RECONCILING AGGRESSION AND SOCIAL MANIPULATION AS MEANS OF COMPETITION .1. LIFE-HISTORY PERSPECTIVE

I reexamined male competitive options via long-term data on adolescent and adult male consort success and data on male weights, age, size, r esidency status, and friendships with females collected from one troop of wild baboons. The options available to a male result from a comple x interaction of variables and change with maturation, migration, and age. The acquisition of aggressive and social competence, the developm ent of alternative nonaggressive strategies, the loss of physical prow ess, and perhaps the effect of inbreeding avoidance all play a role. A ggressive and nonaggressive strategies may be mutually exclusive optio ns for brief periods in a male's life because of ontogenetic, historic al, or physical constraints. But for most of the time, the two are lik ely to coexist. I assess the evolutionary significance of optional str ategies of competition and discuss the conditions that might select fo r optional strategies.