Journal ArticleDOI
Neocortex Size, Social Skills and Mating Success in Primates
Bogusław Pawłowskil,Lowen,Dunbar +2 more
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This work tests the social brain hypothesis using data on the correlation between male rank and mating success for polygamous primates to find that it predicts that species with relatively larger neocortices should exhibit more complex social strategies than those with smaller neocortice.Abstract:
The social brain hypothesis predicts that species with relatively larger neocortices should exhibit more complex social strategies than those with smaller neocortices. We test this prediction using data on the correlation between male rank and mating success for polygamous primates. This correlation is negatively related to neocortex size, as would be predicted if males of species with large neocortices are more effective at exploiting social opportunities to undermine the dominant male's power-based monopolisation of peri-ovulatory females than are those with smaller neocortices. This effect is shown to be independent of the influence of male cohort size.read more
Citations
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The social brain hypothesis
TL;DR: Conventional wisdom over the past 160 years in the cognitive and neurosciences has assumed that brains evolved to process factual information about the world, and attention has therefore been focused on such features as pattern recognition, color vision, and speech perception.
Journal ArticleDOI
Evolution in the Social Brain
TL;DR: It is suggested that it may have been the particular demands of the more intense forms of pairbonding that was the critical factor that triggered this evolutionary development.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Social Brain: Mind, Language, and Society in Evolutionary Perspective
TL;DR: The extent to which the cognitive demands of bonding large intensely social groups involve aspects of social cognition, such as theory of mind, is explored and is related to the evolution of social group size, language, and culture within the hominid lineage.
Journal ArticleDOI
Sex and Friendship in Baboons.
V. Reynolds,Barbara B. Smuts +1 more
TL;DR: Barbara Smuts as discussed by the authors used long-term friendships between males and females, documented over a two-year period, to show how social interactions between members of friendly pairs differed from those of other troop mates, suggesting that the evolution of male reproductive strategies in baboons can only be understood by considering the relationship between sex and friendship.
Journal ArticleDOI
The social role of touch in humans and primates: behavioural function and neurobiological mechanisms.
TL;DR: It is suggested that these two neuropeptide families may play different roles in the processes of social bonding in primates and non-primates, and that more experimental work will be needed to tease them apart.
References
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Book
The comparative method in evolutionary biology
Paul H. Harvey,Mark Pagel +1 more
TL;DR: The comparative method for studying adaptation why worry about phylogeny?
Journal ArticleDOI
New and revised data on volumes of brain structures in insectivores and primates.
TL;DR: More than 2,000 data on volumetric measurements of 42 structures in a variety of up to 76 species (28 insectivores, 21 prosimians, 27 simians) are given.
Book
Sex and friendship in baboons
TL;DR: The findings suggest that the evolution of male reproductive strategies in baboons can only be understood by considering the relationship between sex and friendship: female baboons prefer to mate with males who have previously engaged in friendly interaction with them and their offspring.
Journal ArticleDOI
A composite estimate of primate phylogeny
TL;DR: The composite tree is derived by applying a parsimony algorithm to over a hundred previous estimates, and is well resolved, containing 160 nodes, and will be a useful framework for comparative biologists.
Journal ArticleDOI
Sex and Friendship in Baboons.
V. Reynolds,Barbara B. Smuts +1 more
TL;DR: Barbara Smuts as discussed by the authors used long-term friendships between males and females, documented over a two-year period, to show how social interactions between members of friendly pairs differed from those of other troop mates, suggesting that the evolution of male reproductive strategies in baboons can only be understood by considering the relationship between sex and friendship.