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This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lickman.

Today in the podcast, an age-old question.

Or at least a debate that romantic comedies love to explore.

Men and women can't be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.

That's not true. I have a number of men friends and there is no sex involved.

No you don't.

Yes, I do.

Yes, I do.

That's of course from When Harry Met Sally with Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal, and is perhaps the second most famous scene in the movie.

I'll have what she's having.

Anyway, because romantic comedies insist on being romantic, in this movie, the answer is ultimately no.

Men and women cannot be friends.

But new research adds a wrinkle,

at least in the animal kingdom. My next guest is a world authority on a relatively unknown species of baboon, the kind-up baboon. And she found that they upend a lot of stereotypes about baboon bonding, primate power dynamics, and how male and female baboons get along.

Here to tell us more is Dr. Anna Weyer, founder of the Kasanka Baboon Project in Zambia.

Welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you so much for having me.

Okay, tell me a little bit about these baboons. Where do

they live? What do they look like? Yeah, so kind to baboons, we find them in Democratic Republic of Congo,

Angola, and Zambia. And they're much smaller than the traditional baboon that most people would be familiar with.

So they're about half the size.

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