New Perspectives on Male Parenting in Primates: Insights from Baboons / Joan Silk

In primates and other mammals, male care for immatures is generally restricted to species that form enduring pair bonds or breed cooperatively. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that there are alternate paths to the evolution of male care in nonhuman primate species. Natural selection has favored the evolution of some forms of male care in a number of taxa that live in social groups with polygynous and polygynandrous mating systems. In single-level baboon societies, males compete over access to sexually receptive females and there is substantial skew in male reproductive success. But males also form close ties to particular females while they are pregnant and lactating. Several lines of evidence suggest that these relationships constitute a form of male parenting effort and that males make strategic tradeoffs between mating effort and parenting effort. In this talk, I will discuss these data and their implications for understanding the evolution of male reproductive tactics in our own species.