Smart and social?

Comprehensive analysis questions link between sociality and brain increase in carnivores

		IMAGE: African wild dogs (Lycaon) are social and large-brained. Click here for more information.

Packs of hunting dogs, troops of baboons, herds of antelope: when people observe social animals, they are often struck by how intelligent they seem, and recent studies suggest that sociality has played a key role in the evolution of larger brain size among several orders of mammals. But new research from two evolutionary biologists, John Finarelli of the University of Michigan and John Flynn of the American Museum of Natural History, calls this hypothesis into question—at least for the Carnivora. After a sweeping analysis of many living and fossil carnivore species that places relative increases in brain size in an evolutionary context, Finarelli and Flynn found that increased brain size is not routinely associated with sociality. Their new research paper is being published in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.