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Welcome to Cool Stuff Ryan home. Marcus Baff and Reggie Rizzu with you once again. On today's

episode, are Animals Conscious. A piece from the BBC takes a strong look at that question through the

eyes of the scientific community. And on this day in history, the fork arrives in the United

States and is considered blasphemous. That's coming up on cool stuff.

We recall that yesterday we brought you the story of macaques in Puerto Rico,

altering their post-hurricane behavior to show more compassion for their fellow monkeys.

In that same vein, it felt fitting to bring you this story from Palab Ghosh of the BBC today.

As even the most amateur of biologists know,

Charles Darwin is still revered to this day within the scientific community, mainly due to his theory of evolution. But as Ghosh writes, his ideas that animals are conscious beings in the same

way humans are have long been shunned, though that may now be changing. As Darwin stated,

quote, there is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel

pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery, end quote. But at the time, Darwin's theory was first

conceived in the late 1830s, but not published until 1859, his suggestion that animals think and feel was seen as

scientific heresy among many, if not most, animal behavior experts.

Attributing consciousness to animals based on their responses was seen as a cardinal sin.

The argument went that projecting human traits, feelings, and behaviors onto animals had no

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