A Primate's Memoir is the autobiography of American scientist and author Robert M. He is currently the John A. And Cynthis Fry Gunn Professor of biology, neurology and neurological science at Stanford and serves the National Museums of Kenya as a research associate. By turns hilarious and poignant, A Primate’s Memoir is a magnum opus from one of our foremost science writers. A Primate’s Memoir is the culmination of over two decades of experience and research – an exhilarating, hilarious and daring memoir, and an astonishing masterpiece of the people and nature of Africa. Author: Rober M Sapolsky.
- A Primate's Memoir. A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons. Critics' Opinion: Readers' Opinion: First Published: Mar 2001, 304 pages Paperback: Mar 2002, 304 pages Genres. About this Book. Summary; Excerpt.
- Robert Sapolsky’s “A Primates Memoir” is a masochist’s guide to Africa. It is what you expect from a biological anthropologist who sojourns to Africa in the late 1970s. Sapolsky lives in a tent while studying baboons. At the age of 12, Sapolsky appears to know what he wants from life.
A Primate's Memoir Sparknotes
The alpha male has to be strong, with a good set of canines, to demand respect in order to take power over the troop. While the older female baboons live a good life, the older male just stand by, as the past male alpha tends to leave the troop. The male alpha isn’t your typical son of a king in order to be take over the throne, you just have to be stronger and win the fight in order to take charge, until someone else comes along and knocks you off.
While being stronger than the current alpha or being the oldest female baboon, other factors play a role in determining who mates with whom. Mating is as important as being the male alpha, and being the alpha has its advantage of course. Different male baboons get to mate with the female while she’s ovulating or estrus cycles, but on the day she is most likely to conceive the alpha gets to mate with her. Unlike humans, baboons don’t get to choose who to mate with based of their looks, for male baboons the most important thing is how many children she’s birth. For female baboons being higher up in hierarchy allows them to have more options on deciding who to mate with.
Furthermore, by allowing an alpha to mate with a high female hierarchy, allows for her offspring to be better off than most. The alpha will take care of its offspring, protecting them from danger while allowing the female to live a comfortable life also. It’s important
A Primate s Memoir
- Author : Robert M. Sapolsky
- Publisher : Simon and Schuster
- Release Date : 2007-11-01
- Genre: Nature
- Pages : 304
- ISBN 10 : 1416590366
A Primate's Memoir Summary
In the tradition of Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, Robert Sapolsky, a foremost science writer and recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant, tells the mesmerizing story of his twenty-one years in remote Kenya with a troop of Savannah baboons. “I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla,” writes Robert Sapolsky in this witty and riveting chronicle of a scientist’s coming-of-age in remote Africa. An exhilarating account of Sapolsky’s twenty-one-year study of a troop of rambunctious baboons in Kenya, A Primate’s Memoir interweaves serious scientific observations with wry commentary about the challenges and pleasures of living in the wilds of the Serengeti—for man and beast alike. Over two decades, Sapolsky survives culinary atrocities, gunpoint encounters, and a surreal kidnapping, while witnessing the encroachment of the tourist mentality on the farthest vestiges of unspoiled Africa. As he conducts unprecedented physiological research on wild primates, he becomes evermore enamored of his subjects—unique and compelling characters in their own right—and he returns to them summer after summer, until tragedy finally prevents him. By turns hilarious and poignant, A Primate’s Memoir is a magnum opus from one of our foremost science writers.