Abstract: This book presents an alternative to conventional ideas about the evolution of the human intellect. Instead of placing top priority on the role of tools, the pressure for their skillful use, and the related importance of interpersonal communication as a means for enhanced cooperation, this<BR>volume explores quite a different idea-- that the driving force in the evolution of human intellect was social expertise--a force which enabled the manipulation of others within the social group, who themselves are seen as posing the most challenging problems faced by primitive humans. The need to<BR>outwit one's clever colleagues then produces an evolutionary spiraling of “Machiavellian intelligence.” The book forms a complete and self-contained text on this fast-growing topic. It includes the origins of the basic premise and a wealth of exciting developments, described by an international<BR>team of authors from the fields of anthropology, psychology, and zoology. An evaluation of more traditional approaches is also undertaken, with a view to discovering to what extent Machiavellian intelligence represents a complementary concept or one that is truly an alternative. Readers and<BR>students will find this fascinating volume carries them to the frontiers of scientific work on the origin of human intellect.

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.

Abstract: American Saddlebred horses were used to test the responses of domestic horses to the odours of conspecifics. In all cases the odours were tested in the absence of the donor animal. Thus the test animal's behavioural responses were concentrated on the olfactory stimuli, and possible interference from donor behaviour was eliminated. Stallions were significantly more responsive than mares and geldings. This was shown in both flehmen and sniffing behaviour to urine/vaginal secretions and in sniffing behaviour to faecal samples. Only stallions were used for subsequent tests. Stallions showed no significant differences in response to the odour of urine/vaginal secretions of an oestrus mare from that when she was not in season. Parameters used for analysis of data were frequency, latency and duration of flehmen as well as duration of responsiveness to samples. In testing for differences in odours between individual mares, two methods were used. The stallions differentiated between samples from individual mares. In some cases this differentiation was exhibited when the stallions were merely presented with the two samples in sequence. In other cases statistically significant differences in response to the odours were shown only by simultaneous presentation of the two samples to the test stallion. Parameters used for data analysis were frequency and duration of flehmen and duration of responsiveness.