ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2013
Male infanticide leads to social monogamy in primates.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 77 papers.
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Who cites it
77 citing papers in PubMed.
- Origins of violence: evolutionary decoupling between mild and lethal conspecific aggression in primates.Evolution letters · 2026Article
- When love ends: individual characteristics associated with breakups.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Strategies, costs and counter-strategies to sexual coercion.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Genetic monogamy in high density populations of a threatened Mediterranean rodent.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The Search for Love in Human Evolution: Primate Social Bonds and a New Science of Emotion.American journal of biological anthropology · 2025Review
- Sex-specific hypothalamic neural projection activity drives caregiving in mice.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Mate assessment based on physical characteristics: a review and reflection.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Human Reproductive Egalitarianism: A Catalyst for the Evolution of Personality Traits.Clinical neuropsychiatry · 2025Article
- Evolution of Human Pair Bonds as a Consequence of Male-Biased Mating Sex Ratios?Bulletin of mathematical biology · 2025Article
- When parental care hurts: extended parental care and the evolution of overparenting.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2025Review
- Experience and trust: the benefits of mate familiarity are realized through sex-specific specialization of parental roles in Cassin's auklet.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Social risk to infant: The role of kin for maternal visual monitoring in Tibetan macaques.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Eviction-driven infanticide and sexually selected adoption and infanticide in a neotropical parrot.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Infant spatial relationships with adult males in a wild primate: males as mitigators or magnifiers of intergenerational effects of early adversity?bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Binding Affinity, Selectivity, and Pharmacokinetics of the Oxytocin Receptor Antagonist L-368,899 in the Coyote (Comparative medicine · 2024Article
- Primate social organization evolved from a flexible pair-living ancestor.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Hunter-Gatherer children's close-proximity networks: Similarities and differences with cooperative and communal breeding systems.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Sexual conflict over sex-an underappreciated consequence of childbirth?Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2024Article
- Lower risk of male infanticide in multilevel primate societies.Zoological research · 2023Article
- Human cooperation and evolutionary transitions in individuality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
17 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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4 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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 defense against infanticidal males. However, comparative analyses have been unable to resolve the root causes of monogamy. Primates are unusual among mammals because monogamy has evolved independently in all of the major clades. Here we combine trait data across 230 primate species with a Bayesian likelihood framework to test for correlated evolution between monogamy and a range of traits to evaluate the competing hypotheses. We find evidence of correlated evolution between social monogamy and both female ranging patterns and biparental care, but the most compelling explanation for the appearance of monogamy is male infanticide. It is only the presence of infanticide that reliably increases the probability of a shift to social monogamy, whereas monogamy allows the secondary adoption of paternal care and is associated with a shift to discrete ranges. The origin of social monogamy in primates is best explained by long lactation periods caused by altriciality, making primate infants particularly vulnerable to infanticidal males. We show that biparental care shortens relative lactation length, thereby reducing infanticide risk and increasing reproductive rates. These phylogenetic analyses support a key role for infanticide in the social evolution of primates, and potentially, humans.
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