Frans de Waal: Learning from Primates about ourselves: From Gender to Social Hierarchies
The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss
Lawrence M. Krauss
4.4 • 592 Ratings
🗓️ 27 September 2022
⏱️ 151 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
Frans de Waal is not only my favorite primatologist, he is one of my favorite scientist-communicators. His books on primates, particularly on Bonobos and Chimpanzees—from politics to child-rearing and even culture—reveal a tremendous amount about our closest genetic relatives, and hence about ourselves. His newest book, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist, tackles a particularly hot topic at the current time, but as is typical of his books, this one is both entertaining, and touching, and packed with data rather than anecdotes. I was very happy to sit down with Frans again to talk broadly about the motivations for his career choice, as well as his many years of experience in the field. While we focused on his new book, our discussion ranged far more broadly over the importance of primatology as a new and useful window on humans. I have had the privilege of sharing numerous stages with Frans, as well as hosting him at a previous Origins symposium, and each time I come away with important new perspectives. This podcast was no exception, and I hope you too will come away from it with a different view of yourself and your relationship to the world around you—which after all, is again one of the purposes of this podcast.
Speaking of new perspectives, I describe in the podcast how a video Frans showed me over a decade ago, involving Capuchin monkeys, as I recall, changed my own perspectives on occasions when I experience jealousy or envy, and I think it improved my own behavior, at least a little bit. Once you here him describe it, I wonder, if you then go to youtube and watch it, whether it will do the same for you. Either way, enjoy this entertaining, provocative, and informative discussion with a charming and insightful scientist.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krause. In this episode, I'm |
| 0:14.0 | privileged to have a conversation with one of my favorite scientists and science popularizers, Franz de Val, |
| 0:19.5 | the primatologist. I enjoy every discussion I've ever had with him, and every time I listen to him lecture, I'm amazed. |
| 0:26.6 | In fact, he's actually changed the way I think about myself as we describe and we discuss in this particular video. |
| 0:33.6 | I often refer to a video I saw of his involving capuchin monkeys and cucumbers and grapes when I think about my own behavior. |
| 0:43.3 | And that's one of the great things about Franz's work is it gives us a mirror on ourselves by looking at our closest primate relatives, |
| 0:51.3 | especially if we're interested in trying to find out which aspects of our behavior might be socially or culturally influenced and which might be biological. |
| 1:00.0 | One way to understand that is to look at the behavior of our closest primate relatives, which he does. |
| 1:07.0 | And in his new book, Different, which discusses gender and sex, as seen in very different lights with these two, in some sense, very different primate relatives of ours, he explodes a number of myths about gender and sex that we might have about hierarchy and gender and matriarchy and patriarchy in human societies and in primate societies. |
| 1:31.3 | And the examples are fascinating. I just eat this stuff up. |
| 1:35.3 | And he's such a lovely writer and speaker. |
| 1:40.3 | And in our discussion, we also talk about his own background which is really quite |
| 1:44.8 | well relevant to this new book as you'll see I hope you're as fascinated and transformed by |
| 1:52.9 | our discussion as I was and I as I am each time I talk to him you can watch this podcast |
| 1:59.9 | commercial free ad free on our Substack site, |
| 2:04.7 | Critical Mass, if you subscribe. Now, subscriptions will go to support the Origins Project |
| 2:09.6 | Foundation, a nonprofit that runs the podcast and other activities. So I hope you'll consider |
| 2:14.8 | subscribing. Either way, if you don't want to watch it there, you can watch it on our YouTube channel |
| 2:20.3 | or you can listen to it wherever podcasts can be listened to. |
| 2:23.3 | No matter how you listen to it or watch it, I hope you come away from this |
| 2:28.3 | entertained and also thinking about yourself slightly differently than you did before. |
| 2:33.3 | Enjoy. |
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