Dunbar R I M, Shultz Susanne
British Academy Centenary Research Project, School of Biological Sciences, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 7ZB, UK.
Science. 2007 Sep 7;317(5843):1344-7. doi: 10.1126/science.1145463.
The evolution of unusually large brains in some groups of animals, notably primates, has long been a puzzle. Although early explanations tended to emphasize the brain's role in sensory or technical competence (foraging skills, innovations, and way-finding), the balance of evidence now clearly favors the suggestion that it was the computational demands of living in large, complex societies that selected for large brains. However, recent analyses suggest that it may have been the particular demands of the more intense forms of pairbonding that was the critical factor that triggered this evolutionary development. This may explain why primate sociality seems to be so different from that found in most other birds and mammals: Primate sociality is based on bonded relationships of a kind that are found only in pairbonds in other taxa.
某些动物群体，尤其是灵长类动物中出现的异常大的大脑的进化，长期以来一直是个谜。尽管早期的解释往往强调大脑在感官或技术能力（觅食技能、创新和导航）方面的作用，但现在证据的天平明显倾向于这样一种观点，即正是生活在大型复杂社会中的计算需求促使了大脑的增大。然而，最近的分析表明，可能是更紧密的配偶关系的特殊需求才是触发这一进化发展的关键因素。这或许可以解释为什么灵长类动物的社会性似乎与大多数其他鸟类和哺乳动物的社会性如此不同：灵长类动物的社会性基于一种在其他分类群中仅见于配偶关系的亲密关系。
