Monkey Business - Robin Dunbar, Dave Gorman and Jo Setchell

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Speaker 17 Hello, I'm Brian Cox.

Speaker 1 I'm Robert Ince.

Speaker 17 And this is the monkeyest infinite monkey cage yet.

Speaker 1 It's a key childhood memory for many to be walking around the zoo and getting to the monkey enclosure and then seeing that something is going on.

Speaker 1 You're just a young, innocent child and you say, Mummy, what's that monkey hanging in that tire doing? And she goes, Look away, Brian, look away, there's nothing of interest here.

Speaker 1 But, mum, I'm really interested. There's all things going.
No, let's go to the chinchilla enclosure. But, mother, I'm left with questions unanswered that might damage me in the future.

Speaker 1 And I'll only be able to deal with particles, not living things.

Speaker 1 Psychotherapists actually do believe that it is this this experience that Brian and so many of you have had in the zoo that can lead to a rubber fetish, though only if the rubber has a six-inch tread.

Speaker 1 But today...

Speaker 1 I love the way that rippled around because

Speaker 1 people were reading different images in and surprising yourselves.

Speaker 2 I think most people are just questioning a six-inch tread.

Speaker 3 That's enormous. What kind of tire is that?

Speaker 17 It's a treader, isn't it? Oh, man,

Speaker 2 not six inches.

Speaker 17 That's two or three inches.

Speaker 1 No, I don't. I don't know anything about cars.

Speaker 17 This is going to make no sense now, but anyway.

Speaker 17 But today we're looking beyond the tyre.

Speaker 3 Or indeed.

Speaker 1 We're going through the tyre, which was one of Lloyd Grossman's less successful animal-based shows.

Speaker 17 Because we're going to look at what we can learn from, and I will use more radio 4 language than my colleague here, the romantic behaviour of monkeys.

Speaker 17 We will be asking about the monogamy of the mandrel, the gregariousness of the gibbon, and the temptation of the tamarind.

Speaker 1 Do monkeys appear to fall in love? How does sibling bonding vary? What gets a monkey hot under the furry collar? And how often do we see them exhibit same-sex behaviour?

Speaker 1 Ultimately, what do we learn about ourselves? By learning about the love life of monkeys. To aid Nebetis, we are joined by a psychologist, an anthropologist, and a cruciverbalist.

Speaker 3 And they are.

Speaker 7 Hello, I'm Robin Dunbar. I'm professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford.
And I've spent most of my life studying monkeys and humans and feral goats.

Speaker 7 And I think the most surprising thing that I've seen really with monkeys is just how Machiavellian and scheming they can actually be. They

Speaker 7 really are like watching humans.

Speaker 14 Hello, I'm Joe Setchell. I'm a professor of anthropology at Durham University.

Speaker 14 I study mandrels, who are a very large, very, very colorful species of monkey that live in the rainforest of Gabon in Central Africa.

Speaker 14 And the most peculiar thing that I have learned from studying those monkeys is that they use their vibrant colour to avoid conflict and that they have a scent gland on their chest which they rub against trees to advertise who they are, how high-ranking they are, and even their DNA.

Speaker 2 My name's Dave Gorman. I am what I am, and

Speaker 2 what I am needs no excuses.

Speaker 2 I've just learnt that a mandrel is a type of monkey and not a euphemism.

Speaker 2 And the thing I found

Speaker 2 most edifying from watching monkeys is the knowledge that they are literally too busy singing to put anybody down.

Speaker 1 And this is our panel.

Speaker 1 Let's first of all just start off. Joe, in terms of what is the kind of variety of, I suppose, well, romantic relationships that we see in monkeys or sexual?

Speaker 14 It's hugely varied. So, if we think about primates, all of the primates, it can be from a long-term bond that lasts decades through to a relationship that lasts seconds.

Speaker 14 The cutest relationship, I think, is the T T monkey. So they're one of the ones that form very, very long-term pairs.
And as far as we know,

Speaker 14 which is not very far, but as far as we know, they're relatively monogamous in those pairs. And they sit in trees and twine their tails around one another.
That's a romantic relationship.

Speaker 14 They sit together and twine their tails around each other.

Speaker 14 They're a very cryptic species, which means they hide a lot, so they hide in tangles of vines in the trees, but they always forget their tails.

Speaker 14 So you walk walk around in the forest and just see these two tails hanging out of the forest, and you know where the T T monkeys are.

Speaker 14 I think you're sort of

Speaker 2 imposing some sort of cultural paradigm where you say they twine their tails and that's romantic, because you might also say that's jealous and possessive, total control, that's I always know where you are.

Speaker 1 And also, if you always forget your tail, to combine your tail with someone else's tail will improve the likelihood of remembering your tail.

Speaker 3 Absolutely, Robin.

Speaker 1 What about for you in terms of looking at what we might say? Let's say romantic. Because even defining that can be quite difficult, can't it? We project something of ourselves onto that behaviour.

Speaker 7 Yeah, it's actually much easier to define friendships in monkeys, because their friendships are very similar to our kind of friendships, the way they set them up. I guess romantic relationships

Speaker 7 they kind of look the same, but I mean it does vary enormously from species to species and even within a species. Well, just like humans, I suppose.
Different individuals

Speaker 7 have

Speaker 7 different intensities of relationships. There are introverts and extroverts.

Speaker 17 From an evolutionary perspective, Joe, so you talk about this whole variety of relationships, polygamy, monogamy. Is there anything that's favoured evolutionarily?

Speaker 17 Can we say, well, it would be better if a species only had monogamous relationships, long-term relationships, or what would you say,

Speaker 17 a large number of two-second relationships?

Speaker 14 They're all favoured evolutionarily, which is why they exist. But

Speaker 14 the kind of boring ecological answer is that it depends on the distribution of food. And it depends how many females can live in a group.

Speaker 14 And how many females can live in a group determines how many males can be added to that group. So if there's enough food for just one animal, then a female has to live on her own.

Speaker 14 She might, or she'll have her kid with her, but no one else. If anyone else tries to join her, make a group, then there wouldn't be enough food.

Speaker 14 It does get more complicated than this, but that's the basic.

Speaker 14 Then if you can have two females living together, then they might allow a male to join them. There are advantages to having a male join you.
You avoid harassment from other males. You

Speaker 14 probably do better in terms of protection from predators eating you. But at the same time, the bigger the group, the more likely the predator is to find you.

Speaker 14 And then, if there's plenty of food, then you can have a large group of animals. And when there's a large group of females, no one male can control access to them.

Speaker 3 It's complete chaos.

Speaker 14 It is complete chaos, exactly.

Speaker 14 With a bit of order underneath.

Speaker 2 Is monogamy more prevalent in a smaller group or in a larger group?

Speaker 14 In a small group. So where you have just one female, she might choose to share her area, we call it home range, with one male,

Speaker 14 and she might also choose to only reproduce with that one male. But she could also share her home range with one male and then reproduce with other males.
Okay.

Speaker 1 So Robin, you were just mentioning there the chaos. Do you find yourself sometimes, say you're out on a Friday night and you look out the streets and you think,

Speaker 1 how much am I learning about the monkeys by watching the humans in the same way as I learn about humans from watching the monkeys?

Speaker 7 Actually, to be fair, a lot of the stuff that we've spent the last 20 years doing has been on humans in order to understand monkeys better.

Speaker 7 You can do things with humans that you can't do with monkeys. You can stick humans in neuroimaging machines and stuff like that.
And you can ask them questions.

Speaker 1 Give me an example of one experiment where you might think, right, if we do that to some humans, that will help us understand this particular group of monkeys more.

Speaker 7 Okay, so

Speaker 7 the number of friends you can have is limited basically by the size of your brain. That's a generic relationship across mammals as a whole, basically.

Speaker 7 But in primates, it takes a very quantitative form.

Speaker 7 What we were able to do with humans originally was to look at your personal social network and tie that to the size of different bits of your brain. So it's a very, very strong relationship.

Speaker 7 So we don't actually need to ask you how many friends you've got, Robin. We just need to look at your brain and we can tell you.

Speaker 1 This is one of your most famous and most quoted pieces of research. So tell us, yes,

Speaker 1 it is known as Dunbar's number.

Speaker 7 Dunbar's number, yes, yes.

Speaker 7 That's the limit on the number of meaningful relationships you can have, friends and family, and that's about 150 in humans. That actually consists of a series of

Speaker 7 layers of friendship, of greater and greater intimacy as they come in towards you.

Speaker 7 You've got a small group of very close, intimate friendships, and then bigger and bigger circles of less intimate friendships. So the average is 150.

Speaker 7 But how you are between 100 and 250 correlates with the size of particularly this part of your brain, but also bits around here.

Speaker 17 That's the frontal cortex.

Speaker 7 Yeah, it's prefrontal cortex but also the temporal lobe and then inside that there's this massive wiring connection known as the default mode neural network and they called it the default mode neural network because they had no idea what it did.

Speaker 7 But when you put people in the scanner, brain scanner, and told them to relax and not do anything, then this network became very, very active.

Speaker 7 And being as though a neuroscientist, I apologize to neuroscientists in the audience, and didn't actually know what was going on inside people's heads, they thought it must be the brain daydreaming.

Speaker 7 And it's turned out basically

Speaker 7 when you're put in that sort of situation, what do you do? You think about friends, family, relationships, the social network. So the thing is going crazy because it's thinking about the network.

Speaker 7 And then since we did those originally, there have been about 25 studies now showing this in humans. Neuroimaging experiments have been done on three groups of monkeys.

Speaker 7 the same effect being shown at the individual level.

Speaker 1 So, through neuroimaging, of like Dave or Brian or Joe or me, would we be able to see how shallow our friendship is?

Speaker 3 Yes, exactly. Yes.

Speaker 7 Or even if you have any.

Speaker 3 So,

Speaker 17 how does that scale? So, if you go to, I don't know, let's say a macaque or pick a species.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 17 Then how does it change? Does it change in a linear fashion if it's twice the size?

Speaker 7 So, you'll like this a little bit because it's mathematical.

Speaker 7 And by the way, if you want any evidence of how actually functional that is, that it really exists, this number, somebody did an analysis of 61 million Facebook pages, counting all the friends on each of these 61 million Facebook pages.

Speaker 7 The average was 149.

Speaker 2 They've made the great mistake there of assuming that the people I'm Facebook friends with are people I'm friends with.

Speaker 7 In general, they are.

Speaker 7 Your 150 friends, as I mentioned earlier, are divided up into a series of layers. Those layers have very, very specific numbers.
They're 5, 15, 50, and 150.

Speaker 7 So the five is what we call your shoulders to cry on friends. They're the ones that will,

Speaker 7 when your world falls apart, they will drop everything and come pick you up again. Turns out that those numbers are optima for the efficiency with which information flows through networks.

Speaker 7 And what's more, those are the numbers you find not only between species of primates, but also within primate groups. The structure of primate groups has exactly those numbers as well.

Speaker 7 So they don't run to the 150 because they don't have as big a brain as us. But for species like the boons and macaques and chimpanzees that live in groups of 40 or 50 individuals,

Speaker 7 they're sub-structured in exactly the same way as human social networks are.

Speaker 1 What are the other forms of behaviour that we might expect to be different depending on the cognitive ability to have that many kind of social connections?

Speaker 7 You've got what I call the line dancing problem.

Speaker 7 Imagine you're in a group, you're

Speaker 7 foraging through the grasslands or the woodlands of the savannah or the forest, whatever it is.

Speaker 7 How many people can you have in a group and still have the people at either end in time on a line dance? The answer is without music, very small. And that's

Speaker 7 this problem, is

Speaker 7 the synchrony problem of moving in the same direction. It's really hard work for monkeys and apes and the few other species of mammals that have stable groups to try and keep the group together.

Speaker 7 And initially they do it just by sort of keeping track of their neighbor and keeping going but that only

Speaker 7 will only really allow you to work with up to a group of about 15 maybe maximum and that that'll be about five females and maybe three males, something of that sort of size, and then the rest are kids.

Speaker 7 And you have to break through what's a glass ceiling at that point and produce something else. The producing something else has to do with grooming bonds.
So

Speaker 7 at that point, they start to invest very heavily in social grooming to create this really intense friendships, bonded relationships that keep individuals together.

Speaker 7 So your friends will keep checking on you as well as you keep checking on them.

Speaker 7 And that'll do you up to about 30 groups of of 30, and after 30 there seems to be another glass ceiling and you have to go through that. And that's when they start to use serious cognition.

Speaker 7 The brain really starts to produce

Speaker 7 major new kinds of cognitive strategies which allow them to figure out who's doing what with who, basically.

Speaker 2 So I think I've just realized why S-Club 7 split up.

Speaker 2 Because each of them realized that only five of the others would pick them up when they were down

Speaker 2 and resented the other two.

Speaker 2 Although I am assuming they were all capable of serious cognition, so maybe that's not right.

Speaker 1 How much does that affect, say, the Osmonds? Because there also you've got an actual genetic link as well, which will probably change the relationship, wouldn't it?

Speaker 2 Well, how much does it affect all family bonds if only five people are allowed in that inner circle? The minute you've got a six-person family,

Speaker 2 someone's in trouble.

Speaker 17 The way we've talked about it so far is quite

Speaker 17 mathematical, it seems to me.

Speaker 17 But when we talk about, of course, human relationships, there's a large amount of choice involved.

Speaker 17 So I suppose I'm asking questions like,

Speaker 17 is there a pin-up monkey? Is there a handsome monkey that everyone would go?

Speaker 1 Why are you bringing up, isn't there a pin-up, handsome monkey, Brian? What are you... I just wonder if there's any self-interest here that we're watching.

Speaker 17 It is because it's written down here on the script.

Speaker 3 You wrote the question.

Speaker 3 You wrote that.

Speaker 1 I remember you doing that, crossing out the other one. Is there a monkey that wears a card? Good.
And you went, oh, I don't want to do that.

Speaker 14 So, when I started studying mandrels, I was attracted to them because they have they're very colorful.

Speaker 14 And I wanted to know whether there's a pin-up effect, so whether the most colourful animal is the most impressive, perhaps, perhaps attractive to females, and so on.

Speaker 14 And I've been studying them now for decades. And initially, I did discover that the pin-up animal, the most colourful animal, has the highest testosterone, is the highest ranking.

Speaker 14 And I thought, oh, yeah, so I'm really figuring out something here. He's probably the most important.

Speaker 14 And females do like to hang around the most colourful animal.

Speaker 14 But there are many other things that come into it, too. So there is his colour, there's also how nice he is.
So if a male is brightly coloured but horrible, females are just not interested.

Speaker 14 And it turned out much later when I looked at their genetics, what they're really interested in is genes, and it's got nothing to do with the colour.

Speaker 17 So it's the males that are colourful?

Speaker 14 Males and females. So males are are incredibly colourful, so we focus on that.

Speaker 14 But if you didn't look at a male mandrel and you just saw a female mandrel, you'd notice that she was very pretty and very pink-coloured. So pink nose, blue facial stripes, very pretty.

Speaker 17 And is it the females that are primarily making the choices?

Speaker 14 It's both.

Speaker 14 So yes, females definitely choose. Females have the advantage of being much smaller than males, which means that they can get around a lot more easily.

Speaker 14 I've seen males mate guarding a tree, thinking that their female is up the tree, when the female has jumped out of the tree about 10 minutes ago and has run down, jumped into another tree, run down, run out of sight, and turns up later with another male.

Speaker 3 So the male...

Speaker 1 The through line we see is that the male remains the idiot.

Speaker 14 I'm a female primatologist, so yeah, that's the conclusion I draw.

Speaker 1 And remembers to lift the tail up so it's not dangling down to give away where it is. So that's.

Speaker 14 So mandrels don't have that problem because their tail is only a few inches long.

Speaker 17 And you mentioned genetics. So in terms of the traits that will be attractive beyond the colour, what are the traits that the females are looking for?

Speaker 14 Immune genes, so the strength of the immune system, but not actually.

Speaker 17 How do they gauge that?

Speaker 14 Through smell.

Speaker 14 So there's a link between the immunity genes and the smell of the animal.

Speaker 14 And they're partly looking just for a good immune system, but they're really really looking for a match between their immune system and the male's immune system. Actually, this works both ways.

Speaker 14 Males also base their mating decisions on the female's genetic makeup. And in the end, the point is to make a better quality immune system in the baby.

Speaker 1 Has that changed in terms of the understanding of humans though?

Speaker 1 Because remember when we had Matthew Cobbond a while ago, and he was saying that actually the olfactory senses in humans during kind of dating mating is not quite what we thought it was before.

Speaker 1 before.

Speaker 14 Ah, so

Speaker 14 I think it's changed our understanding of humans in that we're not consciously aware of odour,

Speaker 14 but we're very unconsciously aware of odour. So it affects us enormously, it brings back memories to us instantly, but we don't necessarily think that we're influenced by it.

Speaker 14 So perhaps what we know now about primates and other mammals has influenced what we know about humans.

Speaker 2 But we're the ones who shower and put scent on and do stuff. So we're messing with a system to try and game it

Speaker 2 when actually, if we left alone, we'd probably mate more successfully with people who were better fit for our immune system.

Speaker 7 Not entirely, because your choice of well, I don't say your choice of perfume, but

Speaker 7 in general, women's choice of per perfume, but I guess that applies to aftershaves in the case of men, is directly correlated with your natural smell from your immune system.

Speaker 7 So, you like the perfumes which actually enhance your natural odour.

Speaker 2 So, is that what?

Speaker 7 This is why, if I may give you some belated advice, Dave, don't buy perfumes.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you said it's too late for him

Speaker 7 because you'll buy something you like,

Speaker 7 not the one she likes.

Speaker 2 Okay, well, thank you for giving me a retrospective excuse.

Speaker 3 I'm even buying perfume for my wife.

Speaker 1 I've got to be honest with you, Dave. I remember when you gave her a box set of Lynx Africa.

Speaker 1 Only happy.

Speaker 1 Are you improving your chances? When you choose your perfume and you're saying this will be kind of matching with the smell, is that improving the chance?

Speaker 14 In a way, possibly. But there are other ways in which we also can pick up on our genes.
So one is in the odour that we have on our body. Another is in the mouth when we kiss, for example.

Speaker 14 So you might wear some fabulous perfume that is created to attract the opposite sex, but it won't take you as far as kissing.

Speaker 2 Well, obviously, I didn't kiss my wife until she was my wife, and it was a bit late.

Speaker 1 I remember that moment, you opening your mouth, going, about to have fresh breath, like Safrika.

Speaker 17 This leads us on neatly to the next.

Speaker 17 Because, as we've just discussed, sexual behaviour in humans is extremely complex.

Speaker 17 Do we see such complexity in the sexual behaviour?

Speaker 14 We see lots of different sexual behaviours, so definitely, yes, both across species and within species.

Speaker 14 And also, simply diversity of partner choice. So we have sexual behaviour between males and females, between males and males, between females and females.

Speaker 14 In some species, like the bonobo, was famous for involving all the different age classes, too, which we don't do as humans, or at least legally, we don't do as humans.

Speaker 1 But is that right about because I know we're mainly talking about monkeys, but if we move on to apes as well, I remember being told a thing about the fact that bonobos would also have kind of a fashion sense that they would sometimes pick up, like say, a dead rat and wear it on their head and kind of parade around

Speaker 3 a parisium.

Speaker 3 It fits, doesn't it? It does, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 But is it so things like that, a kind of flamboyant display, which includes accessorizing?

Speaker 14 I suspect that monkeys don't need that sort of accessory in the way that bonobos might, I don't know, because they have their own accessories, like they have bright red noses and blue stripes on their on their cheeks and colourful genitalia.

Speaker 14 Maybe they don't need a rat on the head.

Speaker 1 So it's like there you're describing the difference between the mating technique of Adam Ant and Rod Stewart.

Speaker 1 I've visualized visualized it. That's a bit.

Speaker 3 Thank you for that.

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Speaker 17 The behaviours we've been talking about, so complex behaviours, but many of them driven by environmental factors and so on.

Speaker 17 How much can we read into the intelligence of the individual from the social structures and sexual behaviours that we see?

Speaker 7 Depends what you mean by intelligence. That sort of

Speaker 7 everyday physical world type cognition,

Speaker 7 everybody has to do in order to live in the real world.

Speaker 7 You've got to be able to compute how far is it from here to where Dave is sitting over there in terms of when I leap off this branch to that branch to land in the right place and not

Speaker 3 on the floor.

Speaker 1 I love it when a bit of jeopardy is thrown into the show.

Speaker 7 But social intelligence, that's sort of separate. It exploits a lot of the same machinery, if you like, so causal reasoning reasoning and stuff.

Speaker 7 But the key to that seems to be that it involves what's become known as mentalizing.

Speaker 7 It's the capacity to understand what's going on in somebody else's mind, essentially, or at least to be able to predict how they're going to behave in the future, and to manage and manipulate that to some extent.

Speaker 7 And that is

Speaker 7 extremely expensive in terms of neural processing time. And that's why you end up having to have this huge bit of the brain dedicated, essentially dedicated to managing social relationships.

Speaker 14 So if you have a bright red nose, you don't need any of that, because you can just look at someone else's nose and say, oh, okay, I know what's going on.

Speaker 14 A bit of a sniff to figure out, you know, all the.

Speaker 7 And that's the difference between herding species, like feral goats, who don't have stable relationships

Speaker 7 and don't have stable groups, because there's no point in learning the ins and outs and foibles of a particular individual, because you may never see see them again.

Speaker 7 All you need to know is: are they a bigger thug than you? Are they prettier than you? They've got a nice red nose, or whatever the cues are.

Speaker 7 If you're in a stable group, you've got to do much more machinating, really,

Speaker 7 in order to keep everybody in the same place. Because the problem is, you know,

Speaker 7 as I'm sure you all know, you know, if you're too grumpy

Speaker 7 with your friends when you go out, you know, they'll abandon you.

Speaker 7 You know,

Speaker 7 so if you start sort of being too aggressive within the group, you destroy the group. It's the skills of diplomacy.

Speaker 1 So, Joe, does it monogamy? Would that when we see monkeys that are able to commit to monogamy, will we again will we presume that this this is shows various other forms of intelligence?

Speaker 1 And indeed, even possibly in terms of the rearing of the ch of the babies?

Speaker 14 So, there's a lot of coordination involved, yeah, definitely.

Speaker 14 So, if you're living just as two and you either spend all your time together, which can be involved coordination and giving up what you wanted to do to coordinate with your pair partner, or there are some species, lemurs, actually, rather than monkeys, where they coordinate within a home range but they're not together.

Speaker 14 They just keep in touch by yelling at each other

Speaker 14 and focalizing.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 the ones that have stable groups, stable monogamous groups as a pair, invariably have bigger brains than the ones that have a pair mating arrangement but don't live together.

Speaker 17 So, long-term monogamous relationships, and you said there's an increased brain size associated with that.

Speaker 17 Does that imply that concepts, very human concepts, like love, for example, which you would associate with monogamy, are we allowed, is it appropriate to begin to think in those terms, which are very anthropomorphic, I suppose, terms?

Speaker 7 I mean, the answer is yes, if you look at it, it looks very much like what humans do. But I think

Speaker 7 there is an argument for saying, actually

Speaker 7 you know the the best way to study any system be it cosmology or physics or humans or animals is actually to immerse yourself in it so much that you actually understand it intimately from the inside yourself then you have a much better sense of what how it how the thing works and that in some ways the argument that we should be back off from anthropomorphism wasn't a great idea because it divorced you from what the animals were actually doing.

Speaker 2 The trouble is, it's just so hot inside that bonobo costume.

Speaker 7 Oh, I know.

Speaker 3 Let alone how cramped it is if you want to be in a TT monkey costume.

Speaker 14 So, I would completely agree that we need to immerse ourselves into the lives of primates. It's not typical primatology.
There are some people who do it, and it's very useful.

Speaker 14 Then, you have the opportunity to describe things like when partner lost, for example. So, if a member of one of those long-term pairs dies,

Speaker 14 you see in the other what is very obvious to us as that we assume is grief.

Speaker 14 From a more natural science perspective, it's difficult to know how you measure that, but one thing we do measure is oxytocin, and in those long-term pair bonds, oxytocin is called a bonding hormone sometimes.

Speaker 14 We see that oxytocin is important in maintaining those bonds. It's also important in bonds, even in species that don't have one-to-one bonds.

Speaker 14 So, if you call oxytocin a love hormone, which some people do,

Speaker 14 then we can try to get hold of the idea of love.

Speaker 14 But also, I think there's always a really interesting contrast between what people present in academic conferences and what they talk about in the coffee break.

Speaker 14 And in the coffee break, yes, they'll be talking about how their monkeys love each other because it's so obvious that they do. Last time I visited a facility,

Speaker 14 one of my friends works with captive American monkeys, these little calatricids, and showed me around. And I met all these pairs, male and female, male and female, male and female.

Speaker 14 And then finally, we got to this cage, and she said, Oh, yeah, this is the two boys. They clearly chose each other, and they're hanging out.
And

Speaker 14 they have these brilliant enclosures where they all live in genes. They love to live in genes.
There's genes hanging up in the enclosures.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 14 out of the two legs of this gene, these genes popped out these two little male monkeys, and they've lived together. They just chose to live together.

Speaker 14 They haven't got babies, but she reckons that they would adopt if they were given the opportunity.

Speaker 3 Oh, that is

Speaker 3 if

Speaker 3 Levi 501s don't relaunch with that as opposed to just the most.

Speaker 7 But I think at the end of the day, one has to be a little, I mean, anthropomorphism is a two-edged sword, is the risk, because you can go overboard completely on it.

Speaker 7 So, we have to, you know, if you're going to study these things, you have to be able to live in this sort of

Speaker 7 dual world, as it were, where you can exploit this kind of intuitive understanding that we have of how organisms relate to each other, but at the same time step back and kind of look at it more hard-nosed and sharp.

Speaker 7 And I suppose the hard-nosed and sharp in the end has to come down to, I don't think we'll ever get at it studying it with behavior, maybe, I don't know. But my guess is

Speaker 7 we'll only really know if we can pick it up in the same bits of the brain firing up and the same surges of hormones in the system in the brain.

Speaker 7 So things like oxytocin and endorphins and stuff and the way those flood the brain during the course of interactions. And they are the same.

Speaker 7 I mean the endorphin system and the oxytocin system are the same in monkeys and humans.

Speaker 17 So you're saying a new

Speaker 17 technique, a new frontier of knowledge would be to really to look at the brain.

Speaker 17 of a monkey, let's say, and see that, so we want to see how the neurons fire, if the patterns are the same, the regions of the brain that are stimulated are the same as a human, that would be the final

Speaker 17 proof is

Speaker 17 strong evidence that they're thinking in the same way and experiencing the same thing.

Speaker 14 I think it's closing the gap, but I don't think you'll ever get to that final point where you know what's going on.

Speaker 17 I use the word feelings there, so that's the point, isn't it? The root of it.

Speaker 7 Yeah, because I mean, bear in mind, at the end of the day, we have this problem with ourselves.

Speaker 7 In other words, we tend to see the world as being populated by people like me. And I understand because that's the only reference point I have, is how I think and feel inside me.

Speaker 7 And we kind of generalize that onto other people and assume they're operating in the same way.

Speaker 17 But Joe, you said you don't think we'd ever get to that point where we'd say that the map is now so obvious.

Speaker 17 Let's say you had a family group and you see exactly how the brains are operating, then the patterns in the brain are happening.

Speaker 14 I just think we're still we might be happy with an explanation until we develop some new method and we could go further and to try and explain what's happening in the brain or what's happening in the endocrine system or anything else that you might be interested in.

Speaker 14 And you suddenly realize that you had an approximation of an answer, but there's still more to do and further to go.

Speaker 14 Even when I think, when I say we might be closing the gap, I think the gap is just there. And it is that fact that we have to eventually say, well, the patterns are the same.

Speaker 14 So we are assuming that the experience is the same. But we don't, we'll never know if the experience is the same.

Speaker 1 I think we've done a very English thing with this show, which is we've somehow really dragged out the bit that has allowed us to avoid talking about sex in a desperate bid that we won't get to it.

Speaker 1 But we promised this show would include monkey sex, and so

Speaker 1 please welcome Anita and boat. No, the

Speaker 1 so to get now to that, to the actual sexual behaviour. The nitty-gritty.

Speaker 1 So the first thing is,

Speaker 1 do we get a sense, Joe, that monkeys enjoy sex, that this is fun?

Speaker 14 Yeah, definitely. So if we talk about females, I'm female.
Many female primates clearly show signs of orgasm.

Speaker 14 So again, if we assume that orgasm is fun, because for individuals it seems to be fun, then yeah, they're having fun. They also seek out sex.
Both males and females seek out sex, not all the time,

Speaker 14 and it varies between the individuals, but they seek it out, which suggests that it's fun.

Speaker 1 So, there's not, say, a pattern in terms of the, say, the menstrual cycle

Speaker 1 of the monkey, but or that they would be, it's not merely, oh, hang on a minute, I can have a baby now, that you actually see it as in the same way with humans, that people go, do you know what, it's enough fun to not worry too much about the outcome.

Speaker 14 Loads of reasons for having sex.

Speaker 14 So, yes, of course, sex in order to reproduce, but loads of other reasons too.

Speaker 2 You started with a story about a monkey in a tire at the zoo by itself, which suggests that it is fun.

Speaker 1 Is that the tire element of it?

Speaker 2 The solo element of it suggests that that must be fun. It can't be doing it because it thinks it's going to lead to a baby, so it must be enjoying itself.

Speaker 14 Yeah, so evolutionarily, perhaps there obviously is a link to reproduction, but there's a link to many other things too. In some cases, social bonds,

Speaker 14 between males and females, between males and males, between females and females, and so on. But yeah, definitely, I think we, as far as we know, it's fun.

Speaker 1 And in terms of things like, you know, sometimes you'll see these kind of evangelical preachers, televangelists, or whatever, going on about the fact that we don't see homosexuality in any other animal, which means they've never even named a dog, to be honest, because

Speaker 1 so again, in terms of same-sex relations, sexual relations in the monkey world.

Speaker 14 So, first of all, there are plenty of same-sex relationships in the monkey world.

Speaker 14 I suppose also we should say that when we come to talking about same-sex relationships in humans, whether or not animals do that is completely irrelevant.

Speaker 14 But if we want to look and determine whether animals do it, primates do it, yes, lots. It varies across the species, but yeah, a lot.

Speaker 1 But I think that's in some ways why it's good to know: is you go, this is not,

Speaker 1 you know, people will describe certain things as being against nature, when in fact you go, let us look at the natural world and we see.

Speaker 14 It's everywhere in the natural world, absolutely.

Speaker 1 Dave, I suppose the big question for you really is, and we need a definition, what is love?

Speaker 2 It's committing to not kissing your wife until you're married.

Speaker 2 I don't,

Speaker 2 who knows? Who knows what love is? And even in our own lives, most of us believe we're in love and later can reassess that and go, that wasn't it, actually.

Speaker 2 Because until you've experienced it, you don't. So teenagers fall in love, but it's not, it's a kind of infatuation.

Speaker 2 And later in life, when you feel more deeply in love, you are able to look back on that and go, I just really liked her.

Speaker 2 It's not the same, is it? And what I was feeling was an excitement for novelty. But it's how do you possibly define what it is until it's too late?

Speaker 17 What you've described there eloquently is how complex these ideas are.

Speaker 11 But just

Speaker 1 we are getting quite close to the end, but Joe, in terms of what is love when you're looking at monkeys, how would you go?

Speaker 1 This appears to be what I will define for this piece of research as a loving relationship.

Speaker 14 Oh, well, I would never get away with calling it a loving relationship in a scientific article. I don't think maybe people will in the future.
But when you write the popular book, that's different.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 1 And is that available yet?

Speaker 2 I can't have a feeling that humans have somehow gamed the system, because in almost all other creatures, it's the males who are the flamboyantly coloured, you know, sort of the peacock tail or whatever.

Speaker 2 And in humans, it is the men who grow the beards and do whatever. But most of us shave them off, have a haircut, and say, put some makeup on, love.

Speaker 2 And we've somehow gamed the system and gone, make yourself pretty. You put the colour on, we're not doing it anymore.

Speaker 14 Which is very weird and culture-bound, historically time-bound phenomenon. There There are instances of cultures around the world where men wear makeup and perform for the women to choose.

Speaker 2 Yeah, which feels like the way it should be, but thank God we've got away from that.

Speaker 2 Far too lazy for that.

Speaker 17 We have just about run out of time. Just to give you some insight into the scripts, I'm looking through going.
Is there any question we haven't asked?

Speaker 17 There's one question we haven't asked. It's right at the end.
In this very sophisticated discussion we've had: if you could be any species of monkey, what would it be? So

Speaker 17 that is the the question that's written here, so I feel a duty bound to ask it. Which species of monkey would you be, eminent professor?

Speaker 1 Let's go, Robin, Joe, David.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 Robin.

Speaker 7 That's really difficult for males anyway, because they usually end up in fights which they lose very badly.

Speaker 17 You can be a goat if you want.

Speaker 3 Well, they're as bad.

Speaker 7 Actually, I spent a lot of time working on a very small miniature antelope called a Clipspringer, which is intensely pair-bonded.

Speaker 7 It's the most bonded loyally pair bonded species anywhere in the world I think and it's such a relaxed cozy life that they have if you see one of them the other member of the pair will be within three or four meters always they're never

Speaker 7 monkeys are too violent

Speaker 14 Joe which monkey I would be a dominant female mandrel for two reasons one is I think they have the best life. They're totally in charge.

Speaker 14 They know they're going to be in charge for the whole of their lives. And no one gives them any trouble.
That's the first reason.

Speaker 14 And the other reason is then I'd know what it was like to be a female mandrel.

Speaker 1 So, David?

Speaker 2 Well, I think the

Speaker 2 Cliffspringer. Clipspringer.
Clipspringer. That does sound appealing, but I am scared of heights.
So I'll go for being a female mandrel as well.

Speaker 2 Because who am I to argue with an expert?

Speaker 3 But I'm the dominant one.

Speaker 14 You can be the next one down in the hierarchy.

Speaker 3 Yeah, there's only one.

Speaker 17 There's only one.

Speaker 3 But we'll be in separate groups.

Speaker 1 It'll be okay. So we also asked our audience a question and we said, What is the most curious thing you've seen at the zoo?

Speaker 3 This one, this one's very nice, isn't it?

Speaker 17 An inquisitive child.

Speaker 3 Oh, my God.

Speaker 2 I have one that says, a small monkey stole a tea bag out of a lady's handbag at London Zoo. Which just goes to show those PG Tips adverts were very, very

Speaker 2 when they did those PG tips adverts. You know, the old, if you hummy, I'll play it or whatever, and it was chimps dressed in human clothes and things.

Speaker 2 The way they did that, they put peanut butter on the gums of the monkeys so that they would move their lips, and then they had actors' lip sync. It's a technology they now use in Hollyoaks.

Speaker 3 This is

Speaker 1 my wife, she was a keeper.

Speaker 17 This one, this is like a complaint, a letter of complaint.

Speaker 17 Like one of the ones we get from Radio 4 listeners. It goes on for a long time and it's in green ink.

Speaker 17 I watch an obnoxious couple get too close to an enclosure, ignoring numerous signs of warning about the hippo's curious habit of smashing their tails to spread their excrement widely.

Speaker 17 I enjoyed watching them sprayed by flinging poo.

Speaker 17 For them, them, flings could only get better.

Speaker 1 I've just got a Brian Coxerlottle.

Speaker 3 I've heard that rumour.

Speaker 1 Thank you to our panel, Joe Setchell, Robin Dunbar, and Dave Gorman.

Speaker 1 Next week, it's Christmas, and thanks to Brian's air miles, we're going to the North Pole to meet Father Christmas and his reindeer.

Speaker 1 So, we're going to ask how exactly do reindeer evolve to fly, and what are the health ramifications of eating two billion mince pies and drinking a billion glasses of sherry in one night?

Speaker 17 Or how do living things survive in polar regions?

Speaker 11 It'll be one or the other. It'll be one or the other: flying reindeer, living things in polar regions.

Speaker 1 Thank you, bye-bye. Bye.

Speaker 2 Now, nice again.

Speaker 12 Hi, Cyndia here. I'm very excited to bring you the return of Child.

Speaker 12 So we've been on the journey of an embryo all the way to a baby's first birthday. And now we are going to enter the explosive life of the toddler.

Speaker 12 Because this is the perfect place to unpick the very complicated world of emotions. The emotions that affect us all.

Speaker 12 So come with us as over eight episodes we fall through the abundant and dizzying world of happiness, descend into the depths of fear and the gendered and dangerous world of anger, and then crawl, wobble, and bounce our way through awe, love, anxiety, and surprise.

Speaker 12 From BBC Radio 4, this is Child, with me, India Rakerson. Listen first on BBC Sounds.

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