Evolution.

Society for Experimental Biology

Date:: 1953

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Evolution. Source: Wellcome Collection.

452/484 (page 420)

$422 SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR AND PRIMATE EVOLUTION The effect of this situation on the spatial relations is clearly of a tri¬ angular character, since the farther the subordinate male is from the female, the closer it is possible for the two males to approach each other without precipitating antagonism between them, and vice versa. It is trigonal in the sense originally defined, because a negative sign provided by the dominant male inhibits the approach of a subordinate male to the attractive tí с ti 2Í-' 1 + «-И +2 \ 'Л \ /> / ' * ^ f I г/ / ; Text-fig. 3. Diagrammatic representation of observations made on a colony of Macaca mulatta at the Dudley Zoo. Changes in position of animals within the trigonal region resulting from the introduction of food at position X. (Animals' tracks indicated by broken lines; threats indicated by double-arrowed straight lines.) female. This is expressed spatially in Text-fig. 2 (diagram 7). As the subordinate male primate moves from positions 1-4, the negative sign he receives from the overlord male will increase. Clearly there is a limiting position of proximity to the female at which the positive and negative signs represent a social equilibrium. To move beyond the limiting position increases the negative sign, and precipitates a threat or a fight as the young primate must leam. The farther away from the female he is, the more the negativity is diminished with respect to the positive, and this induces a tendency to move towards the female once more. Thus movement of the$

Evolution.

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