Dorothy Leavitt Cheney
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Dorothy Leavitt Cheney∗ Life and Work Robert Seyfarth
Dorothy L. Cheney studied the social behaviour, communication, and cognition of monkeys. Her goal was to uncover the selective forces that have shaped the evolution of the human mind. Dorothy Leavitt Cheney was a leading figure in the study of behavior, communication, and cognition in animals, particularly nonhuman primates (monkeys and apes). Her greatest contribution was to ground the study of primate vocal communication and cognition in the natural lives of the animals themselves. In two long-term studies of wild primates—vervet monkeys in Kenya and baboons in Botswana—Dorothy and I considered the problems that animals might need to solve in order to survive and reproduce. Our particular focus was on problems of communication and cognition: how has natural selection shaped the minds and communicative skills of our closest animal relatives, the nonhuman primates? What do they know—what do they need to know—about their environment and their social companions to survive and reproduce successfully? In posing these questions, we hoped to bring together two scientific fields that had largely been separate. On the one hand, psychologists were interested in comparing cognition across different species—and thereby gain an understanding of how human intelligence differed from that of other animals—but they worked almost entirely in laboratories, studying rats and pigeons using arbitrary stimuli like circles and squares, and without any reference to social behavior. Questions about the evolution of cognition seemed of little interest to them. On the other hand, ethologists and evolutionary biologists studied a variety of species in their natural habitat and described social
Robert Seyfarth received his B.A. from Harvard University in 1970 and his PhD from Cambridge University in 1977. At Cambridge, he studied with Professor R A Hinde, Royal Society Research Professor in the Department of Zoology. From 1977 through 1981, he carried out post-doctoral research with Professor Peter Marler at Rockefeller University in New York. He retired in 2016 as a Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Seyfarth has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. In 2020, the Animal Behavior Society gave him the Distinguished Animal Behaviorist Award for a lifetime contribution to the study of animal behavior.
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Vol.25, No.8, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12045-020-1024-9
RESONANCE | August 2020
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GENERAL ARTICLE
Figure 1. Dorothy Cheney with baboons in the Okavango Delta, Botswana.
behavior in detail, but while evolution was a central interest, they had little interest in cognition. Our goal was to combine these two fields, asking questions about the evolution of cognition in the wild.
Keywords Evolution, vocal communication, cognition, primates, vervet monkeys, baboons.
The vervets, Tom Struhsaker reported, gave acoustically different alarm calls to different preda
