Ian Sample

speaker

2,123 appearances 29 recordings 3 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard yesterday

Ian Sample’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 — 29 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 8.

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Science Weekly · Are rich people really worse behaved? Here’s the science · 8 Sep 2026 podcast

They wanted to look at the evolution of kissing. matched

And if you want to look at the evolution of kissing, you need to look at where kissing sort of occurs across the animal kingdom, let's say. matched

You want to see all the different species. matched

So then you need to think, well, matched

Animals look different, different things can be going on. matched

And so you have to work out actually what do we mean by kissing? matched

And the definition they came up with was a non-agonistic interaction involving directed, intraspecific, all contact with some movement of the lips, stroke, mouth parts, and no food transfer. matched

If you look across the animal kingdom, there's actually an awful lot of behaviors that could look like kissing. matched

Matilda Brindle, one of the researchers at at Oxford, was telling me about these fish which matched

Fly towards each other with their mouths open. matched

And she said they look like sort of teenagers on a park bench, like really just going in for it. matched

But um they make contact, but you wouldn't really count that as kissing it. matched

This is a territorial display, this is an act of aggression that these fish are doing. matched

And so that's why you have to come up with like a really specific definition that will ensure that what you're trying to find out about is valid. matched

So they looked across all these species to say, yes, we think this counts as kissing in this species and in this species and this species. matched

And once you've done that across the species, you can sort of use these evolutionary trees to think, well, when do we think this evolved? matched

And certainly when you look at uh primates, I mean that team think that kissing probably evolved in the ancestors of large apes, at least, um, about 20. matched

twenty million years ago. matched

So you know that may be the origin of the kissing that humans have ended up ended up with today. matched

It seems to be, you know, an act of trust and an act of sort of faith, because sometimes, you know, you an adult animal could be putting itself at risk getting close to the teeth of some of these animals and getting close in there. matched

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