Time Budgets and Other Constraints

Abstract

The previous three chapters have outlined the main features of primate ecology and demographic processes. This chapter considers some of the consequences of those features for the flexibility that animals have in their decisions about how to behave. The first section is concerned with time budgets and the way in which their components interact with each other. The second is concerned with ways in which demography can limit the choice of social partners open to an individual on particular occasions. Although in the long run subject to evolutionary selective forces, in the short term these considerations provide constraints on the animal’s freedom of choice that are imposed on them by the biological features of the systems within which they live.