Robert M. Seyfarth was born on February 16, 1948. He grew up in Chicago, but enjoyed fishing trips with his father to Canada and the Caribbean. During his senior year at Phillips Exeter Academy, he became interested in science after taking a course on Darwin. In 1970, he graduated from the honors program in Biological Anthropology at Harvard College. Fascinated by wild primates, Seyfarth then applied to work at Cambridge University with Robert Hinde, who had been the thesis advisor of Jane Goodall. Having been accepted by Hinde, Seyfarth then spent two years in the field studying baboons in Mountain Zebra National Park in South Africa, together with Dorothy Cheney, whom he had recently married. In 1976, Seyfarth received a doctorate from Cambridge. After a four-year postdoc at Rockefeller University, and another four years at University of California, Los Angeles as assistant professors, Seyfarth and Cheney moved to the University of Pennsylvania in 1985, where Seyfarth joined the Psychology Department.
Research
Seyfarth's research and publications were largely based on longterm field studies of primates in the natural habitat, usually in partnership with Cheney. From 1977 to 1988, Seyfarth and Cheney studied the behavior and ecology of vervet monkeys, in Kenya's Amboseli National Park. This research was summarized in their book How Monkeys See the World. They showed that the alarm calls of vervet monkeys have specific semantic content, so that playing back a recording of one type of call makes monkeys look up in the sky for eagles, while playing back a different call makes monkeys scan the bushes for a snake. According to the Newsletter of the Animal Behavior Society, "These results were the first strong evidence that non-human vertebrates use signals to refer to things external to themselves, and as such revolutionized our understanding of the cognitive side of animal communication." From 1992 to 2008, Seyfarth and Cheney studied vocal communication and social structure of chacma baboons, at the Moremi Game Reserve in Botswana. This research was summarized in their book Baboon Metaphysics. Seyfarth and Cheney studied baboon vocalizations, social relationships, and social cognition, with a particular interest in factors that contribute to baboon fitness. Their research showed that baboons are acutely aware of hierarchies and relationships in the group they belong to. Baboon mothers who build good relationships with other adults greatly increase the chance of their offspring's survival. According to Seyfarth, the rules for successful baboons are, "like in a Jane Austen novel, be nice to your relatives and get in with the high-ranking relatives". The Animal Behavior Society has described Seyfarth and Cheney as "pre-eminent leaders not just in primate communication but in the field of animal communication as a whole."
