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Book Review
The fieldworkers’ wild truths
The Infanticide Controversy: Primatology and the Art of Field Science by Amanda Rees. University of Chicago Press,
2009. US$40.00 hbk (288 pages) ISBN: 9 780 22670711 2
Volker Sommer
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interpretation, which has earned me distinguished labels
such biological determinist or sexist...
According to Rees, it is the fieldworker’s regress that
generated the heat between opponents. She explicitly denies
that the controversy could have been stirred up by intellectual content alone, such as that of the emerging field of
‘sociobiology’ with its emphasis on competition as a driving
force in sociality. Here, she disagrees with other reconstructions of clashes between adaptionists and non-adaptionists
(e.g. Refs [3,4]), which relate them to philosophical dichotomies such as nature versus nurture, Rousseau versus Locke,
individual versus group selection, and so on.
Rees’ reconstruction, similar to former ones, operates
in a monolingual Anglo-Saxon horizon. I admit to my own
shortcomings in, for example, Mandarin, French or Kiswahili. However, I do know that the complementary
debate about conspecific killings in the German-speaking
world was not sparked by naturalistic animal studies, but
a recent history of militarism and fascism (Refs [5,6]
versus Refs [7,8]). Another missing facet is some in-depth
engagement with infant killings not committed by the
stereotypical big-toothed males, but the allegedly nurturing females, be they gorillas, marmosets, chimpanzees, or
humans.
Rees’ focus is thus relatively narrow. This enables her
to use a stronger magnifying glass, which makes for a
fine-grained narration. By contrast, readers can lose the
plot, given a multitude of names, institutions, dates,
places and species. A timeline might have helped through
this maze (and alerted the author to some confusions of
locations and time).
The book incorporates 20 interviews, most with primate
fieldworkers, and many of whom are key players in the
controversy. Only three interviewees oppose adaptive
explanations (Sussman, Cheverud, Rowell). Sadly, a fresh
memorandum from the iconic figure of the resistance movement, Phyllis (Jay) Dolhinow, is missing altogether. Most
interviewees, including myself, are hardliners favouring
adaptive explanations, such as Sarah Hrdy, who developed
the sexual selection hypothesis, or the behavioural ecologists Packer, Pusey or Borries who applied Hrdy’s theoretical framework to their own field data. The skewed ratio,
so I guess, reflects the current balance of opinions. Rees’
‘symmetrical’ outlook thus bestows disproportionate credibility on the marginal party of non-adaptionists. But then,
what would I do with my venom, if my opponents were
finally silent or silenced?
Amanda Rees did well, given her limited aims. The book
is full of information, and will serve as a repository of
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Exchanging pointed and often nasty arguments (however
silly in hindsight) invigorates the participants of academic
debates and entertains bystanders. The Infanticide Controversy reconstructs the history of a particularly vicious
and drawn-out brawl [1,2]. One faction, the adaptionists,
maintains that the killing of immature animals by conspecifics is targeted and follows regular patterns reflecting
underlying principles, such as resource competition, cannibalism or intra-sexual selection between males. For the
non-adaptionist faction, infant killings are, at best, a pathology or sad mistake, but more probably products of the
imagination of sloppy scientists tainted by Zeitgeist demons such individualism or capitalism.
I longed for a juicy helping of controversy about the
controversy. Instead, The Infanticide Controversy served
an overdose of impartiality. This probably indicates the
quality in the discipline that spurned the investigation:
history and sociology of science. The author vows to have
‘no business making any judgement as to the truth or
falsity of any claims about the origin or maintenance of
animal behaviour’. This sounds alarmingly like trivial
postmodernism, although the variant comes in the more
modest disguise of ‘methodological relativism’. Such an
approach instructs the faithful sociologist to refrain from
‘judgements on scientific truth or falsity’.
Fortunately, for a hot-blooded scientist like myself, who
does not aim for ‘symmetrical explanations’ and loves a
good spat, Amanda Rees embodies the more pragmatic
breed of sociologists who do ‘not dispute the existence of
fact’. Prolonged exposure to her soft-spoken storytelling
thus put me in touch with my inner sociologist who readily
admits to being subjective because ‘facts do not speak for
themselves but are spoken for by scientists’. Rees also
succeeds in educating me about the notion of the ‘experimenter’s regress’, the conundrum that, although experiments are at the heart of the scientific method, ‘it is never
possible to replicate an experiment precisely’.
Fieldwork in particular is subjugated to this logic, as a
subsequent event such as yet another infant mauling is
never identical to the original, requiring a certain ‘interpretive flexibility’. Consequently, findings ‘yield contradictory interpretations where controversy participants held
different worldviews’. This, in a nutshell, is the book’s
message: a rather muted take on what are stormy scuffles.
I know what I am talking about, given that I hold the selfproclaimed world record in witnessing infanticides among
wild primates, tied to an undisputed inflexibility about the
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Department of Anthropology, UCL, London, WC1E 6BT, UK
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Corresponding author: Sommer, V. (v.sommer@ucl.ac.uk).
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0169-5347/$ – see front matter ß 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.tree.2009.08.008 Available online xxxxxx
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1 Parmigiani, S. and vom Saal, F., eds (1994) Infanticide and Parental
Care, Harwood Academic Publishers
2 van Schaik, C. and Janson, C., eds (2000) Infanticide by Males and its
Implications, Cambridge University Press
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References
3 Haraway, D.J. (1989) Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the
World of Modern Science, Routledge
4 Segerstråle, U. (2001) Defenders of the Truth. The Sociobiology Debate,
Oxford University Press
5 Lorenz, K. (1963) Das sogenannte Böse. Zur Naturgeschichte der
Aggression, Borotha-Schoeler
6 Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I. (1997) Die Biologie des menschlichen Verhaltens.
Grundriss der Humanethologie, (3rd edn), Seehammer
7 Sommer, V. (1996) Heilige Egoisten. Die Soziobiologie indischer
Tempelaffen, C.H. Beck
8 Vogel, C. (1989) Vom Töten zum Mord. Das wirkliche Böse in der
Evolutionsgeschichte, Hanser
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knowledge on the controversy for years to come. Her work
might also enable fruitful synergies between social and
natural sciences. Finally, her book can generate data about
the question of how much impartiality a scientist can
stomach. Such merciless self-experiment led, in my own
case, to the firm resolution to remain as judgemental as
possible when it comes to controversies.
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