Frans de Waal - Defining Gender Through The Eyes Of A Primatologist

All right, Dr. Dewal, welcome to the Mantalk Show. How are you doing today?

I'm good. I'm okay.

Yeah. Wonderful. Well, listen, I've seen your work around for a while now, and I've been diving into it and listening to conversations that you've had in the past, and I find your research wonderfully fascinating, and so it really, truly is an honor. I was telling my podcast producer last night, I was like, there's not many. I don't get nervous for interviews anymore. But for some reason, I felt a little background noise of, like, don't say something stupid.

So you managed to do what most guests don't do, which is, you know, I feel a deep respect for you and your work. And so there's. I'm just getting nerves out of the way.

I suggest not to say something stupid anymore.

That's right. Yeah. That's good. That's good. We'll just reinforce it. All right, well, let's begin where I always begin, these conversations, which is tell us a story about a defining moment in your life.

I've had many defining moments with my primates, but if you talk about human affairs. I was a young student, I was maybe 25 or something, and I gave a lecture in the UK. I'm from the Netherlands, so I had to travel to the uk. I gave a lecture. I was very nervous. Was my first official congress, and so on. And afterwards, an American, his name is Bob Goy, he came to me. He was the director, Director of a primate center in Wisconsin. And he came to me, he said, you need to come to the U.S. i didn't think my talk, you know, was like 12 minutes. I don't think it was so impressive, but he absolutely wanted to have me. And so it was a very important moment in my career because I moved to the US And I liked it there, and I'm still here.

Do you still go back and forth? Because. Back. Back to Europe.

I'm very often in Europe. I have a condo in Utrecht in the Netherlands, and so I'm very often there. Yeah.

Nice, nice. I haven't been to the Netherlands, but it's on the. It's on the list, so maybe I'll. I'll have to email you.

Absolute must. I'm now going to the Vermeer exhibit in Amsterdam, which has gotten so much attention, and Vermeer has only painted, like, what is it? 30 paintings. And so it's not a very big, big exhibit, but it's very important, I think.

Very cool. Very cool. Well, let's kind of get into your work, because I think there's so much for us to cover and I want to just start high level and then we'll work our way down to some more of the nitty gritty. Let's just begin with what's the role of a primatologist for the layman person? And what would you say the research that you do is largely used for?

Well, primatologists come in multiple types. You have the ones who work in the field. Very important, of course, that we have those still. We still have primates in the field also. I'm sort of in between. I'm not really a lab worker. I prefer to work with large groups of primates in captivity because I can not only observe them more closely than you can do in the wild, but also I can do certain experiments, behavioral experiments on them. And then you have, of course, also people who work in labs. That's a very different thing, but because that's often medical and I'm not involved in medical studies at all, so.

And then the research between those different fields, what would that be used for? Like, is it for us to better understand ourselves as human beings? Is it to understand just primate culture? Is there overlap there?

Most primatologists, they will say that they're interested in the animals themselves. So in my case also, I'm not working on chimpanzees and bonobos in order to understand humans. I want to understand these animals. But it is, of course, with that kind of species who are so close to us because they're our closest relatives. It's obvious to draw parallels and to see how it extends to human behavior. So automatically you get involved in that. But the first goal, I think, is to understand how these animals live, what they do, how smart they are and so on.

I have a series of questions that I want to go through in terms of your work and this recent book, which is called Different Gender through the Eyes of a Primatologist. But I'm curious, as you've done this work, because it's been decades now, I'm curious what was surprising when you first got into this field. Like, was there anything that sort of took you back as you started to study primates and chimps and bonobos that sort of caught you off guard that you wouldn't expect. Have you built a sort of camaraderie with some of them?

When I was a student, everyone was interested in aggression and violence. This was right after World War II, was sort of obvious obsession. And a famous person, Conrad Lawrence, had written a book about aggression. How Aggression is an instinct that we cannot get rid of. Rid of. And we're all going to be aggressive now and then. And so everyone was studying that also in humans, actually many studies on aggression at the time. And I discovered in that period of time that chimpanzees kiss and embrace after a fight, so they reconcile after fights. And bonobos later, I discovered bonobos do that too, but they do it more sexually than the chimps. So I got really interested in that process. I got interested in conflict resolution and how do you get over violence and how do you restore relationships afterwards? And I found that more fascinating than the question itself. So I think that was my first surprise is that even though I was in charge of studying a question, I ended up studying conflict resolution.

I love that, and that's fascinating. But do you find that the research that's happening within the scientific field, or specifically within your field, largely coincides with social issues and what's happening within the culture? Are those two things separate? Are they interconnected from your view?

They're not easy to separate because, for example, you must have heard about the selfies Gene and Richard Dawkins and so on. That came up in the time that Tatcher and Reagan were talking about how it's best to create a competitive society with a lot of open capitalism, unregulated and so on. And so that's the time that the biologists were talking about how selfish we were. And I think those things were connected. And then later, now we're talking about how cooperative we are. And we are such a cooperative species. That's what everyone now says. But, you know, 40 years ago we were a selfish species. And so I think these things fluctuate with the times and with the mood in the culture, so to speak. I think that all has an effect. So, for example, when Obama became president, he started talking about empathy. And that's exactly the time that we biologists, we got interested in empathy in animals. I think these things are always connected somehow.

Yeah, I think that's the thing that I found interesting. As I've had more and more researchers, scientists, different types of psychologists on the show, that there's just this sort of interconnectedness between what's emerging and bubbling up in consciousness and culture and what we're naturally gravitating towards trying to figure out through science. It's almost like the ideas that are purported and pushed forward culturally are the ones that science then is either has already been working on and it's sort of emanating into the collective consciousness or it's something that science then says, okay, let's go and see if we can prove, disprove or, or steel man. You know, any of these.

I think all these backgrounds have an effect. So, for example, gender has an effect on how you look at primates. When female primatologists became more prominent, we started looking at different things. The male primatologists were all obsessed with hierarchies and violence and territoriality and stuff like that. And then the female primatologists came and they were interested in family relationships and the lives of females and how you raise the young and so on. And so we got different questions. It's also culturally the case. For example, I'm from the Netherlands. I've never had a taste for. Because the Dutch are not really a warrior species, so to speak. I've never had a taste for warfare. And I've never believed in all these scenarios that the anthropologists, the American anthropologists come up with, which is that we evolved to be killing each other, basically. That's really never been my taste. And so I also have a different perspective. I think every culture brings a different perspective, every gender, every background or so.

Yeah, well, let's start getting into a little bit to your work specifically. So in this latest book, again, I'd like to just start high level and then we'll continue to dig in down to some of the various topics. But what would you say is the sort of basic premise of your latest book or research indifferent? And why gender specifically? Is it something that you were inherently curious about, or is it a byproduct of observing the primates and then something that you were sort of sparked to try and observe?

I give many lectures on animal intelligence, animal emotions and so on. And each time I mention sex differences and say the males do more of this, the females more of that, there are questions afterwards because people are very curious about sex differences in the primates. And I think it is because they read that gender differences are cultural. They read that we can reduce them or eliminate them and raise our kids gender neutral. They read that gender is a very flexible concept. And then they want to hear from a primatologist what he thinks about that. Because I think many people are skeptical about it because, well, many people have raised boys and girls at home and they have noticed a few differences, even though they didn't necessarily think that they created them. And so I wrote the book partly to satisfy that kind of curiosity. I thought the book was going to be mostly about sex differences in the primates and how they relate to what we see in humans. But it turns out, and I did not anticipate that before I wrote it, that I also know a lot of gender diversity in the primates because I've known many primates individually and I would say 1 in 10 individuals doesn't fit the molds. They may be female, but act like a male or a male and act like a female, or they have homosexual tendencies. So there's all the gender diversity that we see in human society we see also in primate society. And I got really interested in that. And as you may have noticed in the book, I paid quite a bit of attention to that too. So the book became a bit different from what I thought. But I think there is an intense curiosity in humans about gender because they hear so often that it is purely cultural, and that's of course impossible. There is nothing in humans that is purely cultural.

Yeah, I've always found that sort of argument or take to be wildly fascinating, you know, and we could kind of go into that. But I mean, I think it's always been interesting to me where people are just sort of hooked on this idea that gender is purely cultural and that biology, certain neurochemicals, don't have any impact whatsoever. Physiology has no impact whatsoever. That, for me, has always been quite challenging having grown up. I remember my wife and I were having a conversation and I asked her, what was it like for you to go through puberty? And we had this lengthy discussion about what it was like for the two of us to go through puberty. And it was just such wildly different experiences. You know, I'm describing getting erections on the bus, you know, and in class, embarrassingly, and wanting to, you know, sort of be aggressive. And she's describing emotional volatility and ups and downs and, you know, socializing all these sort of different experiences. And I've always kind of sat there thinking, how is that socialized? You know, how are those physiological responses socialized? It seems very challenging. So. So let's get into some of these nuances because I'm talking about personal experience, which is maybe not so research based, but let's talk about some of the basic premises of the book. So you talk about this notion that gender is not 100% cultural, nor is it 100% biological. So where do we begin to draw the lines? Is there any notion of what does influence it within primate culture and what might be a little bit more biological?

Well, to draw a line is impossible. I know people want that and the media does that for them. They say this trait, let's Say schizophrenia or something. This trait is 90% genetic and 10% cultural or education. That's not possible. You cannot tease these things apart because everything is an interaction between genes and the environment. And so it's an illusion to think that you can tease them apart. I would say with gender, we tend to think that humans have genders, but animals don't. Well, that's of course, nonsense. A chimp or a bonobo is adult when they're 16, meaning they have a very slow development. They learn a lot of things in their lifetime, and so they're just as affected as we are by what happens around them. And we know, for example, from the primate studies that young females tend to mimic adult females. Like their mom, young males tend to mimic adult males who are around. They don't always know who their father is, but they see, of course, adult males. And so there is a lot of self socialization going on in the young. And I speak of genders in the primates too. And that interaction between nature and nurture is always there. It's an illusion that you can tease them apart. The reason we have a gender duality is of course, because we have two sexes, mostly two sexes, and these things cannot be teased apart. And so there's always some biology in your gender perception and your gender expression, and that's really not something that you can avoid.

Why do you say mostly two sexes? What do you mean by that?

Well.

Sex is mostly binary. I would say 99% binary, but it's not 100% binary. And we need to keep that in mind, I think.

And when you say that, are you referring to like intersex or something?

Yeah, there's all sorts of exceptions to it. And sometimes they are very dramatic, like a person who's born with two sets of genitals, male and female, that happens. But you also have all sorts of other exceptions where, for example, the hormonal profiles are not exactly as you would expect, or chromosomal differences. And so there's all sorts of exceptions to the binary, but it is mostly binary.

Do those differences show up within primate culture as well, or is that predominantly within the human species?

Well, in animals, of course, it's very common. In the primates, I don't think we have good data on that. But hermaphroditic primates, they do occur, I think, but in the animal kingdom at large, there are species of fish that are born like a female and they end like a male. So there's all sorts of variability. And so if you take the animal kingdom at large, there's all sorts of exceptions to the binary, I would say.

Interesting. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about boys, girls, within the primate cultures, whether it's chimp or bonobos, and how they play and how they sort of build social structures. Because I think this is one of the interesting parts right out the gates within your book that you start to talk about. So how do these gender differences start to emerge within primate culture from a young age and how they play? Do we see aggression differences between the males and the females? What starts to emerge?

So at a very young age, the females, young females are more interested in infants than the males. So if a mother arrives with a newborn baby, she's going to be surrounded by young females who want to hang out with her, touch the baby, hold it, and later, when they are a bit more experienced, they will become the babysitters for these, these infants. So that's an interest that the females have in all primate groups. And if you give them dolls, for example, the females will carry these dolls on their belly, on their back, try to nurse them, hold them against the nipple, walk around with them. In the wild, chimpanzee females have been seen young females to pick up wooden logs or rocks and carry them on their back or build a nest for them like they have a baby. So all the primate females, I think they have a very strong tendency to test out their maternal skills on the infants of others or on dolls that you give them or that they make themselves. And that's absolutely essential because maternal care is not inborn. Everyone speaks about the maternal instinct, but actually maternal skills need to be learned. And this is one way that they learn them and how they get experience. And if they don't get that experience, they cannot raise offspring. So, for example, in a zoo, a gorilla female is pregnant. And in that group, they have never had any baby gorillas. You know it's going to go wrong. You know that that female is not going to be able to take care of the baby because she's not born with the skills. The skills need to be learned. So that's the female side. And that applies to all the primates. And also the human data is pretty clear on that, actually. And then on the male side, the males are very fond of wrestling and roughhousing and running around and beating up on each other, which is also essential for them because they need to learn fighting skills, but they also need to learn how to inhibit their physical strength when they play with a weaker partner or play with an infant. They need to inhibit all These and actually your average dog does the same thing. If a big dog plays with a small dog, there's also a lot inhibition involved and that's all absolutely essential. And so that's what young males do. I myself, I'm from a family of six boys. Wow. So I know the wrestling part and the rough housing part. I think that's what boys love to do and that's why I'm a bit upset. I hear that in some American schools now they have a no touch policy among kids, which I think is horrible. During COVID maybe that was a good idea. But I think boys really need this kind of experience and they love that kind of mock fighting. And so why would you suppress it? I don't understand that.

Yeah, I have a two year old son and I'm the oldest of five, although there's two girls and two boys, I was going to say below me in age, not necessarily in the hierarchy. But it's interesting to watch my boy as he's started to walk, started to sort of run and this natural curiosity with his body launching himself off the couch, standing at the other end of the couch and running and just like torpedoing his body into mine. It's not something that I've told him to do because he didn't talk yet. And it's not something that I've sort of tried to ingrain in him. It's just something that he seems to be curious about. And I think about myself as a young boy and those things were very strong as well. Which brings me to the question, why do we want to see ourselves in primate culture? Because I noticed that I'm sort of trying immediately drawing comparisons and, and connections between the two. And I think that that's a very natural thing that we do socially. Can you just speak to that?

That's entirely logical because you are a primate. So if you see a primate, a chimpanzee, let's say he has hands like you, he has frontal eyes like you, his body is extremely similar to ours. Of course, we humans, we tend to emphasize the differences and we say, well, they have shorter legs or they have more hair, or we tend to emphasize the differences, but basically they are very similar to us. And I consider humans also apes. I know many people don't consider themselves apes, but essentially that's what we are. So I think the comparison with the primates is very obvious in their body language and everything else. If you go a little bit more distant, if you go, let's say, to elephants or dolphins, the comparison becomes more difficult. Because they have very different bodies.

And would you say that there's a use case in studying primates to understand our own culture and society and biology and psychology? Are there really direct use cases that we can sort of connect and correlate between primate culture and ours?

You mean that something that is useful for us? Yeah. I never look at studying primates in order to give advice to people of what to do in their life. Although I think the one thing that you can learn from it is that our psychology is not an invention of the human species. Our psychology is a very basic primate psychology. I think social, emotionally, we are not different from other primates. We love social relationships. We try to be dominant or at least to, to regulate the lives of others. We grieve, we are jealous, we have sexual attraction. And in all these areas we are extremely primate like. And so I think it is important for us to. And that's useful, I think, to realize that we didn't invent the human species. The human species is an invention of evolution and we are basically primates in that regard. There are a few areas, like intellectual areas, where we are different, but I think our basic emotional lives are very similar.

Yeah, interesting. Okay, tell us a little bit about the socialization, how gender plays into maybe young primates building relationships, the young males building relationships, the young females building relationships. Because you had some very interesting aspects to sisterhood and how the females build bonds within the social dynamics. That I thought was really incredible.

Yeah. So the female bonding is especially important in bonobos. So we have two close relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos. They're exactly equally close to us. Science has always been more interested in the chimpanzee than in the bonobo. And that is because the chimpanzee is male dominated and aggressive and fits better with the way of thinking in anthropology, where warfare has always been central to the human species and so on. But the bonobos are exactly equally close to us, and they have a lot of female bonding. And the females are collectively dominant over the males. They're not individually dominant because they're smaller, but they collectively dominate the males. And so they have all that female bonding which is fed by sexual behavior, basically, because the females have a lot of sex between each other. And that's a bonding mechanism that they use to build that strong relationships that they need in order to dominate the males. So it's a very interesting comparison. It's very big contrast between chimpanzees and bonobos, which also means that the comparison with other primates is not simple, because we have these very different types to compare ourselves with, and there are a few commonalities. I just mentioned the interest of young females in babies, for example. That's something that you find in all the primates. So there are certain commonalities, males being more aggressive than females. That's also something that you find. So there are certain commonalities, but there's also some big variation in the primates.

It's interesting, as you're talking about this, what emerges immediately is sort of sex, as I can't remember exactly how you phrased it, but sex as a means of bonding right between the bonobos and the stigma of female sexuality that sometimes emerges culturally.

Is that something that's very different within primate cultures? How does female sexuality show up within. Within primate culture? Because it sounds like within the bonobos, it's. It's kind of a driving force, if I'm not mistaken.

Yeah. Female sexuality has been downplayed in human society, but also by biologists. So we talked about how human culture affects how we look at animals. Now, this is a case of the Victorians telling us that, of course, males want to have sex and they want to have a lot of sex, and. And females, they don't care particularly, they accept it when it comes, so to speak. That was the attitude with animals and with humans, and it changed only when we biologists, we started to use DNA techniques to see who's the father of whom. And that's how we found in birds. So not even in the primates. In birds, you have all these monogamous pairs, like a male and a female who built a nest and they have eggs. And we have always assumed that they are monogamous and that the male fertilizes all the eggs. But when we started testing eggs in nests, we found that there was a lot of fertilization by other males going on.

And we had to explain that. And people explained that initially by saying, oh, these females, maybe they got raped by somebody somewhere. But now we know that actually females actively go out of their way to find males. That's maybe a very smart technique from evolutionary perspective, to spread your risks not to have all your eggs fertilized by the same male, so to speak. We discovered that in birds first and then in the primates, of course. We now also know we talk a lot about what we call female choice. Yes, the males have a hierarchy which affects who gets to mate with females, but the females have preferences as a female choice, and they don't want to mate with every male equally. And so the females also have. So it's basically a cooperative affair between males and females because there's very little rape in the animal kingdom. So it's usually a cooperative affair and the female has a big say in that also, not just the males.

You're talking about a female selection preference or mating preference. Are there differences between the primate species, like between chimps and bonobos or gorillas? Are they looking for different things in male partners?

Actually, you mentioned gorillas. I think there was a recent study showing that gorilla males, who are much bigger than the female, the males who are good at playing with infants, are the ones that the females prefer. So there could be selection on that. There could be a female systematically, like males, who are nice with their kids. That could be a selection pressure on the males. And. And I think that is often underestimated because males do so little in the primates, usually with the offspring. They don't carry them, they don't feed them, they may protect them, but that's about all they do. But there are observations of both chimps and bonobos where a female loses her life. And so all of a sudden you have an orphan in the group. And these orphans are very often adopted by males, not by females. Females have their own kids, they don't have time for another kid, but by males, adult males, sometimes who adopt them for five years. I mean, they carry them with them and they become basically their kid. And so males, even though they normally don't show the caring tendencies that you would expect, they have them and they can apply them. And I think that's a very interesting observation. They call it a potential. The males have a caretaking potential that is not always expressed. And that's also very important in human society, of course, because we have now all these men who are taking up some family duties that the previous generation didn't do. And so there is a shift in society that's more caretaking by men and sometimes that is ridicules. So you have conservative pundits who say, paternity leave, we don't need paternity leave. Maternity leave, they can understand, but not paternity leave. I think it is being resisted by some forces, but I think it's very interesting development and it's completely within the biological possibilities of our species.

I think there's so many threads in there I want to sort of pull on and explore a little bit. I mean, it's interesting. Like, I took two and a half to three months off. I actually structured my business in a way when my son was born. So That I could be completely present for a few months. I would wish that experience for every father, you know, to just have time to tend. I mean, I got to tend to my wife, who needed a good amount of support, and to be present with my son when he was born. And it really was a wonderful experience. But I remember when I worked at a corporation several years ago, there was a gentleman who wanted to take time off to be with his son, and he. He was trying to get paternity leave, essentially when his. His child was being born and he was up for a promotion within the company. I remember being a part of the conversations where certain people were looking down on this individual suddenly because he was wanting to take paternity leave. I really. I mean, I really fought for him to take that time off. And I was a little pissed off because I was like, what? Like, what's the difference? You know?

Well, that's. That's. It's a very modern way of thinking. Because my father's generation, they would have despised someone, a man who would do that. They would have said, what is this? This is for women. This is not for us. We. We have to work every day, and. And so on. So. So my father's generation of men, I think they. They would indeed look down on that. And then my generation is already a bit more pos. And then the younger generation is really positive about it and enjoys being a father. It's such a big shift in society. And I know that men still don't do 50% of the work at home, but they're doing much more than they used to, that's for sure.

I think it's interesting because if I would have had to have gone out and worked every day, I would have. I would have done that for the family. But I was able to set things up. But yeah, it's interesting does that.

There's a biology behind it. There are some neuroscience studies on men who are the primary caretakers of kids, and that is sometimes homosexual man. Sometimes they have lost their wife, sometimes they have chosen to be the primary caretaker. But they do exist, of course. And if you do the neuroscience on them, their brain becomes more maternal, the amygdala is bigger, there's more oxytocin, there's less testosterone. They change. Basically, there's neuroplasticity that reflects their behavior. And so we always think that. We always think the other way around is that our body and our biology determines our behavior, but what we do in life also determines our biology. And so there is interesting data on that. And I think the human species, particularly since we evolved nuclear families where men and women take care of offspring, the human species particularly has that potential of male caretaking. And I'm sure since their brain changes, they also enjoy the role. It's not something that is a sort of obligation, but it's something that they enjoy doing.

I think I agree entirely. And I've read that. Read some of that research that talks about the decrease in testosterone and the elevation of oxytocin and some of those pieces with men that become the primary caretakers, and it's wildly fascinating. Do you feel this is sort of an off tangent? And we're going to come back, and I want to talk about patriarchy within primate culture and males and alpha, because you've done some phenomenal research and I love your perspective. Do you feel that sometimes your work is politicized or just the work in your field in general is sort of utilized for political commentary? Because it seems like. It almost seems as though sometimes in our attempts as human beings to sort ourselves out and create frameworks that we can live in, we try and pull from data and research to say, this is exactly how it is, or this is exactly how it's not. I'm curious to get your take on that.

Yeah, that happens, of course, is that people say, of course men have more to say in society and are more important in society because look at the primates, the males are dominant, so that's how we need to live. And so they take the primate society as an example of how we should live, even though you could also find contrary examples. But that's of course not what they're looking for. So, yeah, they very often use nature. The whole discussion about whether. Whether we should have a capitalist, open competition society is often based on how people think nature works. You know, the struggle for life. They have a view of nature as if it's one place of competition. It's also a place of lots of cooperation, nature. And there's many species, like, let's say the dolphins, the elephants, the primates, who are highly cooperative animals, but we focus on the competition side and emphasize that in human society. So, yeah, there's a lot of projection going on, ideological projection and abuse of biology. And we biologists, we sometimes participate in that and sometimes we need to go against that, and it's very hard to make up our minds on that.

But I feel it is a simplification and we shouldn't be doing that, but people do that all the time.

Did you have. Sorry. I promise we're going to get back onto your work. But I'm so fascinated because. Were you worried at all writing this book, in terms of writing a book about gender differences in a time when there's just so much controversy around just the word gender sort of evokes a lot of emotionality and response. And so was there any concern on your side or did you hope on some level that it would sort of support some evening out of the chaos that's emerged around this conversation?

Well, I thought actually when I started writing that it might upset certain feminists who insist that gender is purely cultural and is a very flexible, self constructed concept, basically. And I was afraid that they would not want to hear from a biologist. It turns out the book has generated very little criticism in that regard. And actually the reviews have been quite positive. I think it's more the people who are conservative, so not the feminists, people who are against gender diversity or against the LGBTQ community. Those people, they're more upset because I'm explaining how gender diversity can be found in other primates. The people who are against transgender people, for example. At the moment, that's such a big issue in some political parties. They are the ones who are going to be upset because I describe primates who, let's say, who are born like a female but act more like a male. These things happen in other primates too, and I think they are the ones who are more upset than the feminists.

Interesting. Yeah. And it is wildly fascinating to me that there's so much controversy around something that I can't remember exactly if it's like 0.06% of the population that identify as trans. You know, it's, it's, it's.

Yeah, it's. It's 0.6%, 0.6%. It's very small. I think being transgender is largely a biological issue because we know it arises early in life. I think 90% is below the age of seven. So it arises very early and it doesn't change. There was a recent study that said that, that kids who say that they are transgender, they. They don't change their opinion six years later. And so that indicates already that there's some biology behind it. And the big difference with the other primates, believe it or not, that's the biggest difference is that the other primates never make a fuss about it. And so they have individuals who are more homosexual than heterosexual. They have individuals who don't fit the molds of their gender and don't follow the role, so to speak, that normally the genders Play. And I've never noticed that they make, that they are not tolerated. So they're usually very well integrated individuals. And human society is different in that they, humans are so normative. So that's a big difference. With the other primates, we're very normative. For example, if you eat with your hands in a restaurant, you're probably going to be kicked out. We don't accept that. Even though there are a billion people in India who eat with their hands, that's perfectly fine in their culture, but in our culture it's not fine. And so we are extremely normative. We're sort of ridiculous in that regard.

Yeah, that's fascinating. So in terms of when you look at the different primate cultures and you see whether it's within the bonobos or the chimps, someone that is maybe homosexual or what have you, you're saying that that primate isn't treated differently socially. So there's no, they're just, they're integrated in the culture. Like what does that look like in terms of when you observe how that individual is treated?

It's just, that's how that individual is. It's more like it's a personality characteristic. Of course, all the primates have different personalities, like in humans, and you just accept that this individual is more aggressive than that one and this one is more sexy than that one, and it's just part of their personality. And I don't think they worry about it. I think the only individuals that they would not accept is one who disturbs the peace, who, who's overly aggressive. They might have trouble with that. And we have some reports of that kind of individuals being kicked out of society, but other than that, I don't think they worry about it.

Yeah, interesting, interesting. Okay, well, let's, let's move away from that a little bit and move back towards the notion of hierarchy, patriarchy within primate culture. Males, dominance, et cetera. So are males naturally more dominant? Let's just start with the question.

I would first of all make a distinction between physical dominance and power. So physical dominance, yes. The males are bigger than the females in most primates. There's a few where they are the same size, but mostly they're bigger. And so, yes, physically they then dominate the females. That doesn't mean that females don't have power, because even in a male dominated society like the chimpanzee, you can have a female. My last book was called Mama's Last Hug, but about a female named Mama who was the alpha female for 40 years in a very large chimp colony. She was extremely powerful. I don't think a male could become alpha male without her support. She was, to me, together with the oldest male, who was also not alpha male. At that point, the oldest male and the oldest female were the most powerful individuals, even though there's then younger males who physically are capable of beating them up and being stronger and so on. So male physical dominance is fairly natural. That doesn't mean that males have most power in this society always. And in the bonobos, as I've said, the females actually dominate the males.

So when you're creating that distinction between physical dominance and power, what are you referring to when it comes to power? Are you talking about social connections, decision making? Can you elaborate on that?

Yeah, because it's basically a political system. In chimps and bonobos and many other primates, the power structure is decided by coalitions. So the smallest male can be the alpha male because it's decided by who your friends are, who your supporters are. Sometimes it's female, sometimes it's males. The dominant structure is not necessarily the biggest male is dominant. So it's a political structure. And in that political structure, the females can have a lot of power because the females are also part of the coalition system. And if a male abuses everybody and abuses females, for example, an alpha male, he may be kicked out, he may be defeated, because the whole group is basically waiting for a challenger. If then there's a younger male who comes up and challenges that abusive male, they're going to support the younger male to get rid of him. And so it's a political process not unlike human democracy. And in that whole process, the females can have a lot of power.

Yeah. So even within a chimp culture, for example, is it uncommon for a male to rise to the sort of the alpha of the group just through physical dominance, or is he having to create a lot of social connections and. And sort of act as more of a social leader than a physical leader? I guess I'm trying to discern because I think for a long time we've held this notion socially or within our society, or at least this is my perception of it, that chimps especially have a more dominant alpha figure who is there because he is aggressive and he's assertive and he's physically dominant.

Well, it's variable. I would say one in five males, maybe both in captivity and in the field, gets there by being a bully and being physically very strong and intimidating. And if he stays like that, once he has reached the top, he may become a very unpopular leader and we know of some of these leaders having been killed by the group in the wild and in captivity. So it's a strategy that I don't think works so well, but they do exist then. Most of the alpha males that I've known are more like real leaders. They break up fights in the group, they protect the underdog, they protect the young against the old and the females against the males. They can become extremely popular as a result. They become loved by the group because they provide security and harmony to the group and alpha females contribute to that also. Female alpha females, not so much by breaking up fights but by fixing the relationships afterwards. That's what they do. And so these individuals, they can become extremely popular even though they are the dominant. And we always associate dominance with violence, but they are not necessarily violent. So they're actually there to curb to violence in the group. And we've actually done experiments one time, not with the chimps but with monkeys, where we removed high ranking individuals from the group for a day at a time. And the group really falls apart if these high ranking individuals are gone because they're very important for the cohesion of the group. And so alpha males can play a very constructive role. That's why I'm not always happy with the way the word alpha male is being used. I was the one who introduced it with my book Chimpanzee Politics and it became very popular in Washington, the term. And it was used in the business world and if you now look at the business books on alpha males, it's all about how to show that you're dominant, how to get the corner office and beat up everybody. It is a very different picture of what for me is an alpha male. A real alpha male for me is a male who keeps the peace and keeps the group together. It has gotten out of hand the way people use that sort of comparison.

Yeah, that was one of the most striking parts of your work. I was listening to an interview as I prepared for this where you talked about some politician after your work, after that book had come out. I think you said it was Florida Senator Rick Scott who, who declared men are men and women are women, adding we believe in science, et cetera, et.

Cetera, if we believe in science. Actually he doesn't believe in science I believe.

But yeah, yeah, that was actually a more. Sorry, that was a more recent one. I think there was a different politician back in the day when your book came out. But that was one of the most fascinating things for me was this notion that alpha male culturally is someone who's creating cohesion and not necessarily through force. Because I think that that's generally how. You're right. I think that's generally how we look at it within our culture today. And even when I look at some of the spaces that have emerged online, like the manosphere and the red pill movement that a lot of men subscribe to, there is a good amount of, here's a framework for you to operate from that's based on dominance and, and hierarchical positioning where social cohesion isn't at the center of it. And I just don't understand how logically, psychologically, spiritually, or on any other level, any other plane that can't be at the forefront of the equation. Because if you are a leader and cohesion isn't a priority, you're just kind of screwed at some point. Like, it just, it just seems like it's probably not going to go well for you at some point down the road.

And so I think it's a young man's view of leadership. So young male chimpanzees also are like that when they are, let's say, 16, 17, 18 years old. When they're just getting adults, they go for power and violence and they can get quite far with it because everyone is a bit scared of them because they're very intimidating. But there's still no leaders. That's their view of leadership, is to beat up everybody. And I think that's a young man's view of leadership as soon as, as you get a little bit older. And the same is true for chimpanzees. When they get a little bit older, they become more responsible characters and they adopt a very different leadership style and intimidation and physical strength is not necessarily how it is done. If they are good leaders, if they do keep the group together and protect the underdog and all of that, they become so popular that their position actually fortifies. So they don't need to use a lot of violence and aggression to stay in that position, because everyone loves them and think they're, they're doing well and they want to keep them in that position. And so I think it's much more complex than people think. But the role of violence, I think that's more for younger males.

So how. Because I, I really value what you're saying. I am curious about how when those younger males come up, whether it's in chimp culture or some other primate culture, how does the sort of quote unquote alpha male deal with that? Like, is, is there a time and place for physical dominance when he's maybe challenged. What does that look like? How does he maintain his position?

Yeah, it's very important that these young males encounter a little bit counterforce. So the most striking story is on elephants. In elephants. In some parks in Africa, the big bulls have disappeared because of the ivory hunting, because they have the biggest tusks, of course. And so in some of these parks, you have a lot of young male elephants who are growing up without adult males, and they become very unruly. They attack females, they kill females, they kill rhinoceroses, they kill a lot of things because they're very unruly and unregulated. And in one of the parks, they introduced some adult bulls. They flew them in from other places, fully grown male elephants. And these males, they only needed to walk around a little. They didn't need to do anything. They only walked around. And all of a sudden, the younger bulls became very quiet and their testosterone levels went down and they behaved much better than before. And I think the same is true for chimpanzee males is the presence of adult males inhibits a lot of that kind of unruly behavior of the younger males. Again, these males don't need to do much. They just need to be present and their physical presence already inhibits a lot of that behavior. Same is true for humans. We have a lot of studies on fatherless families, and we know that fatherless families, there's a lot of difficulty with the boys who become too violent or get into criminal activity and so on. And so I think the presence of adult men or adult males is important for a normal social development of adolescent males. And that is often forgotten. And I think in primate groups there is a sort of natural regulation going on in that regard.

There's so many parallels that I can draw. Like, I think in my work, I work with a lot of men who have not grown up with a father figure around or, you know, men who have had abusive males as role models, you know, in some way, shape or form, whether they were neglectful or abandoned them, or were verbally or physically abusive in some capacity. And it's so interesting how on almost on a nervous system level, they are unable to regulate. And being around a more mature, grounded man, like I co lead all of my work with a mentor and a colleague of mine who's 72 and he's been doing Gestalt therapy for, you know, four or five decades. One of the things that he talks about continuously is the. The value in men being around other men who are able to regulate their nervous system and and what I almost hear you saying in some ways is something akin to that, is that when this sort of older, more mature, grounded mal has maybe gone through some of the muck of the fighting and maybe has experienced having an older male present in his life that has had that kind of energy shows up that that can be regulating and almost soothing for the younger males. Is that roughly accurate to what you're saying?

Yeah, I think so. There are studies of fatherless families that also. There's also an effect on the girls, by the way, is that girls start to menstruate earlier in a fatherless family, and so they get earlier into their cycles, and I don't know how that works. That's some sort of suppression of their hormonal system that comes from the father figure. So, yeah, I think we don't know these situations exactly. It's certainly not a conscious regulation, it's an unconscious process, I'm sure. But I think it's extremely important. And for example, if you have a group of chimpanzees at a zoo and they say, we're going to introduce some new males to the group, and you know that these males come from a group that has never had adult males, so let's say they're 12, 13, 14 years old, adolescent males who have never had a strong leader in their group, you know that they're going to be very unruly and potentially aggressive and dangerous. You need males who've had a normal development in the presence of adult males. So we all know that in practice in. In the zoo business is that you need to watch out for males who didn't get the right education, so to speak. I love that.

That's good. Well, just as sort of a side tangent, and I'm going to come back to what we're talking about. How would you say that studying primates has shifted your perspective or shifted your own Persona and personality? Because you seem to have. Yeah, I've interviewed a lot of people over the years and you seem to have a very calm, grounded demeanor, but there's also something about you that I wouldn't want to fuck with, for lack of a better term. And so I'm curious if that is a byproduct of the work that you've done, what you've seen. Do you feel like you've matured in some ways because of what you've witnessed? I'm just sort of curious on a personal level how the research and the work that you've done has influenced you personally.

Yeah, I think it has influenced me. And I've always felt very close to animals. And so as a child already I had many animals. And so I've never seen a sharp distinction between humans and other animals. But I think working with the primates has even fortified that kind of thinking, in the sense that I'm now at the point that I really look at human society and human behavior as very much primate behavior, and not just in simple things like facial expressions and so on, but also in the way we deal with issues. And for example, at the moment we have the climate crisis, and I find it so fascinating that we are a species that can think ahead. We are very good at projecting forwards and thinking ahead. And we're not making use of that capacity. We are messing up the whole world because we value immediate gain more than long term gains. And that's so primate like. So I look at everything that humans do as very similar to what I see in the other primates.

Interesting. So let's just come back on the topic of males. Within primate culture, I think that there's sometimes a notion that males are more hierarchical than females. Is that true? Is that something that's maybe a misconception, like, what do you observe and how would you break that down?

I think that's a misconception. So in all the animals, social animals, not just the primates, we see female hierarchies. The term pecking order comes from hens, not from roosters. And so you take elephants, females, dolphin females, wolves, all the primates, female hierarchies are very common. And an alpha female, the female at the top of the hierarchy is found everywhere. And they can be very powerful and very intimidating. And so we usually, in the primates, we make a distinction between the male hierarchy and the female hierarchy. They're not very integrated. The males worry about their position in the male hierarchy, the females about their position in the female hierarchy. The competition is mostly within gender, not between the genders. And I think in human society, the same. There are a few studies on humans, there are a few studies where they put five men in a room or five women in a room and they have to figure out some problem. And then they look at the hierarchy that forms. And it is true that men form a pecking order a bit more quickly than the women, but that's the only difference that we get in the sense that both of them do it and both of them form a hierarchy. So I don't know where that story comes from that women are not competitive and they're peaceful and they don't have hierarchies. I think it's total bunk. And if you look at the data, there's actually quite a bit of data on female competition nowadays. There's also data on female bullying at schools. We used to think that bullying was done by boys, but now we know that the girls do it too, on Facebook and all sorts of places. This whole notion that men are more competitive and hierarchical, I think it's total nonsense. But it's still very much around in the. If you open psychology textbooks, you find that kind of thing is that women are more connected and men are more competitive. And I'm a man who grew up among men and I've always been among men. And I think, yes, there's a bit of competition, but there's a lot of friendship, too. But that's sort of ignored in that literature.

What are the differences or distinctions between how the males are competing within their hierarchy and how the females compete within theirs?

Yeah, one of the big differences, I think, is that males cycle very easily through competition and friendship and reconciliation. So they have a fight, and then an hour later they're drinking a beer together and laughing, and the next day they will have another fight. And they cycle through that very easily and they forget about it. Whereas women, they don't forget so easily. And in the chimpanzees, for example, female reconciliation is much less common than male reconciliation. Reconciliation, I think. But this female strategy is to stay away from rivals and to avoid fights as much as you can, because when fights occur, it's very hard to fix the relationships. Whereas the males don't care, they just cycle through it very easily. And that's very much so in the chimpanzees. And I think it's very much so in humans. And I remember one time a discussion with a Dutch swimming coach who had moved from doing the girls swimming to the boys swimming. And they asked her why she had done that, and she said, well, if the girls at the beginning of the season have a big fight, they don't get over it at all for the whole year. And Ms. Du Bois, she said, they have a fight, and then tomorrow, the next day, they barely know anymore that they had a fight. And she found that much easier to deal with.

And so that sort of similar model within different primate cultures shows up, where chimps or bonobos, the males will have sort of disagreements or brief conflicts between one another. It'll pass quite quickly. But within the. Within the female camp, those would you say rivalries are a little bit more drawn out? Or how would you Describe that.

Well, I usually look at it from the conflict resolution perspective, and I say the. The males have a peacemaking strategy. You have a fight and you make up afterwards. And the females have a peacekeeping strategy.

Try to maintain peaceful relationships and avoid fights, because when fights occur, they're bad, and so we better avoid them. And so it's two very different strategies of dealing with potential conflict and then how it works between the sexes, I don't know. People always ask that for married couples and so on. But it's interesting. There is a psychologist, John Gottman, maybe you know him, who has done a lot of work on married couples. And I still remember him saying that you should not look at the number of fights that people have in married couples. That's not a good measure of their marriage. You should look at what happens after the fights. That's the only good measure that you take is that how do they resolve the issues afterwards?

I agree. I agree. He also talks about the importance of appreciation and that that's a kind of a signal for the health and vitality of the relationship, how authentic the appreciation is. What would you say? Maybe this is. I'm not really too sure how to word this question, but between the males within the different primate species, what are indicators and signs of healthy relationships? Between the males of healthy friendships, like, what does that look like?

The best indicator is always, for me, play behavior. So adult males, even fully adult male chimpanzees, they are still playful, and they pull each other's legs and they push each other and they shove each other, and they have play faces, which is a sort of laughing face, and they tickle each other. If that behavior occurs, then they have good relationships. And in periods where one male tries to climb to the top, that whole behavior disappears, because then there are tensions and there's constantly politicking going on. And then when the relationships are resettled and there's a new alpha male, for example, then at some point they become playful again. And that means that they are relaxing their relationships. So that's a very good indicator for the males. For the females, I would say it is grooming and being nice to each other's kids. So if females sit in a cluster and they groom each other and they play with each other's kids, that's a very good sign. Then they have good close relationships, because females usually don't trust enemies with their infants, and so they would keep them away from them. But if they mingle, all of that, then they have good relationships.

Interesting. So play is a very important part of the dynamic. And then would you say within the males, do you observe them doing anything specifically that sort of builds the bond or the camaraderie outside of simply just play? Or does play fighting have anything to do? Or are there any sort of, like. I don't know, I want to use the word missions, but that's a very human word. But is there anything that the males are sort of gathering together to do that's supporting the community that's building camaraderie?

You know, play fighting is more for younger males that goes into adolescence. But fully adult males, they don't do a lot of play fighting, but they may play in the sense that they run around and they punch each other and stuff like that. I think grooming is also very important for them. And so there's a lot of male. Male grooming going on in primate societies. And so I think that's another way of maintaining these relationships. There are some species, like, let's say, baboons, where the males never groom each other. And I think there are always tense relationships among those males. They, you know, Robert Sapolsky, the primatologist, he has written entire books about the stress levels of baboons. And I think baboon males, they are very stressed because they don't have these close relationships that you see in, for example, chimpanzees. So that's a very different society.

That's very interesting. I remember reading a study years ago, and I was talking about how between men and women, when women embrace and hug, I can't remember if it was oxytocin or dopamine is released almost automatically. And within men, there's a delay of like 10 to 20 seconds that you actually need. Need physical contact longer before the same benefit is released. And so I'm going to have to go and go and look that up to actually get the facts rates on that. But, yeah, I think so.

There's another interesting study that was done in humans where with security cameras, they just took footage from humans who shake hands with each other. What they found is that after shaking hands, people automatically and probably unconsciously, they bring their hand close to their nose so as if they're smelling basically the other one. They do something like this or whatever, they bring the hand close to the nose. It is done mostly after handshakes within the gender. So when women shake hands with women and man with man, and it's probably a way of. So it's not a sexual thing, probably. It's probably a way of assessing the hostility or friendliness or Dominance of the other individual in. Within gender relationships. So we underestimate all these olfactory things. We have a tendency to think that we are a completely visual species, but we do a lot of olfaction also. And I think in the other primates, that's very important too.

Yeah. I mean, that's such an animal thing to do, you know, like, that's so interesting that that emerged. I'm curious. There's a couple more things before we sort of wrap up that I wanted to touch on. And one of them was in the book you talk about, you have a whole chapter dedicated to violence. And I'm wondering if you can talk about the role of violence within primate culture and maybe just some of the misconceptions, some of your observations about where it sort of fits in. I think we've touched on it a little bit, but I think it'd be helpful to discuss that aspect of it.

Yeah. Especially in relation to rape. So people sometimes assume that rape is an animalistic thing. And because we, you know, as soon as we reject a certain behavior, we call it animal behavior. And so we have a tendency to do that. But rape is actually very uncommon in the animal kingdom. So there are a few species. The orangutan, the younger males, not the fully adult males, but the younger males, they sometimes rape a female. And there are certain flies that do it, ducks do it. But you can basically name the species that show rape behavior. It's not particularly common, and in chimpanzees it's extremely rare. I must have observed maybe a thousand copulations among chimpanzees and have never seen a rape. And in Budobis, it's totally absent, because in the budobus, the females dominate, and so it will not happen. So rape is actually more a human behavior, I would say, than a primate behavior. And I think in humans, it's maybe promoted by the way we live. We have houses or huts, and we live in a family environment that is isolated from the rest. And so a man is alone with a woman and can do these kind of things without interference from the outside, which is not possible in a primate group. In primate groups, usually females have a solidarity against that kind of behavior, and we'll try to prevent it. And so in our species, it's maybe more common because of the nuclear family arrangements that we have. And that's one. One circumstance in which it happens. The other one. We see that now at the moment, during the war between Ukraine and Russia. We see that also during war, rapes happen, and that's a totally different context. And I don't know how our species got into the habit of doing that kind of things, but that's very common context also nowadays.

Yeah, that would be. That would be an interesting one to research and study from a psychological perspective. Although I don't know exactly how you would do that, but it does seem to be quite a bit more prominent and common. Does anything like that show up within? Because I know I've seen sort of extreme videos of chimp societies clashing. Right. Sort of like one tribe and another tribe getting into conflicts. And really extreme violence can occur within those clashes. And so can you speak to that? Because that seems to be maybe an example of something that transpires.

Yeah. So chimpanzee males are extremely territorial. They're never friendly to the males in the other territory. I don't think they do much with the females in the other. They actually would welcome them in the group. I don't think it's aimed at the females. That's actually quite unusual. It's mostly male to male. Violence is very different from bonobos where groups can mingle. Two groups can meet and mingle is because the females like to mingle with the females of the other group and they groom them and they have relations with them. In chimpanzees, there is a high level of violence between groups. It's also culturally variable. So you should realize that most of the stories we hear about chimpanzees and most of the programs on TV you see about this kind of violence, they come from East Africa. So the East African chimps are like that. The West African chimps is much less of that kind of behavior. So there's a cultural variation. But yeah, chimpanzee males can be very violent to other males, that's for sure.

That's fascinating. I mean, I feel like there's a whole rabbit hole there in terms of the variances between the different cultures of where chimps are living. And that's a whole other conversation. I feel one of the things that I wanted to start to close out on, and maybe I should have gotten into this at the beginning, was you talk about how the more that we learn about biology, the more that it may lead to gender equality. I think there's something along those lines. I believe I'm paraphrasing. Why is that? What do you think is the intersection between being able to study biology and leading to a deeper sense of gender equality, or at least gender acceptance and understanding?

Well, I think in the discussion about gender equality and I agree that there is inequality in society and that it's to the detriment of women more than men, for sure. So in that discussion, I think people have focused on the wrong problem. They have said gender is the problem. We need to get rid of genders. We need to be gender neutral. We need to reduce gender differences. I'm not against reducing gender differences, but I don't think that's the problem. I think the problem is the inequality and the injustice of it. So we need to work on the political side, on the inequality side. And how do we eliminate that? I don't think it's bad to have two genders or to have even more than two genders and multiple genders. I don't think there's anything wrong with that or that there's a problem. It's the inequality that's the problem. And we should focus on the problem and not on gender neutral raising of children, which is fine up to the age of 10, but as you just mentioned, adolescence is very. When people hit puberty, there's going to be differences and there's going to be substantial differences, for example, in size and strength and cycles and hormones. There's an enormous amount of differences that come up in that time. And yeah, you can raise your kids gender neutrally, but you're going to hit those differences anyway. So I think people have been focusing on the wrong problem. The problem is the inequality and we need to get rid of it. But we can do that without abolishing genders, I think.

So after studying primates for so long and sort of seeing the biological differences, are there things that we maybe culturally can begin to accept about gender or understand about gender that maybe are. I don't know what the word is I'm looking for. I'm like totally blanking on the word, but.

Well, I think if you look at the biology of the primates, there's two things that I would want to emphasize is one is that female leadership is really not hard to find in the primates. And so when people have stories about males need to be leaders because they are better at it or it's more natural for them, I think that's total nonsense. Female leadership can be found in all the primates. And there's really no reason why we should emphasize male leadership more than female leadership. So that's one. The other one is we discussed this, is that male parental care is not always found in all the primates. And in some primates it's actually almost completely absent. But the males have a potential to do that we know that from the adoptions that we have seen in the wild and in captivity.

We should not underestimate the potential for men to be caretakers for children. It's not something unnatural, in my opinion, is that potential is clearly there, and if we want in our society, we can exploit that potential and increase it. So I think biology does give us a view of a bit more flexibility in society than we thought we had or than conservative forces say we have. So I'm an optimist in that regard. I think in the other primates, we can see a lot of things that can be done right and that we're not doing maybe in our society.

You mentioned the female leaders within primate cultures. Have you noticed a difference between what male leadership looks like versus female leadership? And maybe that's opening up a different can of worms. But I'm curious to.

I've done a few podcasts recently on female leadership.

Of course, about human society. Mostly what is missing, because I've read a few books on that issue. Also, what I miss in that discussion is assertiveness of women. So all the alpha females that I know in primate groups, they are assertive. They are not soft and gentle and kind to everybody. They have the top position, and they want to keep the top position, and they will punish females who go against them. So they are assertive. In the literature of female leadership in humans, I miss, they always present it as kind and empathic and. And wonderful leaders. And that cannot be true. I don't think you can be the boss of a corporation, a woman boss, and not be assertive in one way or another or let everyone know that you're the boss. So that element is sometimes missing. I think that's because of the narratives in our society that women are nicer than men. And I'm not convinced of that. But, yeah, I think it's a sort of biased observation that's of kind going on.

Yeah, it's interesting. I have. I just had Richard Reeves on the show who wrote a book called On Boys and Men. You heard of that one?

Yeah. No. I don't know. I don't know.

He's a researcher at the Brookings Institute, and he's done this whole. Written this incredible book about how when we ignore biology in our culture, you know, our genders suffer because of it. Right. And the gender equality in the way that is sort of being presented becomes very challenging because we. We do ignore the biological differences. And he's sort of talking about how, you know, young men's prefrontal cortex develops slower. And so the education institutions are sometimes not, what we're finding out, not necessarily geared towards young boys, et cetera, et cetera. It is a wildly fascinating piece and it's interesting to hear your perspective on all this. I want to close out by first off, just thanking you for this wonderful, wonderful conversation. This was truly fascinating, enlightening. And there's so many different pathways that could go down. There's other sort of strings that I wanted to pull on. But anything that you would like to leave the listener with in terms of something that maybe we didn't cover or something that you haven't discussed about the book or the research in other shows that you think is absolutely imperative to know about?

No, I think we've covered a lot of things. I'm just sorry that it's not simple. People want simple answers. They want to hear from a primatologist what is the biology of gender. And, you know, the primates are also cultural beings and humans are also biological beings. And we have these two close relatives who are not the same. And so it is a complex story, but I think we should look at gender as a complex story. It is not simple. And people who try to simplify it, either for their own progressive purposes or conservative purposes, I think they are misleading. It is a very complex issue and there's a lot of diversity also, and each individual is a bit different from. From the rest. I think we're forgetting that it cannot be simplified. And so that's my message, is that it is a complex issue, but I do think the other primates tell us a story about it for sure.

I agree. And I think that's one of the things that I actually really love about your work and your message is the reinforcement of the nuance between the two within this conversation of biology and gender and how enriching that can be. So thank you so much, Dr. Dewal, for joining me on this conversation. For everyone out there listening, don't forget to men it forward Share the episode with somebody that you know is going to enjoy it. We'll have all the links to Dr. Dewal's book and work in the show notes, so go check that out. And until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off.