Dorothy Cheney — scientist studied primates up close
Dorothy L. Cheney, whose careful research into how primates live and communicate revealed the surprising complexity of their thought processes and social structures, died Friday at her home in Devon, Pa. She was 68.
Her husband and research partner, Robert M. Seyfarth, said the cause was breast cancer.
“Cheney was a spectacular scientist,” Robert M. Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University and the author of books like “A Primate’s Memoir,” said by email. “Along with Robert Seyfarth, she did wonderfully clever, elegant field experiments that revealed how other primates think about the world — showing that they think in far more sophisticated and interesting ways than people anticipated.”
Rather than doing their research in laboratories, Cheney and Seyfarth spent long stretches in the wilds of Africa and elsewhere, studying gorillas, baboons, vervet monkeys and other animals.
One of their bestknown experiments, conducted in Kenya in 1977, showed that vervets made distress sounds not just involuntarily, out of fear, but to convey a specific message about a given threat. They hid loudspeakers in bushes, played recorded sounds of vervets and watched the reaction. A particular bark sent the animals scurrying up trees because it was a warning about leopards; a lowpitched staccato noise had them looking skyward for predatory eagles.
They summarized their research in their first book, “How Monkeys See the World: Inside the Mind of Another Species” (1990).
Later research in Botswana included insights into the hierarchical nature of baboon societies and its possible evolutionary effects.
“Because Western scientists learned about primates by examining corpses or observing single animals brought home as pets,” they wrote in their 2007 book, “Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind,” “few if any ever learned what can be discovered only through long, patient observation: that the most human features of monkeys and apes lie not in their physical appearance, but in their social relationships.”
Dorothy Leavitt Cheney was born Aug. 24, 1950, in Boston. Her father, Edward, was a Foreign Service officer, and her mother, Sally (Leavitt) Cheney, was a translator.
Because of her father’s job, Cheney spent parts of her childhood in Malaysia, Holland, India and Nicaragua. (Edward Cheney died in a plane crash in the Philippines in 1976.) She graduated from Abbot Academy in Massachusetts in 1968 and earned a bachelor’s degree in political science at Wellesley College in 1972.
She had planned to go to law school. But her husband, whom she had married in 1971, had applied to work with the noted zoologist Robert Hinde at Cambridge University, and when he had an opportunity to go to South Africa to study baboons, he suggested she come along.
“I thought, ‘What the hell, this could be fun for a year or two,’ so I decided to put off law school and join him,” she said in an interview for Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “It was a transformative experience.”
After 18 months, she applied to study with Hinde as well. She received a Ph.D. in zoology at Cambridge in 1977.
She and her husband were assistant professors at Rockefeller University in New York, then in 1981 joined the faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1985, they moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where, at her death, Cheney was a professor of biology.
In a 2007 interview with the New York Times, Cheney and Seyfarth talked about the rules they had for staying safe in the places where they worked — for instance, never working alone or wading in water more than knee deep. Even so, they said, they would sometimes find themselves in trees with baboons waiting for lions below to go away.
Seyfarth, in an email interview, said theirs was not one of those partnerships in which each person had a defined role.
“Our scientific contributions are hard to separate because the genesis of our ideas and experiments quickly became lost in the mists of conversation,” he said. “One of us had an idea, the other critiqued it, and back and forth it went until it finally took shape and neither of us remembered or cared who took credit for what.”
“Ours was a kind of scientific work that was less controlled than a laboratory experiment,” he added, “but it suited us both perfectly.”
In addition to her husband, Cheney is survived by her daughters, Caroline Cheney Roberts and Lucia Hall Seyfarth; a sister, Margaret Cheney; two brothers, Drew and Thomas; two stepsisters, Robin Bell and Roseanne Currier; a stepbrother, David Bell; and a granddaughter. Her mother died last year.
The discoveries Cheney and Seyfarth made about baboons were certainly thought-provoking, indicating a society formed around motherdaughter lines of descent and a brain specialized for social interaction and hierarchical dynamics.
“Monkey society is governed by the same two general rules that governed the behavior of women in so many 19thcentury novels,” they wrote in “Baboon Metaphysics.” “Stay loyal to your relatives (though perhaps at a distance, if they are an impediment), but also try to ingratiate yourself with the members of high-ranking families.”
Cheney talked about the animals in a 2007 interview with NPR.
“They seem to know a huge amount about each other’s social relationships and each other’s dominance ranks,” she said, “so the social complexity, on the surface anyway, appears to be very similar to that of a very complex human society, and yet they’re not humans.
“So the question is, what differentiates us from them and what sort of selective pressures might have gotten us from an organism that looks like a baboon to an organism that looks like us?”