Male infanticide leads to social monogamy in primates

Male infanticide leads to social monogamy in primates.

Although common in birds, social monogamy, or pair-living, is rare among mammals because internal gestation and lactation in mammals makes it advantageous for males to seek additional mating opportunities. A number of hypotheses have been proposed to explain the evolution of social monogamy among mammals: as a male mate-guarding strategy, because of the benefits of biparental care, or as a defe...

Evolution of social monogamy in primates is not consistently associated with male infanticide.

Comparative analyses suggest that monogamous breeding systems evolved in mammals where feeding competition reduces range overlap between breeding females, preventing males from guarding more than one female at a time (1). In contrast, a recent analysis for primates suggests that monogamy evolved as a form of paternal care that reduces the risk of male infanticide (2). Here we reexamine the dist...

Classification Biological Sciences: Evolution Title The evolution of social monogamy in primates is not consistently associated with male infanticide

Reply to Dixson: Infanticide triggers primate monogamy.

We thank Alan Dixson (1) for his interest in our paper (2). Unfortunately, he seems to have misread it. First, contrary to Dixson’s claim, we did not conflate callitrichid “monogamy” with obligate monogamy in other primates, like gibbons and the small cebids. We note that these were conflated in Lukas and Clutton-Brock’s (3) recent report on the evolution of monogamy but not in our paper. Dixso...

Social Monogamy in Nonhuman Primates: Phylogeny, Phenotype, and Physiology.

Monogamy as a social system has been both a scientific puzzle and a sociocultural issue for decades. In this review, we examine social monogamy from a comparative perspective with a focus on primates, our closest genetic relatives. We break down monogamy into component elements, including pair-bonding and partner preference, mate guarding or jealousy, social attachment, and biparental care. Our...