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  3. The main exception to primate researchers’ general pattern of ignoring interactions between males and infants has been the study

The main exception to primate researchers’ general pattern of ignoring interactions between males and infants has been the study

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问题     The main exception to primate researchers’ general pattern of ignoring interactions between males and infants has been the study of male care among monogamous primates. It has been known for over 200 years, ever since a zoologist-illustrator named George Edwards decided to watch the behavior of pet marmosets in a London garden, that among certain species of New World monkeys males contributed direct care for infants that equaled or exceeded that given by females. Mothers among marmosets and tamarins typically give birth to twins, as often as twice a year, and to court the female in her staggering reproductive burden the male carries the infant at all times except when the mother is actually suckling it. It was assumed by Kleiman that monogamy and male confidence of paternity were essential to the evolution of such care, and at the same time, it was assumed by Symons and others that monogamy among primates must be fairly rare.
    Recent findings, however, make it necessary to reverse this picture. First of all, monogamy among primates turns out to be rather more frequent than previously believed (either obligate or facultive monogamy can be documented for some 17-20 percent of extant primates) and second, male care turns out to be far more extensive than previously thought and not necessarily confined to monogamous species, according to Hrdy. Whereas previously, it was assumed that monogamy and male certainty of paternity facilitated the evolution of male care, it now seems appropriate to consider the alternative possibility, whether the extraordinary capacity of male primates to look out for the fates of infants did not in some way pre-adapt members of this order for the sort of close, long-term relationships between males and females that, under some ecological circumstances, leads to monogamy! Either scenario could be true. The point is that on the basis of present knowledge there is no reason to view male care as a restricted or specialized phenomenon. In sum, though it remains true that mothers among virtually all primates devote more time and/or energy to rearing infants than do males, males nonetheless play a more varied and critical role in infant survival than is generally realized.
The author of the passage suggests that it is “appropriate to consider the alternative possibility” because the previous view
选项 A、results in a contradiction
B、depends on problematic data
C、appears less definite given certain facts
D、conflates two distinct phenomena
E、overlooks a causal relationship between correlated phenomena
答案C
解析 alternative possibility对应第二段开头的reverse this picture，因此我们可以知道，作者提出alternative possibility的原因是第二段第一句提及的Recent findings，即第二句的两个内容：一夫一妻制很普遍、雄性照顾婴儿不只发生在一夫一妻制中。这两个发现都和第一段的观点相悖，因此答案是选项C。A项文中未提及。B项第一段完全都是人们的假设，看不出其基于的数据是什么。D项文中来提及。E项第一段和第二段都在讨论male care和monogamy之间的因果关系。
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