194 | Frans de Waal on Culture and Gender in Primates

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 25 April 2022

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Humans are related to all other species here on Earth, but some are closer relatives than others. Primates, a group that includes apes, monkeys, lemurs, and others besides ourselves, are our closest relatives, and they exhibit a wide variety of behaviors that we can easily recognize. Frans de Waal is a leading primatologist and ethologist who has long studied cognition and collective behaviors in chimps, bonobos, and other species. His work has established the presence of politics, morality, and empathy in primates. His new book is Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

Frans de Waal received his Ph.D. in biology from Utrecht University. He is currently Charles Howard Candler Professor of Primate Behavior in the Department of Psychology at Emory University and director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. Among his awards are the Knight of the order of the Netherlands Lion, the Galileo Prize, ASP Distinguished Primatologist, and the PEN/EO Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, not to mention an Ig Nobel Prize.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello, everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.
0:03.6	We're very interested in human beings, right? Not just here on the podcast, but we listeners,
0:09.3	I presume, that you, like I, are interested in the behaviors, the ways that we operate,
0:16.2	and the expectations that different human beings have of each other, right? We are human beings.
0:20.8	Human beings are intrinsically interesting, but because we are some of them, we have a special
0:24.8	interest in them, but it's also raising a problem because when we study the behaviors of human
0:30.2	beings, it's hard to get outside, right? It's hard to look at human behavior as a disinterested
0:35.4	observer. It's too easy to put ourselves into the shoes of whatever other human beings were studying,
0:41.5	and furthermore, when we find some human behavior, it's a little bit too easy to say that that
0:46.2	particular behavior is actually necessary, or a law of nature, or something like that.
0:52.2	Studying different cultures can save us from falling into this trap, because different cultures
0:56.8	have different customs and so forth, but maybe even more effective is to study non-human primates.
1:03.5	Primates are our closest animal relatives, they include apes and monkeys and various lemurs and
1:09.1	things like that, and they behave in fascinating ways, both individual ways and social ways,
1:15.6	ways that are similar from species to species and very different from species to species.
1:20.3	Today's guest, Fronster Wall, is one of the leading primatologists, and in general,
1:25.2	animal behavior study, or animal psychologist, I guess maybe it's fair to say,
1:30.4	that we have. He's done a lot of breakthrough studies to talk about the culture, the morality,
1:36.5	the social structures that primates have, and as you might expect, some of them you look at and
1:43.1	you go, oh my goodness, that's just like human beings. I get it, I recognize that, and others you go,
1:48.4	wow, that's very different. Maybe we could be that way, maybe we should be that way.
1:54.2	Both sides give us something to think about. He has a new book out, which is exactly along
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Sean Carroll | Wondery, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Sean Carroll | Wondery and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.