Jo Setchell

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 one-to-one bonds.

So if you call oxytocin 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 calotricids, and 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 they have these brilliant enclosures where they all live in jeans.

They love to live in jeans.

There's jeans hanging up in the enclosures.

LAUGHTER

Out of the two legs of these jeans 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.

I think it's closing the gap, but I don't think you'll ever get to that final point where you know what's going on.

I just think we're still, we might be happy with an explanation until we develop some new method and we 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.