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Primates (2010) 51:273275 DOI 10.1007/s10329-010-0200-z
BOOK REVIEW
Amanda Rees (ed): The infanticide controversy: primatology and the art of eld science
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2009, 304 pp
Alexander H. Harcourt
Received: 22 March 2010 / Accepted: 29 March 2010 / Published online: 29 April 2010 Japan Monkey Centre and Springer 2010
Amanda Rees The Infanticide Controversy is a detailed, comprehensive, accurate account and analysis of the history of primate eld studies, and of the debate within primatology about functional hypotheses for infanticide by male primates.
On one side was the majority who rapidly accepted the idea that primate males had evolved to react in certain circumstances to the presence of infants that they had not sired by killing them. The argued main benet of the killing is that the mother comes back into estrus sooner than if the male had not killed the infant, and hence the male reproduces sooner than he would have done otherwise.
On the opposing side was a minority who did not accept the functional interpretation of the infanticides, and apparently as a consequence, did not accept the validity of most of the reports of infanticide.
While the controversy is a minor incident in the history of science, Rees account is not minor. Rees uses her analysis of eld primatology and the infanticide controversy to present a broad ranging discussion of the nature of science, and the interaction between science and society. The topics addressed are the usual grand ones in accounts of the history, philosophy, and sociology of sciencethe nature of evidence, the inuence of accepted scientic theory on what we see and our interpretation of it, the nature and conduct of scientic debate, regional differences in the management of science, and, of course, cultural and societal inuences on scientic ideas and their acceptance.
Detailed, quantitative analysis of the behavior of wild animals exploded in the 1960s and 1970s; in other words,
within the lifetime still of many of its originators. In this book, then, we have a history of a scientic eld interpreted not through the mist of times past and the dust and mites of old documents, but the clearer (I wont say clear) lens of contemporary participants. Rees uses her account of the infanticide controversy...