In perhaps the monkiest Infinite Monkey Cage episode there’s ever been, Brian Cox and Robin Ince attempt to uncover the secrets of love, lust and friendship in primates. Swinging by to offer a hand (or tail) are evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, anthropologist Jo Setchell, and comedian Dave Gorman.Together the panel explores Dunbar’s number in monkeys – the idea that the number of friendships an individual can maintain correlates with brain size – with the very creator of the theory! They ask whether monkeys feel love the way we do, why some species remain strictly monogamous but others don’t, and what we could learn about ourselves through studying them. Robin goes bananas for bonobo fashion, while Dave couldn’t give a monkey’s about finding an aftershave to complement his natural smell.Series Producer: Mel Brown Researcher: Alex Rodway Executive Producer: Alexandra Feachem A BBC Studios Production
Chapter 1: What is the main focus of the episode about primates?
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Hello, I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robert Ince. And this is the monkey-est infinite monkey cage yet. It's key childhood memory for many to be walking around the zoo and getting to the monkey enclosure and then seeing that something is going on. You're just a young, innocent child and you say, Mummy, what's that monkey hanging in that tyre doing? And she goes, look away, Brian, look away! LAUGHTER
There's nothing of interest here. But, Mum, I'm really interested. There's all things going... No, let's go to the chinchilla enclosure! But, Mother, I'm left with questions unanswered that might damage me in the future. And I'll only be able to deal with particles, not living things.
LAUGHTER
Psychotherapists actually do believe that it is this experience that Brian and so many of you have had in the zoo that can lead to a rubber fetish, though only if the rubber has a six-inch tread. But today... I love the way that rippled around, because... People were reading different images in and surprising yourselves. I think most people are just questioning a six-inch tread. That's enormous.
What kind of tyre is that? That's just a tractor, isn't it? Not six inches. That's two or three inches at most. No, I don't know anything about cars. This is going to make no sense now, but anyway. But today we're looking beyond the tyre. Or indeed... We're going through the tyre, which was one of Lloyd Grossman's less successful animal-based shows.
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Chapter 2: How does Dunbar's number relate to monkey social structures?
Cognitive strategies which allow them to figure out who's doing what with who.
I think I've just realised why S Club 7 split up. Because each of them realised that only five of the others would pick them up when they were down and resented the other two. Although I am assuming they were all capable of serious cognition, so maybe that's not right. How much does that affect, say, the Osmonds?
Chapter 3: Do monkeys experience love similarly to humans?
Because there also you've got an actual genetic link as well, which would probably change the relationship, wouldn't it? Well, how much does it affect all family bonds if only five people are allowed in that inner circle? The minute you've got a six-person family... Someone's in trouble. The way we've talked about it so far is quite mathematical, it seems to me.
But when we talk about, of course, human relationships, there's a large amount of choice involved. So I suppose I'm asking questions like, is there a pin-up monkey, is there a handsome monkey that everyone would go for? Why are you bringing up, is there a pin-up handsome monkey, Brian? I just wonder if there's any self-interest here that we're watching.
It's because it's written down here on the script. LAUGHTER You wrote that. I remember you doing that, crossing out the other one. Is there a monkey that wears a card? And you went, oh, I don't want to do that.
So when I started studying mandrills, I was attracted to them because they're very colourful. And I wanted to know whether there's a pin-up effect, so whether the most colourful animal is the most impressive, perhaps attractive to females and so on. And... I've been studying them now for decades.
And initially, I did discover that the pinup animal, the most colorful animal, has the highest testosterone, is the highest ranking. And I thought, oh, yeah, so I'm really figuring out something here. He's probably the most important. And females do like to hang around the most colorful animal. but there are many other things that come into it too. So there is his color.
There's also how nice he is. So if a male is brightly colored, but horrible, females are just not interested. And it turned out much later, when I alluded to their genetics, what they're really interested in is genes, and it's got nothing to do with the colour.
So it's the males that are colourful?
Males and females. So males are incredibly colourful, so we focus on that. But if you didn't look at a male mandrill and you just saw a female mandrill, you'd notice that she was very pretty and very pink-coloured. So pink nose, blue facial stripes, very pretty.
And is it the females that are primarily making the choices?
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Chapter 4: What variations exist in romantic relationships among monkeys?
But social intelligence, that's sort of separate. It exploits a lot of the same machinery, if you like, so causal reasoning and stuff. But the key to that seems to be that it involves what's become known as mentalising.
It's the capacity to understand what's going on in somebody else's mind, essentially, or at least to be able to predict how they're going to behave in the future and to manage and manipulate that to some extent. And that is... extremely expensive in terms of neural processing time. And that's why you end up having to have this huge bit of the brain essentially dedicated to...
managing social relationships.
So if you have a bright red nose, you don't need any of that, because you can just look at someone else's nose and say, oh, OK, I know what's going on.
A bit of a sniff to figure out... And that's the difference between herding species, like feral goats, who don't have stable relationships and don't have stable groups, because there's no point in learning... the ins and outs and foibles of a particular individual, because you may never see them again. All you need to know is, are they a bigger thug than you? Are they prettier than you?
Have they got a nice red nose? Or whatever the cues are. If you're in a stable group, you've got to do much more machinating, really, in order to keep everybody in the same place. Because the problem is, as I'm sure you all know, if you're too grumpy... with your friends when you go out, they'll abandon you. So if you start being too aggressive within the group, you destroy the group.
It's the skills of diplomacy.
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?
So there's a lot of coordination involved. Yeah, definitely. So if you're living just as two and you either spend all your time together, which can be involved with coordination and giving up what you wanted to do to coordinate with your partner, or there are some species, lemurs actually, rather than monkeys, where they coordinate within a home range, but they're not together.
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Chapter 5: How does monogamy manifest in different monkey species?
But it's, how do you possibly define what it is until it's too late?
LAUGHTER
What you've described there eloquently is how complex these ideas are. We are getting quite close to the end. Jo, in terms of what is love when you're looking at monkeys, how would you go, this appears to be what I will define for this piece of research as a loving relationship?
Oh, well, I would never get away with calling it a loving relationship in a scientific article, I don't think. Maybe people will in future. But when you write the popular book, that's different.
And is that available yet? I kind of have a feeling that humans have somehow gamed the system because in almost all other creatures, it's the males who are the flamboyantly coloured, you know, sort of the peacock tail or whatever. And in humans, it is the men who grow the beards and do whatever. But most of us shave them off, have a haircut and say, put some make-up on, love. LAUGHTER
And we've somehow gamed the system and gone, make yourself pretty. You put the colour on, we're not doing it anymore.
Which feels weird and against... This is very culture-bound, historically time-bound phenomenon. There are instances of cultures around the world where men wear make-up and perform for the women to choose.
Yeah, which feels like the way it should be, but thank God we've got away from that. LAUGHTER too lazy for that. We have just about run out of time. Just to give you some insight into the scripts I'm looking through. Is there any question we haven't asked? There is one question we haven't asked. It's right at the end.
In this very sophisticated discussion we've had, if you could be any species of monkey, what would it be?
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