Ologies with Alie Ward - Philematology (KISSING) with Robin Dunbar

Episode Date: April 7, 2020

Why do we kiss? What makes a good kiss or a bad kiss? How many microbes do we exchange? Is it good for us? One of the world’s most accomplished researchers on kissing, social behavior and relationships, Dr . Robin Dunar of Oxford University reluctantly agrees to be interviewed and explains how kissing may have evolved, how discos are research labs and friends are people you can invite yourself to have a beer with. Also: how to deal with the loneliness of isolation, autism and intimacy, why your cheerfulness may impact people you don’t even know and … Alie’s first kiss. Dr. Dunbar’s books are available here A donation went to: www.alaseniorliving.org Sponsor links: TheGreatCoursesPlus.com/ologies; EMBRWave.com/ologies; betterhelp.com/ologies (code: ologies) More links at alieward.com/ologies/philematology Transcripts & bleeped episodes at: alieward.com/ologies-extras Become a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologies OlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes and STIIIICKERS! Follow twitter.com/ologies or instagram.com/ologies Follow twitter.com/AlieWard or instagram.com/AlieWard Sound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray Morris Theme song by Nick ThorburnSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh hey, it's yesterday's coffee. That's now today's iced coffee. Ally Ward, back with a tender, sloppy, heartfelt episode of oligies. Oh, kissing. Oh, smoochin. Suckin' face. Who? Why? For how long? How? That's right, this week. We're gonna go all the way to first base. But before we toss you balls, let's say some thank yous to all the folks at patreon.com slash oligies for supporting the show since literally day one for being our backbone and also for all the folks wearing your oligies hats and backpacks and shirts

and drinking cold coffee out of oligies mugs and for all the folks who tell friends and tweet and grime about the podcast and hit subscribe, give it a rating on iTunes, keeping it up in the charts and especially y'all who review, you know I creep them like a crush. Each week I read you a fresh one such as this one from oldzeb22 who says, This is the podcast I suggest to my friends and family more than any other. Dad Ward is the fun-loving, foul-mouthed, bad-defending, nerdy friend your mother warned you about who also casually mentions that she has several dead birds in her freezer which I hope she's using for good and not to do some terrible prank on a neighbor.

Keep up the great work. Stay safe, keep them coming. I would never waste dead birds like that. But thank you, oldzeb. I appreciate it. Thank you to everyone who's spreading the show around via word of mouth. Speaking of mouths, let's jump right into them. Filomatology. It's a real word. It's the study of kissing. It comes from filima, meaning a kiss in the Greek tongue.

And as soon as I saw this word years ago, I just longed to probe the topic. So I searched scientific journals just for the word kissing and then I found several studies done by a professor and an anthropologist at Oxford in the UK. Hot diggity boy, howdy. This dude was legit. He got a bachelor's and a master's in psychology and philosophy from Oxford University, a PhD in psychology on the social dynamics of gelata baboons. He's a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford.

He's been an author on over 400 articles in scientific journals, including such hits like What's in a Kiss, the effect of romantic kissing on mate desirability, and examining the possible functions of kissing in romantic relationships. And if you've ever heard the notion that humans can only have about 150 stable friendships, that's all him. It's called Dunbar's number. He explained it casually as, quote, the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink

if you happen to bump into them in a bar. Oh, I wanted to be one of his 150 and interview him so much. So I emailed him and he wrote back saying no, but more politely, a quick two sentence rejection. I'm afraid I'm just too tied up with other commitments at the moment. My apologies. So I wrote back with literally a pretty please in the subject line. He wrote back a shimmering letter just said, yes, fine by me.

I literally gasped. I screamed when I got it. So we hopped on to Skype to record. And in remote calls, we speak via Skype, but I have theologists record into their voice memos on their phone and then we cut them together for better sound quality. It's just a little pro trick I learned from the illusionists, Helen Zalsman, but we have some difficulty.

I can maybe just record you straight from my speakers and we will worry about it in post. We'll fix it in post. But we gave it a good try. I was terrified already of this interview. So much at stake. Such a well regarded dude. Will I botch it?

How does the rest of it go? Or do we bond immediately and have a jolly time talking about smooches and first kisses and why people kiss and the microbiome and social relationships, kissing and other animals, why we fall in love with some people and not others, the notion of soulmates and doing research in nightclubs. So swipe on some lip balm, pucker your ears for the wit and the wisdom of anthropologist,

scholar and gentlemen, Oxford Philometologist Dr. Robin Ian McDonald Dunbar. Let's do it. Okay. Good. Okay. First off, hi. Thanks for being here. And this is all edited. So don't worry.

We'll cut out anything. Anything. Anything sensible and leave the rubbish here. Yes, exactly. Only the rubbish. That's what we're going for. And so now I'm not sure if this is a word that gets used often, but you are a philometologist.

Would that be correct? A person who studies kissing? Well, I wouldn't have said that twice, but I've never heard the word before. It's a real word. It's an actual word, a philometologist. Yeah, philometology is the study of kissing. And I don't know if you know this, but you are one of the world experts in it.

Literally have been looking for an expert in this to do this ology for like years and you're the dude. We have done a little bit, but it's a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of what we spend our lives really doing. Honest gov. Or milad, as they say in criminal courts to the judge. It wasn't me, milad. I didn't do it.

Again, over 400 papers authored, written or edited more than 20 books, including Thinking Big, How the Evolution of Social Life Changed the Human Mind, The Science of Love, and The Science of Love and Maturail. Oh, the British. They all have honorary doctorates in self-deprecation. Well, you've done it more than anyone else, so I'm going to ask you what you know about it. So, and you're an author, you're an evolutionary biologist, you're an anthropologist, you have so many credits.

How did you get interested in science and interested in behavior? I guess in a way, this sort of, as much as anything goes back to the fact that I grew up in East Africa and so you're kind of immersed in many different cultures there. And in the end, it kind of drew me off into initially psychology and then I ended up studying primates in Africa again, but monkeys mainly and spending an awful lot of time studying them before I, 20 years or so later, ended up back again studying humans properly for the first time. Was it at all a relief to start studying the behavior of humans?

Because you could ask them questions or was it just more complicated? No, it was complete desperation because I would have carried on studying monkeys and antelope, which we'd been studying as well. But there was no funding available for anything like that in Britain during the 1980s. And I ended up studying humans because they were there on the street and you could do a lot of the kind of things. You could ask the same kinds of questions. We'd been asking about primate behavior.

You could ask of humans too, you know, why do they choose this person to make lives? Why do they invest in their children and the way they do all these kind of questions we ask of monkeys and apes when we study them? You can kind of do it on the street. It was free. You didn't need a big grant to do it. And people, you know, you could ask them questions because they obviously were people. You could give them survey questions to fill in as well as observe them.

And what led you to want to study social relationships? Because you're known for the Dunbar number. You're known for you have a book, The Science of Love. Like, what is it about social relationships? Nothing about love. You got to know something if you're a scientist about it. I'm a boy. You are not.

You were a world expert in this. I mean, I guess that that must put a lot of pressure on you in relationships if you are an expert in them. Tell me about it. All right, his Wikipedia page notes that he's been married at least once, but we were only a few minutes in. It was too early to pry, but he's charming and affable. I imagine that's plus his research history.

I bet that's a hit in social situations. Okay, so yes, I suppose all the way through ever since I first studied anything in the world, even before I started my PhD, what I was interested in was social evolution. How do different society, different animal societies, you know, come to be? Why did one species have one kind of society and other species have another kind of society? So that's a kind of rather a big question because you have to study practically everything about them, their ecology, their genetics, their evolutionary history and so on. And then that transfers very easily across to humans because obviously different cultures

have different societies. You know, their culture is their society, if you like. You know, you can ask meaningful questions about why one group living in one area has gone down one particular road and has the kind of, you know, perhaps their polygamists and another group living somewhere else, some monogamists, those kind of questions. Now you studied monkeys and you studied apes, including humans. Do other animals kiss on the mouth? Yeah, actually some of the other mammals in fact do.

I mean, it's not really common in the way it is in humans or even to some extent the way it happens in some of the monkeys' apes where they kind of do a kind of lip-to-lip kissing and particularly with babies, I think, you know, mother monkeys mouth their babies often and frequently and then, you know, in some species they will feed them tidbits that they've been eating, you know, mouth-to-mouth and so forth. So you can kind of see where kissing came from, if you like. It's easy to see, but I mean, nobody does this stuff to the quantity and quality of humans. I want to kiss you just once.

Why do you think humans slumber on each other? This is almost the big evolutionary question that remains unanswered. It's not all clear. There are various suggestions one can make. One is it's clearly very kind of erotic, if you like. It's very arousing and the lips have a lot of brain tissue devoted to them, sensory brain tissue is devoted to the lips disproportionately. So put it this way, monkeys and apes are very tactile.

They do a lot of cuddling and stroking and, if you like, petting, all those kind of things we do and a lot of this sort of social grooming and social grooming triggers the release of endorphins in the brain, which kind of make you feel very relaxed and happy, contented with the world. It's very 1960s hippie age, she likes it. Endless sun, chill vibes, hot bodies. The world is a beautiful place and very trusting of the person you're doing this with or who's doing it to.

And these involve a very special set of neurons which only respond to light, slow stroking of the skin. And we have those neurons too, they're known as the C-tactile neurons. They don't do anything else. They're not involved in pain or anything, sensing pain or anything like that. We respond exactly the same way. That's why in our closer relationships we're very tactile. It's an awful lot of cuddling and petting and I don't mean this in a kind of social context.

When you're talking to your good friends, there's a tap on the shoulder and the arm around the shoulder and all this kind of thing that goes on. We're very tactile in that sense, even though we don't really think about it. But on the other hand, because it's a very intimate thing, as it is in monkeys' names, you don't do it with everybody. This is why when you're caught in a crowded lift you feel very uncomfortable because all these people in very close physical contact with you and normally you'd only allow your nearest and dearest family and friends to be in that close physical contact to you.

So we're very ambivalent about it for the very reason that touch is very indicative of both close relationships and also spilling over from there. It quickly gets exploited in courtship and sexual relationships between partners. So the lips clearly play a major role in that. That said, one of the other things that happens during kissing in particular is the exchange of huge quantities of bacteria. A 10-minute kiss, I forget the exact amount, but it results in the exchange of something like 10 million bacteria from one body to the next.

So a 2014 study out of Amsterdam revealed that one 10-second French kiss can transfer 80 million microbes into your partner's mouth. That is the entire population of New York City cramming into your mouth every second of a kiss. That's love, baby. So if he was interested in me, he'd want my germs. He'd just crave my germs. Oh, no.

Now, this is quite useful because actually it tells an awful lot about the other person. So you've both got bacteria, the microbiotic sort of elements from the other person being exchanged, but also you're getting a lot of their, in the saliva and stuff, a lot of the enzymes and other bits and pieces that the body produces, particularly immune systems. So your personal smell, I hate to raise this tricky issue at this juncture, but your personal smell and taste are directly determined by the same genes, same set of genes that determine your immune system. Really?

So we're using our tongues and our snoots to gather intimate intel about a person's immune system. You thought Google was sneaky. Whew, the nose is sneakier. So is the tongue. And now Dr. Dunbar addresses some Western flim flam about different greetings, such as the Koenig greeting of Inuit folks and the Maori greeting, the Hongi, among others. It's a complete myth that they're rubbing noses.

What you do is you put your nose side by side or just in front of somebody else's, and you breathe in slowly and deeply. And as the Maori's put it, this is you're breathing in their spirit, right? So you're actually breathing in their smell and by the same extension when you kiss folk, you're tasting their same immune system. You're actually checking out who they are and whether you like them or not. And the people you like tend to be people who have a different set of immune genes to the ones that you have, right?

Normally when you choose a mate, a romantic partner, you choose somebody who's kind of ticks as many boxes as possible for similarity to you, looks like you and feels like you as it were, because what you're trying to do is to find the same set of genes. So you don't lose these beautiful genes that you've been handed on by your parent. What a lot of species do is spend a lot of effort and time looking for people who have similar, not identical, but very similar genes to them. So that means they're kind of bringing that same family set back together again, except for immune system genes, because what ideally you want in your beautiful bouncing babies

is as broad a set of immunities as possible. So if you pick the same ones, you know, they're only kind of acquiring immunities to half the number of diseases and bacteria and stuff that's possible. Whereas if you pick somebody who's really quite different, you're giving them a much better chance in life. So if someone rejects you, not you necessarily, but just if someone rejects a person, it might just be that your immune systems are too similar. Can you take that?

Is that like a way to take heartbreak and stride? Yes. Yes. They're family. They're family. Has any of this research that you've done, is it difficult not to apply it to your own life, the lives of people that you know? I think if you work on human behavior, you just inevitably spend most of your time sitting

at the back of the pub watching people. It's really difficult not to do that. And it's such fun, you just see, and even, you know, I mean, it's amazing if you read something like Jane Austen's book, she is such an acute observer of human behavior. It's unbelievable, you know, considering she was writing from a very narrow social background, you know, whatever it was nearly 300 years ago, you know, I mean, her observations of the foibles of human behavior, particularly in the mating arena, are just electric. And this is what makes the films that, you know, the kind of costume dramas that they

do have her novels so successful, you know, they're just such acute observations on, you know, the little things that bother people about relationships. She was an anthropologist, I guess. She has to rank as, before anybody even thought of the name, anthropology, she has to rank as the founding mother. I may have lost my heart, but not my self-control. And now if you're in the pub and you see people on a date, can you tell, by the way, they kiss whether or not they've got fireworks?

Or if you're watching like Love Island or something. I would give it an eight out of ten, strong kiss. It was very wet and voluptuous. Oh God, not that. You're the bachelor. Yes and no. I think it's probably hard to tell. I mean, there are, I mean, this is, I mean, it actually is really very hard to tell because

in many ways the two sexes behave quite differently in those sort of contexts. So women are much more attentive when they're meeting, even just meeting a boy for the first time. And this causes a lot of problems, I think, for boys, because boys are not that great in terms of sexual skills. Really? You're okay. This signals the girls are going to, girls kind of have this way of being very attentive

to you and, you know, sort of paying close attention when they're not really interested. Straight, cis, non-binary, LGBTQ, if you have ever been on a date and thought, wow. That went amazing. And then they ghost you, well, this might be because one never knows how an ego is going to take rejection in real time. So to play it safe, you might just pretend to be interested and also more romantically and optimistically. Dr. Dunbar explains.

You know, when you first meet somebody, you kind of don't know really whether they're the right person or not. So the last thing you want to do is kind of put them off. You want to kind of keep them interested a bit, or keep them interested long enough that you can assess the inner self as it were and figure out whether they're the right person for you or not. Do they see the world the way you do? Do they have the same kind of moral and political views as you?

Do they have the same interest? Do they like the same music? Do they have the same sense of humor? All these kind of boxes that you would like to have ticked. And it takes a long time to find out all these details. So you need to invest quite a lot of time. It turns out that the more boxes you have ticked of that kind, the longer the relationship will last.

Really? You do want to make sure, you know, you don't want to take a complete duffer. I don't know what that means. Yeah, I looked it up and duffer is an incompetent or stupid person. And I'm not British, but I don't think that's a compliment or a box you want to check in your dream date. So you need to check out this person and make sure that they do tick your boxes for you. Or at least as much as possible because there's no mis-right or mis-right.

There's no such thing as perfection. Oh, no. Okay. Maybe there is somewhere, but there's sort of somewhere in the, I don't know how many of us are other on the planet now, seven billion or something. Yeah. So I make three and a half billion of each sex. So somewhere in that three and a half billion, there is Mr. or Mis-Right.

But, you know, you're never going to find them. That's many lifetimes of searching. Oh, God. This is like a Morrissey song. Romantic, but incredibly depressing. So what you do is you do exactly as Jane Austen says, right? Yeah. We're all there looking for Mr. Darcy because, you know, he has the chiseled features and

the cultured family background and the biggest state and all that kind of thing. But only one person is going to get Mr. Darcy. Right? So what are the rest of you do? The rest of us have to settle for the cure. The great problem is, you know, all of us in the end settle for a compromise because otherwise you will never find anybody. You'll always be rejecting them.

It's not quite matching up to your levels of perfection. And if you accept a kind of compromise, there's always a risk that it's kind of not going to work as well as you'd hoped. That's life. But what about our early evaluations can help lead us toward a partner who's right for us? Can we tell from making out with someone whether or not like this could be long term? I think so. But this is the end product of a long process of courtship in effect.

In other words, if you look at what happens during courtship, normally it sort of breaks down into a series of stages. And at each stage you kind of explore the qualities of the person before you. And then you just hold off a moment and go, should I pull out here? Or should I go to the next level? Right. Now those levels tend to start with distance cures, so vision. So do they look pretty or do they look handsome according to the respect of sexes?

Are they attractive? And then it moves into a sort of conversational mode, I think, where you're now close enough to talk to them, so you're now picking up on all the cultural boxes, what I call the seven pillars of friendship. There are seven dimensions, which are a bit like a supermarket barcode on your forehead. It's a verbal supermarket barcode. There are also things you like and dislike and the languages you speak and all these kind of things that make up this complex of cultural elements that tick your boxes or

don't tick your boxes according to your personal interests. Okay, quick aside. I looked up Dr. Dunbar's seven pillars of friendship and essentially things that make us bond with others are, one, growing up in the same place, especially during the core teenage years, two, speaking the same language, three, having the same education, four, enjoying the same type of hobbies, five, sharing the same moral or political point of view, six, having a similar sense of humor, and seven, sharing the same musical taste, just in case you need some metrics by which you can judge strangers before you sniff them.

But having decided that they meet most of your requirements at that point, you kind of move into a bit closer, which is why kind of old fashioned dancing was very suitable because when you're sort of couple dancing, waltzing and all this kind of thing, you're now into breathing territory and you can have a good sniff. I smell nice. I'm going to check the immune system from a little distance, close enough. Here's the interesting thing. We often think of perfumes as sort of designed to obscure all the horrible bodily smells

that you have. In fact, it's actually quite the reverse. Really? Yeah. The perfumes you like, they're very, very, very personal to you. They actually are the ones closest matched to your own personal bodily smell. So what you're doing is enhancing your natural body. So if you tend to gravitate toward fruity ones or musky ones, that's more an amplification

of your own sense. Yes. Yes. So that's your own natural body odor, not the kind of sweaty armpits. You probably do want to cover up. Right. Your natural sense. And that's why there are so many different scents.

This is why I try and tell guys, you should never buy a girl perfume. You'll get it wrong because you'll buy the one you like and it may not be the one that she likes because it doesn't match her natural body sense. Yeah. And then once you've kind of gone to that point, at the next point, you can try a little kissing, I think is the answer, because that gives you another sort of look into, peer to their soul in a sort of taste sort of way. Taste and smell are kind of really one and the same thing in the end.

If you're happy with that, then take the brakes off. Take the brakes off. That should be someone's tinder bile. Now, how are you studying this? Are you behind one-way glass with a clipboard and getting people drunk? Are you having people fill out surveys? How do you study this? Everything we've done by and large, on kissing anyway, has been by surveys or offering people

vignettes. Little vignettes. Here's Jim, a little bit about Jim and how good a kisser he is, and here's Fred, a little bit about Fred, which do you prefer, that kind of thing. This has sort of backed off a lot of work we did on make-choice strategies, which are done by looking at Lonely Hearts ads in the days before Tinder arrived, where people kind of, in those old newspaper ads where you would say a little bit about yourself and a little bit about who you were looking for, they were very, very nice little summaries of what people

actually had in mind, and sometimes also how they carefully didn't say things which they thought might be unhelpful. Such as? Where they lived, if it was kind of down market, so if you looked at London ads, because the London Post codes, the ZIP codes, I suppose it's true, any big city really, they're a kind of up market ZIP codes and down market ZIP codes, and you never, ever saw down market ones, but you often saw up market ones. Really?

Oh, that's interesting. There's little stuff, things like that, and most of the time you wouldn't even notice it. It took us a long time to realize that that was what was happening. Uptown, Gabby. When you're showing people vignettes and you're like, here's Jim, here's Fred, this is what kind of kisser they are, how do you determine what a good kisser is, because I think anyone who's dated more than one person has kissed a good kisser and has been subjected to a

bad one. Like how do you determine that? We carefully tried to avoid it. We just left it up to the imagination of the subjects, right? I guess in these kind of things, you are trying to elicit people's natural responses, so if you're too specific often, that just doesn't give them the freedom of imagination for themselves. So you have to leave it up to them to write their own like romance novel in their mind. So Dr. Dunbar mentioned a wonderful Austrian anthropologist, Carl Grammer, whose career

has been spent doing observational studies of courtship behavior of humans by gathering data, going to a disco, if you will, and watching and taking note of how people are interacting. And I was like, no, people don't do this. And Dr. Dunbar was like, yes, they do. He's done it. He's done science in the club. We've done stuff in nightclubs on dancing and on conversations, and those are all being done on smartphones.

Smartphone is just a computer, basically, isn't it? So you can upload software that you would normally have on an iPad or something like that, and you can just press buttons and everything gets recorded. So you're coding data sets, but it looks like you're just like texting. Yeah, sending text. And you're really boring because you're just sitting in the corner sending text. So why would you want to go and ask them for a text? Oh, my God.

Now, what about long-term partners? Do people kind of stop kissing after a while? Should they continue kissing? Or once they've sized someone up and they've decided to be with them, are they still sniffing each other? Yes, I think so. I think that has to be true. I mean, I suppose when you get incredibly old, maybe not, or maybe you do. I don't know.

I haven't got there yet. But also, you know, kissing and smell tell you a lot about somebody's health. And that's kind of important, too. That's actually one of the cues that people who worked on that side of things have really shown are quite important. It's kind of grossly obvious. Somebody has got bad breath. You head for the bar as quickly as possible.

You don't want to be with them. And, you know, it's because, you know, it's kind of indicative of general physical health as much as anything. So you tend not to want, unless you're an angel in disguise, anxious to look after them. You know, this sort of second thing. Yeah. Okay, side note. I'm sorry. I have to tell the story.

Once a long-term boyfriend ordered a cream of roasted garlic soup at our favorite restaurant. This was probably 15 years ago. I still remember how searingly painful it was to smell him for at least a week after. It wasn't his fault. You know what? I just looked up the restaurant I had to. One Yelper wrote about the soup, quote, I thought I would be in heaven, but a demon from hell came knocking.

The garlic was so intense, I literally kept wondering if I had ingested Drano. That restaurant is now closed. R.I.P., you. Now, other causes of halitosis in case you're wondering that could ruin your smooch game, dry mouth, which also causes morning breath, barf, gum infections, diseases such as some cancers, intestinal infections, acid reflux, or having a foreign body such as a piece of food lodged in the nostril, which is a good indicator that maybe you don't want to trust this person with your babies. Whatever.

When you're looking for a romantic partner, it's kind of not ideal for them. Right. Now, why do you think we're not utterly repulsed by kissing, given how dangerous it could be from like a viral or bacterial standpoint? That's because I think in the past, even the relatively close historical past, you didn't do these kinds of things very often with people outside your community. Right. So as part of the courtship and sexual activities that you engage in with people in general,

pretty much most of that is confined to your community. So you all share the same diseases and have the immunities to them, right? You tend not to get kissing probably being anything like is common between people from different communities, because usually that means they just killed all your mails and carried you off as war booty. Yeah, no, thanks. This is not an ideal relationship. No.

Even the kissing is part of that kind of process of courtship leading up to sex. This is kind of probably not the ideal situation for you. So that means most of your kind of expectations really in your psyche is built around the fact that this is all part of your little local community. And I think that's probably so hard-wired in us now because we've lived with that for literally millions of years. Yeah. Have people been kissing for millions of years or is it relatively recent?

That is a complete unknown. We will never know because it's not the sort of thing that gets fossilized. It's very hard to say. I mean, I think most of these behaviors we have, you can kind of trace back to their primate origins in some form and primates will do these things. So things like laughter, you know, we share laughter with great apes, but it's slightly different the way we do it. And in turn that laughter, the localization, this sort of pant-like localization we give

when we laugh is really the old-world monkey play localization. It's a play invitation. And it's just been sort of exaggerated and kind of ritualized progressively leading up to the way we use it now. So it's, you know, most of our kind of behaviors have those sort of obvious origins in something primate. And that's true of something like kissing. I think it's done much more extensively by us.

I mean, even the Bonobos, the so-called pygmy chimpanzees from the Congo who are the kind of less aggressive and more friendly chimpanzees, if you like. Bonobos, by the way, are the sexy, horned-up, free-spirited monkeys. Kind of like your friend who comes to brunch in a loose sundress with no bra. And you're like, good for you, girl. That's inspiring. And are the only species of any species, certainly of monkeys and apes anyway, of mammals, that have copulate face-to-face rather than front to back, as they were, in the way that all

of the animals do. Even they don't engage in huge amounts of kissing. They do a little bit, but it's not. Nobody's in the human league. Wow. Because Bonobos are known as the most amorous, really, of the... Yeah. Yeah, that's right.

But it's for that reason. It's because they have face-to-face copulation, and that's really very rare. Then their behavior is really weird. They have sex with everybody. Oh, yeah. I've heard. It's like Burning Man over in Camp Bonobos. Well, it's worse because it's Burning Man with children.

That's a good point. I have some questions from listeners. Can I ask you? Yes. Okay. But before we get to your questions, oligies patrons from patreon.com. A dollar a month gets you in the club. A few quick words from sponsors of the show who make it possible for us to donate to a

charity of the oligists choosing each week. And Dr. Dan Barr's grandmother was a Los Angelino, and he asked that we find and donate to a charity locally, which helps seniors. So a donation this week went to ALA, which is affordable living for the aging, which provides affordable housing and supportive services and alternate housing options for low income and formerly unsheltered seniors that even help match senior roommates. How amazing is that? ALA gives seniors in Los Angeles secure home environments and the affordable housing they

need and deserve. So that donation was made in Dr. Dan Barr's honor, and it was made possible by sponsors, who you may hear about now. Okay. Your questions open wide for some answers. Renee Jennings, who's the first time question asked, we usually associate kissing with romance, but what is going on with the European way of greeting people with a kiss on each cheek? Do we know where they came from?

Oh, that's just standard and Maori nose rubbing. Oh. Right? You're just sniffing really. I mean, a lot of the Europeans don't even do a sort of smacky kiss sound. It's just a head on one side, head on the other side. If you really call it three times minimum, but it really is just getting close enough to be able to breathe in the spirit of the other person and see who they really are.

And people do it with babies. I mean, women especially do it with babies. You can see they pick babies up and bring them up to their face. And I've heard women say, I just love the smell of newborn babies. Yeah. And you go, oh, yeah. You're just checking out who this is. Come on.

So I guess dogs do it on the other end and humans do it on the face? Yeah. Yes. And that's very primate. I mean, monkeys, particularly old world monkeys and apes are fascinated by each other's babies and they're forever picking them up and nuzzling them and sniffing them and checking out. Basically, that's just checking out, you know, are you in my family or the other family? Mm-hmm.

Oh, and side note, Swedish researchers found that the scent of dirty baby hats released dopamine in study participants kind of like drugs would. And now they're looking into making a baby head nasal spray to treat depression. But what is the smell that we're huffing off of a baby? Is it old milk? Is it new skin? Is it promise? Hope?

Nope. It's something called Prety. And according to the internet, it comes from the Vernix caseosa, which is the whitish cheese-like substance that coats a newborn's skin at birth. Okay. So it is a little cheesy to want to smell a newborn. Also, patron Alyssa asked about kissing newborns and giving them diseases and I looked this up in an article on babyology, said that if you have a cold sore, don't kiss a baby.

Also just probably don't kiss any babies if they're not your babies because you could be asymptomatic of so many things. Also wash your hands before you touch a baby. Now, if it's your own baby, I don't know what to tell you. It's your baby. You do what you like. I kiss my dog's face constantly and I love her disgusting musky bullion breath. It's like a drug.

So gross. So precious. Jess Swan asked, is it more common to close eyes when kissing or is it different in different cultures? I have no experience in this. I don't know. So Dr. Dunbar said, in his observation, women tend to close their eyes more and some research suggests that this is because of input overload.

So in order to concentrate on tactile senses, you might have to just throw visuals offline. Just eyes. I'm going to put you on pause for a minute. Mouth is driving this boat. If you close your eyes, you won't know, will you? No. Boys tend not to. Really?

That's interesting. I have no idea whether that's peculiar to kind of Western and European cultures that were, whether that's true of other cultures elsewhere in the world. There are a ton of people who asked if there is a scientific term for French kissing and why is the French that kissed this way? I believe in long, slow, deep, soft wet kisses that last three days. I don't know whether it's the same term as used in any language other than English. It may be just in English being rude about the French.

Okay, I thought that might leave some of you horny for answers. So on behalf of patrons Anna Elizabeth, Ruby Johnstone, Vikria Wilson, Vince Alasha, Anna Valerie, Hannah Black, El McCall, Heather Densemore, Caitlyn Berger, Audrey Weber, Bennett Gerber, Rachel Ames, Haley Everson, Robert O'Neill, and Kristen Heine, I looked up kissing doula francès and sloppy tongue kissing, aka tonsil hockey, and it came to be known as Frenching from World War I soldiers who returned from Europe and they were kissing on their spouses in a way that they thought mirrored the lusty ways of the sexually liberated French.

And the French are like, what are we going to call it? Us kissing? No. And after decades of calling it a lover's kiss or to kiss with the tongues, clunky at best. Finally, in 2014, they have an official included in the dictionary term. It's galochée, which takes its name from an ice skate because it's all slippery. Hopefully it's not that cold. So Escargot, also slippery, already taken.

Although most cultures kind of kiss on the lips as it were, I don't know if all cultures around the world necessarily engage in sort of tongue kissing as it were. Yeah. I mean, I feel like the French have kind of made out well with it. I mean, I feel like it's headed up being a boon. What about some people asked why they might not like kissing? Are there people who just aren't really into it? I think it probably depends on how tactile you are.

So people differ on a kind of dimension of attachment in ways known as the attachment scale. I mean, they have several dimensions to the attachment scale, but essentially they're measuring your warmth and coolness in your personal relationships with other people. So at the hot end, this is all very kind of Italian-ate, and people are always putting their arms around you and giving you big hugs all the time. And then they're kind of at the cool end, this is the, don't touch me, I'm British. In fact, I mentioned distinguishes between people who have a high density of endorphin

receptors in the brain, the low density. So it's like people who have a low density of endorphin receptors fill those up very quickly with a small amount of physical contact. Oh, side note, April is National Autism Awareness Month, and some folks on the autism spectrum have varied sensory sensitivities. So for example, some researchers think a light touch might feel uncomfortable because different nerve fibers carry different types of touch. So touch with pressure is carried really fast via type A nerve fibers, whereas light stroking

types of touch moves more slowly across those C tactile fibers Dr. Dunbar mentioned earlier, and it registers in emotional centers of the brain. So some folks on the autism spectrum report that kissing feels like sensory overload. Others say that light touch is uncomfortable. Others are perfectly fine with both and enjoy both. It's very individual and the research is ongoing. But Dr. Dunbar notes that a partner's sensitivity is always something to consider. One of the common features of autism is you really don't like physical contact.

It's really disturbing for you. So this is not a difference between the sexes per se, this is just different styles of sociality. But at the end of the day, the question I'm kind of inclined to ask is how many people have you kissed, right? Most of us have not kissed vast numbers of people. So the likelihood of kissing somebody who doesn't match your style and requirements is pretty high. You have to get through an inordinate number of them in order to go, no, no, this one's

a good one. So statistically speaking, there's a fair chance that the first, I don't know, 30 or whatever, let's say, turn out to be unsuitable from your point of view, perfectly suitable to other people. That's just bad luck, I'm afraid. Bad luck but good germs? Now a ton of patrons, including Heather Densmore, Ally Smith, Kristen Donne-Urban, and first-time question-askers, Chinoviato, Hanna C., Charlotte, and Vespa Clerks asked, in Vespa's words,

is it true that kissing might have originated to share immunities between partners or was I lied to? So they wanted to know about microscopic make-out exchanges. If you kiss more people, would you have a stronger microbiome? You're certainly exchanging, I mean, exchanging microbiome constantly, you know, every time you contact, physically touch somebody, so, you know, and obviously much more is being exchanged through kissing. So the answer is yes, and people who live together and from the same family tend to have much

more similar microbiomes. Your microbiome has turned out to be much more important for you than anybody ever imagined. It affects your health, it affects your, how you develop psychologically as a child, cognitively, it affects, you know, your psychological balance as an adult. For more on this, see the microbiology episode from November 2018 with Dr. Elaine Shou wherein we learned that 90% of our serotonin is made in our sloshy, squishy, pooey guts. So if you're in a bad mood and have a bug up your butt, it might just be because you don't have the right bugs up your butt.

Yeah, so your partner can literally rub off on you. Yes, your friends do terrible things to you. Because it's some very nice research by some guys who are then at Harvard, most of them have moved on there, sharing that, you know, your likelihood of becoming depressed or becoming happy, giving up smoking, becoming obese, et cetera, et cetera, almost anything you care to look at was determined by whether your friends, your people you sort of spent most time with, were in that state or not. So if they, you know, if your three nearest closest friends were happy, you were much

more likely to become happy, you know, in a year's time, because if they got depressed, you were going to get not just your microbiota that you're spreading around the place, it's your psyche as well. So not only can your invisible critters be contagious, but your big moods are too. How? Why? So I checked this out and I found a paper by UC San Diego and Harvard researchers titled, quote, Dynamic Spread of Happiness in a Large Social Network, Longitudinal Analysis Over

20 Years in the Framington-Hart Study, which read, quote, emotional states can be transferred directly from one individual to another by mimicry and emotional contagion, perhaps by the copying of emotionally relevant body actions, particularly facial expressions, so people can catch emotional states they observe in others over timeframes, ranging from seconds to weeks. So for example, the study continued, students randomly assigned to a mildly depressed roommate became increasingly depressed over a three month period, although silver lining, happiness is more contagious than sadness.

Now the study went on to say that the relationship between people's happiness extends up to three degrees of separation. For example, to the friends of one friend's friends, that's halfway to Kevin Bacon. So other studies on friendship and happiness report that loneliness can be toxic. So in this weird, unprecedented time of self-isolation, just try to take time to chat with friends online or FaceTime or Zoom them or scream at your neighbor from over a fence 40 feet away, talk to the birds or your cat. So if you are feeling lonely, just know you're not alone in any way.

A few people, Rachel Weiss and Zoe Jane, wanted to know if you had a good first kiss story. My God, that was before the dinosaurs didn't stick back. I can't even remember what it was like. Mine was very slobbery. I remember being like, I don't think that's how that's supposed to go. I was 16, black hair, combat boots, fully goth and very unaware of technique. Also, I was so nervous. I kept gulping air and then I burped in his face.

Sorry, high school boyfriend. I'm sure that's all our first experience. Does every one, Jessica Janssen wants to know, because you're an expert at behavior and court, you know, courtship and kissing, does everyone think you're an expert at kissing? Is that expected of you? Well, I'm still waiting to be asked. One day, Dr. Dunbar, one day. So, despite his wealth of published papers on the subject, this man will not kiss and tell.

He is a fortress of make-outery. It's admirable. It's frustrating, but it is admirable. Any movies or TV shows that have had really spot-on or really terrible courtship or kissing scenes? Off the top of my head, it's kind of hard to answer. Yeah. I mean, I still think, in the end, probably the most brilliant piece of relationship stuff ever written was Friends, and it's in the sort of Jane Austen level of kind of observation

of people's foibles and stuff like that. And in a funny sort of way, even the, I can't think of the program now, it's the science one. Oh, Big Bang Theory? Big Bang Theory, right? It's just the dynamics of how the guys work together in that is so acute, you know. It's the writing of that and the observation of just human behavior is as good as they're observating the writers, the scriptwriters, understanding and writing on the science. And they do some of the most extraordinarily good science popularization, as probably the

cream of the cream. At the same time, they're human kind of dynamics, and just it's beautiful to watch, you know. It's marvelous. I just want to say a quick hello to Big Bang Theory showrunner and young Sheldon co-creator Steve Miloro, who is himself an oligite. Hey, Steve. What's up? Hey.

Also, for folks who have seen both Friends and the Big Bang Theory, does anyone feel like those two apartments connected by a landing kind of share a vibe? I always did, and out of curiosity and poor time management, I just looked it up. And Friends and the Big Bang Theory, are you ready for this? Had the same production designer, a guy by the name of John Schaffner. He was also responsible for the iconic Rattan sofa and Floridian ease of the Golden Girl set. He had a great job and he did a great job.

Anyway, moving on. The last questions I always ask her, what do you hate about your work the most? What's the most annoying thing about your job or about research? What's the worst? Well, research is always hard work, right? So collecting data is extremely tedious. Goes on for, you have to do it for hours and hours and hours and stuff. That's the sort of one of the downsides of it.

It's a kind of benefit that what you're watching is something that itself is entertaining. But I think the real irritating side of it is just trying to get stuff published. Because, you know, you're having to deal with people who seem not to live on this planet when you try and publish your beautiful new data and often it's because it's left field for them. In a way, because of where we work, which is, you know, on human behavior and social evolution in mammals in particular, you just sometimes wonder whether these people have relationships.

And what about your favorite thing about it? Oh, it's just such fun, right? You know, I mean, it really is. And also, I mean, it's a sort of curiosity thing about how other people behave. But on the other hand, it's really like sitting in front of an enormous jigsaw puzzle because you're dealing with social evolution. You're not just dealing with some tiny little gene that does, you know, when it works, does this and when it doesn't work, doesn't do this.

You're dealing with these complex interactions between genetics, physiology, behavior, ecology, history, relationships of the moment, the brain doing stuff up there. And this is all this massive, great kind of jigsaw puzzle going on in front of you. And you sort of fiddle away a bit down in this corner and then you do a bit in that corner. And then gradually the whole picture suddenly kind of appears in front of you. And well, you know, perhaps literally one day, everything suddenly seems to fall into place and you just go, wow, that is amazing.

So you get to have these real breakthroughs when all the data fits. Yeah. Especially when there's no obvious reason why two bits of data should fit together. When you actually look at them from the right angle, as it were, suddenly you go, oh, actually, they do. That aha moment, finally at last, it's almost like when you find someone that you actually fall in love with, I'm sure. Absolutely.

You know, our scientists are just in love with our data. That's all. And what about the work that you've done on social relationships? Do you think that it's made your relationships better in your life? Or do you look too closely at them? In some ways, maybe, because you kind of have to have to think about relationships and why people are behaving in a certain or responding in a certain way. But also, there is a sense in which the less you know, the better.

Yeah. Because these things, you know, if you know too much, you try and do it, force it, and then it doesn't work. Right. The most important thing about relationships in the end is just going with the flow and letting it take its own course and it'll work, and it'll work naturally. And this is why I get very, very irritated with mostly guides who come to me with I've

got a new app or improving people's relationships, you know, and usually it's just reminding you when their birthdays are and things like that, how long would you be involved? And I go, no way. This is a completely pointless exercise, because, you know, if you try and put in all those kind of artificial memory things, it's just going to screw the whole thing up. In the end, your relationship with somebody is about your wanting to be there with them. Not, oh, God, it's Monday and I haven't said hello yet. Yeah.

Oh, so true. Well, thank you so much for all of the work that you've done. It's nice to know that people can just sniff each other, slobber, and then relax, see what happens. Exactly, but don't do it with strangers. Thank you so, so much for doing this. I hope this wasn't too painful. I so appreciate your time.

I know how so you're so busy and I just I realize that I fully begged you. So thank you for doing it. You did. No, your pleasure, my pleasure. Well, get some sleep. Thank you for staying up late. OK, very good. Bye.

So find smart people and gently beg them to hang out on Skype and ask them stupid questions for the greater good of relationships everywhere, including mostly right now in your homes. Thank you to everyone who is sheltering in place right now. You are literally saving lives. Thank you. Links to Dr. Dunbar's TED Talk and books are up on my website at alleyworn.com slash oligies slash philometology.

I'll put a link to that in the show notes. And we are at oligies on Instagram and Twitter. I'm Ali Ward with 1L on both. So let's be internet friends, shall we? Also, bleeped episodes for kids are free on my website, alleyward.com. Thank you to former intern, now employee Caleb Patton for working on those. Also, free transcripts, including of super recent episodes are up on my site. Thank you so much to professional transcriber Emily White for

heading up a volunteer army of transcribers to work on those. And I'm going to shout out a few of them right now because they so deserve it. Thank you transcribers Lauren Fenton, Deb Ward, Katie Coast, Mickey McGrath, Hannah Dent, Emily Dawn, Asuka Dejica and Rika Eringa and Lisa Zahn and Florence Yuan for working on the transcribing guide. And of course, OG, old timers, Mike Melsior and Wendy Fick. Y'all have been doing it since the beginning. So thank you all for making those episodes accessible to deaf and hard of

hearing oligites and for people who just want to look up what we may have said. Y'all are amazing. And thank you to Aaron Talbert for adminning the oligies podcast Facebook group and being a pal since we were four. I love you. Thanks, Shannon Feltes and Bonnie Dutch of the Comedy Podcast. You are that for managing oligiesmerge.com. They are sisters.

They're hilarious. Thank you to assistant editor Jared Sleeper of the Mental Health Podcast, my good bad brain. He also does quarantine calisthenics on Instagram Live at noon Pacific every day, sometimes in full character of gold prospectors or leprechauns. He's a delight. Thank you to lead editor and host of the kitty themed per cast in the Dino pod. See Jurassic right.

Stephen Ray Morris for stitching these episodes together and keeping the oligies trains run it on time. You are among the finest of audio engineers to toot. I'm lucky to have you. So Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote and performed the theme music. And if you listen to the very end, you know, I tell you a secret issue. This week, I wasn't sure where to pop this in and aside, but I need to get it off my chest.

I need someone to do us all a solid hop on Wikipedia and change the entry for something that rhymes with Schmeskemo Schmiss. Because number one, that E word is considered a slur by a lot of indigenous circumpolar people and Inuit folk. And also because the Wikipedia image of the people doing it are two white folks and it was uploaded from Texas. So can we get that changed? OK, second secret.

I have made out with two like semi celebrities and they were the worst kissers of my life ever, ever. This is years apart. Just a tongue in your mouth like a woodpecker. Just beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, and you're like, what? How has no one told you that's not good? Anyway, obviously short lived. One of them put his tongue in my ear in a restaurant.

That was the last time I saw him. Let me tell you, no bueno. So before you get all moony eyed at Harry Styles or Brad Pitt, just know. Number one, neither of those weren't the guys. But you never know, man, just because someone's a total fox does not mean they know how to use their mouth. Yikes. Wow.

I am kissing and I'm telling, but I'm not telling all of the information. So I feel like it doesn't count as a kiss and tell. Anyway, if you're in lockdown and you're missing people and smooches, just think about the 80 million bacteria that you're not getting in your mouth. Also think of all the people who are breaking up because they have to live together so much going to be a lot of single people after this. And then there's going to be a lot of smooching, just saying. OK, bye bye.