Defining Love and Final Thoughts

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK The ultimate cookout starts with the ultimate ingredients. At Whole Foods market, no antibiotics ever burgers and kebabs are prepped and ready to throw on the grill. Fire up a juicy ribbeye. Grab creamy potato salad and savory flatbreads from the prepared foods department, and round it all out with three hundred sixty five brand condiments, chips and dips at everyday low prices Whole Foods Market, Make your summer sizzle. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first didn't li up to the height. Like those five dollar roses at a gas station or a second hand piece of technology that breaks in the first ten minutes. Marketers know that feeling We optimize for the numbers that look great. impressions reach and react that when they don't show revenue, Well That's a not so great conversation with the CFO. LinkedIn has a word for that Bullpan Now you can invest in what looks good to your CFO LinkedIn adds generates the highest roWas of all major ad networks You'll reach the right buyers because you can target by company, industry, job title M cut the blls spend Advertise on LinkedIn the network that works for you two hundred and fifty dollars on your first campaign on LinkedIn ads and get a two hundred and fifty credit for the next one 's go to LinkedIn d. com slash broadcast. That's linkedIn d. com slash broadcast Terms and conditions apply This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. I don't know about your house, but at my house, everybody's online. streaming, shopping, Zoom calls, you name it. That's why having fast, reliable internet that can keep up really matters and why you need Optimum's famously fast fiber Internet. It blows flaky five G home internet out of the water. It has the fastest and most reliable internet speeds And doesn't slow down when everybody's online, which let's be honest, is all the time. Right now, they have a deal that's tough to beat, just twenty five dollars a month for five years. So don't wait, callall eight eight eight for optimum. Visit optimum dot com or stop by your local optimum store today. famamously Fast Fiber for twenty five dollars a month for five years, That's a no brainer Terms apply see optimum. com for details. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robin Enss, and this is the mononkeyest Infinite Monkey Cage yet It's key childhood memory for many to be walking around the zoo and getting into 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, lookook away, Brian, look away. There's nothing I'm interested. 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. And 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 lo the way that rippled around because people were reading different images in surprising yourselves. I think most people are just questioning a six inch tread. That's enormous. What kind of tre is this? It's a tas tre, isn't it? Oh not six inches. two or three inches No, I don't, 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 Tre, 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 for 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 Tamarin. 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 Nebett us, we are joined by a psychologist, an anthropologist and a cruifverbalist And they are. 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. And I think the most surprising thing that I've seen really with monkeys is just how Machiavelli and scheming they can actually be. they reallyally are. like watching humans Hello, I'm Joe Setchellel. I'm a professor of Anthropology at Durham University. I study Mandrels who are a very large, very colourful species of monkey that live in the rainforest of Gebon 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 learned that a mandrel is a type of monkey and not a euphemism. And the thing I found The most edifying from watching monkeys is the knowledge that they are literally too busy singing to put anybody down. Iss that paddle 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 all sexual. It's hugely varied. So if we think about primates all of the primates, it can be from a long term bond that last decades through to a relationship that last seconds The cutest relationship, I think, is the Titi mononkey. 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 or they hide in tangles of vines in the trees, but they always forget their tails. So you walk a lot r in the forest And just see these two tails hanging out at the forest and you know where the teii monkeys are I thinkre you're sort of 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. 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. ch going on there. Absolutely. Robin, what about for you in terms of looking what we might let us 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 and 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 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 differenterent intensities of relationships through introverts and extroverts. From an evolutionary perspective, Joe, so you talk us about this whole variety of relationships, polygamy, monogamy, is there anything that's favoud 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. What kind of boring ecological answer is that it depend 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 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. 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. And a bit of order underneath Yeah. 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 H 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. 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 much the same way as I've learned about humans from watching the monkeys Actually, to be fair, a lot of the stuff that we've spent the last twenty years doing has been on humans in order to understand monkeys better. 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, if we do that some humans, that will help us understand this particular group of monkeys more Okay, 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 been 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, Roban. We just need to look at your brain and we can tell you. This is one of your most famous and most quoted pieces of research So tell us, yes, that it is known as Dumbar's number 's number. Yes, yes. That's the limit on the number of meaningful relationships you can have, friends and family. and that's about one hundred fifty in humans That actually consists of a series of layers of friendship of greater and greater intimacy as they come in towards 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 one hundred and fifty How you are between one hundred and two hundred and fifty correlates with the size of particularly this part of your brain, but also bits around aroundound here and 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 know as the default mode neural net network And they called it the default mode neural network because I 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 Being as though a neuroscientists, an apologists and neuroscientist 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 networks. And the thing is going crazy because it's thinking about the network. And then since we Did those origin been about twenty five studies now showing this in humans. New imaging 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 are? Yes exactlyes O even if you have any. So how does that scale? So if you go to, don't know, let's say a macaque, pick a species? Okay then how does it change? Does it change in a linear fashion? if it twice So you'll like this a 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 as numers. Somebody did an analysis of sixty one million Facebook pages, counting all the friends on each of these sixty million facebook pag The average was one hundred and forty nine 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 one hundred and fifty friends, as I mentioned earlier, are divided up into a series of layers. Those layers have very, very specific numbers. They're five, fifteen fifty and one hundred and fifty. So the five is what we call your shoulders to cry on friends. They're the ones that will When your world falls apart, they will drop everything and come pick you up again Ts out those numbers are Optima for the efficiency with which information flows through networks. and what's more thoseose 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 one hundred and fifty because they don't have as big of a brain as us For species like baboons and Macaques and chimazzees that live in groups of forty or fifty 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 kind of social connections? You've got what I call the line dancing problem. Youll immagine you're in a group 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? the answer is without music very small and that's the this problem, it's the synchrony problem 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 neighbour and keep it going. without will only really allow you to work with a to a group of about fififteen may be maximum. And that'll be about five females and maybe three males, something of sortter size than the rest of kids. And you have to break through what's a glass ceiling at that point and produce something else in the producing something else has to do with grooming bonds. so they 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'll do up to about thirty groups of thirty. and after thirty there seems to be another glass ceiling and you have to go through that. And that's when they start to use serious cognition brain really starts to produce major new kinds of conitive strategies which allow them to figure out who's doing what with who think I think I've just realized why S Club seven split up because each of them realized that only five of the others would pick 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 Osmondans? Because theyre also you've got an natual genetic link as well, which will probably change the relationship, wouldn't it? Well How 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 talkoued about it so far is it is quite So mathematical, it seemed to me, so 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 Wh you bring 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 ping? It' because it's written down here on the frit H you wrote the I 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 have they're very colorful And I wanted to know whether there's a pin up effect, so whether the most colorful animal is the most impressive, perhaps, 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 colorful 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 color There's also how nice he is. So if a male is brightly coloud 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 colorful Males and females. So males are incredibly colorful So we focus on that. But if you didn't look at a male mandrel and you just saw a female mandrel, you'd I noticice that she was very pretty and very pink coloud pink nose, blue facial stripes 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 makeate 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 a run down, Jumping' another tree, run down. run out of sight and turns up later with another male So mle The through line we see is that the male remains the idiot. I'm a female primatologist, so yeah, that's the conclusion. And remembers to lift the tail up so it's not dangling down to give away where it is. 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 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 not they're partly looking just for a good immune system, but they're really looking for a match between their immune system and the malees immune system. Actually this works both ways. for males also b their making decisions on females 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? I remember when we had Matthew Cobond 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. A, so It's I think it's changed our understanding of humans in that we We're not consciously aware of odor But we're very unconsciously aware of odor. It affects us enormously. 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 after shhaves in the case ofen directly correlated with your natural smell from your immune system. So you like the perfumes which actually enhance your natural odor So it's that is why this is why, if I may give you some belated advice, Dave. you send it's too late for him because he'll buy something you like, not the one she likes. Okay. Well, thank you for giving me a retrospective excuse. I' 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 I'm very 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 child? 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 kissed, 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 l that. I remember that moment, you open your mouth, I better to have fresh breath, Africa. this leads us un neatly to the next who does. 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 behavior between males and females, between males and males, between females and females in some species like Bonoba was famous for involving all the different age classes too, which we don't do as humans, at least legally, we don't do as humans But sound right back? 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 they would sometimes pick up like say a dead rat and wear it on their head and kind of parade around. And that's you he here fashion a paris It f, doesn't it? It does ye yeah. So things like that a kind of flamboyant display which includes accessorizing. 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 the head As f say it seems like that you're describing the difference between the mating technique of Adamnt and Rod Stewart I've visualised it, That's. Thank you for that Oh. The ultimate cookout starts with the ultimate ingredients. At Whole Foods Met, no antibiotics ever burgers and kebabs are prepped and ready to throw on the grill. Fire up a juicy ribbeye. Grab creamy potato salad and savory flatbreads from the prepared foods department, and round it all out with three hundred sixty five brand condiments, chips and dips at everyday low prices Whole Foods Market, Make your summer sizzle. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first D didn't live up to the height Like those five dollar roses at a gas station or a second hand piece of technology that breaks in the first ten minutes. 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The behaviourors we've been talking about are complex behaviours, but many of them driven by environmental factors and so on How much can we read into the intelligence of the individual from the social structures and sexual behaviours that we see Th's what you mean by intelligence sort of everyday physical world cognition You have 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 Dav is sitting over there in terms when I leap of this branch to that branch to land in the right place and not to land on day on the floor. I love it when a bit of jeopardy is thrown into the show. But social intelligence, that's sort of separate. it exploits a lot of the 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 mentalizing. 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 dedicated, essentially dedicated to managing social relationships. So if you have a bright red nose, you don't need any of that because you can someone else's nose and say okay, I know what's going on. A bit of a sniff to figure out what all that. 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 bigger thugs than you? Are they prettier than you Theyve got a nice red nose or whatever whatever the cQues 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. becausecause the problem is You know, as 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 stop sort of being too aggressive within the group, you destroy the group. It's the skills of diplomacy. So Joe, does it monogamy? When we see monkeys that are able to commit to monogamy, will we againg, where we presume that this is shows various other forms of intelligence And indeed, even possibly in terms of the rearing 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 and vocalizing And the ones that have stable groups, stable monogamous groups there's a pair invariably have bigger brains than the ones that have a pair mating arrangement but don' live together. So long term monogamous relationships, and you said there's an increased brain size associated with that. Does that imply that concepts are very human concepts like love, for example, which you would associate with monogamy allowed? is it appropriate to begin to think in those terms, which are very anthrothroomorphic, 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 There is an argument for saying, actually You know, the best way to study any system be 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 how the thing works. and in some ways the argument that we should 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 cram it is if you want to be in a Ti monkey costume. 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. the opportunity to describe things like when partner lost, for example, say if a member of one of those long term pairs dies You see in the other what is very obvious to us as that we assume is grief 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 to w bonds If you call oxytotin 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 one of my friends works with captive American monkeys, these little calitra kids. and we 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 at these 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. And out of the two legs of this gene, these genees 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. That is if Levi five hundred's don't relaunch with that is opposed. But I think at the end of the day, one has to be a little I anthroomorphism is a two ed sword' 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 Jew 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 nosose 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 will 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 oxyidtocin and endorphins and stuff and the way those flood the brain during the course of interactions. And they are the same. I mean, the endorphin system and the osteoocin system the same in monkeys and humans. So you're saying a new a new technique a new frontier of knowledge would be to really to look at brain of a monkey, like say And see the so we want to see how the neoms fire, if the patterns are the same. the regions of the brain that are stimulated same as a human. That would be the final the proof was strong evidence that they're thinking in the same way and experiencing the same I think 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. Yeah. In other words, we tend to see The world has been populated by people like me 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 ono other people and assume they're operating in the same way. But Joe, you said you don't think we'd ever get to that point where we'd say 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 developed some new method And you 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. there's still more to do and further to go Even when 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 So we are assuming that the experience is the same But we'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 anat in v note So to get now to that to the actual sexual behaviour the nitty gritties. So the first thing is do we get a sense Joe, that monkeys enjoy sex, that this is Yeah, definitely. So if we talk about females, one female, many female primates clearly show signs of orgasm 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 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. But you know what? it's enough fun to not worry too much about the outcome. Loads of reasons having sex not 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 tire 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 case, social bonds mean betweenween males and females, three males, 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, tele evangelists, whatever going on about the fact that we don't see homosexuality in any other animal, which means theyve never even owned a dog to be honest because. But 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. varies across the species, but yeah a lot. But I think that's in some ways why it's good to know as 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 a big question for you really is and we need a definition. What is love It's committing to not kissing your wife until you're married. D don't who knows, who knows what love? Be 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 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 N 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 we are getting quite close to a bit, Joe, 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 ight. 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 peacocktail 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 makeup 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. Wh this is very weird and againound historically time bound phenomenal. There are instances of cultures around the world where men wear makeup and perform So