The Lemur's Legacy

The Evolution of Power, Sex, and Love

Russell believes that by looking at primate fossils, anatomy and biochemistry, and behaviour, we can build the syntheses and explanatory theories for the biological explanation of human behaviour. According to Russell, this synthesis begins with the earliest primates, the lemurs. The first five chapters include basic material on evolutionary theory, genetics, and a review of primate evolution and taxonomy, setting the stage for his targeted popular audience.

The real roots of human behaviour began with the first lemurs and more precisely, according to Russell, with a mouse lemur like ancestor. “Their story offers a glimpse at the beginnings of human social behaviour, and the tangled roots of power, sex and love” (p. 101). From the mouse lemur, Russell believes, humans inherited mother-daughter bonds, the matrilineage (“the stable base of primate social groups. Including . . . our own.” [p. 117]), and a number of gender differences in behaviour, including the evolutionary strategy for males to impregnate as many females as possible and for females to choose the male with the best possible genes for survival.

Young males, “awash in androgynous hormones” (p. 110), travel through the forest alone or in small groups, finally settling in regions peripheral to female ranges. Females (human and mouse lemur) are by nature timid and stay close to home and males are adventurous and risk-taking. Of the few males that survive to adulthood, the females choose to mate with those best fit, while males attempt to mate with anybody. A few of these males become old, fat, docile, and in-aggressive (“grandfatherly, Sir John Falstaffs” [p. 116]). These are allowed to remain in female nesting groups. Russell asserts, “A female's preference for a mellow male companion is characteristic of almost all primates studied so far. A low level of male aggression appears crucial to sustaining a male-female bond” (pp. 116-117).

The roots of human romance lie in the consort bond introduced by our primate cousin, the lemur, more than 40 million years ago, asserts naturalist Russell. Lemurs originated the habit of treating a mate as an exclusive possession. The legacy of this behaviour, he claims, is human monogamy, "a grand biological and cultural illusion of faithfulness" which produces offspring with the least social disruption. Female dominance, prevalent in lemur troops, gave way to male dominance among apes. Like chimpanzees, writes Russell, human males wage war or fight in order to redirect aggression outside the group; females seldom engage in physical violence, but when they do, it is mainly to protect their resources. This intriguing study of the nascent science of "evolutionary psychology" seeks to explain such human characteristics and behaviours as romantic love, rape, gender roles and social organization with recourse to the direct observation of nonhuman primates.

As an unabashed evolutionary psychologist committed to science, reason, and a multidisciplinary approach, Russell has written a frank but disconcerting introduction to the emergence of human behaviour that stresses the indispensable paradigm of organic history. Russell argues that the brain biochemistry and behavioural patterns ...