Monkey Business - Robin Dunbar, Dave Gorman and Jo Setchell

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. Acer does it. So, we can now listen to your podcast. to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robin Ince. And this is the monkeyest infinite monkey cage yet. It's 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. You're just a young, innocent child and you say, Mummy, what's that monkey hanging in that tyre doing? And she goes, look away, Brian, look away! There's nothing of interest here. 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. I'll only be able to deal with particles, not living things. Psychotherapists actually do believe that it is 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. But today... I love the way that rippled around, because people were reading different images in and surprising yourselves. I think most people are just questioning a six-inch tread. That's enormous! What kind of tyre is that? That's just a tractor, isn't it? Not six inches. That's two or three inches at most. No, I don't know anything about cars. This is going to make no sense now, but anyway. But today we're looking beyond the tyre. Or indeed... We're going through the tyre, which was one of Lloyd Grossman's less successful animal-based shows. 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. We will be asking about the monogamy of the mandrel, the gregariousness of the gibbon and the temptation of the tamarind. 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? Ultimately, what do we learn about ourselves by learning about the love life of monkeys? To aid and abet us, we are joined by a psychologist, an anthropologist and a cruciferbalist. And they are. Hello, I'm Robin Dunbar. I'm a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford. And I spent most of my life studying monkeys and humans and feral goats. 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 really are like watching humans. Hello, I'm Jo Setchel. I'm a professor of anthropology at Durham University. I study mandrills, who are a very large, very colorful species of monkey that live in the rainforest of Gabon in Central Africa. And the most peculiar thing that I have learned from studying those monkeys is that they use their vibrant color 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. My name's Dave Gorman. I am what I am, and what I am needs no excuses. I've just learnt that a mandrill is a type of monkey and not a euphemism. And the thing I found most edifying from watching monkeys is the knowledge that they are literally too busy singing to put anybody down. And this is our panel. Let's first of all just start off, Joe, in terms of what is the kind of variety of, I suppose, romantic relationships that we see in monkeys, or sexual? 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. The cutest relationship, I think, is the titi monkey. So they're one of the ones that form very, very long-term pairs. And as far as we know, 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. They sit together and twine their tails around each other. 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. So you walk around in the forest and just see these two tails hanging out of the forest, and you know where the titi monkeys are. I think you're 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. Yeah, total control. That's I always know where you are. 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. There's a lot going on now. Absolutely. Robin, what about for you in terms of looking at what we might see? Let's say romantic, because even defining that can be quite difficult, can't it? We project something of ourselves onto that behaviour. 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, 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, you know, have different intensities of relationships. There are introverts and extroverts. From an evolutionary perspective, Jo, so you talked about this whole variety of relationships, polygamy, monogamy. Is there anything that's favoured evolutionarily? Can we say, well, it would be better if a species only had monogamous relationships, long-term relationships, or what would you say, a large number of two-second relationships? They're all favoured evolutionarily, which is why they exist. But 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 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 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 it does get more complicated than this but that's the basic um 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 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. 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. It's complete chaos. It is complete chaos, exactly. With a bit of order underneath. Is monogamy more prevalent in a smaller group or in a larger group? 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. And she might also choose to only reproduce with that one male. But she could also share her home range with one male and reproduce with other males. OK. 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, 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. 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. Because 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. Give me an example of one experiment. You might think, right, if we do that to some humans, that will help us understand this particular group of monkeys more. OK, so 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. But in primates, it takes a very quantitative form. 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. 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 tell you. This is one of your most famous and most quoted pieces of research. So tell us, yes, that it is known as Dunbar's number. Dunbar's number, yes. Yes, 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 layers of friendship, of greater and greater intimacy as they come in towards you. 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. But how you are, between 100 and 250, correlates with the size of particularly this part of your brain, but also bits around here. That's the frontal cortex. Yeah, it's prefrontal cortex, but also the temporal lobe. And then inside that, there's this massive wiring connection, and it's the default mode neural network. And they called it the default mode neural network because they had no idea what it did 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 And being as though a neuroscientist, apologies 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. And it's turned out, basically, 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. 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. So the same effect being shown at the individual level. So through neuroimaging of like Dave or Brian or Joe or me, would we be able to see how shallow our friendship was? Yes, exactly. Yes. Or even if you have any. So how does that scale? So if you go to, I don't know, let's say a macaque or pick a species, then how does it change? Does it change in a linear fashion if it's twice this? So you'll like this little bit because it's mathematical. 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. The average was 149. They've made the great mistake there of assuming that the people I'm Facebook friends with are people I'm friends with. In general, they are. 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. So the 5 is what we call your shoulders-to-cry-on friends. They're the ones that will, you know, 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. 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. So they don't run to the 150 because they don't have as big a brain as us. But for species like baboons and macaques and chimpanzees that live in groups of 40 or 50 individuals, they're substructured in exactly the same way as human social networks are. What are the other forms of behaviour that we might expect to be different depending on the cognitive ability to have that many social connections? You've got what I call the line dancing problem. imagine you're in a group you're foraging through the grasslands or the woodlands of the savannah or the forest or whatever it is how many people can you have in a group and still have people at either end in time on a line dance and the answer is without music very small and that's this problem it's 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 and initially they do it just by sort of keeping track of their neighbor and keeping going but that and will only really allow you to work with a 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 than the rest are kids and you have to break through what's a glass ceiling at that point and produce something else producing something else has to do with grooming bonds so they can at that point they start to invest very heavily in social grooming to create this really intense friendships, bonded relationships that keep individuals together so your friends will keep checking on you as well as you keep checking on them and that will do you up to about 30, groups 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. The brain really starts to produce major new kinds of cognitive strategies which allow them to figure out who's doing what with who. I think I've just realised why S Club 7 split up. Because each of them realised that only five of the others would picked them up when they were down and resented the other two. Although I am assuming they were all capable of serious cognition, so maybe that's not right. How much does that affect say the Osmonds? Because there also you've got an actual genetic link as well, which would probably change the relationship wouldn't it? 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 someone's in trouble. The way we've talked about it so far is quite mathematical it seemed to me. But when we talk about, of course, human relationships, there's a large amount of choice involved. So I suppose I'm asking questions like is there a pin-up monkey? Is there a handsome monkey that everyone would go for? Why are you bringing up is there a pin-up handsome monkey, Brian? What are you... I just wonder if there's any self-interest here that we're watching. It's because it's written down here on the script. You wrote that. 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. So when I started studying mandrels, I was attracted to them because they're very colourful. And I wanted to know whether there's a pin-up effect, so whether the most colourful animal is the most impressive, perhaps attractive to females and so on. 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. And I thought, oh yeah, so I'm really figuring out something here. He's probably the most important. And females do like to hang around the most colourful animal. 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. 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. So it's the males that are colourful. Males and females. So males are incredibly colourful, so we focus on that. 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. And is it the females that are primarily making the choices? It's both. 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. 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 ten minutes ago and has run down, jumped into another tree, run down, run out of sight and turns up later with another male. So the male... The through line we see is that the male remains the idiot. I'm a female primatologist, so, yeah, that's the conclusion I thought. And remembers to lift the tail up so it's not dangling down to give away where it is. So that's... So mandrels don't have that problem because their tail is only a few inches long. 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? Immune genes, so the strength of the immune system, but not actually that. How do they gauge that? Through smell. So there's a link between the immunity genes and the smell of the animal. and they're partly looking just for a good immune system, but they're really looking for a match between their immune system and the male's immune system. Actually, this works both ways. 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. Has that changed in terms of the understanding of humans, though? Because I remember when we had Matthew Cobb on 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 ah so it's i think it's changed our understanding of humans in that we we're not consciously aware of of odor but we're very unconsciously aware of odor so it affects us enormously it brings up brings back memories to us instantly but we don't necessarily think that we're influenced by it So perhaps what we know now about primates and other mammals has influenced what we know about humans. 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, when actually, if we left alone, we'd probably mate more successfully with people who were better fit for our immune system. Not entirely, because your choice of... Well, I don't say your choice of perfume, But in general, women's choice of perfume, but I guess that applies to aftershaves in the case of men, is directly correlated with your natural smell from your immune system. So you like the perfumes which actually enhance your natural odour. This is why, if I may give you some belated advice, Dave, don't buy perfume to be a girlfriend. Yeah, you're saying it's too late for him now. Because you'll buy something you like, not the one she likes. OK. Well, thank you for giving me a retrospective excuse. I'm never buying perfume for my wife. I've got to be honest with you, Dave. I remember when you gave her a box set of Lynx Africa. She looked overly happy. 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 in a way possibly but there are other ways in which we also can pick up on our genes so one is in the odor that we have on our body another is in the mouth when we kiss for example 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. Well, obviously, I didn't kiss my wife until she was my wife, and it was a bit late then. I remember that moment, you opening your mouth, going, better have fresh breath, links Africa. This leads us on neatly to the next question. It doesn't, though. Because as we've just discussed, sexual behaviour in humans is extremely complex. Do we see such complexity in the sexual behaviour? We see lots of different sexual behaviours, so definitely, yes, both across species and within species. And also simply diversity of partner choice. So we have sexual behaviour between males and females, between males and males, between females and females. In some species like the bonobo was famous for involving all the different age classes too which we don do as humans or at least legally we don do as humans But is that right about because I know we 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. And that's your idea of fashion. A parade scene. It fits, doesn't it? It does. Yeah, yeah. So things like that, a kind of flamboyant display, which includes accessorising. 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 cheeks and colourful genitalia. Maybe they don't need a rat on their head. It's fascinating. So it's like there you're describing the difference between the mating technique of Adam Ant and Rod Stewart. I've visualized it. Thank you for that. I'm not selling today at Shopify.nl. That's Shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. Go to asr.nl slash duurzamekeuzes. This does ASR for you and a more sustainable community. ASR does it. So, we can listen to your podcast now. Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles. Designer, marketer, logistics manager. All while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial. and start selling today at Shopify.nl. That's Shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. Murder, mystery and an accent where you immediately fall. On your service, ma'am. On BBCNL you find the best British misdaad series. From the sun-spirited streets of paradise... This is murder. ...to the dark streets of Belfast. Put your helmet on, man. Good humor, serious misdades, lovely unfulfilled characters and exactly the right dose of sarcasm. Bingo. BBCNL, the place for the best British misdades series. Just on your Netherlands TV. what you mean by intelligence, that sort of everyday physical world type cognition, everybody has to do in order to live in the real world. 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... To land on Dave. ..and end up on the floor. I love it when a bit of jeopardy is thrown into the show. LAUGHTER But social intelligence, that's sort of separate. It exploits a lot of the same machinery, if you like, so causal reasoning and stuff. But the key to that seems to be that it involves what's become known as mentalising. 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. and that is extremely expensive in terms of neural processing time and that's why you end up having to have this huge bit of the brain essentially dedicated to managing social relationships. 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. A bit of a sniff to figure out all the information. And that's the difference between herding species like feral goats who don't have stable relationships 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 them again. 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. If you're in a stable group, you've got to do much more machinating, really, in order to keep everybody in the same place because the problem is, you know, as I'm sure you all know, you know, if you're too grumpy with your friends when you go out, you know, they'll abandon you. You know, so if you start sort of being too aggressive within the group, you destroy the group. It's the skills of diplomacy. 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 and indeed even possibly in terms of the rearing of the of of the babies so there's a lot of coordination involved yeah definitely 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 they just keep in touch by yelling at each other um vocalizing and 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 so long-term monogamous relationships and you said there's a there's a increased brain insight is associated with that does that imply that concepts are 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 i mean the answer is yes if you look at it it looks very much like what humans do but i think that there is an argument for saying actually 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. The trouble is it's just so hot inside that bonobo costume. Oh, I know. Let alone how cramped it is if you want to be in a Titi monkey costume. 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. Then you have the opportunity to describe things like when partner loss, for example. So if a member of one of those long-term pairs dies, you see in the other what is very obvious to us that we assume is grief. 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. 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 so if you call oxytocin a love hormone which some people do then we can try to get hold of the idea of love 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 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 um 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 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 these they have these brilliant enclosures where they all live in jeans that they love to live in genes. There's genes hanging up in the enclosures. 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. They haven't got babies, but she reckons that they would adopt if they were given the opportunity. Oh, that is... If Levi 501s don't relaunch with that, it's... 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. 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 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. 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 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 so things like oxytocin and endorphins and stuff and the way those uh flood the brain um during the course of interactions and they are the same i mean the endorphin system the oxytocin system are the same in monkeys and humans. So you're saying a new technique, a new frontier of knowledge would be to really to look at the brain 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, the proof is strong evidence that they're thinking in the same way and experiencing the same feeling. 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. I use the word feelings there, so that's the point, isn't it, the root of it? Yeah, because, I mean, bear in mind, at the end of the day, we have this problem with ourselves. 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 and we kind of generalize that onto other people and assume they operating in the same way But Jo you said you don think we ever get to that point where we say that the map is now so obvious. 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. I just think we're still, we might be happy with an explanation until we develop some new method and we could go further into trying to explain what's happening in the brain or what's happening in the endocrine system or anything else that you might be interested in and you suddenly realize that you had an approximation of an answer but there's still more to do and further to go even when i think when i say we might be closing the gap i think the gap is just there and it is that the fact that we have to eventually say well the patterns are the same so we are assuming that the experience is the same but we don't we'll never know if the experience is the same. 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. But we promised this show would include monkey sex, and so please welcome Anita and both. No, the... So, to get now to that, to the actual sexual behaviour. The nitty gritties. So the first thing is, do we get a sense, Jo, that monkeys enjoy sex? That this is fun? Yeah, definitely. So if we talk about females, I'm female. Many female primates clearly show signs of orgasm. 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. And it varies between the individuals, but they seek it out, which suggests that it's fun. So there's not, say, a pattern in terms of the say the menstrual cycle of the monkey 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 loads of reasons for having sex, so yes of course sex in order to reproduce but loads of other reasons too you started with a story about a monkey in a tyre at the zoo by itself, which suggests that it is fun. Is that the tyre element of it? 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. 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, between males and females, between males and males, between females and females, and so on. But yeah, definitely. I think as far as we know, it's fun. 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 known a dog, to be honest. LAUGHTER But that... So again, in terms of same-sex relations, sexual relations in the monkey world. So, first of all, there are plenty of same-sex relationships in the monkey world. 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. 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. But I think that's in some ways why it's good to know, is you go, this is not, 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... It's everywhere in the natural world, absolutely. Dave, I suppose the big question for you really is, and we need your definition, what is love? It's committing to not kissing your wife until you're married. I don't... 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. Because until you've experienced it, you don't. So teenagers fall in love, but it's not. It's a kind of infatuation. 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. 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? What you've described there eloquently is how complex these ideas are. But just, because we are getting quite close then, but Jo, in terms of what is love when you're looking at monkeys, how would you go, this appears to be what I will define for this piece of research as a loving relationship? 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 future. But when you write the popular book, that's different. Right. And is that available yet? I kind of 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. 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 make-up on, love. And we've somehow gamed the system and gone, make yourself pretty. You put the colour on, we're not doing it anymore. This is very culture-bound, historically time-bound phenomenon. There are instances of cultures around the world where men wear make-up and perform for the women to choose. Yeah, which feels like the way it should be, but thank God we've got away from that. Far too lazy for that. We have just about run out of time. Just to give you some insight into the scripts, I'm looking through, is there any question we haven't asked? There is 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 that is the question that's written here, so I feel duty-bound to ask it. Which species of monkey would you be, eminent professor? Let's go Robin, Joe, David. Robin? That's really difficult for males, anyway, because they usually end up in fights which they lose very badly. You can be a goat if you want. Well, they're as bad. Actually, I spend a lot of time working on a very small miniature antelope called a clip springer, which is intensely pair-bonded. It's the most pair-bonded, loyally pair-bonded species anywhere in the world, I think. It's such a relaxed, cosy life that they have. If you see one of them, the other member of the pair will be within three or four metres always. They're never separated. because that's an antelope right yeah i'm giving up on monkeys all right monkeys are too violent joe which monkey i would be a dominant female mandrel for two reasons one is i think they have the best life they they're totally in charge they know they're going to be in charge for the whole of their lives um and no one gives them any trouble that's the first reason and the other reason is then I'd know what it was like to be a female mandrel. Yeah. APPLAUSE So, David? Well, I think the... Was it Clipspringer? Clipspringer. Clipspringer. That does sound appealing, but I am scared of heights. So I'll go for being a female mandrel as well. Because who am I to argue with an expert? I'm the dominant one. You can be the next one down in the hierarchy. Yeah, there's only one. There's only one. But we'll be in separate groups. It'll be OK. So we also asked our audience a question, and we said, what is the most curious thing you've seen at the zoo? This one's very nice, isn't it? An inquisitive child. I have one says, a small monkey stole a teabag out of a lady's handbag at London Zoo. Which just goes to show those PG Tips adverts were very, very... LAUGHTER When they did those PG Tips adverts, you know the old... I'll play it, or whatever. And it was chimps dressed in human clothes and things. 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' lips ink it. It's a technology they now use in Hollyoaks. This is... My wife, she was a keeper. LAUGHTER This one, this is like a complaint, a letter of complaint. Like one of the ones we get from Radio 4 listeners. It goes on for a long time and it's in green ink. 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. I enjoyed watching them sprayed by flinging poo. But then, flings could only get better. I've just got a Brian Cox-a-lottle. I've heard that rumour. Thanks to our panel, Joe Setchel, Robin Dunbar and Dave Gorman. 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, 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? Or how do living things survive in polar regions? It'll be one or the other. It'll be one or the other. Flying reindeer, living things in polar regions. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. APPLAUSE In the Evernote holding cage. Doing that nice again. Hi, it's India here. I'm very excited to bring you the return of child. 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. because this is the perfect place to unpick the very complicated world of emotions, the emotions that affect us all. 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. From BBC Radio 4, this is Child with me, India Rackerson. Listen first on BBC Sounds. This is not the future we were promised. Like, how about that for a tagline for the show? From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work and your politics, your everyday life. And all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.