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More About This Textbook
Overview
Most humans don’t realize that when they exchange emails with someone, anyone, they are actually exhibiting certain unspoken rules about dominance and hierarchy. The same rules regulate the exchange of grooming behavior in rhesus macaques or chimpanzees. Interestingly, some of the major aspects of human nature have profound commonalities with our ape ancestors: the violence of war, the intensity of love, the need to live together.
While we often assume that our behavior in everyday situations reflects our unique personalities, the choices we freely make, or the influences of our environment, we rarely consider that others behave in these situations in almost the exact the same way as we do. In Games Primates Play, primatologist Dario Maestripieri examines the curious unspoken customs that govern our behavior. These patterns and customs appear to be motivated by free will, yet they are so similar from person to person, and across species, that they reveal much more than our selected choices.
Games Primates Play uncovers our evolutionary legacy: the subtle codes that govern our behavior are the result of millions of years of evolution, predating the emergence of modern humans. To understand the rules that govern primate games and our social interactions, Maestripieri arms readers with knowledge of the scientific principles that ethologists, psychologists, economists, and other behavioral scientists have discovered in their quest to unravel the complexities of behavior. As he realizes, everything from how we write emails to how we make love is determined by the legacy of our primate roots and the conditions that existed so long ago.
An idiosyncratic and witty approach to our deep and complex origins, Games Primates Play reveals the ways in which our primate nature drives so much of our lives.
Editorial Reviews
Publishers Weekly
Maestripieri (Macachiavellian Intelligence), professor of evolutionary biology and related sciences at the University of Chicago, explores behavioral similarities between humans and other primates in his engaging but flawed book. Such an analysis is important, he writes, because “human nature is a particular, specialized version of a more general primate nature.” Drawing on his own work with rhesus macaques as well as broader primate literature, Maestripieri offers solid grounding in the basics of animal behavior while discussing the evolutionary roots of complex social patterns. The behaviors he focuses on are both critical and fascinating: sexual choice; dominance relationships; the nature of altruism and selfishness; and coalition building, among others. But when it comes to humans, Maestripieri presents less data and more anecdotes, so his arguments about homologous human-primate behavior are not fully compelling. Furthermore, he can simply ignore issues that contradict his theories. For example, in discussing charitable contribution as status-building activity through the public recognition given to donors, he overlooks contributors who truly wish to remain anonymous. Still, the author brings readers closer to his goal of integrating economic models with evolutionary theory to create “more predictive models of human decision-making” (Apr.)Library Journal
Maestripieri (Inst. for Mind & Biology, Univ. of Chicago; Macachiavellian Intelligence: How Rhesus Macaques and Humans Have Conquered the World) critically examines human behavior within the context of primate evolution. He stresses the similar adaptive social relationships that have emerged in our species, apes, and monkeys, especially macaques, baboons, and chimpanzees. His research focuses on game theory to illuminate the changing complexities of dominant/subordinate interactions and hierarchical patterns. Furthermore, Maestripieri discusses grooming, altruism, nepotism, social alliances, and theoretical/mathematical models of strategies involving cooperation and competition. Of special interest are the sections dealing with free will, bonding rituals, sexual selection, the violence of war, and the value of romantic love. The author asserts that the uniqueness of the human animal is grounded in its big brain in general and its use of symbolic language as articulate speech in particular. Nevertheless, he maintains, evolutionary biology links our species to the other primates in terms of psychology and cognition as well as genetic makeup and social behavior. VERDICT This informative and provocative work is a major contribution to understanding and appreciating the nature and behavior of humankind. Students and professors of biology and anthropology especially will find this book significant.—H. James Birx, Univ. of Belgrade, SerbiaKirkus Reviews
Maestripieri (Evolutionary Biology/Univ. of Chicago; Macachiavellian Intelligence: How Rhesus Macaques and Humans Have Conquered the World, 2007, etc.) rejects the notion that "natural selection has left its mark on human mental processes but not on contemporary human behavior." Comparing human mental predispositions to computer algorithms, the author suggests that much of our social behavior is hardwired. He scoffs at the idea that recently evolved, uniquely human qualities such as "our new language abilities, our new ability to think and act morally, our new emotions and feelings, and our new cognitive ability" have revolutionized the way we act. Instead, Maestripieri believes that in most everyday social situations our default action is to rely on ancient solutions, shared with our primate ancestors, in dealing with problems. While not denying our "amazing artistic, scientific, and scholarly achievements," the author writes that we "solve everyday social problems by resorting to the ancient, emotional, cognitive and behavioral algorithms that crowd our minds." To make his radical claim plausible, Maestripieri recasts primitive society in the image of modern free-market ideology, using the analogy of cost-benefit-analysis to describe how primates trade grooming for sexual privileges. In the same vein, the author writes that dominance/submission relationships pervade our society and are in fact crucial to maintaining harmony in marriage as well as in the competitive public domain. He compares corruption in his native Italy, where nepotism is apparently key to social advancement in the army and academia, to kinship relationships among primates, and he describes a culture of cutthroat competition in American universities, where academics use peer review and tenure as weapons in the struggle for their own career advancement. The cynicism of the author's message is made more palatable by his lively wit.Product Details
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Table of Contents
Introduction ix
Chapter 1 Dilemmas in the Elevator 1
Chapter 2 The Obsession with Dominance 17
Chapter 3 We Are All Mafiosi 53
Chapter 4 Climbing the Ladder 79
Chapter 5 Cooperate in the Spotlight, Compete in the Dark 109
Chapter 6 The Economics and Evolutionary Biology of Love 143
Chapter 7 Testing the Bond 171
Chapter 8 Shopping for Partners in the Biological Market 195
Chapter 9 The Evolution of Human Social Behavior 229
Epilogue 267
Acknowledgments 275
Notes 277
References 285
Index 297