Mammal Societies - Hardcover

Clutton-Brock, Tim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1119095328 ISBN 13: 9781119095323

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016

Synopsis

The book aims to integrate our understanding of mammalian societies into a novel synthesis that is relevant to behavioural ecologists, ecologists, and anthropologists. It adopts a coherent structure that deals initially with the characteristics and strategies of females, before covering those of males, cooperative societies and hominid societies. It reviews our current understanding both of the structure of societies and of the strategies of individuals; it combines coverage of relevant areas of theory with coverage of interspecific comparisons, intraspecific comparisons and experiments; it explores both evolutionary causes of different traits and their ecological consequences; and it integrates research on different groups of mammals with research on primates and humans and attempts to put research on human societies into a broader perspective.

About this title

About the Author

Professor Tim Clutton-Brock is one of the world's leading zoologists. As of 2008, he was the Prince Philip Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and head of the Large Animal Research Group at the Department of Zoology of the University of Cambridge, and a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. He also holds extraordinary professorships in the Department of Zoology and Entomology and the Mammal Research Institute of the University of Pretoria, South Africa.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1987. He is an ISI Highly Cited researcher. He won the 1997 Frink Medal of the Zoological Society of London. In 2012, he was awarded the Darwin Medal from the Royal Society for his work on the diversity of animal societies and demonstration of their effects on the evolution of reproductive strategies, and the operation of selection and the dynamics of populations.
Professor Clutton-Brock's early work was on social behaviour in primates. Much of his recent work focuses on three long-term studies: of red deer on the Scottish island of Rùm, of Soay sheep on St Kilda, and of meerkats in the southern Kalahari. He is one of the founders of the Kalahari Meerkat Project, the subjects of which are featured in the television programme Meerkat Manor, and the BBC's Natural World series.

Review

"Mammal Societies is an authoritative and magnificently written synthesis of mammalian social behavior. As Tim Clutton-Brock states in the preface, his goal was to “. . .create an integrated account of mammalian societies. . .,” which he achieves with a seamless elegance honed through decades of long-term research on primates, ungulates, and carnivores. The book explains the fundamental theory underlying sociality, and then applies it to understand the diversity of mammalian behavior. Unlike previous syntheses that separate humans from non-human primates, and primates from non-primates, Clutton-Brock masterfully integrates his knowledge of these disparate literatures, and of behavioral diversity in general, to create a genuinely interesting and stimulating overview and synthesis of what we do and do not know about mammalian social behavioral diversity with implications for understanding ourselves.....Throughout, Clutton-Brock clearly deconstructs hypotheses and critically reviews both the logic and the data supporting them...Mammal Societies is a goldmine for graduate students and those establishing new studies about the adaptive value of sociality in any taxa. It would make an outstanding book to read in a graduate seminar and should be on the desk of any graduate student or academic interested in social behavior in any taxa...In summary, Mammal Societies is an intellectual tour de force that will become a citation classic and will set the stage for the next generation of studies on the adaptive value of sociality. Although not an easy read, it is a must read for anyone interested in the diversity of social behavior and its implications for population demography, and the evolution and maintenance of animal sociality..."(Journal of Wildlife Management-December 2016)

Shortlisted for the British Ecological Society's 'Marsh Book of the Year Award 2017', which acknowledges the important role that books have on ecology and its development.

Edition details

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1119095328
• ISBN 13: 9781119095323
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 768