So there are many ways in which play can be useful but not necessarily in the way that you see it so play fighting it was thought well there practicing playing for when I have to do real fights as adults but study showed that these animals that are gauge and play fighting doesn't really help them when they fight for your are you telling me that cats that chase more lasers don't also end up bringing more birds home because they've honed their

skills necessarily no studies have actually shown that giving kittens playful experiences with the predatory play where they chase has absolutely no effect on how good

Wow are we yes where are we here why are we here not entirely clear we are misfits gross into existence by random chance with no hints at all

as to how we're supposed to make sense of it all it's immensely bizarre here we are

Hello everybody and welcome to the here we are podcast I'm your host Shane Moss joining me today got a special guest Jordan

Rick Hart who I'm going to have kind of introduce himself but how I know Gordon is is because during COVID I've been sitting in on a poker night every every other Saturday with with some academic friends and meeting some new people

and Gordon has a ton of interesting research including we're going to be talking about a few things today including anthropomorphism and play an animals he has a book

the secret social lives of reptiles and but but I think we're maybe going to do a whole separate reptile episode with Gordon and his co author co authors another time

so we're going to be talking about play today which is a little bit fitting because we play poker together to garden before you kind of introduce your background the people probably want to know how would you rate my poker skills

well I would say above mediocre I would rate them below mediocre I actually I actually love play I love I love I love board games I like chess and I and I enjoy gamble I like blackjack but there's something about poker I can't get myself to care that much about

I like the I like the social I like hanging out with you guys in chat and and everything I can't get myself to care enough to make the right moves I like to make the exciting moves and play a little recklessly so I always end up losing money as Gordon can testify to

but but that's that anyway Gordon why don't you introduce yourself a little bit to the to the audience to give them a little bit of your background.

Okay I was raised in midwest in Wisconsin actually and went to college and got a degree in undergraduate degree in a new program called bio psychology and then got my PhD in that area but actually studied snake behavior

and I've been very interested in reptiles all my life but I've sort of remained at the cusp between biology and psychology for the rest of my career and I still continue my interest in in reptiles which which I did my early research back in the 1960s believe it or not so I'm wearing wearing Wisconsin where you from.

I was born in Milwaukee oh nice and a baby area of Milwaukee Wisconsin and went to you British Chicago that was a hundred miles south and then I came down into Tennessee where I remain for over 50 years now at the University of Tennessee and I'm in both the departments of psychology and ecology and evolutionary biology.

So again it's that relationship between the biology and the psychology that's always been my interest and that I sort of remained in even though it was being a person studies reptiles in a psychology department you get a lot of concerns.

These are like animal snakes you know that sort of yeah yeah so so we're kind of going to be talking about play quite a bit today I do so so you study a lot of play and animals and you also have it's kind of important to you been critical of some of the anthropomorphizing that happens in in research could you maybe set that up a little bit and and maybe some of the

why why we have to be careful not to anthropomorphize too much in situations.

Well anthropomorphism when I was in start off in school there were two sins that you shouldn't do as a scientist studying animal behavior one was being anthropomorphic and the other was relying on anecdotes.

So those are the two sins and they go back to like the early 19th or late 19th century in the post Darwinian enthusiasm for looking at continuity between animal and nonhuman animal and human behavior.

Even Darwin got very anthropomorphic and looking at relationships between the emotions and mental lives of other species and ourselves.

For the goal of focusing on continuity and the similarities but often based on at that time really poor methods to study behavior there wasn't really you know motion pictures or movies or video to document behavior and it was very easy to apply human type processes concepts to other species and in fact anthropomorphism is the

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