Brian Cox

You look 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?

Well, obviously, I didn't kiss my wife until she was my wife, and it was a bit like that.

I remember that moment, you opening your mouth, going, better have fresh breath, links Africa.

This leads us on neatly to the next question.

Because as we've just discussed, sexual behaviour in humans is extremely complex.

Do we see such complexity in the sexual behaviour?

But is that right?

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, 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 around.

It fits, doesn't it?

It does, yeah, yeah.

So things like that, a kind of flamboyant display, which includes accessorising.

LAUGHTER It's fascinating, so it's like there you're describing the difference between the mating technique of Adam Ant and Rod Stewart.

LAUGHTER

Oh, I've visualised it.

The behaviours we've been talking about, so 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?

So, Joe, monogamy, when we see monkeys that are able to commit to monogamy, will we presume that this shows various other forms of intelligence, and indeed even possibly in terms of the rearing of the babies?