Baboons socialize through verbal cues.

Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, husband-and-wife biologists at UPenn have spent 14 years learning how to talk like baboons.

Using recordings that imitate various members of the troop and watching their response, baboons social patterns and thinking can be revealed to a new level of detail.

The result is that a good deal of the processes we consider to be human, particularly social behavior, can be understood to be a product of natural selection.

Their conclusion, based on many painstaking experiments, is that baboons’ minds are specialized for social interaction, for understanding the structure of their complex society and for navigating their way within it.

“Monkey society is governed by the same two general rules that governed the behavior of women in so many 19th-century novels,” Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth write. “Stay loyal to your relatives (though perhaps at a distance, if they are an impediment), but also try to ingratiate yourself with the members of high-ranking families.”

By contrast, the male hierarchy, which consists mostly of baboons born in other troops, is always changing as males fight among themselves and with new arrivals.

The shaper of a baboon’s mind is natural selection. Those with the best social skills leave the most offspring.

NYTimes