, A. E., & Thalmann, U. (2000). Origin and evolution of primate social organisation: a reconstruction. Biological Reviews, 75, 405–435.
Abstract: Abstract
The evolution and origin of primate social organisation has attracted the attention of many researchers, and a solitary pattern, believed to be present in most nocturnal prosimians, has been generally considered as the most primitive system. Nocturnal prosimians are in fact mostly seen alone during their nightly activities and therefore termed “solitary foragers”, but that does not mean that they are not social. Moreover, designating their social organisation as “solitary”, implies that their way of life is uniform in all species. It has, however, emerged over the last decades that all of them exhibit not only some kind of social network but also that those networks differ among species. There is a need to classify these social networks in the same manner as with group-living (gregarious) animals if we wish to link up the different forms of primate social organisation with ecological, morphological or phylogenetic variables. In this review, we establish a basic classification based on spatial relations and sociality in order to describe and cope properly with the social organisation patterns of the different species of nocturnal prosimians and other mammals that do not forage in cohesive groups. In attempting to trace the ancestral pattern of primate social organisation, the Malagasy mouse and dwarf lemurs and the Afro-Asian bushbabies and lorises are of special interest because they are thought to approach the ancestral conditions most closely. These species have generally been believed to exhibit a dispersed harem system as their pattern of social organisation (“dispersed” means that individuals forage solitarily but exhibit a social network). Therefore, the ancestral pattern of primate social organisation was inferred to be a dispersed harem. In fact, new field data on cheirogaleids combined with a review of patterns of social organisation in strepsirhines (lemurs, bushbabies and lorises) revealed that they exhibit either dispersed multi-male systems or dispersed monogamy rather than a dispersed harem system. Therefore, the concept of a dispersed harem system as the ancestral condition of primate social organisation can no longer be supported. In combination with data on social organisation patterns in “primitive” placentals and marsupials, and in monotremes, it is in fact most probable that promiscuity is the ancestral pattern for mammalian social organisation. Subsequently, a dispersed multi-male system derived from promiscuity should be regarded as the ancestral condition for primates. We further suggest that the gregarious patterns of social organisation in Aotus and Avahi, and the dispersed form in Tarsius evolved from the gregarious patterns of diurnal primates rather than from the dispersed nocturnal type. It is consequently proposed that, in addition to Aotus and Tarsius, Avahi is also secondarily nocturnal.
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Rogers, A. R. (1988). Does Biology Constrain Culture? Am Anthropol, 90(4), 819–831.
Abstract: Most social scientists would agree that the capacity for human culture was probably fashioned by natural selection, but they disagree about the implications of this supposition. Some believe that natural selection imposes important constraints on the ways in which culture can vary, while others believe that any such constraints must be negligible. This article employs a “thought experiment” to demonstrate that neither of these positions can be justified by appeal to general properties of culture or of evolution. Natural selection can produce mechanisms of cultural transmission that are neither adaptive nor consistent with the predictions of acultural evolutionary models (those ignoring cultural evolution). On the other hand, natural selection can also produce mechanisms of cultural transmission that are highly consistent with acultural models. Thus, neither side of the sociobiology debate is justified in dismissing the arguments of the other. Natural selection may impose significant constraints on some human behaviors, but negligible constraints on others. Models of simultaneous genetic/cultural evolution will be useful in identifying domains in which acultural evolutionary models are, and are not, likely to be useful.
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Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. J. (1996). Why Culture is Common, but Cultural Evolution is Rare. Proc Br Acad, 88, 73–93.
Abstract: If culture is defined as variation acquired and maintained by social learning, then culture is common in nature. However, cumulative cultural evolution resulting in behaviors that no individual could invent on their own is limited to humans, song birds, and perhaps chimpanzees. Circumstantial evidence suggests that cumulative cultural evolution requires the capacity for observational learning. Here, we analyze two models the evolution of psychological capacities that allow cumulative cultural evolution. Both models suggest that the conditions which allow the evolution of such capacities when rare are much more stringent than the conditions which allow the maintenance of the capacities when common. This result follows from the fact that the assumed benefit of the capacities, cumulative cultural adaptation, cannot occur when the capacities are rare. These results suggest why such capacities may be rare in nature.
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Marino, L. (2002). Convergence of complex cognitive abilities in cetaceans and primates. Brain Behav Evol, 59(1-2), 21–32.
Abstract: What examples of convergence in higher-level complex cognitive characteristics exist in the animal kingdom? In this paper I will provide evidence that convergent intelligence has occurred in two distantly related mammalian taxa. One of these is the order Cetacea (dolphins, whales and porpoises) and the other is our own order Primates, and in particular the suborder anthropoid primates (monkeys, apes, and humans). Despite a deep evolutionary divergence, adaptation to physically dissimilar environments, and very different neuroanatomical organization, some primates and cetaceans show striking convergence in social behavior, artificial 'language' comprehension, and self-recognition ability. Taken together, these findings have important implications for understanding the generality and specificity of those processes that underlie cognition in different species and the nature of the evolution of intelligence.
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Jolly, A. (1998). Pair-bonding, female aggression and the evolution of lemur societies. Folia Primatol (Basel), 69 Suppl 1, 1–13.
Abstract: Lemur societies have been described as convergent with those of anthropoids, including Papio-like female-bonded multi-male groups. Recent research, however, shows at least 5 pair-bonded species among the Lemuridae and Indriidae. Three more, Eulemur mongoz, Eulemur fulvus and Varecia variegata, have societies combining aspects of pairing with aspects of troop life. The best-known female-bonded societies, those of Lemur catta, Propithecus diadema edwardsi and Propithecus verreauxi, may be assemblages of mother-daughter dyads, capable of high aggression towards other females, but derived from more solitary female ancestors, perhaps also living as pairs. The internal structure of such lemur groups differs from the more extensive kin groups of catarrhines. This in turn may relate to the lemurs' level of social intelligence and to lemur female dominance over males.
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Parker, S. T. (1997). A general model for the adaptive function of self-knowledge in animals and humans. Conscious Cogn, 6(1), 75–86.
Abstract: This article offers a general definition of self-knowledge that embraces all forms and levels of self-knowledge in animals and humans. It is hypothesized that various levels of self-knowledge constitute an ordinal scale such that each species in a lineage displays the forms of self-knowledge found in related species as well as new forms it and its sister species may have evolved. Likewise, it is hypothesized that these various forms of levels of self-knowledge develop in the sequence in which they evolved. Finally, a general hypothesis for the functional significance of self-knowledge is proposed along with subhypotheses regarding the adaptive significance of various levels of self-knowledge in mammals including human and nonhuman primates. The general hypothesis is that self-knowledge serves as a standard for assessing the qualities of conspecifics compared to those of the self. Such assessment is crucial to deciding among alternative reproductive and subsistence strategies. The qualities that are assessed, which vary across taxa, range from the size and strength of the self to its mathematical or musical abilities. This so-called assessment model of self-knowledge is based on evolutionary biological models for social selection and the role of assessment in animal communication.
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Bouchard, T. J. J., & Loehlin, J. C. (2001). Genes, evolution, and personality. Behav Genet, 31(3), 243–273.
Abstract: There is abundant evidence, some of it reviewed in this paper, that personality traits are substantially influenced by the genes. Much remains to be understood about how and why this is the case. We argue that placing the behavior genetics of personality in the context of epidemiology, evolutionary psychology, and neighboring psychological domains such as interests and attitudes should help lead to new insights. We suggest that important methodological advances, such as measuring traits from multiple viewpoints, using large samples, and analyzing data by modern multivariate techniques, have already led to major changes in our view of such perennial puzzles as the role of “unshared environment” in personality. In the long run, but not yet, approaches via molecular genetics and brain physiology may also make decisive contributions to understanding the heritability of personality traits. We conclude that the behavior genetics of personality is alive and flourishing but that there remains ample scope for new growth and that much social science research is seriously compromised if it does not incorporate genetic variation in its explanatory models.
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Levy, J. (1977). The mammalian brain and the adaptive advantage of cerebral asymmetry. Ann N Y Acad Sci, 299, 264–272.
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Zhang, T. - Y., Parent, C., Weaver, I., & Meaney, M. J. (2004). Maternal programming of individual differences in defensive responses in the rat. Ann N Y Acad Sci, 1032, 85–103.
Abstract: This paper describes the results of a series of studies showing that variations in mother-pup interactions program the development of individual differences in behavioral and endocrine stress responses in the rat. These effects are associated with altered expression of genes in brain regions, such as the amygdala, hippocampus, and hypothalamus, that regulate the expression of stress responses. Studies from evolutionary biology suggest that such “maternal effects” are common and often associated with variations in the quality of the maternal environment. Together these findings suggest an epigenetic process whereby the experience of the mother alters the nature of the parent-offspring interactions and thus the phenotype of the offspring.
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