ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2017
Why are there so many explanations for primate brain evolution?
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 71 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
71 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Socioecological complexity in primate groups and its cognitive correlates.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Pooled it
- Energy Constraints and Ecological Adaptation Drive Divergent Evolution of Sensory and Cognitive Brain Regions in Bats.Integrative zoology · 2026Article
- Article
- Article
- Core Body Temperature Negatively Correlates with Whole-Brain Gray Matter Volume: A Pilot Study in the Context of Global Warming.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- Sex and Gender Identities Are Emergent Properties of Neural Complexity.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Social fish have larger brains and greater relative telencephalon sizes: support for the social brain hypothesis from wild, intraspecific comparisons.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Evolutionary Trajectories of Consciousness: From Biological Foundations to Technological Horizons.Brain sciences · 2025Review
- Why friendship and loneliness affect our health.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Review
- Serial visual reversal learning in captive black-handed spider monkeys, Ateles geoffroyi.Animal cognition · 2024Article
- Sexual size dimorphism in mammals is associated with changes in the size of gene families related to brain development.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Evolutionary-developmental (evo-devo) dynamics of hominin brain size.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Oxygen and the Spark of Human Brain Evolution: Complex Interactions of Metabolism and Cortical Expansion across Development and Evolution.The Neuroscientist : a review journal bringing neurobiology, neurology and psychiatry · 2024Article
- Neural signatures of social inferences predict the number of real-life social contacts and autism severity.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Cognitive performance is linked to fitness in a wild primate.Science advances · 2023Article
- Both Diet and Sociality Affect Primate Brain-Size Evolution.Systematic biology · 2023Article
- Human cooperation and evolutionary transitions in individuality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Extended parental provisioning and variation in vertebrate brain sizes.PLoS biology · 2023Article
- Shibboleth: An agent-based model of signalling mimicry.PloS one · 2023Article
- Archimetrosis: the evolution of a disease and its extant presentation : Pathogenesis and pathophysiology of archimetrosis (uterine adenomyosis and endometriosis).Archives of gynecology and obstetrics · 2023Article
11 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The question as to why primates have evolved unusually large brains has received much attention, with many alternative proposals all supported by evidence. We review the main hypotheses, the assumptions they make and the evidence for and against them. Taking as our starting point the fact that every hypothesis has sound empirical evidence to support it, we argue that the hypotheses are best interpreted in terms of a framework of evolutionary causes (selection factors), consequences (evolutionary windows of opportunity) and constraints (usually physiological limitations requiring resolution if large brains are to evolve). Explanations for brain evolution in birds and mammals generally, and primates in particular, have to be seen against the backdrop of the challenges involved with the evolution of coordinated, cohesive, bonded social groups that require novel social behaviours for their resolution, together with the specialized cognition and neural substrates that underpin this. A crucial, but frequently overlooked, issue is that fact that the evolution of large brains required energetic, physiological and time budget constraints to be overcome. In some cases, this was reflected in the evolution of 'smart foraging' and technical intelligence, but in many cases required the evolution of behavioural competences (such as coalition formation) that required novel cognitive skills. These may all have been supported by a domain-general form of cognition that can be used in many different contexts.This article is part of the themed issue 'Physiological determinants of social behaviour in animals'.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.