“Those monkeys are deranged,” she recalls a prominent physical anthropologist saying dismissively of her work and her 1977 book on the topic, The Langurs of Abu. It was easier for that anthropologist, and anthropology in general, to pathologize an entire troop of langurs and dismiss Hrdy’s many months of meticulous fieldwork than it was to concede that males might operate selfishly rather than for the “good of the species.”
