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The Infanticide Controversy: Primatology and the Art of Field Science, by Amanda Rees. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 288pp. $40.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780226707112.
To the modern sensibility, infanticide is abhorrent. And yet, it occurs throughout the animal kingdom and has occurred at various times in human society. The extent to which infanticide occurs in animals has been increasingly documented over the past forty years by animal behaviorists. Why does infanticide occur? Amanda Rees in The Infanticide Controversy: Primatology and the Art of Field Science examines the way primatologists have understood the causes of infanticide. She details the history of the controversy about infanticide and suggests that the controversy is best understood within the framework of the way in which primatologists conduct their field research.
One of the tenets of most scientific experiments is that an experiment is reproducible. However, observation in the field is dependent on time and place and cannot be repeated. How valid then is the observation? Rees terms this dilemma the "fieldworker's regress." Primatology provides an excellent example of fieldworker's regress. Researchers often go alone to remote locations to study groups of animals. They observe small slices of the lives of these animals and even if they return or if someone else returns to the same location, things will be different. Some animals will have migrated, others will have died and others will have been born. How representative then are the observations of these individual researchers? Do they reflect the reality of a species that may be widely distributed over a diversity of environments or are these observations...