It is a rare moment when one is given the chance to proselytize for a methodological approach, and I am grateful for this opportunity to advocate for a particular way of studying natural phenomena that affords researchers almost unlimited creativity to design, explore, and generate predictions about a system. Almost 25 years ago, as a first-year graduate student, I read a paper that wormed its way into my head and has remained influential to this day. That paper – by Irenaeus te Boekhorst and Paulien Hogeweg, published in 1994 in the journal Behavior – was radical because it offered a countervailing hypothesis to the standard socioecological model proposed to explain the flexible association and subgrouping patterns of chimpanzees. The “standard” model posited that the benefits of cooperation among male kin in defending access to females and territory were key in explaining why male chimpanzees were commonly found in parties with other males, while female chimpanzees were more often solitary because of the costs of feeding competition.