Can primates shed light on the roots of romance?

Sanjida O?Connell, contributor

Games Primates Play is a partially successful attempt to show how primate behaviour can inform our understanding of humans

IN 2000, movie stars Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston married in grand Hollywood style. Just five years later the couple were divorced, and Pitt's new girlfriend, Angelina Jolie, was pregnant with his child. Tabloids were filled with speculation about why Pitt left Aniston when they had seemed to be in love. But, as Dario Maestripieri writes in Games Primates Play, "no tabloid reporter ever interviewed an economist or an evolutionary biologist about the Brad and Jennifer marriage fiasco".

A psychiatrist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, Maestripieri argues that human behaviour, like our anatomy, can be explained by looking at our biology. Natural selection strongly shaped our social behaviour, and the same pressures faced by our ancestors would also have influenced our closest living relatives - other primates. So to understand how and why we behave the way we do today, he suggests we turn to those primates.

To get back to Brad and Jen, Maestripieri uses a combination of evolutionary biology and economics to explain why people fall in and out of love. Our big-brained children require two adults to stay together to rear them for four to seven years at least, he says, and love evolved to maintain relationships for this lengthy, albeit limited, period of time (even if the pair don't end up having children together).

In economic terms, he argues that we choose mates who enhance our material interests - but only so long as the benefits outweigh the costs. When the costs go up, or the benefits aren't enough, such as missing opportunities to date other people and produce more children, one or both partners will quit.

Romantic love, Maestripieri suggests, is a variation on an older, more primitive survival mechanism: the emotional and psychological bond between animal mothers and infants. For this bond to turn into romantic love, he says, some evolutionary shifts in behaviour were required - among them a reduction in promiscuity and testosterone levels in human males compared with other apes.

Just how our biology drives behaviour is the subject of numerous books, but Maestripieri does a commendable job of bringing something fresh to his analysis. In two areas this book falls short, however. To begin with, even though chimpanzees are the primates most closely related to us, most of the animal examples Maestripieri refers to involve macaques, presumably because he studies them. Secondly, in attempting to convince us that all of our behaviour can be explained by primate analogies, he glosses over the wide variation among people.

We can certainly learn much about our behaviour by looking at other primates, but due to our big brains, variability in upbringing, environment and culture - plus the fact that we are no longer subject to raw natural selection - humanity is a collection of people who are quirkily different from one another. Even though Maestripieri sprinkles his book with anecdotes from his own experience, he fails to acknowledge this.

Still, overall Games Primates Play is an interesting, funny and engaging study of human nature. And Maestripieri's amusing and often endearing anecdotes add colour and insight. For instance, the chapter "We are all Mafiosi" was inspired by an encounter with Barack Obama, before he became US president. Maestripieri relates how he met Obama at an event in Chicago for their children's school and attempted to explain to him how human politics mirror macaque behaviour. Like humans, he points out, macaques are nepotistic, hierarchical and form alliances to try to attain higher status. I, for one, would have loved to have found out what Obama said in return.

Book information:
Games Primates Play: An undercover investigation of the evolution and economics of human relationships by Dario Maestripieri
Basic Books
?11.99/$27.99

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