Thursday, April 10, 2008

Our Inner Ape

I just hit upon a fascinating episode of the great australian podcast All in The Mind, called our inner ape, which deals with the nature and evolution of of social cognition in primates, and also has interesting tidbits on the evolution of language. Here's the heading:

"Apes are our closest relatives -- nearly 99% of our genes are identical -- but how do our inner lives compare? Culture, empathy, language, learning -- do chimps have the smarts to pull these off? Channel your 'inner ape' with the world's top primatologists as they unearth surprising results."

The podcast features short interviews withj a lot of the big names in the field, such as Michael Tomasello, Joan Silk, Dorothy Cheney (co-author of Baboon Metaphysics) and Andrew Whiten (co-inaugaurator of the Macchiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis).

I just listened to it and think it really worthwile to be checked out (be warned, though, the podcasts' main host for this episode, Volkarth Wildemuth, has a very noticeable german accent)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

...please where can I buy a unicorn?