Reply to Dixson: Infanticide triggers primate monogamy

Abstract

We thank Alan Dixson (1) for his interest in our paper (2). Unfortunately, he seems to have misread it. First, contrary to Dixson’s claim, we did not conflate callitrichid “monogamy” with obligate monogamy in other primates, like gibbons and the small cebids. We note that these were conflated in Lukas and Clutton-Brock’s (3) recent report on the evolution of monogamy but not in our paper. Dixson may have confused the two papers [in their commentary on the papers, de Waal and Gavrilets (4) make the same mistake]. Instead, we classified callitrichids as having a variable mating system [as most field workers now acknowledge: see also Dunbar (5)].