Robert Seyfarth
Stress and Social Life in Wild Baboons
Saturday, May 12, 2007
10:00 a.m.
Fisher-Bennett Hall, Room 401
For almost 20 years, Penn professors Robert Seyfarth (psychology) and Dorothy Cheney (biology) have been studying the social behavior of wild baboons in the Okavango Delta of Botswana. In this talk, Professor Seyfarth will describe the animals’ social structure and discuss how predation, infanticide and social instability bring stress to the baboons’ lives. He will also describe how baboons rely on their close social bonds to overcome stress and consider what this reveals about the evolution of human intelligence and the adaptive value of human social relationships.
Robert Seyfarth is a professor of psychology. His research focuses on the social behavior, vocal communication and cognition of nonhuman primates. With his wife, Penn biology professor Dorothy Cheney, he has studied monkeys and baboons in their natural habitat since the early 1970s, including an 11-year study of vervet monkeys in Amboseli National Park in Kenya. That research is described in their book How Monkeys See the World: Inside the Mind of Another Species. Together, they have published over 100 academic papers and book chapters. Their long-term goal is to get a foothold of understanding on the evolution of human abilities like cognition and language. Since 1992, Cheney and Seyfarth have studied the social behavior and communication of baboons in Botswana. Their book Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind reports on their findings and explores how baboons conceive of the world and their place in it.
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