Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind - Softcover

Cheney, Dorothy L.; Seyfarth, Robert M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226102440 ISBN 13: 9780226102443

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2008

Synopsis

In 1838 Charles Darwin jotted in a notebook, “He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.” Baboon Metaphysics is Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth’s fascinating response to Darwin’s challenge.

Cheney and Seyfarth set up camp in Botswana’s Okavango Delta, where they could intimately observe baboons and their social world. Baboons live in groups of up to 150, including a handful of males and eight or nine matrilineal families of females. Such numbers force baboons to form a complicated mix of short-term bonds for mating and longer-term friendships based on careful calculations of status and individual need.

But Baboon Metaphysics is concerned with much more than just baboons’ social organization—Cheney and Seyfarth aim to fully comprehend the intelligence that underlies it. Using innovative field experiments, the authors learn that for baboons, just as for humans, family and friends hold the key to mitigating the ill effects of grief, stress, and anxiety.

Written with a scientist’s precision and a nature-lover’s eye, Baboon Metaphysics gives us an unprecedented and compelling glimpse into the mind of another species.
“The vivid narrative is like a bush detective story.”—Steven Poole, Guardian

“Baboon Metaphysics is a distillation of a big chunk of academic lives. . . . It is exactly what such a book should be—full of imaginative experiments, meticulous scholarship, limpid literary style, and above all, truly important questions.”—Alison Jolly, Science

“Cheney and Seyfarth found that for a baboon to get on in life involves a complicated blend of short-term relationships, friendships, and careful status calculations. . . . Needless to say, the ensuing political machinations and convenient romantic dalliances in the quest to become numero uno rival the bard himself.”—Science News

“Cheney and Seyfarth’s enthusiasm is obvious, and their knowledge is vast and expressed with great clarity. All this makes Baboon Metaphysics a captivating read. It will get you thinking—and maybe spur you to travel to Africa to see it all for yourself.”—Asif A. Ghazanfar, Nature

“Through ingenious playback experiments . . . Cheney and Seyfarth have worked out many aspects of what baboons used their minds for, along with their limitations. Reading a baboon’s mind affords an excellent grasp of the dynamics of baboon society. But more than that, it bears on the evolution of the human mind and the nature of human existence.”—Nicholas Wade, New York Times

About this title

About the Author

Dorothy L. Cheney is professor of biology and Robert M. Seyfarth is professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. They are the authors of How Monkeys See the World, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

FOUNDATIONS OF TROPICAL FOREST BIOLOGY

Classic Papers with Commentaries

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2002 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-10244-3

Contents

Preface......................................................................................................................................xviiIntroduction Robin L. Chazdon...............................................................................................................1PART ONE Tropical Naturalists of the Sixteenth through Nineteenth Centuries Robin L. Chazdon and the Earl of Cranbrook.....................5PART TWO What Shaped Tropical Biotas as We See Them Today? T. C. Whitmore..................................................................69PART THREE Ecological and Evolutionary Perspectives on the Origins of Tropical Diversity Douglas W. Schemske...............................163PART FOUR Plant-Animal Interactions and Community Structure Bette A. Loiselle and Rodolfo Dirzo............................................269PART FIVE Coevolution Robert J. Marquis and Rodolfo Dirzo..................................................................................339PART SIX Case Studies of Arthropod Diversity and Distribution Scott E. Miller, Vojtech Novotny, and Yves Basset............................407PART SEVEN Terrestrial Vertebrate Diversity B. A. Loiselle, R. W. Sussman, and the Earl of Cranbrook.......................................441PART EIGHT Floristic Composition and Species Richness Robin L. Chazdon and Julie S. Denslow................................................513PART NINE Forest Dynamics and Regeneration David F. R. P. Burslem and M.D. Swaine..........................................................577PART TEN Ecosystem Ecology in the Tropics Julie S. Denslow and Robin L. Chazdon............................................................639PART ELEVEN Human Impact and Species Extinction Rodolfo Dirzo and Robert W. Sussman........................................................703PART TWELVE Securing a Sustainable Future for Tropical Moist Forests D. Lamb and T. C. Whitmore............................................771Bibliography.................................................................................................................................837List of Contributors.........................................................................................................................861

Chapter One

Tropical Naturalists of the Sixteenth through Nineteenth Centuries

Robin L. Chazdon and the Earl of Cranbrook

An earnest desire to visit a tropical country, to behold the luxuriance of animal and vegetable life said to exist there, and to see with my own eyes all those wonders which I had so much delighted to read of in the narratives of travellers, were the motives that induced me to break through the trammel of business, and the ties of home, and start for some far land where endless summer reigns. -A. R. Wallace, A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro (London: Ward, Lock and Co., 1889)

The story of tropical biology begins with naturalists-explorers with a keen curiosity, an eye for variation, and a passion for collecting. Cartographers, missionaries, collectors, and chroniclers set out from their home bases in Europe to discover new worlds and to document the riches they discovered. These trailblazers brought home a new vision that changed the world in countless ways. Their many published works still speak to us today. In this part we highlight works of these pioneering tropical biologists, some of whom never lived to see their major works in print.

Naturalists of the Early Colonial Period

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century missionaries and explorers laid the groundwork for later scientific expeditions by beginning the process of documenting the biological riches of tropical regions of the New and Old Worlds (von Hagen 1951). Gonzalo Fernndez de Oviedo y Valds spent thirty-four years in the New World as a colonial administrator and royal chronicler to King Ferdinand of Spain. Oviedo's famous Sumario de la natural histria de las Indias was published in 1526 in Spanish, English, and French. Jos de Acosta, a Jesuit priest sent to Peru as a missionary, published Histria natural y moral de las Indias in 1590. This treatise on native life, medical flora, and diseases of the New World enjoyed phenomenal success in Europe. Early in the seventeenth century, the Dutch prince Maurice von Nassau-Siesgen traveled to Recife, Brazil, with fellow European naturalists and collected many botanical and zoological treasures, surpassing anything done earlier in the Americas. These collections were studied by Georg Marcgrave and Willem Piso, the first European scientists to study the flora and fauna of Brazil (F. Ortiz-Crespo, personal communication).

Compared to other centuries, however, the seventeenth was a "sterile century" for natural history in the Hispanic world-not a word was published during this time of inquisitions, prohibitions, and exclusivism (von Hagen 1951). Elsewhere in Europe, however, the lamp of curiosity burned as brightly as before. As natural sciences developed alongside advances in medical understanding, the seafaring nations of northwestern Europe extended ever further into the tropical world, in exploration for trade and discovery for its own sake. The coasts of Africa, India, Ceylon, the East Indies, and beyond were visited and trading outposts established. The Dutch had strong interests in botany. Their universities were equipped with botanical gardens and heated houses to cultivate tender tropical plants (Burkill 1965).

The Dutch East India Company set its capital at Batavia on Java, in the early part of the seventeenth century, and its officer Georg Everard Rumpf (Latinized as Rumphius) was soon settled further east in Amboina in the Moluccas. In 1662, Rumphius set out to make a systematic study of the flora, fauna, and geology of Amboina and arranged a leave of absence to devote himself full time to natural history endeavors (Sirks 1945). Disaster struck in 1670, when he went blind. Four years later, he lost his wife and youngest daughter in a violent earthquake. As if these disasters weren't enough, his books, collections, and manuscripts were destroyed by fire in 1687, and then the manuscript of his major work, Amboinsche Kruidboek (also known as Herbarium Amboinense), was lost at sea (although a copy survived). This and his other great work, Amboinsche Rariteitkamer, were published posthumously. In this monumental work, Rumpf describes and illustrates the organisms of the seas surrounding Ambon Bay, as well as minerals and rare concretions taken from animals and plants. An English translation is now available for the first time, under the title The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet (Rumpf 1999). Yet, in his lifetime, through his specimens and correspondence, descriptions, and anecdotes of the natural history of this tropical region, Rumphius became known to the world of scholars and educated people generally. His floristic descriptions laid the foundations for a knowledge of the vegetation of Amboina and other islands of the Malay Archipelago. Moreover, as a precursor of the binary nomenclature of Linnaeus, he developed a system for naming crustaceans based on two names, a generic name followed by an adjectival one to describe the species (Sirks 1945). Heinrich van Rheede tot Draakestein (1636-1691), the governor of the Dutch possessions in Malabar, is also well known for the collections and descriptions of plants of the Malabar Coast in his monumental work Hortus Malabaricus, which was heavily dependent on local knowledge (Went and Went 1945, Burkill 1965, Larsen 1989).

The expansion of the British East India Company in India and beyond similarly engendered a flood of returning specimens, stories, and surveys of the natural history of South Asia. In Britain, 1628 saw the publication of the first compendious bird book in English, Francis Willughby's Ornithology. The book was compiled by the famous botanist John Ray (1678), who drew on the variety of written sources available to him, covering familiar native species as well as exotics from unknown parts of the world.

The Enlightenment turned things around in the eighteenth century; international collaborative ventures blossomed. Louis XIV asked King Philip V of Spain for permission to send a scientific expedition to Quito, Ecuador. The French scientist Charles Marie de La Condamine joined with Pedro Vicente Maldonado, a renowned cartographer born in Riobamba, to explore the Esmeraldas forest and to undertake the first scientific descent of the Amazon. La Condamine's expeditions led to the first botanical description of rubber, chemical tests on curare poison, and the first collections of quinine plants (von Hagen 1951). Accompanying the expedition was the French botanist Joseph de Jussieu, who spent thirty-five years collecting in Ecuador. In 1749, Jussieu sent specimens of coca back to Paris, but later suffered a terrible loss when boxes of his specimens were stolen by a thief who mistook them for precious commercial merchandise (Acosta-Solis 1968). La Condamine's account, Relation abrge d'un voyage fait dans l'intrieur de l'Amrique mridionale, published in 1745, stimulated an entire century of Spanish exploration in South America.

The Influence of Linnaeus

The stability that Carl von Linnaeus brought to systematics in the mid-eighteenth century inspired a new emphasis on identification and classification of species. Botanical discoveries abounded when the Spaniard Jose Celestino Mutis traveled to New Granada (now Colombia) in 1760 as a physician to the viceroy. Accompanying Mutis was Pehr Lfling, a favorite pupil of Linnaeus, who died before he could write about his experiences (von Hagen 1951). Mutis organized a botanical expedition and trained many native South American naturalists, while maintaining correspondence with Linnaeus (Mutis 1760-90). His thirteen-volume Flora Bogota was never entirely finished. Over a hundred boxes of botanical specimens, 6,840 drawings of plants, and four thousand pages of manuscript still reside in the Spanish national archives (von Hagen 1951). Since 1988 eighteen volumes of the "Mutis Flora" have been published (Castroviejo 1989). Also remaining in the Spanish archives are many collections and writings of Hiplito Ruiz and Jos Pavn, who collected during a 1777-1778 expedition to Chile and Peru. Many of their collections fell victim to fire, a grounded ship, and lack of funds (von Hagen 1951). Padre Juan de Velasco, born in Ecuador in 1727, published a four-volume work on the natural history of Ecuador (Velasco 1789,Acosta-Solis 1968). Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira from Bahia, Brazil, led a scientific pilgrimage along the Amazon and elsewhere in Brazil, collecting thousands of well-preserved and carefully labeled specimens. Ferreira's discoveries were documented in his book Viagem Filosfica (1783-1792). His specimens, including many Neotropical monkeys and marmosets, were sent to Lisbon, where they were later plundered by Napoleon's troops and brought to the Paris Natural History Museum (F. Ortiz-Crespo, personal communication).

Eighteenth-century British naval expeditions left more than a legacy of naval charts. In 1768, Captain James Cook set out in the Endeavour to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus (Raby 1997). On board were two naturalists, Joseph Banks and Douglas Solander, a pupil of Linnaeus. Banks later became president of the Royal Society for forty-two years and helped found the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. The new map of the world, based on Cook's voyages, testified to the treasury of newly discovered plants-Point Solander and Cape Banks define the extreme points of Botany Bay on the New South Wales coast (Raby 1997). The African Association was formed in 1788 to promote exploration and provided a focus for a series of British-sponsored expeditions in the late eighteenth century (Raby 1997). Banks was one of the founders and Baron Alexander von Humboldt signed on as a member. Banks helped to arrange the African voyage of Mungo Park to visit Timbuktu and the Niger River in 1795. This and subsequent expeditions produced few contributions to natural history of equatorial Africa, however. It wasn't until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that scientific exploration in equatorial Africa yielded biological riches (Worthington 1938).

The influence of Linnaeus spread quickly to the Indian subcontinent, where botanical collecting and cultivation blossomed during the eighteenth century. In 1778, the Dutch East India Company contracted Johann Gerhard Koenig, a protg of Linnaeus, as a naturalist, to make trips to Siam and the Malay Peninsula for the purpose of tracing the origins of spices and medicinal plants (Burkill 1965). Koenig was the first of a long succession of botanists and naturalists who worked out of Madras, including William Roxburgh and ending in 1828 with Robert Wight. Koenig first traveled to Madras in 1768 to join other Danish missionaries at their Royal Danish Mission at Tranquebar. The Madras botanists did much to promote botanical exploration in India (Burkill 1965). Their botanical legacy includes Roxburgh's three-volume Flora Indica (published posthumously in 1820-24) and Wight and Arnott's Prodromus Florae Peninsulae Indiae Orientalis (1834).

The Legacy of Alexander von Humboldt

While a student at the University of Gttingen, Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) met Georg Forster, who had been with Captain Cook on his second voyage and published an account of the expedition. The two traveled together in 1790 to France and England, where Humboldt became influenced by Forster's experience in scientific traveling and writing (Nicholson 1995). In 1798, Humboldt met Aim Goujaud Bonpland, a physician and amateur botanist, in Paris, where they had both been invited to join a French expedition around the world. The venture was cancelled and the two traveled to Spain, where they found the Spanish ministers eager to support their proposal for a scientific expedition to Spanish America.

Humboldt has probably exerted more influence than any other tropical naturalist. His five years of exploration in South and Central America from 1799 to 1804 produced a rich scientific harvest. He and Bonpland traversed ten thousand kilometers on foot and by canoe, collecting twelve thousand plant specimens-three thousand of which were new species. They doubled the number of plant species known in the Western Hemisphere (Raby 1997). Their Voyage aux Rgions quinoxiales occupies thirty volumes and cost Humboldt his entire fortune to publish (Stearn 1968). Although Humboldt attributed all thirty volumes to Bonpland and himself, Bonpland authored only one of the volumes (Wilson 1995). The first English translation of this work was published between 1814 and 1829 in five volumes under the title Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent during the years 1799-1804. Humboldt's Essai sur la geographie des plants (1805) firmly established plant geography as a scientific discipline. To Humboldt we also owe the concepts of plant associations, life forms, and isotherms (Stearn 1968). In the words of the young Simn Bolvar, "Baron Humboldt did more for the Americas than all the conquistadores" (Wilson 1995, xxxix).

Perhaps the most lasting legacy of Humboldt is the spark that he ignited in the next generation, creating a wave of European biological exploration. The mid-nineteenth century witnessed a new breed of explorer-naturalists, "scientific entrepreneurs," many of whom were not subsidized by family wealth or government sponsorship. Charles Darwin, one of the last independently wealthy amateur naturalists, spent five years exploring South America as an unpaid naturalist aboard the Beagle (Desmond and Moore 1991, Desmond 1994). On board he carried a copy of Humboldt and Bonpland's Personal Narrative, a gift from J. S. Henslow, his Cambridge professor of botany. From Santa Cruz in 1832, Darwin wrote in a letter to Henslow,

Here I first saw a Tropical forest in all its sublime grandeur. Nothing, but the reality can give any idea, how wonderful, how magnificent the scene is.... I never experienced such intense delight. I formerly admired Humboldt, I now almost adore him; he alone gives any notion of the feelings which are raised in the mind on first entering the Tropics. (Wilson 1995, Raby 1997, 19)

In his old age, Alfred Russel Wallace wrote that Personal Narrative was "the first book that gave me a desire to visit the tropics" (Stearn 1968, 122).

It is therefore fitting to begin this volume of key papers with Humboldt's words. A brief selection from volume 3 of his Personal Narrative describes his overall impression of tropical climates and scenery. A second selection from volume 5 discusses intriguing global patterns of plant distribution. Here, Humboldt is grappling with the notion that climate alone cannot explain the unique geographic distribution of certain plant groups. Reading these selections provides a sense of Humboldt's eloquent synthesis of scientific observation and poetry. If you have the opportunity to read the entire work, you will not waste a moment of your time. There is still plenty of inspiration lurking within these yellowed pages. A considerably less flowery (but abridged) translation of Humboldt's Personal Narrative by Jason Wilson was published in 1995.

Early Nineteenth-Century and Victorian Naturalists

The Amazon attracted the greatest concentration of Victorian naturalists. Historian Peter Raby (1997) writes, "The great triumvirate of Amazon naturalists, Bates, Wallace, and Spruce, followed in Humboldt's footsteps-literally, in the case of Wallace and Spruce-as they quartered the forest of the Amazon basin and the Andean foothills" (13-14). Alfred Russel Wallace and Henry Walter Bates were inspired to travel to South America after reading Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle (1839) and especially William Henry Edwards's A Voyage up the River Amazon (1847), as well as Personal Narrative. In 1848 Wallace and Bates set sail for Par, present day Belm. Wallace was to spend four years and Bates eleven years in the Amazon Basin. Lacking university education, they were eager, self-taught collectors of meager means who supported their travels by selling specimens to dealers in London.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from FOUNDATIONS OF TROPICAL FOREST BIOLOGY Copyright © 2002 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226102440
• ISBN 13: 9780226102443
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 358