Kinship and Behavior in Primates

Bernard Chapais and Carol M. Berman, Eds (2004)

Oxford University Press

ISBN 0195148894 (hardback) £70.00

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This book, edited by primatologists and behaviourists Bernard Chapais and Carol Berman, presents a series of chapters on the various aspects of primate kinship and behaviour. After presenting the challenges of studying this topic in a thought-provoking introduction, entitled “The Kinship Blackbox”, the book is broken up into five parts covering methodologies, determinants, genetics, effects on behaviour and the evolution of human kinship.

As the editors judiciously point out in their introduction, this is the first compilation to be published on kinship and behaviour in non-human primates, although a number of individual reviews have been published on the subject. Interestingly, none of the authors of these reviews took part in this book. This book therefore represents a fundamental reference for students and professionals interested in primate behavior, ecology and evolution. As a molecular geneticist interested in primates, I enjoyed reading every chapter and I particularly commend the editors for successfully compiling a comprehensive survey of the current knowledge on this topic, including useful and promising methodologies for gaining further information as well as remaining unknown questions.

Part I gives an overview of the different methodological advances for determining kin relationships. The use of genetic data is the obvious one and Phil Morin and Tony Goldberg review the different genetic methods and markers (with their limitations and assumptions) that can be used to identify relatedness and kinship relations in the first two chapters. In Chapter 3, David Woodruff reviews the sampling and non-invasive genotyping methods in more detail, emphasizing the challenges faced by geneticists in the beginning of the era of non-invasive sampling techniques. These challenges are still omnipresent; working with non-invasive DNA is still very demanding in time and money.

Part II contains three chapters on “Kin compositions: ecological determinants, population genetics, and demography”. Individual dispersal and philopatry and their consequences on kin composition are well described by Lynne Isbell who reviews the ecological bases of female dispersal and philopatry. In the following chapter, Hoelzer, Morales and Melnick emphasise the importance of individual dispersal and subsequent reproduction in population genetics and particularly gene dispersal or gene flow. In the third chapter, David Hill explains how demographic variation affects the kinship structure and the behaviour in cercopithecines.

In Part III, the diversity of effects of kinship on behaviour are described in six chapters. Part IV then goes on to develop the proximate and functional processes of kin bias in four chapters.

Finally, Part V wraps up the survey with a very interesting discussion on the evolutionary origins of human kinship. Molecular data and non-invasive genetics (described in chapter 3 by David Woodruff) allow primatologists to assess degrees of genetic relatedness and kinship relations between individual primates. If combined with important data on inter-group and intra-group variations that are provided by experimental studies in both free-ranging and captive populations, they allow to reconsider that area of research and give us insights on kin recognition and selection, kinship structure and even evolutionary origins of human kinship.

The editors conclude the book with a very informative discussion of the factors likely to be critical in understanding the nature and origins of the variation in kin recognition, as clearly described through the various chapters of the book. They also highlight some of the most relevant questions for future research in the area of kinship in primates.

Benoît Goossens

Cardiff School of Biosciences, Cardiff University