Collaborative Research: Relationship Among Demographic, Social and Genetic Structure

Duke University, Durham NC

Investigators

Abstract

This research characterizes and tests hypotheses regarding the bidirectional inter-relationships among individual behavior, social structure, and genetic structure in a natural population of non-human primates. The study population of savannah baboons, Papio cynocephalus, has been under study by PI and colleagues for over two decades. We elucidate the role of behavior in providing the organism's immediate response to variable conditions, and in shaping the future through determining the context within which development and gene expression occur. Behavior thereby determines , to great extent, the phenotype that is subject to selection. Genetic analyses will identify relatedness among pairs of individuals for most of whom behavioral and demographic data are available. These will be integrated with PI's recently developed database, permitting analyses of related forms of behavioral and demographic data. Hypotheses to be tested address (1) the relationships among several types of individual and pairwise behaviors (mating, agonistic, and affiliative), (2) the relationships of these lower-level behavioral processes to group-level behavioral processes (dominance hierarchies, grooming networks), and demographic processes (fission and demographic structure of groups), and (3) the relationships of the pairwise and group-level processes to genetic structure within social groups. These relationships are at the core of models of primate socio-ecology and the evolution of behavior.