Sex and Friendship in Baboons
With a new introduction by the author. When it first appeared in the mid-1980s, this book transcended the traditional ethological focus on sexual interactions by analyzing male-female relationships outside the context of mating in a troop of wild baboons. Barbara Smuts 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. Her findings, now enhanced with data from another fifteen years of field studies, 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. Smuts suggests that female choice may promote male investment in other species, and she explores the relevance of her findings for the evolution of male-female relationships in humans. Praise for the first edition: [Smuts] provides the reader with a vivid description of her own mental processes in carrying out the project-from the formulation of the initial questions, to the design of the data collection protocol, to the objective definition of friendship, to the moments when she gained insights from particular incidents in the field and used them to create or refine hypotheses, and finally to the analysis and interpretation [conveying] to the reader both the richness of everyday exchanges between male and female baboons and a feel for the intellectual experience of fieldwork." -C. M. Berman, Animal Behavior Barbara B. Smuts is Professor of Psychology and Anthropology at theUniversity of Michigan, Ann Arbor."
