So how do we observe those behaviors and make sense of them?

Yeah, so I'll use an example to explain this.

Another behavior that I became really interested in is consolation behavior.

So reconciliation is when two former opponents engage in friendly interactions.

Consolation is when an uninvolved bystander of that original conflict approaches the victim and offers some kind of reassuring contact.

And this behavior, which is known as consolation, is seen as the best behavioral marker of empathy in the animal kingdom.

And so what gives us confidence that when an individual consoles another, they're experiencing a form of empathy? Well, we look at the function of that behavior.

Yeah.

Even if you look at the history of these hierarchies of life

that I mentioned, Aristotle, Skala Naturae, the great chain of being, they haven't placed all human beings on a par.

They've ranked human beings accordingly.

So enslaved people and women, for instance, ranked below the Greek white male ideal archetype.

And that supposedly subhuman human groups, they didn't count as fully human at all.

And it's very interesting to me to think about the ways that something like anthropocentrism or human exceptionalism acts to kind of reinforce other forms of discrimination against human beings, sexism and racism.

And there's so much interesting literature and studies on this.

What are your thoughts about that?

odd form.

But so is that nest.

Completely.

And I think we've had a, an unfortunate tendency of explaining these constructions like spider webs and birds' nests as being instinctive and automatic.

And because of that, we've taken away all of this sort of like cognitive ingenuity that is required.

It's like, oh no, this is just what these animals do.

They're programmed to do it.

that happens in that environment.

I wonder if you could talk about that and maybe some of the differences that you have seen that people don't know about.

Right.

So the arrogant ape, people understandably question, okay, if you clearly mean humans by that, are you talking about all humans? Is this a species-wide characteristic, this belief in human exceptionalism that humans are somehow separate from and superior to other animals and to the rest of nature? And as you point out, I make very clear in the book that human exceptionalism is not a human universal.

I trace the origins of of this worldview or cosmology throughout Western history, in particular, going back even before the Judeo-Christian tradition to Greek and Hellenistic philosophy, to Aristotle's Scala Naturae, the scale or ladder of nature, which placed humans at the top, followed by large social mammals who acted and looked like us, followed by smaller mammals and then birds and reptiles all the way down to plants and fungi and still below them were rocks and inorganic materials.

That ladder of nature was enormous.

absorbed into medieval Christianity and what's called the great chain of being, which is very similar to the scala naturae, except instead of humans at the top, gods and angels and spirits are at the top and then humans just below them.

And they alone were thought to straddle the kind of immaterial world of the soul, right? And the spirits and the material physical world of the body and what makes us animality and what makes us animals and what we have in common.

neurons right

Hmm

... similarity and continuity between species.

In the cases of our closest living primate relatives, it's often more straightforward, and we could use a term like parsimonious, right? To assume that there are shared mental characteristics and experiences between humans and other primates.

This criticism of being anthropomorphic is, is coming from this idea in science that we should always defer to the simplest, most straightforward, and parsimonious explanation.

And traditionally in science, that has been to assume that other forms of life lack rich internal worlds, lack rich emotions and cognition and, and social experiences.

But what the primatologist Frans de Waal offered us is that actually you could argue that the most parsimonious, straightforward explanation is to assume continuity among species, not just in physical forms and characteristics, but also in mental characteristics, in emotions and relationships and cognitive faculties.

So when we're talking about a characteristic, let's say, like joy or grief or empathy or jealousyAs being anthropomorphic, why are we assuming that humans have a premium on that capacity and that it's only derivatively not human? We might instead use a, a term like primatomorphic or mammalomorphic when we're talking about characteristics that are common to one or several species.

How does this show up in science? I mean, does this create for, for bad science, and how?

Could you tell me any time that you were working with bonobos or chimps or macaques or, or anything where you were, like, totally surprised in the moment of what happened and what you learned and, and the behavior?

Many times, um, one that comes to mind now that I wrote a bit about in the book was an interaction I had with a young male baboon named Bear.

This was in the Namib Desert.

And at the time, yeah, like I said, he was, he was juvenile.

Now he's an adult.

But he was acting like a, a young male baboon and causing a lot of conflict, both within his own group and also with the team of human field researchers that was following this, his troop that summer.

And one day that escalated to a point where it was a bit dangerous.

What do you think might shift if other fields of science were to adopt some of those-Same dynamics and strategies, both in terms of academic research and, and in the wider human world.

Could you tell me any time that you were working with bonobos or chimps or macaques or anything where you were like totally surprised in the moment of what happened and what you learned and the behavior?

Many times, one that comes to mind now that I wrote a bit about in the book was an interaction I had with a young male baboon named Bear.

This was in the Namib Desert.

And at the time, yeah, like I said, he was juvenile.

Now he's an adult.

But he was acting like a young male baboon and causing a lot of conflict, both within his own group and also with the team of human field researchers that was following his troop that summer.

And one day that escalated to a point where it was a bit dangerous.

What do you think might shift if other fields of science were to adopt some of those-Same dynamics and strategies, both in terms of academic research and, and in the wider human world.

And, um, talk about some examples from the animal world where, um, where animals either that you've witnessed, um, or have read about and then written about, uh, achieved some impressive cognitive feats.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so one of the most amazing encounters I ever had with another animal, uh, happened in the desert, was with a chacma baboon, a desert-adapted chacma baboon.

His name is Bear.

And he was a juvenile at the time, causing quite, uh, the ruckus, like within his social group, but also amongst the human researchers.

He was kind of always challenging us and, um, prodding us and getting our attention, climbing on people.

It wasn't the best situation, um, (laughs) as you can imagine.

Are there other examples from, from the animal kingdom that, that, uh, open your eyes, open one's eyes?