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Reconciling aggression and social manipulation as means of competition. 1. Life-History perspective

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Abstract

I reexamined male competitive options via long-term data on adolescent and adult male consort success and data on male weights, age, size, residency status, and friendships with females collected from one troop of wild baboons. The options available to a male result from a complex interaction of variables and change with maturation, migration, and age. The acquisition of aggressive and social competence, the development of alternative nonaggressive strategies, the loss of physical prowess, and perhaps the effect of inbreeding avoidance all play a role. Aggressive and nonaggressive strategies may be mutually exclusive options for brief periods in a male’s life because of ontogenetic, historical, or physical constraints. But for most of the time, the two are likely to coexist. I assess the evolutionary significance of optional strategies of competition and discuss the conditions that might select for optional strategies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, University of California, San Diego, 92093-001, La Jolla, California

    S. C. Strum

  2. Institute of Primate Research, Nairobi, Kenya

    S. C. Strum

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Strum, S.C. Reconciling aggression and social manipulation as means of competition. 1. Life-History perspective. International Journal of Primatology 15, 739–765 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02737429

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