Monkey talk

“He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.”

baboon.jpgDarwin wrote this in 1838, reflecting on the power of our close animal relatives to illuminate human dynamics. Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth of UPenn have just published a book about baboon social behavior, Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. Marty Moss-Coane, my personal idol, interviewed Robert Seyfarth this morning on her radio show, Radio Times. It’s a great interview: Dr. Seyfarth describes how he and collaborating animal behaviorists draw their conclusions using field observations and experimental manipulations, providing a glimpse into how basic science research (in an extra-interesting field) is conducted. Definitely worth listening to the show to the very end, when he gives a positively extraordinary account of baboons goat-herding in Namibia.

Radio Times is broadcast every weekday from the Philadelphia NPR station WHYY, 90.9 FM. You can listen to this particular show from the Radio Times archive.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 8th, 2007 at 1:44 am and is filed under News and reports, Science research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Monkey talk”

  1. Dean Says:
    June 8th, 2007 at 8:18 am

    The University of Chicago Press has an excerpt from Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind on their website. The excerpt is from the opening chapter, “The Evolution of Mind”: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/102436.html

  2. jb Says:
    June 11th, 2007 at 8:25 pm

    Unrelated to the topic at hand:

    I was going to send you something that you might find interesting, but I can’t find any way to do that. An email address or even a comment web form would be very welcome.

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