Have you ever felt your work colleagues sometimes act like animals? In this conversation, Jane and Adam take that idea literally, exploring what Jane's expertise on chimp behavior can teach us about how humans relate and organize. With grace and wisdom, Jane shares primal insights on how we acquire and keep power, the difference between being a ...

Fairness matters ... to both people and primates. Sharing priceless footage of capuchin monkeys responding to perceived injustice, primatologist Sarah Brosnan explores why humans and monkeys evolved to care about equality -- and emphasizes the connection between a healthy, cooperative society and everyone getting their fair share.

What happens when two monkeys are paid unequally? Fairness, reciprocity, empathy, cooperation -- caring about the well-being of others seems like a very human trait. But Frans de Waal shares some surprising videos of behavioral tests, on primates and other mammals, that show how many of these moral traits all of us share.

Consider the claw. Frequently found on animals around the world, it's one of nature's most versatile tools. Bears use claws for digging as well as defense. An eagle's needle-like talons can pierce the skulls of their prey. Even the ancestors of primates used to wield these impressive appendages, until their claws evolved into nails. So what caus...

(NOTE: Statements in this talk have been challenged by scientists working in this field. Read "Corrections & Updates" below for more details.) Elaine Morgan was a tenacious proponent of a theory that is not widely accepted. The aquatic ape hypothesis lays out the idea that humans evolved from primate ancestors who dwelt in watery habitats. H...

In this fascinating look at the "alpha male," primatologist Frans de Waal explores the privileges and costs of power while drawing surprising parallels between how humans and primates choose their leaders. His research reveals some of the unexpected capacities of alpha males -- generosity, empathy, even peacekeeping -- and sheds light on the pow...

At Stanford University, primatologist Robert Sapolsky offers a fascinating and funny look at human behaviors which the rest of the animal kingdom would consider bizarre.

Laurie Santos studies primate psychology and monkeynomics -- testing problems in human psychology on primates, who (not so surprisingly) have many of the same predictable irrationalities we do.

Elaine Morgan, armed with an arsenal of television writing credits and feminist credentials, spent her life on a mission to prove humans evolved in water.

Robert Sapolsky is one of the leading neuroscientists in the world, studying stress in primates (including humans).

When two people are trying to make a deal -- whether they’re competing or cooperating -- what’s really going on inside their brains? Behavioral economist Colin Camerer shows research that reveals how badly we predict what others are thinking. Bonus: He presents an unexpected study that shows chimpanzees might just be better at it.

Susan Savage-Rumbaugh has made startling breakthroughs in her lifelong work with chimpanzees and bonobos, showing the animals to be adept in picking up language and other "intelligent" behaviors.

Laurie Santos looks for the roots of human irrationality by watching the way our primate relatives make decisions. A clever series of experiments in "monkeynomics" shows that some of the silly choices we make, monkeys make too.

ReThinking with Adam Grant March 2, 2021 Jane Goodall on Leadership Lessons from Primate‪s‬ Adam Grant (00:00): Hey WorkLifers, it's Adam. We're getting close to the premiere of season four of our show, but today I've got another conversation for you from our Taken for Granted series of unscripted interviews about re-thinking assumptions. This...

The legendary chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall talks about TACARE and her other community projects, which help people in booming African towns live side-by-side with threatened animals.

Savage-Rumbaugh's work with bonobo apes, which can understand spoken language and learn tasks by watching, forces the audience to rethink how much of what a species can do is determined by biology -- and how much by cultural exposure.

Sarah Brosnan studies how and why animals make decisions.

What if we stopped seeing females (of every species) as passive and instead welcomed the extraordinary diversity of sexuality? Through tales of same-sex bird couples, sexually transformative fish and unexpectedly promiscuous chimps, zoologist Lucy Cooke invites us to embrace the "genderless continuum" of females in nature, ditching archaic sexua...

Jane Goodall hasn't found the missing link, but she's come closer than nearly anyone else. The primatologist says the only real difference between humans and chimps is our sophisticated language. She urges us to start using it to change the world.

Louise Leakey asks, "Who are we?" The question takes her to the Rift Valley in Eastern Africa, where she digs for the evolutionary origins of humankind -- and suggests a stunning new vision of our competing ancestors.

Tuesday, March 2, 2021 Adam Grant (00:00): Hey WorkLifers, it's Adam. We're getting close to the premiere of season four of our show, but today I've got another conversation for you from our Taken for Granted series of unscripted interviews about re-thinking assumptions. Adam Grant (00:12): This year and last, many of us have been forced to co...

Why are babies cute? Why is cake sweet? Philosopher Dan Dennett has answers you wouldn't expect, as he shares evolution's counterintuitive reasoning on cute, sweet and sexy things (plus a new theory from Matthew Hurley on why jokes are funny).

Svante Pääbo explores human genetic evolution by analyzing DNA extracted from ancient sources, including mummies, an Ice Age hunter and the bone fragments of Neanderthals.

Dubbed "the woman who redefined man" by her biographer, Jane Goodall has changed our perceptions of primates, people and the connection between the two.

Moshe Szyf is a pioneer in the field of epigenetics, the study of how living things reprogram their genome in response to social factors like stress and lack of food. His research suggests that biochemical signals passed from mothers to offspring tell the child what kind of world they're going to live in, changing the expression of genes. "DNA i...

Did humans evolve from monkeys or from fish? In this enlightening talk, ichthyologist and TED Fellow Prosanta Chakrabarty dispels some hardwired myths about evolution, encouraging us to remember that we're a small part of a complex, four-billion-year process -- and not the end of the line. "We're not the goal of evolution," Chakrabarty says. "Th...

Where did Zika come from, and what can we do about it? Molecular biologist Nina Fedoroff takes us around the world to understand Zika's origins and how it spread, proposing a controversial way to stop the virus -- and other deadly diseases -- by preventing infected mosquitoes from multiplying.

Frans de Waal studies primate social behavior -- how they fight and reconcile, share and cooperate.

Can we use our brains to directly control machines? Miguel Nicolelis suggests yes, showing how a clever monkey in the US learned to control a robot arm in Japan purely with its thoughts. The research has big implications for quadraplegic people -- and in fact, it powered the exoskeleton that kicked off the 2014 World Cup.

We know other primates are a lot like us. But how close are they, and what can we learn about ourselves from them? Lauren Brent is a primatologist and evolutionary biologist who has spent years studying social bonds -- particularly friendship -- with an eye to learning how and why those behaviors evolved. We talked to her just after she rehe...