Product Description
In 1838 Charles Darwin jotted in a notebook, “He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.” Baboon Metaphysics is Dorothy L. Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth’s fascinating response to Darwin’s challenge. Cheney and Seyfarth set up camp in Botswana’s Okavango Delta, where they could intimately observe baboons and their social world. Baboons live in groups of up to 150, including a handful of males and eight or nine matrilineal families of females. Such numbers force baboons to form a complicated mix of short-term bonds for mating and longer-term friendships based on careful calculations of status and individual need. But Baboon Metaphysics is concerned with much more than just baboons’ social organization—Cheney and Seyfarth aim to fully comprehend the intelligence that underlies it. Using innovative field experiments, the authors learn that for baboons, just as for humans, family and friends hold the key to mitigating the ill effects of grief, stress, and anxiety. Written with a scientist’s precision and a nature-lover’s eye, Baboon Metaphysics gives us an unprecedented and compelling glimpse into the mind of another species. “The vivid narrative is like a bush detective story.”—Steven Poole, Guardian “Baboon Metaphysics is a distillation of a big chunk of academic lives. . . . It is exactly what such a book should be—full of imaginative experiments, meticulous scholarship, limpid literary style, and above all, truly important questions.”—Alison Jolly, Science “Cheney and Seyfarth found that for a baboon to get on in life involves a complicated blend of short-term relationships, friendships, and careful status calculations. . . . Needless to say, the ensuing political machinations and convenient romantic dalliances in the quest to become numero uno rival the bard himself.”—Science News “Cheney and Seyfarth’s enthusiasm is obvious, and their knowledge is vast and expressed with great clarity. All this makes Baboon Metaphysics a captivating read. It will get you thinking—and maybe spur you to travel to Africa to see it all for yourself.”—Asif A. Ghazanfar, Nature “Through ingenious playback experiments . . . Cheney and Seyfarth have worked out many aspects of what baboons used their minds for, along with their limitations. Reading a baboon’s mind affords an excellent grasp of the dynamics of baboon society. But more than that, it bears on the evolution of the human mind and the nature of human existence.”—Nicholas Wade, New York Times

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 11 reviews)

this is not metaphysics by selfconscious (Las Vegas, Nevada USA)

3 Stars
June 08, 2009
While this book is delightfully written and very interesting, it is not any kind of metaphysics. I was reminded of The Metaphysics of Apes: Negotiating the Animal-Human Boundary as I read it. If it is metaphysics you crave, then explore Ontology and Philosophy of Mind: The Metaphysics of Consciousness. Or, from the biological perspective, look at Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are along with Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (Vintage).

An extremely well-written and interesting book. by Padraig Hogan

5 Stars
April 11, 2009
I picked up this book as almost an afterthought after some picking out some of the more obvious books in primatology. Despite what a certain other author implies in his books on bonobos and chimps, I felt it might be interesting to find what primates who had branched off a little earlier than the Great Apes were like, to get a better picture of our most primal instincts and concerns. I definitely wasn't disappointed in this regard. This book is everything I could have wished for and more. I would say this is the best book I have on primatology. A close second would be Chimpanzee Politics, which is also very well-written and it's on specifically chimps. This doesn't just stick to baboons, it goes into every single aspect of primatology and beyond. It talks about language, social structure etc., but it has a lot on their excellent baboon studies as well. Every page is choc-a-block with interesting information and the authors are extremely careful not to try to put any bias on their information. It's hard to read at first it's so comprehensive, and yet it's so good that I surprised myself by being drawn into it and reading it first out of all the books I got. It's entertaining, warm, interesting, logical and extremely comprehensive, again in ALL aspects of what we can learn from primatology. It delivers every part of the argument and what could be argued and tries to put things in a clinical way. Occasionally I got the impression they were even a little too harsh on their primate friends at times, for example concluding that unlike apes, monkeys don't really have a real concept of empathy or theory of mind. The only caveat I have is that much of the commentary in the "theory of mind" chapters is pretty empty. The authors make such allegations as that if a dog appears confused or doesn't want to do something (such as jump into a car after being commanded to), that it doesn't prove him being "aware" of him not wanting to do it. They also go on and on and on and on and on and on (you get the idea), about whether or not a baboon/monkeys etc. are "self-aware" and have a concept of others and "know" there are others with thoughts and motives of their own. This is a pure and unabashed superiority-complex, determined to put down animals other than ourselves and give reasons as to why they're not really conscious. Of course the baboons know others have intentions, they look at what each other is doing and calculate and plot and threaten and so on. It's what you yourself have observed and reported. Do WE as HUMANS know others have intentions? Why yes, of course we do as well. We obtain our information about them in the exact same way, just that we have a hugely bigger brain than them (and of course our world is much different now). As is well-known and yet they neglected to mention, the chimpanzee "other person's sight" test only failed on humans and only because chimps often regard humans as all-seeing, all-knowing beings (and who could blame them considering the magical things humans to them to do/know?). The test worked when put against other dominant chimps, ie. yes they CLEARLY saw their intentions. At one point having reduced themselves out of all logical ways in which humans had "awareness" or "metacognition" and baboons didn't, they quoted someone else as saying: "because we can report it", which is in my view a farcical argument and just relies on the fact that (modern) humans have language and baboons do not. They overglamourise the human mind, we don't really have any special magical intellect either apart from looking at individuals' behaviours and today usually using the knowledge we acquired from language.

Thought provoking analysis of baboons by Steven A. Peterson (Hershey, PA (Born in Kewanee, IL))

5 Stars
January 01, 2008
The team of Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth has collaborated on numerous publications, including a fine book, "How Monkeys See the World." This represents an ambitious addition to their body of work. A takeoff point is a quotation from Charles Darwin's notebooks, from 1838 (Page 1): "Origin of man now proved--Metaphysic must flourish--He who understands baboon would do more toward metaphysics than Locke." The authors use the Cambridge English Dictionary to define metaphysics (Page 2): "the part of philosophy that is about understanding existence and knowledge." The authors have been studying baboons for many years. This book summarizes much of their work and indicates the ingenious experiments that they have devised to assess baboons' thought processes and to explore if they possess something like a "theory of mind." They consider, in the process, the extent of "social intelligence" in baboons. At the outset, they propose two general points that guide their analysis of "baboon metaphysics": (1) natural selection leads to a brain for any species that are specialized for the relevant survival needs; (2) baboons have great expertise in navigating social life, since they live in relatively complex social systems. Key chapters in this volume: Chapter 3: The dangerous world in which baboons live is well portrayed. Predators pose a danger. Another unfortunate factor of baboon life is infanticide. If a new male enters a troop and becomes dominant, for instance, he may try to kill all young baboons. In this manner, the new male is in a position to begin reproducing very soon with female baboons who lost their infants; he is able, as a result, to increase the amount of his genetic material in the troop through siring his own infants. Chapters 4 and 5 are critical, as they lay out the very different social worlds of male and female baboons. In either sex, dominance hierarchies are central. Males strive to attain the alpha ranking, that is, being the most dominant male in the troop. Male hierarchies are unstable, leading to considerable social stress. Females' hierarchies are more complex and more stable. Among females, their lineage is important. Each lineage has its own ranking, so one is either born into a top ranking, middle ranking, or low ranking family. Successfully managing to thrive in this social order calls for a high level of social skills. Baboons, as Chapter 6 emphasizes, have quite good "social knowledge." The understanding of how baboon society works is based on (Pages 118-119) ". . .an innate predisposition to recognize other individuals' ranks and social relationships." Chapter 7 builds on this with a discussion of the social intelligence of baboons, with the authors emphasizing the criticality of baboons' understanding of how to navigate complex social life in a way that facilitates their survival and successful reproduction. The chapter concludes with an interesting discussion of how baboons' social intelligence differs from that of other species, as a result of the evolutionary demands on baboons. Chapter 8 focuses on the extent to which baboons have a "theory of mind," that is, understanding of the mental states of other baboons. The authors conclude that there might be (page 197) "vague intuition about other animals' intentions," but that there is nothing like a well formed ability among these animals to understand intentions and motivations of others. The volume concludes in Chapter 12 with a summary discussion of "baboon metaphysics" and with speculation about the relevance of their research for understanding humans. With respect to the former, they conclude that baboons demonstrate that some animals can live in complex societies with a theory of mind and without language--if their mental abilities allow for "making sense" of how to navigate their complex social world. The latter discussion notes what differences could lead to humans having a theory of mind that baboons do not possess. All in all, a remarkable book. It has value in helping us to understand baboons in their own terms; it helps think about the position of humans in nature and why we are unique (as all species are unique); it provokes reflection on the ability to reflect on oneself and others and try to understand why we behave as we do. Nice touches abound, as illustrated by a charming reference to characters from Jane Austen's novels to make points about individual baboons' behavior. This is an ambitious work, and there will be questions. The authors seem to overreach when exploring a theory of mind. It's almost as if they are using a human orientation to study baboons rather than focusing on baboons themselves. In some ways, I'm not sure that the theory of baboons' minds is so crucial as the authors do. The social intelligence part of the picture seems to me more important. Finally, using the philosophical term metaphysics in a baboon context may represent another reach too far. Nonetheless, these are relatively minor points. The bottom line? A terrific book. . . .

Uneven by algo41 (cinnaminson, nj United States)

4 Stars
December 31, 2007
Chapter 3 is as good nature writing as I have ever read; it is not to be missed even if you do not read the rest of the book. The last chapter is nicely written, and a good summary of the author's views. Most of the book is very uneven. Much of it reads like a Ph.D. thesis. It is often repetitive and unnecessarily hard to follow. At the same time, it is easy to reach false conclusions, and the authors try to be very careful, relaxing only when providing their more general speculative theses, such as that social requirements are the impetus for primate cognitive evolution, and that social concepts provide the basis for language and even grammar (for another view, see Jerome A. Feldman's "From Molecule to Metaphor"). The point they make about animal's much greater capacity for understanding language vs. producing language is well substantiated in the book, and it is a good way to think about much animal behavior such as that of dog. Even readers like myself, who have read previous books about animal cognitive abilities and also child development (animals are frequently compared to young children of various ages), will learn things if they wade through all the book's pages. The authors point out that humans have different cognitive systems, so that people who are blind due to problems in the cortex, may be able to see even if they cannot consciously report on what they have seen, as proved by experiments. Well it turns out that the well known experiments showing the age at which children are first aware that others may have different beliefs than theirs, so that others may not know where something has been moved while the children were watching and they were not, is not the whole story. At younger ages, using different, evolutionary older cognitive systems, there is some awareness of other's beliefs, even if not conscious. For whatever reason, the authors maintain a view that chimpanzees are not cognitively superior to monkeys, except for tool use. They do not even have as a reference any books by Franz de Waal, one of the leading authorities on chimpanzee mental abilities, and director of the "Center for the Advanced Study of Ape and Human Evolution". A good book by him is "Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals." There is also a terrible "typo". On p. 40, it is stated that infanticide accounted for "at least 53% of all infant deaths". On p. 57 it is stated that "53% of all infants born during our study" died as a result of infanticide. The latter is a much stronger statement, since if 200 infants were born, 100 died, and 53 were victims of infanticide, the first statement would be true, but the 2nd would not.

Baboons and the Social Mind by H. S. Vishniac (Stillwater, Oklahoma United States)

5 Stars
December 07, 2007
This is a scholarly book which is simultaneously entirely suitable for the general reader. None of Baboons, psychology, or metaphysics are my fields but I was utterly fascinated by the authors' research and their contribution to the concept of the social mind as important in the evolution of the human species. READ THIS!

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