Monkey Business - Robin Dunbar, Dave Gorman and Jo Setchell

The Infinite Monkey Cage

BBC

Comedy, Science

4.7 • 9.4K Ratings

🗓️ 17 December 2025

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In perhaps the monkiest Infinite Monkey Cage episode there’s ever been, Brian Cox and Robin Ince attempt to uncover the secrets of love, lust and friendship in primates. Swinging by to offer a hand (or tail) are evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, anthropologist Jo Setchell, and comedian Dave Gorman.

Together the panel explores Dunbar’s number in monkeys – the idea that the number of friendships an individual can maintain correlates with brain size – with the very creator of the theory! They ask whether monkeys feel love the way we do, why some species remain strictly monogamous but others don’t, and what we could learn about ourselves through studying them. Robin goes bananas for bonobo fashion, while Dave couldn’t give a monkey’s about finding an aftershave to complement his natural smell.

Series Producer: Mel Brown Researcher: Alex Rodway Executive Producer: Alexandra Feachem A BBC Studios Production

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.
0:07.0	Hello, Greg Jenner here, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast that takes history seriously and then laughs at it.
0:13.4	This Christmas, forget about socks. We've got the best present of all.
0:17.2	Dead people!
0:18.2	All that sounds like zombies. Sorry, it's not zombies. Let me start again.
0:21.8	In our new family-friendly podcast series, dead funny history, historical figures come back to life
0:26.8	but just long enough to argue with me, tell their life stories and sometimes get on my nerves.
0:31.8	You're dead to me.
0:32.8	Dead funny history.
0:34.1	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:36.5	Welcome to the Infinite Monkey Cage. New episodes are released weekly wherever you get your podcasts,
0:40.8	but...
0:41.3	If you're in the UK, you can listen to every episode a week early, first on BBC Sounds.
0:46.0	Hello, I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robin Ince.
0:48.2	And this is the monkey-est infinite monkey cage yet.
0:52.1	It's key childhood memory for many to be walking around the zoo and getting
0:57.0	to the monkey enclosure and then seeing that something is going on. You're just a young,
1:01.7	innocent child and you say, Mommy, what's that monkey hanging in that tire doing? And she goes,
1:07.0	look away, Brian, look away. There's nothing of interest here. But, Mom, I'm really interested.
1:12.2	There's all things going.
1:13.7	No, let's go to the chinchilla enclosure.
1:16.5	But, mother, I'm left with questions unanswered
	...

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