med Fiona”—a 3-year-old Family 1 member, a borderline bully known to have initiated many a scuffle—“started something with someone in Family 3. It escalated. Family 3 saw its chance. And they just started to take Family 1 out. You could see it from who was wounded and who wasn’t, and who was sitting in preferred places, and who was run out of the colony, and who was suddenly extremely deferential. One other female in Family 1, Quark, was killed; another, Josie, was hurt so badly we had to put her down. They’d gone after all of Cocobean’s other daughters, too. Somebody had bitten the big male in Family 1 so badly he couldn’t use his arm. Fiona got roughed up pretty bad. It was a very systematic scuffle. They went right at the head of the group and worked their way down.”

Soon after Novak described all this to me, he and I walked around the enclosure. Though it was the middle of a broiling July day, downtime for the monkeys, you could see hints of the new order. Family 3 calmly occupied what seemed to be the new center of power, a corncrib near the pond (one of several corncribs set out for shelter). They groomed one another, napped, and evenly stared at us as we stared at them. A more nervous bunch clustered in another crib down the hill. When we got within 30 feet, the largest monkey in the group shot up onto the cage bars. From 10 feet up it screamed at me, rattled the bars, and showed some nasty teeth.

From there I went to Suomi’s office and asked him what he thought had happened. Suomi has thought a lot about this coup, and it’s easy to see why. All of the important threads he’d been weaving together in his research were on display in this revolt: the importance of early experience; the interplay of environment, parenting, and genetic inheritance; the maddening primacy of family and social bonds; the repercussions of different traits in different circumstances. And now, in light of the orchid hypothesis, he was beginning to see that the threads might be woven together in a new way.

“About 15 years ago,” he said, “Carol Berman, a monkey researcher at SUNY-Buffalo, spent a lot of time watching a large rhesus-monkey colony that lives on an island in Puerto Rico. She wanted to see what happened as the groups changed size over time. They’d start at about 30 or 40 individuals—a group that had split off from another—and then expand. At a certain point, often somewhere near a hundred, the group would reach its limit, and it, too, would split into smaller troops.”

Such size limits, which vary among social species, are sometimes called “Dunbar numbers,” after Robin Dunbar, a British evolutionary psychologist who argues that a species’ group limit reflects how many social relationships its individuals can manage cognitively. Berman’s observations suggested that the Dunbar number of a species reflects not just its cognitive powers but its temper

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