Dr. Silk will be speaking as part of the Evolution and Social Sciences lecture series. See link below for more details.

New Perspectives on Male Parenting in Primates: Insights from Baboons

In primates and other mammals, male care for infants and juveniles  is usually 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 some baboon species, males compete over access to sexually receptive females and there is substantial skew in male reproductive success. But males also form close ties to the mothers of their offspring. Several lines of evidence suggest that these relationships are a form of male parental care 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.