Dorothy Cheney, Who Studied Primates Up Close, Dies at 68

Dorothy Cheney, Who Studied Primates Up Close, Dies at 68

“Our scientific contributions are hard to separate because the genesis of our ideas and experiments quickly became lost in the mists of conversation,” he said. “One of us had an idea, the other critiqued it, and back and forth it went until it finally took shape and neither of us remembered or cared who took credit for what.”

“Ours was a kind of scientific work that was less controlled than a laboratory experiment,” he added, “but it suited us both perfectly.”

In addition to her husband, Dr. Cheney is survived by her daughters, Caroline Cheney Roberts and Lucia Hall Seyfarth; a sister, Margaret Cheney; two brothers, Drew and Thomas; two stepsisters, Robin Bell and Roseanne Currier; a stepbrother, David Bell; and a granddaughter. Her mother died last year.

The discoveries Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth made about baboons were certainly thought provoking, indicating a society formed around mother-daughter lines of descent and a brain specialized for social interaction and hierarchical dynamics.

“Monkey society is governed by the same two general rules that governed the behavior of women in so many 19th-century novels,” they wrote in “Baboon Metaphysics.” “Stay loyal to your relatives (though perhaps at a distance, if they are an impediment), but also try to ingratiate yourself with the members of high-ranking families.”

Dr. Cheney talked about the animals in a 2007 interview with NPR.

“They seem to know a huge amount about each other’s social relationships and each other’s dominance ranks,” she said, “so the social complexity, on the surface anyway, appears to be very similar to that of a very complex human society, and yet they’re not humans.

“So the question is, what differentiates us from them and what sort of selective pressures might have gotten us from an organism that looks like a baboon to an organism that looks like us?”

(Original source)