Highly Social Lemur Species Are Smarter Than Their Loner Cousins

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Highly social lemurs are better thieves than their less-social cousins.

On its surface, this isn’t particularly surprising. The social intelligence hypothesis claims that the evolution of primate intelligence was driven by the need to predict and manipulate the behavior of others.

So the more a primate species has to keep track of social relationships, the smarter those primates ought to be, the better they should be at stealing from you.

One problem with the social intelligence hypothesis is that most comparisons between species have been made just between two closely related species that live in groups of different sizes, such as among different types of corvids or monkeys. A more ideal test would be a comparison among several different closely related species.

Read more: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/thoughtful-animal/2013/06/26/more-friends-make-lemurs-better-thieves-but-what-does-it-mean-for-brain-evolution/?WT.mc_id=SA_syn_BusinessInsider#ixzz2XTIg1ZuQ