Around three decades ago, the myth of the passive female primate was at its height, bolstered by two assumptions. All females were assumed to be uniformly successful at reproduction, because "all females breed." And social evolution was thought to proceed mainly by sexual selection, in which female-female relationships played a small part. So when female cercopithecines--animals such as baboons and macaques--were found to have highly variable levels of success in breeding, correlated with an individual's lifelong rank in the female hierarchy (her dominance status), the myth took a beating (1). From then on, female strategies were seen to have their own logic independent of males, and the ecology of female primate relationships became a vigorous research area that was crucial to understanding social evolution. But there were a few holdouts. In some well-studied species--the great apes, for example--there seemed to be little variance in female reproduction. Selection on female reproductive strategiesappeared particularly weak in these species, allowing females to be considered as relatively passive pawns of male maneuvering. A new study on page 828 of this issue suggests that this view was simply the result of our ignorance (2) and that dominant female chimpanzees are indeed more reproductively successful than their lower-ranked associates.
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