The Tim Ferriss Show - #598: Primatologist Isabel Behncke on Play, Sexual Selection, and Lessons from Following Bonobos for 3,000 Kilometers in the Jungles of Congo

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Starting point is 00:04:56 Go to headspace.com slash Tim today. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. I'm very excited about this. We're going to be talking about a whole slew of different topics, a wide spectrum of my personal interests, but not expertise. My guest today is Isabel Benke. Let me spell that for you per her Twitter handle, at Isabel, I-S-A-B-E-L, last name B-E-H-N-C-K-E. Isabel is a field primatologist and applied evolutionary ethologist who studies social behavior in animals, that includes us humans, to understand our urgent challenges with each other and the planet. Isabel grew up at the foothills of the Andes Mountains in Chile, where she developed a lifelong love for nature and wildness, as well as culture and the arts.

Starting point is 00:06:09 An explorer scientist, she is the first South American to follow great apes in the wild of Africa. She walked more than 3,000 kilometers, for us Yanks, that's roughly 1,864 miles, quite a few, in the jungles of Congo for her field research observing the social lives of wild bonobo apes, who together with chimpanzees are our closest living relatives. Isabel documented how bonobos play freely in nature and has extended this research to show how human apes play at Burning Man, for instance, other festivals, and in everyday life. Isabel has observed how play is at the root of creativity, social bonding, and healthy development, findings that have relevance in education, innovation, complex risk assessment, freedom, and many, many other places. Isabel, we'll see how I can screw up these titles and,

Starting point is 00:06:55 of course, decrees, which is always a challenge. Isabel holds a Bachelor's of Science in Zoology and a Master's of Science in nature conservation, both from University College London, a master of philosophy and MPhil in human evolution from Cambridge University, and a PhD, although I think it's a doctor, Dr. Phil, that's not Dr. Phil, as in the daytime show host, something like that, PhD in evolutionary anthropology from Oxford University. She has won several distinctions for her public communication and knowledge integration, which ranges in format from TED, which was also most recently on the grand stage. So congratulations for that. Wired, the UN, BBC, where I think she won,

Starting point is 00:07:36 or was nominated as having one of the most interesting interviews of 2020. I think she ranked number three. And Nat Geo to rural schools in Patagonia and traveling buses of schoolchildren in Cago. She is a senior fellow of the Grutter Institute, a TED fellow, and currently advises the Chilean government working on long-term strategies in science, technology, innovation, and knowledge for Chile's president. She can be found in Chile and New York City. You can find her on Twitter, like I mentioned, at Isabel Benke, and on Instagram, Isabel underscore Benke, B-E-H-N-C-K-E. Now we can get into it. Isabel, nice to see you. Hello, Tim. Very nice to see you.

Starting point is 00:08:17 So we're going to bounce all over the place, and we've met before, so I am excited to dig into all sorts of different stories, all sorts of background, and cover a lot of things that we have not talked about. So let's start with Bako and Jiro. Who are Bako and Jiro? Maybe you could paint a picture for us. I love this question. It was August 2010, and Baku and Giro are two males, and one of them was kicking the other in the nuts. Where I like to start all my interviews. Gently. Gently.

Starting point is 00:09:02 There was no harm done. And don't do this at home. I should have started saying that. There was also some biting and other forms of physical touch, which may have looked to an untrained eye like fighting but Bako and Jiro were not fighting they were playing and Bako and Jiro were in the depths of the jungles in Congo and they are they were not humans but bonobo males and this observation of these two males playing was to me really extraordinary because let me give you some context after the kicking in the nuts comment. Bonobos are, together with chimpanzees, our living closest relatives. We have many other evolutionary relatives, but they're dead, they're extinct.

Starting point is 00:10:02 So for us primatologists, it's really amazing to be able to observe the naturally occurring behavior of apes in the wild it's uh difficult for many reasons but uh but they are still some alive which is great and i was following this wild group of bonobos for a long time, for many months. And of course, they don't usually meet other communities. And we can get into that. Why is it that typically interactions are within a community? And then suddenly the study group, you know, they have this way of traveling, which seems very, very intentional.

Starting point is 00:10:42 And you can tell it when you observe it. They suddenly kind of switch on to, okay, we're going somewhere. And they cross the river, which typically demarcates their territory. And I was like, oh, God, where are they going? These guys are going somewhere, like very intentionally. And they went into the territory of the neighboring community. So I was like, whoa, something's going to happen here because it doesn't happen very often.

Starting point is 00:11:07 And in chimpanzees, when chimpanzees meet other communities, typically they try not to because it's aggressive. And you can have neighboring males that patrol the territory and they will kill a male of the other territory, of the other community, sorry. And sometimes not only kill but also maim. For instance, they will take out their genitals. It's very, very, that's why this Bonobo observation, I think, is poignant because there's this joke I cannot, okay, I'll ask you.

Starting point is 00:11:40 What's the most vulnerable part of the male anatomy? Well, I think. Well think it's a leading question. Yes, I would imagine, you know, having a bonobo pull and poke my genitals would make me feel very vulnerable. Yes, right. But that's the point. Really, and I think that's the take home of this story. It is an extremely vulnerable part of the male anatomy. And it's actually used that as such in aggressive interactions so that you actually use it in playful interactions. It's, I think, playing with a line of trust, vulnerability and real life risk that's extremely interesting and gets at the root of what play is. And so these males were playing and they were males from different communities.

Starting point is 00:12:34 So what kind of trust do you need to build in order to have this kind of interaction between males that don't usually live together or are related? Yeah, it's a very unusual greeting among humans, right? To take a trip to Kansas City and walk up to a stranger and grab him by the balls. Please do not do this at home or anywhere. At least of all outside home. Yes. So we're going to come back to bonoboland because we're going to talk a lot about bonobos.

Starting point is 00:13:10 But this, suffice to say, genital play comes up a lot. And you have matriarchs holding on to males by the genitals, walking them around in circles. You have lots and lots of this type of play, and this is not a prescriptive recommendation to anyone out there, but it is interesting. So, we're going to come back to it. I thought I would just rewind for a second because we mentioned a lot of things in your bio. We mentioned applied evolutionary ethologist, for instance. Let's start there. What is an evolutionary ethologist and what is an applied evolutionary ethologist?

Starting point is 00:13:47 Ethology is the study of behavior. I might as well just use behavioral sciences. But I use ethology because it's my own particular field of training. People might be familiar with the work of Conrad Lorenz. I'm not, so. Oh, okay. So Western mythology, animal behavior, comes from a group of people that were in Europe studying animal behavior.

Starting point is 00:14:17 And when they were studying animal behavior, there are pressures and adaptations in other animals that are interesting in themselves, but they also help us think about our own behavior. And so for them, it was very important to observe behavior as naturally occurring in habitats where animals live. So, of course, we can still observe behavior in cages and in zoos and inside homes, and that has its own value. But as ethologists, we try to observe behavior as well in the wild, because when it's interacting with ecology, I think it tells us something very important about the environment in which animals have evolved and what does this tell us about their behavior today.

Starting point is 00:15:05 So that's ethology. And then the word applied, I use it in the sense that I was trained and worked as an ethologist, but almost without wanting or thinking about it, I can't help but think about the world and the problems that we have today. So whenever you think about, say, cooperation, competition, play, aggression, obviously your mind goes, okay, what does this tell us about war and creativity and innovation and so on? So applied is really trying to cross that bridge between science and society. Great answer. Very helpful. Thank you. Alright, so now would Lorenz, I'm thinking, I don't know this

Starting point is 00:15:49 particular name, but would B.F. Skinner have been an overlap in terms of timing or would Skinner have come much later on in terms of looking at, I guess, classical and operant conditioning and things like that yeah so that's a great question i think not only in timing but also in terms of approach so lorenz let me tell you an anecdote about lorenz and we'll go to skinner what was the full name of lorenz conrad with conrad lorenz conrad lz. Great name. Yeah. He was observing birds, and he's most famous for having brought up geese. So he had these incubators with geese eggs, and he discovered in printing, namely, that when the eggs hatched, the first thing that the chicks looked at, if it was him rather than the female, the chicks would imprint on him.

Starting point is 00:16:52 So he effectively, this is not quite what ethologists would do today, right? But we're talking about the origin story. And so he started walking, basically the chicks would follow him. And he learned the vocalization. So he learned to communicate with them and go like, and then they would follow him. And he became like the mother geese. I love that because, of course, again, don't do this at feet and the wings and the mind of another animal as much as you can as the other animal rather than as a human that help you become a better scientist. And so I think Lorenz had that genius and he tried to look at the animals in themselves. Right. And then I guess Skinner, in contrast, was like, we can't understand the inner life

Starting point is 00:17:49 of animals. So we're just going to look at observable behavior. Please correct me if I'm getting any of this wrong. But stick them in a box and then shock them and do various things. And we're just going to clinically take notes on it. So very different, very, very different. Yes, very different. very different approach based on very different assumptions, right? Yes, very different assumptions and actually completely understandable because of course Skinner was trying to do science and he was trying to isolate variables and to do controlled experiments, which is, you know, an essential part of science. So of course Conrad Lorenz did things that today wouldn't be considered proper science either.

Starting point is 00:18:29 I think these guys were experimenting in different ways. And today we have a conciliance and integration of the experimental side of behavior and the naturalistic observations that is kind of exciting. Yeah, totally. And I want to give you credit for a great word consilience i just want to define this for people that is a fucking great word noun agreement between the approaches to a topic of different academic subjects especially science and the humanities there's also a book by eo wilson called consilience that people might

Starting point is 00:19:03 check out it's a bit dense, but consilience is a great word. So thank you for that. Thank you for supporting that. I love that. Absolutely. And I think the contrast of Conrad and B.F. Skinner is interesting on a whole bunch of levels. And it's something that has fascinated me for a long time. For instance, I watched a documentary, I believe the name is NIMH or Project NIMIM, and it spoke to, I want to say, let's just say a field experiment, also with laboratory experiments that was conducted in perhaps the 60s or early 70s. And the premise was attempting to raise a baby chimpanzee as a human. And spoiler alert, it ended up being quite a train wreck but what they observed and when i say they i should be very specific the let's just call it field adoptive parents of this chimpanzee is that

Starting point is 00:19:54 the chimpanzee would exhibit all of these incredible behaviors outside of the lab but as soon as you brought this particular chimp into the lab, they just refused to cooperate or at the very least didn't exhibit these behaviors. So when I'm having conversations with any number of folks, and I love science, I'm very involved with funding science, and they say, well, do they have randomized controlled studies related to X in a laboratory? My answer sometimes is you can't really do it, or it's very, very hard, particularly with, in this case, maybe an obvious example of animal behaviors. So let's jump from there back in time further to Darwin and Humboldt. Now, I expect a lot of

Starting point is 00:20:41 people listening will recognize Darwin, but they may not recognize Humboldt. So if we really rewind the clock, you just give us some of the history, the early history of evolutionary thinking. Because this is also something I don't know a lot about, but it just came up last week in conversation with someone named Noah Feltman, who's been on the podcast, very smart guy. And he raised a couple anecdotes that I had never heard. So take it away. Origins of evolutionary thinking. If you think about evolution, you will picture an old Darwin, old Charles Darwin with a long beard, correct? So like the lone genius that had this great idea which by the way the philosopher daniel dennett says the best idea ever thought was evolution and so let's define what is this like such amazing idea the simple idea that all life is related so evolution really is about how all

Starting point is 00:21:41 life is related and how all life evolves. Everything has an origin. And like King Lear said, nothing comes from nothing. So Darwin himself was the grandson of this extraordinary man who was called Erasmus Darwin. Erasmus Darwin was a polymath. He was a doctor. He was creative. He was a polymath, he was a doctor, he was creative, he was a poet. He is one of the biggest influences on the romantic poets, on Byron and many others.

Starting point is 00:22:20 So Darwin inherited, first of all, these strange influences. And Erasmus Darwin used to hold these meetings in his home they were called the lunar society when they were trying to find out basically about life and creativity and you know as polymaths do. The polymouth happy hour. Let's get to the bottom of all knowledge. Yes. Well, this actually is a big point. The Lunar Society was called like that because they would meet once a month in full moon. And of course, drinking and food sharing was involved. And they had to ride back home.

Starting point is 00:23:01 And so a full moon would actually be a very practical thing to have. Good call. Good call. Good call. Nothing mystical about it. It's just like, no, we're going to be drunk off our asses. We need to be able to see the sidewalk. Oh, yeah. Reality.

Starting point is 00:23:15 Empiricism. And so Erasmus Darwin had in his chariot an emblem called Econcia Omniae in Latin, life comes from the sea. The point what I'm trying to make here is that Darwin himself had ancestors, both intellectual ancestors, but also family ancestors that were thinking about evolution. Often, you know, ideas are in the environment. So that's the family side of Darwin equally or if not more important I think for Darwin was the influence of Alexander von Humboldt von Humboldt is a Prussian aristocrat who was born the same year than Napoleon I think 1769 and he died by the way on 1859 which is the date that darwin published the origin of

Starting point is 00:24:09 species so there's like an interesting evolutionary contingency there and von humboldt he was an explorer a genius another polymath scholar and i above all, which is the point that I want to link between Darwin and Humboldt and the origins of how we think about nature and how we think about evolution, neither of them were white coat lab scientists or just scholars that live within four walls. They were both explorers and they were both adventurers, and they were both naturalists. And this is super important, because I think it's a tradition of thinking

Starting point is 00:24:54 that basically has given us the most important ideas that we have today on evolution and nature. And let me synthesize those ideas. Humboldt leaves Europe and embarks on this extraordinary trip to South America. And of course, I'm not biased, but they were both in trips to South America. Yeah, of course. Let me point that out. I'm not biased, but let me tell you. Exactly. But let me tell you how you... Where in South America?

Starting point is 00:25:27 So, well, all over the place, but not quite. Humboldt goes to Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador, and he climbs Chimborazo, and basically he does an Andean route. He never got to Chile, unfortunately. But Darwin spent around three years in Chile, the voyage of the Beagle that we can talk about separately. But the five-year voyage of the Beagle, three years-ish were in Chile,

Starting point is 00:25:52 which I think is super important. Basically, he spent a lot more time there than in Galapagos. I need to say that. Quick question. Why did von Humboldt choose to go where that expedition ended up going? First, the new world, in a nutshell. The excitement of the new world. First of all, he needed to get out of Europe because his mother had very high hopes for him as a civil servant. So when his father died, he had an inheritance and he decided to spend it funding his own adventure. Mom must have loved that. Yeah, no, right.

Starting point is 00:26:33 Because she was like socially, I don't want to say snob, but ish. She was high society, right? Aristocrat. Yeah, exactly. Old world, like Brahmin. Yeah, it's no joke. No, exactly. Old world, like Brahman. Yeah, it's no joke. No, exactly. So it's like, you, you're going to give me grandchildren that have a certain position, right?

Starting point is 00:26:53 Yeah. And he's like, oh. I'm going to Venezuela, mom. See you when I see you. Exactly. I have my own funds. But I mean, it's a longer story. And if you want to read about this, I would really recommend the most fantastic book I've read in the last few years by Andrea Wolff.

Starting point is 00:27:14 It's called The Invention of Nature. And there are several books about von Humboldt, but in Andrea Woolf's research, she brings together the adventure, the naturalist, and also the influences. So what I think to me is amazing as a scientist is that we all know about Darwin and we can see his image. Immediately you go like, oh yeah, old guy with beard. But who is Humboldt and why we don't actually know more about him? Humboldt was the direct intellectual father of Darwin. Darwin was reading Humboldt's diaries of his explorations in South America. And when Darwin gets invited to go on the Beagle, he was actually thinking of Humboldt.

Starting point is 00:28:03 And in Patagonia, when he's actually, he's called, he's a very bad sailor. He hates being on board, which is another topic. This is Darwin? This is Darwin. He would puke and, you know, get seasick. Which I think it was good because then it meant that he had to go inland. That's a different topic. But the point is that he's writing his Voyage of the Beagle diaries and citing Herr Humboldt saying, thank you.

Starting point is 00:28:29 If it weren't for you, I would have not taken this voyage, which is amazing how this kind of lineages and of influence. So you have on one hand Humboldt that invents, inverted commas, the modern concept of nature because he really invents the concept of ecology, how things are interrelated. So the field of complex systems, the field of ecosystems as complex systems, I really think takes a lot from Humboldt because, and this is important, see the British tradition is about taxonomy and organization in boxes, lineos. But whether it was because he was German and also humbled as a young man, had spent time in Jena with Goethe and with the creatives and poets of the early Romantics. And so I think that experience really opened his mind to the future scientist

Starting point is 00:29:27 that he would become. Wow. Just casually hanging out with Goethe. Man, what an era. I know. I know. Just going out to coffee with Goethe. Oh my God. Yeah. As one does. Yeah, as one does. I wanted to read a letter from Letters of Note, which I recommend to everyone. They have Instagram, they have a website, they have books. Letters of Note, which are copies of old letters, generally older letters from people of note to other people. And there's an excerpt of one letter from Charles Darwin to Charles Lyell, I believe it is, L-Y-E-L-L, from October 1st, 1861. And it reads, but I am poorly today and very stupid and hate everybody and everything. So he didn't always have good days. Yes. I love that letter so much. Yes. This is incredible. So how has, when you think about, let me really make a large leap here to a question that might seem strange, but a lot has happened, a lot has been observed, a lot has been studied, a lot has been found since Humboldt and Darwin's day. As it stands right now, what are some of the most interesting theories or

Starting point is 00:30:48 let's just call them theories or findings related to evolutionary biology? And I'd love to know if there are any newer, let's just say in the last 10, 20 years, theories related to evolution that people might find interesting or surprising. And I'm going to keep talking for a second just to also buy time. And part of the reason I'm asking, this is as someone who really has not studied evolutionary biology, I would like to think I have a basic understanding, but that's probably hubris. I've had two different dinners recently in the last few months with two incredibly smart people who, granted, come from religious families. So I want to grant that. But both of them have also extremely strong mathematics backgrounds.

Starting point is 00:31:35 And in effect, after a couple glasses of wine, they raised a couple of names and they said, we're not sure if, it seems probabilistically that sort of the original, let's just call it description of evolutionary thinking per the era of say Darwin and so on can't really account for all that we've observed to date. And I don't know if that's nonsense. I don't know if there could be anything to it, but I would love to hear any and all thoughts. It doesn't have to relate to that specifically, but certainly it planted a seed and they were like, well, go check out this person who's a credible scientist who agrees with me, but I haven't actually done that homework. So any thoughts? Of course, I don't know what these mathematicians

Starting point is 00:32:19 specifically are referring to, so I would need to you know as i said but i would mention one thing i think the most exciting revolutionary aspect of the last let's call it 50 years is a sort of integration between darwin and complexity so you know santa fe institute meets darwin and meets humboldt and let me explain why because darwin as a naturalist described the mechanisms by which new species arise namely natural selection he also described sexual selection and then you might say, well, what's the difference? I remember a teacher saying, look at nature, look at any structure that seems useless. And then typically that will be a result of sexual selection, peacock feather versus wings. Anyway, so Darwin described both sexual selection, natural selection. Could you actually just take a second to expand on that?

Starting point is 00:33:25 So sexual selection is something that doesn't have a utility per se, but it could be a, I think you said a feather, like a particular, I guess a mating dance would be too obvious. Yes. It's selected. Say Tim is funny and Tim gets to reproduce because he's funny. So it's, right? You know, one can hope, a boy can dream.

Starting point is 00:33:50 Sorry, that was an awful example. That was perfect, that was perfect. No, sorry. Jury's still out, TBD. We are lonely species, and males have some advantages in that respect. Although technology also brings other possibilities. But it's actually, now that I think about it, it's not such a bad example. Because you would say, what advantages would being funny actually bring?

Starting point is 00:34:20 You're spending cognitive energy in something. You're being silly. You're spending time. And maybe you're distracted. Maybe if you're too distracted, cognitive energy in something you're being silly you're spending time and maybe you're distracted maybe if you're too distracted a predator will get you but if females like it well that trait will get selected and that works for feathers you know cleverness there are many traits that you can go with. This looks like expensive and annoying and inordinately colorful, but there are traits that evolve and get selected again and again because mates choose them.

Starting point is 00:34:55 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. The answer is invariably AG1 by Athletic Greens. If you're traveling, if you're just busy, if you're not sure if your meals are where they should be, it covers your bases. With approximately 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food sourced ingredients, you'll be hard-pressed to find a more nutrient-dense formula on the market. It has a multivitamin, multimineral greens complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health, an immunity formula, digestive enzymes, and adaptogens. You get the idea.

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Starting point is 00:36:21 but you were saying, all right, so Darwin covered natural selection, right? Like too slow, you get eaten by a saber-toothed tiger kind of thing. Sexual selection, which would be, say, the colors of the feathers, not for flight purposes, but for, say, mating purposes. Humor, you gave another example. But you were going to explain how Darwin plus complexity is something else. Now, in this case, I don't actually know what complexity refers to. So I would love to hear more. I don't want to get in trouble with the mathematicians. But I think a broad way of describing complexity is how things interact with other things. So it's in a way the study of structure.

Starting point is 00:37:03 And that's why complexity combined with evolutionary theory is important, because there are not only genetic information being passed, but organisms exist within structures, namely societies, but also ecosystems. And these structures impose dynamics of their own, in turn, that influence the organisms. Let me give you a specific example on how these two domains combine, the two domains being complexity and evolutionary thinking, which is going back to your question of what do I think is most interesting as a development today? It's niche construction. The concept of niche construction. Are you familiar with this? I know those two words separately, but I'm not sure what they mean in this context. Okay, great. Fantastic. Fantastic. So niche construction is basically to construct the niche. Okay. What does that mean?

Starting point is 00:38:05 So far, I gotcha. I follow. So far. Yes, exactly. Great. So Darwin described how worms, earthworms, are not only adapted to their environment, but also in the process of living, they modify the environment they're in. So a worm travels, creates burrows, eats, defecates. In doing so, changes the organisms that are available,

Starting point is 00:38:32 changes the frequency of these organisms, also changes the pH of the soil and so on. Namely, the activity of an organism modifies the environment in which the organism is in and I mentioned the example of earthworms because it's a very basic simple example this is most obvious when we think about humans every organism on earth is a niche constructor organisms are not passive things that just adapt to their environment

Starting point is 00:39:03 which I think it was the old way of seeing things. Like an organism is a thing that basically has to respond and adapt. And the revolution, I think, is that in niche construction, you go, organisms are also agents of their own change. Because by the process of living, they modify themselves, each other, and their environments. So if you think about the other animals, say humans, we not only modify our environments physically, but also we are cultural niche constructors, which means that we live in worlds that are also cultural. By creating these worlds, then you have to adapt to them. If you have to adapt to them, that changes the feedback loop on your own existence.

Starting point is 00:39:57 So that's why traits that 10,000 years ago would have not been very useful for survival, now they might be very useful, and the other way around. So that's why I think that's a longer conversation. But the notion of cultural niche construction, I think it's exciting. It combines elements of mathematical complexity theory, although I don't want to get in trouble with the mathematicians. I'm very scared of them. Go talk to the Santa Fe Institute people about this.

Starting point is 00:40:26 Yeah, no problem. And what I'll also do, do any names come to mind, researchers, scientists, mathematicians, or otherwise, who comment or have investigated and studied the intersection of, say, Darwinian thought with complexity? Do any names come to mind? Or we can certainly do some homework. The original book on this was published by John Odlin Smee and Kevin Leyland, two mathematicians and naturalists broadly understood. And today I would point out to David Krakauer, who is the president of the Santa Fe Institute. And I think he himself in his thinking and just the work he does, kind of embodies this.

Starting point is 00:41:09 Perfect. They have a lot of great applied work. Santa Fe Institute, for instance, I would suggest reading what they published in relation to understanding the pandemic from this point of view. I think this approach is incredibly enlightening. All right. We'll link to all of those in the show notes. So people will be able to find everything that we just mentioned, or I'm using the royal we, everything that you just mentioned.

Starting point is 00:41:33 And what you said about niche constructors modifying their environment, which in turn creates this feedback loop, reminds me of the Winston Churchill quote, we shape our tools and then the tools shape us. And it applies all the way from the earthworm to, for instance, large herbivores in Africa. If you look at hippopotami and the paths that they create, which affect water flow and a million other things, it's just incredible how interconnected all of it is and how many feedback loops exist. So you do need some mathematics to begin to try to evaluate how these many hundreds and thousands and millions of feedback loops might interact in any way that we can comprehend. So I'll check out David Krakauer. That's a great lead. How many bonobos are there in the world at this point, roughly speaking?

Starting point is 00:42:30 It's very difficult to have an exact number, but they would fill out a small stadium, maybe hopefully more than 10,000 and probably less than 60,000. Got it. And how many, just for comparison purposes, how many chimpanzees are there? Is it a multiple of that? Is it roughly the same? Yes. Oh, for sure.

Starting point is 00:42:51 It's at least one order of magnitude more. No, not two orders of magnitude. But if you sum the three subspecies, I want to say around a million or less. But actually, let me get back to you with the latest count. Okay, no problem. Now those two, bonobos and chimpanzees are contrasted because they seem to have so many differences of not just styles,

Starting point is 00:43:17 personalities, behavior, their societal structure, right? And I do want to talk about all of these things. Why is there such a discrepancy in the number of bonobos versus chimpanzees? Is it due to the state of affairs in Congo? Is it because they're, for whatever reason, not naturally selected as well? Could that be a plausible vote in favor of aggression? I don't know. How would you describe the discrepancy? And I'm not fishing for a yes answer to the latter. I'm just saying it's, I hadn't thought about this until I prepared for this interview. And I was

Starting point is 00:43:55 like, why are there so few bonobos? And I didn't have a good answer to that. I think the word is contingency, evolutionary contingency, namely probably the evolutionary event that led to the speciation of these two species, speciation meaning what happens when you have an ancestral population of an ape that was the grandfather of chimps and bonobos, something happens and later down the river of time you have two distinct populations, one is bonobos, one and later down the river of time you have two distinct populations one is bonobos one is chimpanzees it was probably this event was probably but we're still discussing

Starting point is 00:44:34 about it the formation the geographical formation of the river congo the river congo is an enormous river that in order for you guys to picture don, don't think of a river, think more of like a moving lake. If anyone has visual images of the Amazon, the Congo is only second in size to the Amazon. It's really the Congo Basin and the Amazonian Basin are equivalent. Both of them are the lungs of our planet. So you have this enormous river. And north of the River Congo, you have the distribution of chimpanzees. And south of the River Congo, you have bonobos, which means that at the time, and both species adapt and niche construct with their environment. Bonobo environment is a lot more wet and tropical jungle than chimpanzees.

Starting point is 00:45:34 Having said this, there's a huge variation in chimpanzee habitat. Chimpanzees are probable, but I mean, I say this with so many caveats because bonobos also have ability to exist in somehow drier environments. But as a gross overgeneralization, chimps exist in a more varied array of landscapes. They can be in tropical forests, but also in drier environments, which probably is a chicken and egg thing. Can they be there because they're better at adapting? Or is it because they were north of the river that they actually adapted that way what we know is what we find today and so i think it's contingency and you know sometimes they hunt sometimes they don't in depending

Starting point is 00:46:17 whether they're in dry environments they hunt more depending this is chimpanzees. Yes, sorry, chimpanzees. And so I think both species are incredibly flexible, but chimpanzees have a wider distribution, and perhaps in terms of the dietary adaptations, they might be more flexible. On the dietary side, just because I'm extending our conversation that we had many months ago, and I'm just curious, so I'm going to follow my curiosity. So apologies to everyone who's expecting is that not only do they hunt, but they also kind of sport hunt in a way.

Starting point is 00:47:12 Or do they go on raids of sorts? Could you just maybe speak to both and contrast? And I would just love to know because I've never asked anyone and you're the person to ask if bonobos have ever been observed to hunt. Both species hunt. Chimpanzees hunt more than bonobos that's the summary and now let's dig into this for years the archetype was that chimps were you know mean aggressive hunters and bonobos were like the nice vegan loving orgy nice, vegan-loving. Orgy lovers. Exactly. Thank you. Suddenly I became coy, but I don't know why. Yeah, yeah. What was that all about?

Starting point is 00:47:51 You just got so shy all of a sudden. I was like, what? Exactly. Yes. But yes, thank you. I think that's what's so cool about studying animals and about science is that things are always more complex and have more variance and nuance. And as you understand more the animals, particularly when you're dealing with large brain intelligent animals, like duh, of course they're plastic. Of course they change.

Starting point is 00:48:20 Of course not all the populations do the same stuff. Of course there's a huge variation according to which environments they're in. So then you can start making predictions and saying, well, if they're in wetter environments, if they're in richer environment, how does this drive behaviors like hunting and aggression and so on? But that's the domain of socioecology, which is the study of how social behavior changes according to environmental pressures. So having said that, I mentioned that because I think it's important to understand that we are also animals subjected to the same pressure. I guess what? Our environment changes, we change.

Starting point is 00:48:56 So for chimps and bonobos, it's the same. We can even speak of, say, Western chimpanzees have been said of having a more bonobo strategy in the sense of females have stronger bonds and they can be nicer and hunt less than Eastern chimpanzees that hunt more and there's more events of aggression, etc. And geographically, could you just place us where would the range of the western chimpanzees be versus the eastern? And I know there's probably not a super clear demarcation down the middle, but geographically, where are we placing those groups? The eastern chimpanzee would be the chimpanzee that most people know because of Jane Goodall studies. So your Gombe chimp is your eastern chimp.

Starting point is 00:49:46 And I think that's, thank you for asking that question, because, of course, for Jane, when she started studying these chimps and the things she observed, including the four-year war, Jane Goodall, after a while, she thought that chimpanzees, to begin with, they were like a nicer version of us so i think this is inserted in a broader context of of course we're looking at ourselves by looking at these animals and when she makes this amazing discovery when she observes them using tools and there's a famous anecdote she writes to louise leaky who hacked the idea of her going there and saying look i know

Starting point is 00:50:27 that the definition of human is we're the only animal that uses technology but i've observed these animals namely chimpanzees using and creating technology so we have a problem basically we are there how are we going to handle the pr on this one, Dr. Leakey? Dr. Leakey, we have a problem, Dr. Leakey. Either we widen the definition of who is allowed to use technology or we change the meaning of being human, right? I hope that's in letters of note, by the way. I don't know if it is, but it should be.

Starting point is 00:51:02 That telegram. Yeah, it might be. I mean, they've gathered some incredible letters. And people also can hear quite a bit about some of these earlier experiences that Jane Goodall had in my conversation with her. So we explore that quite a bit. And they can also find documentaries like Jane online, which will give you quite a view into this four-year war, as you

Starting point is 00:51:27 mentioned. I mean, just as different tools, obviously different weaponry, but just as horrifying as human war. I mean, ongoing protracted war, which is not isolated to chimps, right? I mean, we look at certain ant populations. I mean, if my memory serves me correctly, I mean, there are like decade-plus long wars going on. I want to say somewhere in the American Southwest or near Mexico. And then we get to the West. If you can comment on any of that, at some point we'd love to know where the Western chimps are.

Starting point is 00:51:59 Look at Africa, Central Africa. Note where the Congo River is, which is on kind of on the upper third bit of DRC, talking very broadly here, and then look west. And so Guinea and Cote d'Ivoire and all that area that is north of the river on the west. Yeah, I'm going into Google Maps and looking at this right now. You know what's interesting?

Starting point is 00:52:26 It says Gombe. I'm looking at Gombe. Oh, I guess I got pulled into the wrong place. Gombe is in Tanzania. Yeah, right. But Gombe, there's also a Gombe in Nigeria. So people should be aware if they pull up on a map. Gombe is in Tanzania in the context in which we're using it.

Starting point is 00:52:43 Yeah. So if you, again, look at the map of Africa and if you look at the heart of it, literally the heart of it, that is Zaire DRC, Democratic Republic of Congo. To the right of that, you'll find Gombe, Tanzania, and Eastern Africa. Yeah, exactly. So that boundary and Lake Tanganyika is in that boundary. Yeah, exactly. on the Tanzanian side. When you climb Gombe and you look down at Tanganyika, then you can see Congo. Got it. That is kind of the line that I'm trying to draw. May I just mention real quickly to describe for folks, so I'm looking at a map here. So DRC,

Starting point is 00:53:38 Democratic Republic of Congo is kind of smack in the middle of Africa. And if you imagine that country, this is going to sound kind of funny, but as the United States, DRC, Congo is the United States, there's actually a little hook in the southeast that kind of looks like Florida. If you were to look at where New England is, right on that border, let's just say going into the ocean, that would be Uganda. And then below that, say around where New York, New Jersey would be, you have Rwanda, Burundi, and then you have Tanzania covering pretty much everything down to Florida. And there is this gigantic lake, as you mentioned it, which I'm not going to be able to pronounce properly, that forms the border,

Starting point is 00:54:23 basically, between DRC and Tanzania. What was the name of this lake again? Tanganyika. Tanganyika, right. Yeah. So that gives you a bit of an image. So the Western Chimps, where does that group begin? This is going somewhere, folks, so don't worry.

Starting point is 00:54:39 I'm not getting like totally Where's Waldo with geography forever, but do they start west of that lake? So Lake Tanganyika goes north-south. It's like a very long and actually very deep lake. I think it might actually be one of the deepest lakes in the world, only after Baikal, I'm not sure. But west of that you have gorilla populations. So the western chimpanzees are north.

Starting point is 00:55:06 Again, think of DRC as this heart of Africa. And then the river, the Congo River, is on the upper bit. Right, yeah. As Conrad, the writer, the author of The Heart of Darkness, described it because he sailed there. That's the origin of Heart of Darkness. In fact, he described it as a coiling snake. So think of the Congo River as this enormous coiled snake that kind of goes, it's at the head of DRC.

Starting point is 00:55:39 And DRC, for context, is the size of Western Europe. It's an enormous, enormous country. So Western chimpanzees are northwest of that. I see. You see what I mean? Yeah, I do. So you were talking about your conversation with Jane and the four-year war and aggression in chimpanzees.

Starting point is 00:56:01 The person to read and listen and follow about that work, who is the modern Jane Goodall in the sense of following chimpanzee behavior and working on aggression, which is of course, and the origins of war, which for very obvious reasons is a very topical issue today, is Richard Rangham. He's a British primatologist who has been at Harvard directing the PAN lab for many years. He has many books. He's an incredibly creative. How do you spell Richard's last name?

Starting point is 00:56:39 Rangham. W-R-A-N-G-H-A-M, Wrangham. And his last book is called The Goodness Paradox, namely why is it that humans are relatively good if we should, in inverted commas, given what we see in chimpanzees, be a lot more aggressive. And so I think all things that richard covers are about this topic are incredibly useful and he has been observing chimpanzees well he worked with jane and so i

Starting point is 00:57:13 can't recommend him more thoroughly that was one and then the second you mentioned war in ants i think the recommendation there would be and you you had also mentioned E.O. Wilson. E.O. Wilson, the author of Consilience, he, naturalist and naturalist and very famous for sociobiology in 1964, namely combining social sciences and natural sciences and creating a bit of a stir in the process. But his favorite student, he's alive today, the student, because EO died a couple of months ago. Very recently, yeah. I would invite everyone to read the work of Mark Moffat. Mark Moffat is also an ant biologist, the favorite student of E.O. Wilson, and Mark, an explorer, another person in this tradition of doing theoretical work, thinking about animal and human societies,

Starting point is 00:58:13 but combining exploration, science, and theoretical thinking. He published a book called Swarm. It's basically about human societies, and he makes this wonderful point that in many respects, the dynamics of ants informed us about our sociality, including war, a lot more than we can see in other animals. Very cool. Swarm. Great name. Great book title. let's just say contrasting behaviors of western chimps and eastern chimps and then bonobos do you think it's primarily a function of food scarcity versus abundance or something like that i think that definitely plays into it but i also think that you have the niche construction element there, namely that cultural animals have dynamics of their own that are perhaps put in place in first place because of ecological conditions. But once they get going, they have their own weight, like a culture. And their own sort of durability also, even if the

Starting point is 00:59:25 initial conditions are not the current conditions. Correct. As you mentioned, you have genetics as we understand it. I mean, we. I'm giving myself a lot of credit there. But genetics in terms of DNA and the code that gets passed down, as we understand it, environmentally

Starting point is 00:59:42 largely unmodified DNA, meaning you have these random mutations that sometimes lead to better fitness and then natural selection. But we don't have to go down this rabbit hole because it's also a rat hole. It gets co-opted by a lot of new-agey stuff. But epigenetics also, these more acute effects on progeny and their behavior and so on.

Starting point is 01:00:03 Please continue. You were saying the niche construction. So by cultural weight, could you give an example of that, the impact of that? Selection pressures that work on behavior of social animals. So let me give you an example.

Starting point is 01:00:19 So when you observe bonobos, immediately females, they stand out as being very, as we would call them, empowered. And they seem to make decisions and to kind of have the upper hand in the sense, not that bonobo males are in any way, and let me make this super clear, bonobo males are magnificent, strong, amazing males. They're not like spider males who get eaten after procreation. No, exactly. They are beautiful, magnificent males.

Starting point is 01:00:50 This is not an example of like a war of the sexes where you have, okay, females won the war of the sexes, and these guys are like puny little guys on the outskirts of society. No, I can show you pictures, videos. They're magnificent. And I think also they have fun. They, videos. They're magnificent. And I think also they have fun. They're playful. They're strong.

Starting point is 01:01:08 But going back to the example you asked for, immediately this difference between kind of vulnerable females being empowered, they don't get raped, for instance. So female choice, well, female choice exists throughout nature, but rape can happen in some societies and some species. In Bonobos, we have not observed rape. Males make like an invitation to mate, which is kind of a fun head bob.

Starting point is 01:01:36 It's like tango. Gesture. Cabaseo. Right? Sorry. Inside joke, guys. This is how males invite women to dance from, like, across the room. Anyway.

Starting point is 01:01:48 No, but this is correct. I had not thought about this. Same, same. No, I failed as a rheumatologist and a South American. This is like staring me in the face. So the males do this head-bobbing thing as the invitation. As the invitation. The point I want to make is that you can ask,

Starting point is 01:02:14 why is this happening in bonobos, say, as opposed to other species? And the thinking is that the environment, the wealth in the environment, it played a very important role in the development of bonobos. Because let me backtrack a little bit into Sociology 101. Think what are your main problems if you're a mammal. If you're a female mammal, typically female mammals are constrained by resources. Because being a female mammal is expensive calorically. You have to travel if you're lactating, if you're carrying babies.

Starting point is 01:02:48 There's a lot of investment that female mammals have to do with procreation and carrying babies for sometimes a very long time because mammals have large brains, which are in turn expensive to maintain. And babies can be useless. And they're born before they're ready to go. Correct. I mean, in order to pass through the birth canal or to be born properly, they're born kind of helpless.

Starting point is 01:03:14 That is most extreme in the case of humans. In humans, yeah. In humans, yes. But broadly speaking... I guess, yeah. No, I'm sorry. I was thinking mostly of kind of higher primates and humans. To be clear, like when a giraffe drops out, it's got to be ready to run or it's lion food.

Starting point is 01:03:30 Yeah, but that's a great point, actually. Just think, observe giraffes or any large herbivore, the relative period of uselessness in an infant between this kind of animals versus us or gorillas, chimps, bonobos. Herbivores, whether it's a giraffe or a horse or a deer, they get up and they start walking. They're still protected by the mother and of course fed by the mother. But our babies are useless for a very long time. It's expensive to be a female mammal. It's expensive. Exactly. Thank you. It's expensive to be a female mammal. So female mammals are typically constrained by resources. And so if you have an environment where there aren't enough resources, female mammals, the most basic thing is that they have to be on their own because there isn't enough food for everyone to gather, right? So not enough know, not enough supermarkets can only fit, say,

Starting point is 01:04:27 one female and her two babies. You're stuck on your own. If there is enough food, ah, now you can go to a party. You can hang out with other females, right? And this is really important because I think what, like, the social revolution for bonobos was that female mammals were able to hang out together. In order to form a bond, you need a very basic thing to happen. If you are a primate that doesn't bond online, you need to be in the same physical space because mammals bond through physical interaction.

Starting point is 01:05:00 And so if an environment allows for females to be in the same place, you can afford that possibility. Not that it will always happen, but we think that in bonobos, the fact that they were in a relatively wealthy environment, wealthy meaning a forest, a tropical forest with a lot of fruit and fruit has high calories, then you can be in the same place. And this is where you get into the multiple feedback loops. Females in the same place. And this is where you get into the multiple feedback loops. Females in the same place, females hanging out with each other, social proximity, social proximity bonding, bonding alliances. Alliances, we advance our own interest. What is our interest? Female mammals have two problems. Well, there are many problems, but one of them is being energetically expensive and the

Starting point is 01:05:45 second one is infanticide so infanticide exists it's relatively widespread and so if you think i'm i'm gonna sound like a horrible person without a heart but if you think of like your genetic your genetic investment taking away love what terrible thing to say. Obviously, for a female mammal, your child being killed is an awful thing. And so purely because of the time and energy invested in creating and maintaining this infant. So what I'm trying to get at is that the adaptations for female mammals that have to do with avoiding infanticide are important. So in that sense, choosing males that are nice males and not choosing males that will probably be infanticidal is an important thing.

Starting point is 01:06:36 Oh, interesting. Okay, so I have a question. Can I jump in with a question about this? So when I hear, this is probably not a sentence I use very often, but when I hear infanticide, what I think about is cases with, say, lions, bears. It's very, very common in the natural world where a, let's just call it a challenger male will come to a pride, kill a resident male, and that male lion will want the female lions to go into estrus so if they're lactating that won't happen therefore he will kill the cubs and this happens amongst bears is my understanding but you're saying in this case there's also infanticide where the actual biological father will kill the infants? Not typically.

Starting point is 01:07:26 No, no, not typically. I meant, sorry, I should have been specific about that. What I wanted to say is that infanticide, as you're pointing out, happens in nature. And avoiding infanticide, the only thing that I'm saying is that avoiding infanticide, it's important for females. It's important. Yeah, totally.

Starting point is 01:07:42 Yeah. So what I'm trying to get at is that I think, you asked about the contribution of a wealthy environment. Why are bonobos so nice? Yeah, yeah. Is it because they have more fruit? I think that plays into it, but I also think it's a cultural niche construction. But also, you have multiple levels of selection. I think what we see is that females have been selecting nice males and nice males get rewarded for being nice because females choose them. So what you see is that multiple

Starting point is 01:08:14 feedback loops. The way of summarizing this better, I think was done by the rapper Baba Brinkman. Didn't see that coming. I don't, but please continue. Yeah. He's a great lyricist, and he rapped the original species. When he was rapping about how sexual selection works and these processes of basically female choice, and he was showing gangsters and, you know,

Starting point is 01:08:42 kind of a rap culture being all aggressive and she said girls you are selecting traits in males so in order to create a better world don't sleep with mean people yeah good advice good advice i'm obviously saying it as a joke but what I'm trying to illustrate here is that female sexual choice is important and in bonobos because of what was possible for them to happen, given that they were able to form coalitions. Perhaps we see it more clearly. Let me ask a couple of housekeeping questions that may go nowhere. So I apologize to everyone if this goes nowhere. But if you look at, say, bonobo versus chimpanzee populations, is there a different gender split? So if you look at a given cohort, I don't even know how you would define that. It's probably not a single troop. It's

Starting point is 01:09:39 probably a little wider than that. But if you look at bonobos, is it like 50-50, male-female, and chimps roughly the same? Is it 60-40? Is it 80-20? And second question is about body size discrepancy. So between males and females, in bonobos, is the discrepancy the same as in chimps? And I'm trying to think of other factors aside from food scarcity or abundance that might contribute to different social dynamics both species have the same sex ratio around 50 50 and in terms of tim is asking about dimorphism so sexual dimorphism is if you look at males and females if roughly the body size and other traits kind of similar or whether you see big differences. So one example of like huge dimorphism would be gorillas, like the males, think of a male silverback, big, enormous guy, and females much smaller or say a stag, a deer, red deer. So as a rule of thumb, again, grossly overgeneralizing, dimorphism indicates lack of monogamy.

Starting point is 01:10:48 So again, maybe we shouldn't get into this because there are many nuances here. But in chimpanzees and bonobos, the male-female size, females are a little bit smaller in both species. And dimorphism might be a little bit more in chimpanzees. Namely, you don't see this huge body size difference, but there is a body size difference. In humans, it's evident as well, in the sense of most males, if you think of averages, are taller, heavier, stronger than females. And obviously there are exemptions, but we're talking statistically.

Starting point is 01:11:27 Yeah. And so if we come back to what you said about dimorphism, that that is reflective or indicative of a lack of monogamy. Is that right? Typically. Could you elaborate on that? Let's think about animals that have most dimorphism. Again, let's pick the stag deer or gorillas. Typically, that indicates a harem social structure in the sense of one male and several females. And that will, of course, it's not as simple as that. With time, we have learned that gorilla social systems are a lot more flexible than we thought. I mean, that's another rule of thumb. It's always more complicated than you think.

Starting point is 01:12:09 And I think Oscar Wilde has a great quote about that. The truth is rarely simple. No, what's that quote? I forgot. I'll look it up. Yeah. But it's a rule of thumb. But bonobos and chimpanzees are similar, I think, in much more ways than we think they're different.

Starting point is 01:12:26 In the past, I think because we were coming out of, or we still are, in a kind of thinking of evil and goodness. So chimpanzees were like the bad guys and bonobos were the good guys and chimpanzees are technological, machiavellic politicians and, you know, male rapists. And then bonobos are the feminists, like peace loving. And again, their life is a lot more complicated. And so I would just really like to stress that we should try to get out of this kind of sharp contrast. Both species have undergone their own paths. I don't think it's correct to say good guys and bad guys. There are no angels.

Starting point is 01:13:15 Bunnobus are no angels. There is conflict at every level of organization in nature. And also I think we should be careful about the naturalistic fallacy. Naturalistic fallacy meaning, oh, if this happens in nature, it means that this is okay for us to do the same in human societies, or this ought to on the internet are attributed to Oscar Wilde, but I believe that the quote is, the truth is rarely pure and never simple. Yeah, that's the one. That's it. Thank you.

Starting point is 01:13:52 For people who don't have the context, when you talk about Heart of Darkness, Congo, could you describe the land in which these bonobos live from a human perspective? What does the congo look like what are some basics that we should know about the congo just so people have an appreciation for what it means to walk more than 3 000 kilometers on foot in the jungles of the congo congo is uh historically you will hear about the two congos, Congo-Brazzaville and Congo-Kinshasa. When we're talking about Congo, we mean Congo-Kinshasa, meaning DRC, Democratic Republic of Congo, what was known before as Zaire. So again, picture Africa, literally picture the heart of it, this enormous big central middle, and that is Congo-DRC. Congo is the size of Western Europe, as we were talking before, given that it's so large, there are many biomes, but I went to the tropical jungles, literally in the heart of

Starting point is 01:14:55 Congo, namely about 100 miles south of the river, just on the line of the equator, so my GPS would mark 0000, about 600 kilometers, 400 miles from the nearest town. This means that first of all you have logistics that are complicated, that are the logistics of any tropical rainforests. There are dangers that are inherent in tropical rainforests such as trees falling. In fact, that's one of the most dangerous things. If you're following a group of large-bodied animals that are arboreal, and you are a biped, and these guys are traveling on the trees, and this is a primary forest, namely there are old and dying and dead trees, many times entire pieces of, whether or not, sometimes a tree, but a huge branch, sometimes the size of a table would fall a few inches from you.

Starting point is 01:15:50 And so that has caused injury, permanent injury, and actually a death in the group of people that live in the study site. There are other obvious dangers, like snakes. There were green mambas, black mambas, Congo vipers. We couldn't have antivenom because for antivenom, you need electricity in order to have a fridge. Refrigeration. Refrigeration.

Starting point is 01:16:15 So we didn't have electricity or any form of public sanitation for that matter. So I think for me, i was always thinking about the you really shouldn't get bitten by a snake that that's the bottom line don't get bitten by a snake 101 the most obvious danger i think with congo or a woman would be physical violence from people. Congo is the rape capital of the world, but this pertains to the chronic conflict that Congo has. But I was quite far from that conflict. That conflict happens mostly in the east.

Starting point is 01:17:00 Of course, it could erupt any time, and it was a concern, but I think I was more in the kind of dangers of the forest, I would say. Then there's disease, tropical disease. You think you can control many things, but I took this book called the Oxford Handbook of Tropical Medicine. I did not read it beforehand, and I think if I would have read it beforehand, maybe it would have been… There's a small degree of ignorance that sometimes is helpful. I'm not advocating. Actually, I should take that back because, of course, I'm all about knowing and knowledge.

Starting point is 01:17:39 Play with the snakes. Play with the snakes. No, no, don't play with the snakes. Kidding, kidding, don't play with the snakes. Play with the snakes. No, no, don't play with the snakes. Kidding, kidding, don't play with the snakes. But the chapter in this book about infectious disease in tropical areas in Central Africa is quite scary. And that's the only thing I'm going to say about that. So you have, I mean, certainly in the urbanized or less remote parts of Congo, you have warfare, you have violence, you have rape, as you mentioned, disease also, right? I mean, sort of urban disease. Birthplace of Ebola and HIV, is that correct? Correct. Yes.

Starting point is 01:18:15 Yeah. So you have a lot going on. You talked about the dangers, some of the remote dangers. You're navigating all of this in the course of doing field work. Just to shift gears for a second, because you mentioned the death by tree. Why is it that the Japanese, I think, University of Kyoto, has such a dominant role, it would seem, in bonobo research? How did that happen? We were talking about Western mythology and Conrad Lorenz. So animal behavior studies in the West come from that line of animal behavior in Europe,

Starting point is 01:18:53 whose origin is in biology. The Japanese have a different tradition in ethology that for them comes, broadly speaking, from the social sciences. And let me explain. I think this is really interesting because you see two cultures coming at the same, broadly speaking, area of study with different approaches. The book for more on this is by Frans de Waal, the Dutch mythologist, and it's called The Ape and the Sushi Master,

Starting point is 01:19:32 in which it's a great title, in which he asks this question, like why, where, and are the Japanese so interested in animal behavior? The Japanese came to animal behavior with the kind of questions we're asking today earlier than the West, probably for two reasons. One of them is a contingency,

Starting point is 01:19:52 an evolutionary contingency, namely habitat. In Japan, there are primates. You have Japanese monkeys. So people, I would invite your audience to Google Japanese monkey hot tub and what you will see, right? I don't know the proper name, but the snow monkeys. Yes.

Starting point is 01:20:11 Incredible. In the hot springs. Japanese macaque, also known as snow monkey. Yeah. And so the reason I'm mentioning that is because I'd like you to imagine what it means for a culture to live in a place where you have these animals nearby. And so that means that for the Japanese, primates, monkeys were part of the mythology and of their stories. So think of the mythologies and the stories that we have in the West and our intelligent animals. They're mostly, say, ravens or foxes.

Starting point is 01:20:45 Think of like German fairy tales. Who's clever? Oh, it's the raven. And why? For obvious reasons, because those were the animals that were available in our environment. So we think and interacted with them. We didn't have monkeys. For the West to look at monkeys, we had to go to Africa or to Asia. So that's the first reason that I think

Starting point is 01:21:06 it's evolutionary contingency namely the Japanese as a culture co-evolved with primates in the presence and they were part of the mythology and the story. I think also their religion Shinto so you know more about Shinto than I do but basically basically interrelationships. I think that predisposed cognitively the Japanese to be much more prepared to think about continuities and discontinuities between humans and other primates. So the combination of these two factors made that in the 1940s, already you had a tradition of Japanese primatology. First, there was this guy who was looking at horse behavior, and then he started looking at other primates' behavior. And very famously, he discovered the innovation of potato washing.

Starting point is 01:21:56 And so this female that, you know, they were eating potatoes that had sand, and, you know, everyone, you kind of go, oh, that's kind of annoying but still food and she learned to wash them in the water and her friends and family learned from her so it became a very well-known example of innovation and also who innovates and how innovations spread through social networks so question for you where was that potato washing? Do you recall? Yes, in an island. Oh gosh, I just forgot the name of the island. Imo.

Starting point is 01:22:30 The name of the female is Imo. And I'll get back to you with the name. Imo. That's funny because it means potato. So there's a joke in Japanese. This is not going to mean anything to anybody. But hotta imo ijiruna is a joking way. It kind of sounds like, what time is it now but hotta imo ijiru na is a is a joking way it kind of sounds like what time is it now hotta imo ijiru na but it means don't touch the potato i've just

Starting point is 01:22:52 picked but imo is a way of saying potato or i think you can also use it to mean like country bumpkin in japanese but that's funny so oh that's Oh, that's great. Yeah. So emo monkey potato washing. I'm just pulling it up really quickly. So I want to ask you a question about this. All right. Sweet potato washing revisited 50th anniversary of primates article. So this is something I'm looking at on Springer.com. Talks about Koshima monkeys. so I'm guessing it's on

Starting point is 01:23:26 Koshima island yeah so Koshima almost certainly means little island ko is like kochigari for those judo people out there Koshima and then Shima is like you know Hiroshima wide island Koshima so Koshima now I had heard I would love to, the reason I'm asking specifically is I wanted to ask you, is it true? And it may not be at all, but let me back up and say, it seems to be true that there's this phenomenon of people and humans in disparate geographical locations having similar or identical scientific breakthroughs around the same time, which is bizarre and raises a lot of questions. Could just all be coincidence, but it seems to happen on a reasonably regular basis when you read these biographies of scientists. It's like,

Starting point is 01:24:17 it's like, you know, nothing happens for 200 years and then it's like neck and neck down to the week, right? And I believe something like that also happened with darwin yeah darwin and wallace yes yeah so wallace kind of beat him to the punch and he wrote a letter to his friend complaining like the other letter and then his friend was like charles you got to get your ass on this get after it and then he pushed forward and then no one remembers wallace right so it's like nothing, nothing, nothing, and then flash boil all of a sudden. And I remember someone telling me that this was also true for the sweet potato washing in the sense that, I guess in this case, Emil learns to wash these potatoes. And then around the same time, monkeys of the same species on other nearby islands began washing sweet potatoes do you know if this is even as a story something that exists putting aside maybe they travel from island to island i mean they

Starting point is 01:25:12 must have gotten there somehow to begin with so i suppose they do but do you have you heard this this story at all i've heard the on the wackier side of that, there are some explanations, like morphic resonance. Yeah, morphogenic fields and all that stuff. Right, so I mean, I don't want to drag you into the mud here, but what are your thoughts on any of this? I think, if I may remain empirical about it, I think also thinking as an ecologist, I think it's first of all, it's attention biased. Right, right. Given that I'm trained as someone who looks at nature and I'm astounded at our own blindness of like, how many times can I pass through a place without saying something until I go,

Starting point is 01:25:57 oh, what about this? And then I see it everywhere. Yeah. It's like buying a new car and then you see that car everywhere. It's like, no, it's not like everyone bought it the same day you just didn't notice it before yeah amazing so there's that effect but that's not all i think there's also an ecosystem effect namely that inventions don't quite i mean this view of like the lone person whether it's a Japanese macaque female or Darwin alone, like old man in his studio. We think in ecosystems, in environments, through interaction with the world.

Starting point is 01:26:33 So we are picking up stuff that it's already, it's fruit that is in our forest, so to say. So that other people start picking it is not incredibly surprising. Is there anyone you are aware of who is a credible scientist who would even entertain the notion of morphic resonance or is interested in alternative or complementary theories for how some of these things manifest? Or is that just universally thought to be bullshit? I know Rupert Sheldrake personally, and I really like him.

Starting point is 01:27:06 Yeah. And I think the work his son, Merlin, you probably know he's doing is fantastic on fungi. And so he's such a great guy. He's a fascinating character. Fascinating character. I've never met him, but fascinating guy. Yeah. You should meet him and go for a walk with him. He was originally a botanist, so he knows everything. Just to go for a walk with him outside is wonderful. So let's leave it there. All right. Go for a walk with Rupert.

Starting point is 01:27:37 All right. On the list. Thank you. Okay. So how did we get on to sweet potato washing in the first place? Yeah. You asked why the Japanese have a field site in Congo, which is a great question. Yes, yes.

Starting point is 01:27:50 Because when I'm looking at, for instance, the network of play interactions in Wamba Banobos, and I'm looking at the names, right? And it's like Natsuko, Yukiko, Nachi, Kyota, Yume, right? Fuku, Kitaro. Or in the very beginning, we talked about Jiro, I think it was. And that is most certainly a Japanese name. Like Jiro dreams of sushi.

Starting point is 01:28:14 Same, same. Super, super fascinating. I love hearing the names of the Iwan Bunobo group pronounced properly. Yeah, they have some good names. They have some good names they have some good names yeah they've got they've got some good names yeah i will ask about where you think humans are getting it wrong or maybe making mistakes when it comes to sex play gender i am gonna ask you about that but i'm planting a seed so that it'll just gestate for a little while. But first, let's talk about, or rather, let me ask you about, and I just saw it pop up here, the adaptive joker hypothesis. What is that? That is the name I gave to my theory on play

Starting point is 01:28:59 behavior, basically. I did for my master's and for my PhD, I studied play behavior. And the question you ask yourself as a semi-revolutionary biologist, as a mythology, is that what's the function of behavior? And so play has typically and continues to, very rightly, thought as developmental scaffolding. Namely, something, a behavior that is expensive and risky, but young animals do, in order to build up the organism. So play prepares you for the future, play trains skills, all of that is true. Play fighting in leopards or something like that. Play fighting in leopards, word play in young humans. As a rule of thumb, you will observe how the young of a certain species play,

Starting point is 01:29:50 and you can have inferences on what they do as adults, and play is training for adulthood. So all of that is true. But if you think of the word scaffolding, to me it was puzzling, because it's like developmental scaffolding. So maybe it's because I come from a family of architects, but I keep thinking a scaffold is something that is used to build a building. And then when the building is done, you remove the scaffold, i.e. the scaffold is useless. It's just aiding you in constructing something.

Starting point is 01:30:21 And when the thing, the building is ready, you take the scaffold away, and the object is the thing, i.e., the building that is ready. And if play is a scaffold for building adult organisms, it means that play should finish when somatic growth finishes. You turn 17, 18, you stop playing. I think, again, this is roughly true in many species. It's not very common that adult animals play. But if you start looking around again with this question of like, ask the question and then tell me which animals play as adults. And so what would come to mind? Let me ask you that question. Which animals play as adults. And so what would come to mind?

Starting point is 01:31:06 Let me ask you that question. Which animals play as adults? Play as adults, yes. Dolphins would come to mind? Yeah, yeah. Humans, obviously. What was that second one? Humans.

Starting point is 01:31:18 Oh, I thought you said Cubans. I was like, maybe Cubans. Yeah, sure. I don't know. They do like salsa. I mean, that kind of looks like that. And great music. Yeah, sure. They do like salsa. I mean, that's kind of looks like that. And great music. Yeah, great, great music. I'm sitting in Austin, Texas. There are actually a lot of amazing Cubans

Starting point is 01:31:32 here, which is why maybe that's talking about the sort of attention bias. But humans, although, I mean, one would need to, I think, perhaps take a second to define play. So if play is not this, I can't remember the exact modifier you used, but this scaffolding. If it is not that, then what is play, right? It seems like something that doesn't serve an obvious functional purpose that entails some degree of positive emotional display. I mean, I don't know if that's me struggling for a definition, but... No, you're correct. We're mixing two definitions there. So I want to make a distinction when you ask these questions. Tim Bergen, another famous ethologist, defined the four questions. When you think about a behavior, what, why, and from where? So the question I was asking

Starting point is 01:32:27 is, what's the evolutionary function of the behavior, which is different from defining it, how does it look today? Okay. So if you want to define it, and when you observe something and you want to study it, you need to define it, how does it look today? So you can define it broadly as a behavior that appears cooperative in the sense that it doesn't look forced. Animals are not doing it under constraint, duress, or obvious aggression. And there might be a sense of enjoyment and it appears not having an obvious purpose. It has repetitive elements, but these repetitive elements also have variation. And so the element of enjoyment and recombination of elements is part of it. And so appearing to

Starting point is 01:33:12 having fun, but of course, you know, that's easy when you look at humans, but like you look at reptiles and it's like, how do you know a snake is having fun? It's like, well. I don't have a deep exposure to a lot of animals. I would say canids, certainly. You see something resembling play in dogs, in fox, etc. Yeah, wolves, certainly. Cats, I mean, there seems to be some type of tailing off in almost every species I think of in terms of play. I mean, maybe you have like old dudes, you know,

Starting point is 01:33:46 like 70-year-old humans playing chess and parks and so on, but the types of play change certainly over time. You know, one of the coolest things I've ever seen was video captured by a trail camera in the U.S. of a coyote playing with, it certainly looked like play with a badger. Yes. I remember that they hunt together and it was jumping around,

Starting point is 01:34:12 wagging its tail, dropping into kind of this downward dog, like play position, just as a domestic dog, domesticated dog would. And I don't want to take us too far off track, but this is directly mapping from some northern american indian mythologies or what were thought to be mythologies that had largely never been

Starting point is 01:34:34 observed by a sort of western field biologists and it was kind of thought to be this nonsensical mythology and then lo and behold it's actually right there in front of you on camera it's pretty cool but i i'd never observed i don't think i'd observed much in terms of non-combative interspecies play in that way right so you're like a cat playing with a mouse but the mouse isn't having a great time no that that would be there's one animal they're having fun and playing the other one is not. So those are a few examples that come to mind. What other examples come to mind for you?

Starting point is 01:35:11 The family of corvids, so ravens, crows, are very playful birds, parrots as well. It's not a coincidence if you look at brain to body size ratio, both these groups of birds namely parrots and corvids are kind of equivalent if you will to cetaceans and great apes cetaceans including dolphins yeah dolphins of whales so in that these are animals that don't think of immediate genealogical relationships but think of the niche again.

Starting point is 01:35:47 What niche, what do these animals have in common? They are highly social. They live in complex societies. They have to deal with complexity. They tend to be long lived. And just if you add the dimension of time, if you're social and are long lived, it means you have to deal with uncertainty because who's your friend? Will they be your friend two weeks from now? You haven't seen them. With whom to cooperate? With whom not to cooperate?

Starting point is 01:36:12 Social life is complex. And so all of these groups of animals have these things in common. Elephants is another group of animals that also play and they fall in this broad group of, generally speaking, large-brained, intelligent animals that live for a long time. They're very innovative but also extremely social. So you have a relationship between sociality and intelligence. And I think the third element there is that play when it's possible, because now we get into the sociocology of play, play is not always possible, particularly for adults. Many things need to happen for play to make sense. Play has costs and risks and is more important for the young.

Starting point is 01:36:59 So the scaffolding is still true. But my question was like, why do you see this behavior in adult animals where it's risky and expensive in time and energy? And this brings us to, I've been thinking a lot, Tim, about time budgets and energy budgets at a personal level. I think because you are Mr. Optimization. Yeah, sometimes. Yeah, well, actually, time budgets, you're all about time budgets, namely how you organize your time, right? Okay, can I actually tell you something what a friend said yesterday? It was very funny.

Starting point is 01:37:40 I follow, I mean, I'm part of a literary club. I attend a workshop every week here in Chile. We are Latin, and it's a country of poets, and I'm coming from that explanation of the Latin poetry tradition. Sure. And I told them we were going to speak today, and they said, oh, yeah, I know that guy. I studied him with my son because he has a method for only working one hour a week. And then I said, yeah, kind of.

Starting point is 01:38:18 They were obviously referring to the four-hour week. And then in a very kind of Latin poet, yeah, I thought it was interesting. I was initially compelled by this idea of working less but then i thought he works a lot in order to work less the paradox we live in paradox yes ladies and gentlemen but basically yeah time budget so actually that led us to a very interesting discussion on the use of time and what is to optimize and not to optimize. Sure. And play behavior, I think, has several insights in that use of time and use of energy. And at what level do you put the optimization goal?

Starting point is 01:38:59 I have some thoughts on this in a sense. And I should point out for people who are not aware, most listeners will recognize the name Pablo Neruda, but some may not associate Neruda with Chile. And so Chile has this incredible literary tradition. Of course, that's only one example, but I would say part of why play fascinates me, and then I want to come back to what worries you about humans right now based on what could we use more of? What would you encourage people to perhaps think about that could take any number of different forms? Play is very interesting to me because I think it overlaps with what we might describe as flow states quite a lot. And certainly if we include sports in play, although sports can become very violent in some cases. But if we include that, then I find that time is a construct, right? We don't have time to get into that right now, which is an intended pun. But for those interested in getting into

Starting point is 01:40:08 the really strange aspects of time-space as a user interface, listen to my conversation with Donald Hoffman. But not every hour is created equal, right? You can have the experience of passing an hour sitting at an airport waiting for something, and it seems like 10 hours. You can have the experience of being stuck in your inbox and doing various types of work, and the entire

Starting point is 01:40:31 day passes and you can't remember a single thing that you accomplished. And then you can have this time dilation when you play where you're kind of getting more hours per hour, if that makes any sense. The perception of time changes. In my experience, part of my reason for being so interested in play is you can kind of buy more time from a perceptual perspective. Completely. I think your point of the overlap with flow states is correct. I think play is broader than that. Flow states are a subcategory of play,

Starting point is 01:41:07 but certainly I think they're best understood through the lens of play. Flow states are perhaps more goal-oriented than play necessarily is. If you distinguish between play and games, games are typically more goal-oriented and have clear outcomes. So a contest obviously has an outcome. And say, if you just like play fighting with words or dancing, the reward is the activity itself. It's intrinsic reward.

Starting point is 01:41:35 So I would draw that distinction. What can we learn from what you've observed in the natural world? Maybe what you've studied of earlier human civilizations or ways of organizing, ways of playing, and why is it important? I know that's a huge question, but I'm just thinking of the people who are listening to this podcast. And you can speak to me as if you're giving me the advice, because I would like to hear it too. And if it makes you twitchy to think of it as advice, you can just describe it as an observer slash adventure scientist. A lot of people listening to this are probably listening to this podcast

Starting point is 01:42:16 by and large to certainly learn from disparate fields and different types of experts, but also they probably work a fair amount. I would imagine most people who listen to this podcast work a fair amount. And if you were to give them two glasses of wine and ask them if they would like more play in their lives, they'd be like, yeah, for sure, for sure. And then that Saturday night, they get back to Monday and that conversation disappears and is long forgotten. so yeah what do we do i would say as an animal and i say this i think hopefully by now you realize that i say this in the best possible way you are constrained first by two things so i want you to think about your energy budget and your

Starting point is 01:42:59 time budget your energy budget is for you basically your financial budget. So I think you obviously have covered this extensively on how to manage and create energy budgets. I define energy in the physics way of energy, ability to do work. So for organisms energy available comes in the form of metabolic energy. For humans I think a good proxy is financial energy. Financial energy can increase. You can win the lottery and you can follow Tim's advice and earn more money. God save us. Good luck, everybody.

Starting point is 01:43:41 There you go. Yeah. Right? So that's a great thing because thanks to people like Tim, actually, that you can increase your energy budget. Fantastic. Your time budget, however, you can't. Time is an incredibly democratizing force because you and an earthworm have 24 hours in a day. So that's a fixed budget, which means that there's this constant interplay,

Starting point is 01:44:06 you know, tango or martial art, if you want, between your energy budget and your time budget. How you buy time or you use time is in interaction with your energy budget. The most obvious thing is that if you increase your energy budget, you have more money, you can buy your time, right? So the first observation that I had with Bonobos was that kind of sociological question. When they have more wealth, i.e. there's more fruit, what will they invest it in? It's kind of an investment question because they could become fatter, for instance, namely storing that metabolic energy, or they could spend it in grooming conversation so to say for bonobos it was really interesting to me to see that in terms of investment decision bonobos when there

Starting point is 01:44:56 was more fruit they played more which tells you several things the first one is that play is expensive not always you can play that's fine fine. You know, first of all, you should have sufficient metabolic energy to eat and travel and feed your kids and so on. Play is, in that sense, especially for adults, it's true that it's a luxury. But here we come into the adaptive joker expensive hypothesis. There are some things in nature and in human cultures that when you can afford them, they create more luxury. Investment in education, living in a city like Austin or New York, in places that might be expensive to live, but you are putting yourself in a particular ecosystem that feeds into you the possibility of creating something further. The development of the human brain is another example,

Starting point is 01:45:45 something that is very expensive to grow, but if you can afford it, it also affords new possibilities. So what I'm trying to say is I think that frame of thinking where you're trading off time budgets and energy budgets, any investor would know this, but at a personal level, it has helped me to look at it much more clearly because your time is fixed, but your income can grow. And so how do you become like an adapted animal changing your time budget accordingly, not only to your income, but also to

Starting point is 01:46:20 your context. Context is the context, stupid, right? Paraphrasing Bill Clinton, obviously it's the economy, stupid, but it's the context. Context is the context. Stupid, right? Paraphrasing Bill Clinton. Obviously, it's the economy. Stupid, but it's the context. Context is incredibly important in this sense. So I think there are ways that you can describe your context. How much risk is there? How much uncertainty is there? So I think if there's a lot of uncertainty, you can actually develop ways to become more flexible. That's what I was trying to study with the adaptive joker hypothesis. What is a joker? In cards, a joker is the card that adopts the value of the moment, right? It's a trump card.

Starting point is 01:46:55 But that value is given by context, which means that play is making you very good at reading context. It's really all about assessing context. And then it changes. It grows. It decreases. It becomes more intense, less intense, more aggressive, less aggressive.

Starting point is 01:47:13 Do you see what I'm trying to say? I think I do. Could you give an example of that? So, for example, ways of playing change form, like Joker shapeshifts. The name comes from, it's a pretend behavior. It's a shapeshifting behavior according to what's happening. So today, after the pandemic, well, sorry, we're still not after the pandemic, but we're kind of entering that space.

Starting point is 01:47:41 Largely, yeah. Hopefully, fingers crossed. Talent, yes. I think ways of playing that are increasing in frequency are obviously face-to-face play. There's a hunger for in-person IRL, in real life events. You go like, well, that's kind of obvious. But it's not obvious, if you will. We have amazing technology.

Starting point is 01:48:06 The entire world has learned to Zoom. Why are we actually willing to still travel long distances and pay for plane tickets and suffer ridiculous queues and stuff like going to Burning Man? Because this kind of play is important. We have this necessity for in real life meetings. Direct contact for humans is a very important form of play. It's not the only form of play.

Starting point is 01:48:32 So that would be a very obvious example that I think I might predict we will see a lot of demand for that. You said earlier, if I may interject, that you've only recently started implementing or applying some of these learnings related to play into your own life so how have you applied these to your own life or what are some ways that you explore play the literary workshop is one so i do this weekly my teacher is called matias ribas He's an editor and a poet.

Starting point is 01:49:19 And that kind of intellectual play, allowing myself to like, oh, I will spend time not only in science stuff, but actually actively pursuing artistic endeavors has been, I think, really life changing. And I had to kind of learn my own lesson. Oh, guess what? Play is important. At so many levels, literature has become, I mean, it was when I was a child, but I had kind of left it. I think it's useful if you think of the ways you played as a child. There's something very true there. Some play people talk about this. Look at your pictures. What were you drawn?

Starting point is 01:49:46 What kind of play did you do? Was it literary play? Was it play with animals? Social play? Play fighting? Construction play? People that did Legos? I think there's a deep truth on personal development that has to do with what are we drawn in our purest forms of play, so to say.

Starting point is 01:50:05 So to recover that, I think is like lesson number one. Let me jump back to Bonobos for a second. I had a book recommended to me. I can't remember the book nor the author. I'm a bit embarrassed about that. But it related to chimpanzees. And it was the story of a particular, I want to say zoologist, who had taught, this is going to be very broad strokes, a particular chimpanzee something like 200 signs from American Sign Language.

Starting point is 01:50:33 And that chimpanzee then had offspring and taught the offspring something like 70 or 80 signs. So it was a language, it was a vocabulary, really, I guess, a language more than just vocabulary that was passed from this chimp to offspring. And it was the story of this. And I found myself wondering- Was it Pampanisha? It might've been, it might've been. I'm blanking on the name. But in this case, it was a chimpanzee. But the question that came to mind for me was, because I've become very interested in animal communication, not necessarily people who are like horse whispers and so on, although that is also interesting to me. It's more so animal-to-animal communication, right?

Starting point is 01:51:15 So within a wolf pack, how do they communicate? Let's say birds in flight, how do they maintain formation when they're actually taking micro-sleeps and the way that they rotate through this form? I mean, the whole thing is just incredible, but how do they communicate if they communicate? Or how do they know if they don't communicate, for instance, right? A lot of these types of questions. And so I was looking at this book summary and I thought to myself, I wonder if this is a step up for the chimpanzee or a step down for the chimpanzee to have this surrogate language. In other words, is it an augmentation or is it replacing something that

Starting point is 01:51:51 actually has much more subtlety and nuance to it? And so I know this is a big shift of gears, but it could affect how one looks at the play they choose to engage in. How do bonobos communicate and how nuanced is their communication, right? Is it just like four or five, 10 or 12 different kind of screeches and grunts that they get the rough gist across with? Has that been in any way distilled or identified by field biologists? Thank you. We are learning, obviously, and we're still learning, and a lot more will come. But the first thing that I think is very important to know

Starting point is 01:52:30 is that communication is multimodal. So it's comprised of gestures, hand gestures, but also body language, posture, proximity. You are sitting next to whom. You are in which location. Just the physical location is also a part of communication. It's also vocal, their utterances, their utterances have different meanings and they sometimes can be combined in different ways. Their communication is flexible, their vocal communication is not as, obviously, flexible as human languages. We have really taken vocal communication to an extreme. But so we have vocal, we have hand gestures, we have body language, and other cues.

Starting point is 01:53:20 Smell is also important. So if you take this as a whole they have different meanings depending how you combine it the other thing that is important to understand i think in relation to your question and the chimpanzee example is that it's very difficult for us as humans given that we exist in language to not define intelligent communication from a human perspective. Given that I do language, how good are you at doing language? Oh, language, spoken word, right? If you're not as good as doing language, it means that your communication is inferior.

Starting point is 01:53:58 So you're defining the ability to swim if you're a fish according to how you swim. So that is kind of a little bit inevitable perhaps but I think today we try to think of it from the point of view of the animals in relation to the problems they have to solve and in relation to the environment they are in notice oh can they solve puzzles because we're so good at solving puzzles so that's in general terms and the other thing that I think is important to think when you think about animal communication is, again, their environment. Bonobos live in the jungle.

Starting point is 01:54:34 One of the obvious problems when you're in the jungle is that there's a lot of trees. So seeing visual cues are sometimes difficult. I learned if you talk to birders, you are birding in a forest, you start listening. Basically, you bird by listening to calls, not by visually recognizing. And I realized that I shifted perceptual modes. So to say, I was following play and i would get super attuned to it would sound weird but temperature which is i call it a temperature but it's really a combination of things i the time of day the place where you your body knows what's likely to happen and then And then auditory cues, namely laughter, very distant, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

Starting point is 01:55:28 And then you follow that and then you see them. The reason I mentioned that is because it gave me a very obvious insight into Bonobo communication, namely they can't always see each other. Therefore, auditory communication is important. Yeah, I've only recently really come to appreciate how discrete different animal calls can be. And I hesitate to use the word nuanced because I'm not really sure in this context what that would mean. But for instance, you can train your ear to identify, say, a wildebeest alarm call for a lion versus a leopard they sound different or a squirrel alarm call for certain types of predators that are stationary versus same predator when it's moving

Starting point is 01:56:15 so there's even for animals we would consider perhaps very again this is kind of anthropomorphizing and judging them by our capabilities, but simple, right? Still have a wide range of ability to communicate. And I have to imagine that we've only scratched the surface. I know there's been some very interesting research done with dolphins, but if we could talk about this for hours and hours and hours, which we won't, but if you had to hazard some theories that you think are worth examining, say, over the next five, 10, 20 years, maybe we'll have more technology that will assist in this, but as it relates to field biology and animal communication, do you have any theories you'd like to posit as worth exploring? Or do you think there are any insights that perhaps you've observed? Not insights, any phenomena that you've observed that you think, well, this isn't really something

Starting point is 01:57:19 I can, I wouldn't go so far as to say this exists and I've proven it exists, but there is a hypothesis kind of worth disproving here that is interesting. Does anything come to mind for you? Many things which are mostly questions. Following bonobos in the jungle, we try to predict their daily movements. Just the question, where are they going and why? And we couldn't. We couldn't. Not even the most experienced trackers.

Starting point is 01:57:51 Because we wanted to know where they were going for a very practical reason, because that would allow us to sleep for longer and find them, right? And we couldn't. And they seemed... So the mental maps in their heads, their cognition, how do they know where to forage? It's a very basic question. And a lot of animal behavior people with a particular species have very good answers about this. Whether you're talking about migratory birds, amazing.

Starting point is 01:58:22 I mean, migratory birds, how do they know? Have you seen the distances that these birds travel little guys i mean it's amazing yeah so then the world of cetaceans or bats austin and bats and echolocation another huge topic but to stick with bonobos in the jungle the jungle is in many ways like the sea in the sense of that this particular jungle is flat. You don't have perspective, not like Chilean forests where you're in the mountains and you can see far. So for my own perspective, I was like, this is just like a sea of green. Obviously, I'm not attuned to the nuances that they are attuned.

Starting point is 01:59:05 Also, because it's not temperate environment, but tropical, the fruiting patterns, it's kind of weird. Some trees fruit once a year, some trees every two years, some trees you go, I don't know, a few months. So what I'm trying to say that the environmental uncertainty, the fluctuation in fruiting patterns is, to my human antenna, very large. And they seem to have this map that basically they know. They know when the Mbambo tree has ripe fruit, they were like, okay, we're shifting across the whole territory.

Starting point is 01:59:41 And I'm like, how do they know? These basic questions about travel I find them fascinating but maybe that was my own like geek thing because I look at GPS endlessly so I haven't worked it out yet that's one answer but that is actually compounded by actually the second part of the answer to your previous question about play in my personal life for the pandemic I was in Chile and I discovered not only like this old way of literary play but also started climbing again and being a lot more spending a lot more time in the mountains and so that is that opens an entirely new chapter in terms of physical exertion and risk. And I'm not like a martial arts guy,

Starting point is 02:00:28 but still, I, you know, I like to. Well, you and I both know Jason Nehmer, the co-founder of Acro Yoga. So you have no excuse not to do acro.

Starting point is 02:00:40 Oh yeah. I'm going to try to get out of it as much as I can. Which is probably, I'm going to try to get out type of itch. I've never, with the exception of maybe some weird injury, never had an acroyoga session where I'm like, wow, I really wish I hadn't done that session. You always feel better afterwards. Checks so many boxes. So I want to give him credit, Jason, where credit is due since he's the one who also introduced us. To come back to that travel question or how they know where to forage, two things come to mind for me. One that is equally mysterious in some respects, which is a story told in a book called Of Wolves and Men by Barry Lopez,

Starting point is 02:01:38 which is a spectacular book. And he talks about traveling with field biologists and at multiple points observing say a wolf pack that would get up point in one direction and just head off and they would trek for this is in deep snow too i mean this is calorically energetically expensive right this decision has consequences and they would travel for multiple days and then intersect perfectly with a migrating caribou herd that happened to be traveling sort of the opposite side of this triangle. And you just have to ask yourself, okay, how does that happen exactly? And there are, you know, maybe it's a seasonal thing. Maybe the caribou are doing that constantly. So it's really just like intersecting with a highway, although by the story and the description it didn't seem to be the case.

Starting point is 02:02:30 I find it very exciting that there are so many open questions, because it seems like at every point in human history, we more or less thought we had it all figured out. I mean, this is true during the Alexandrian periods. This is true with the Egyptians. It's true for hunter-gatherers. I mean, by and large, we had it figured out. Maybe our explanatory model was gods and this and that and the other thing. But one has to assume that, as one doctor said to me, 50% of what we know is wrong. We just don't know which 50%. The other hypothesis that comes to mind as you're talking about bonobos and forging behavior, and we don't have to get into this, but people should look it up on Wikipedia at the very least, is I believe it's called the drunken monkey hypothesis. And the drunken monkey hypothesis is a hypothesis that humans are predisposed to alcoholism and ethanol abuse because we were rewarded for being highly attuned, from cue that we used to locate food sources. And that that is one partial explanation, or maybe complete explanation,

Starting point is 02:03:54 for why we are so predisposed to alcoholism as humans, which I thought was pretty interesting. I haven't gone too deeply into it, but it's face value seems to make some sense to me. And I know we have gone a lot longer than planned, Dr. Isabel. So I want to be respectful of your time. And also, I think both of us probably need a little bit, speaking of something calorically expensive, this conversation, I think, is probably calorically expensive. So we, I think, was probably calorically expensive. So we could use some food and blood glucose. But is there anything, and we'll do a round two at some point. This has been so much fun, and I didn't even get through 5% of the notes I have in front of me. So no shortage of things to discuss. Is there anything that you would like

Starting point is 02:04:39 to mention before we come to a close for this round one. People can find you online on Twitter at Isabel Benke, B-E-H-N-C-K-E. We'll link to that in the show notes. Instagram.com forward slash Isabel underscore Benke. And we will include all of these in the show notes at Tim.blog slash podcast with links to all the resources mentioned. Anything else that you would like to bring up? Any other comments, complaints, requests of my audience, anything at all before we bring this to a close? Thank you, Tim. Two things. One, the comment on the Instagram and Twitter. It's basically, I love feedback because I think nature evolves through feedback.

Starting point is 02:05:27 I'm not very big on Twitter. I think I've been publishing more in Instagram, mainly through a form of play because I discovered for myself that taking pictures is fun. So they're not necessarily great, but it's a way of playing. So anyway, if anyone wants to kind of interact there,

Starting point is 02:05:44 that's, and I welcome the good, the bad to kind of interact there that's uh and i welcome the good the bad and the ugly so that's fun for me i love to learn and then the second point was in relation to your comment about the drunken monkey hypothesis i do think it's a partial explanation because as you will know by now my bias is to go back to origins and take you a little bit further back in time the reason why we have asked yourself why would we have the machinery for being drawn to fermentation in first place think about that i think the answer of that is play because play is about the machinery for a kind of biological excitement and intensity seeking and so the overlap of abuse substance abuse but also creativity and risk taking I think a lot of these reward mechanisms are linked and this is a huge topic and it's complicated because we go both on the light side and the dark side

Starting point is 02:06:45 of things like creativity, which should not be spoken lightly, but let me just leave that maybe for the next time. We'll save that for chapter two. And for people who, you bring up a great point actually, which is, I mean, many great points, but the assumption that our ancestors sought out fermented fruit as a food source may be off base, because there are tons of animals, or solely as a food source, might be misplaced. the animal kingdom, you find examples of seeking inebriation, right? You find tons, tons all over the place. So, you know, reindeer in Lapland like to have fun too. People can look up that story in the origins of Santa Claus if you want some extra credit reading. But Isabel Benke, so nice to see you. It is so lovely to spend time together and to have a chance to explore all these things. You have so many other stories.

Starting point is 02:07:50 You have so many other interests. We didn't even get to your photographing of dead animals. Going to leave that as a teaser. There are so many interesting side alleys to take and we will share that with everyone in round two at some point. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Starting point is 02:08:13 Lovely. Thank you so much for leading such a wonderful dance. Hasta la proxima. And for everybody listening, thank you so much for tuning in. Until next time, be a little kinder than is necessary and take care. Hasta la proxima. Gracias. Hey guys, this is Tim again.

Starting point is 02:08:33 Just one more thing before you take off and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun,

Starting point is 02:09:23 again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Headspace.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #598: Primatologist Isabel Behncke on Play, Sexual Selection, and Lessons from Following Bonobos for 3,000 Kilometers in the Jungles of Congo

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