Brian Cox

speaker

1,719 appearances 13 recordings 8 series first heard Oct 2024 last heard 16 Jun

Brian Cox’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.

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The Infinite Monkey Cage · Monkey Business - Robin Dunbar, Dave Gorman and Jo Setchell · 17 Dec 2025 podcast

Let's first of all just start off, Jo, in terms of what is the kind of variety of, I suppose, well, romantic relationships that we see in monkeys or sexual?

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.

LAUGHTER

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.

From an evolutionary perspective, Joe, 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?

Is monogamy more prevalent in a smaller group or in a larger group?

In a small group.

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?

Give me an example of one experiment where you might think, right, if we do that to some humans, that will help us understand this particular group of monkeys more.

This is one of your most famous and most quoted pieces of research.

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