57. Dr. Frans de Waal — Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 12 March 2019

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Based on his latest book — Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves — the legendary biologist and primatologist Frans de Waal continues his empirical and theoretical work on animal societies, politics, intelligence, sentience, consciousness and, now, feelings and emotions. In this conversation Dr. de Waal and Dr. Shermer discuss:

the difference between feelings and emotions
the problem of “other minds” (how do we know what other people, much less animals, are thinking and feeling?)
why it took a century since Darwin’s book on the evolution of animal and human emotions before scientists took up the mantle
the push back from social scientists that Paul Ekman and other scientists, including de Waal, got for suggesting emotions evolved
A.I. and emotions (can we program feelings into robots?)
the six different emotions and why there are very probably more
the nature/nurture debate in the study of emotions
primate politics in U.S. elections: a biologist analyzes the Trump-Clinton debate #2
is Trump an alpha male or a bully?
the difference between sentience and consciousness
animal rights and the future of factory farming.

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This Science Salon was recorded on February 12, 2019.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Science Salon Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Schurmer.
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0:43.7	794 3119. And so that's that's the general introduction to the podcast. I want to note here that we have had
0:56.5	technical difficulties as you can see. I'm in a nice studio here in Santa Barbara
1:00.9	the local NPR Affiliated station here was kind enough to let me shift
1:07.5	from my home-based studio, which was not that great, to a much better studio studio here so you can expect much better
1:15.0	sound quality and video quality hopefully as well. My guest for this
1:20.2	episode is the great Franz Duval and I've great Franz de Valle.
1:23.7	And I've known Franz since the 90s.
1:27.4	And I've hosted him a couple times at Cal Tech
1:29.8	for his various books like Primate politics. He is the Dutch American ethologist
1:35.2	and zoologist having earned a PhD in biology from the University of Utrecht in
1:40.7	1977 he completed a six-year study of the chimpanzee colony at Berger's
1:46.3	Zoo in Arnhem before moving to the United States.
	...

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