Of chimps and children

07/12/22 • 44 min

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Welcome back, friends! Apologies for the brief delay in getting this episode out. We’re now happily back on track and super stoked for what we have coming up—starting with today’s episode.

My guest is Dr. Michael Tomasello, a voraciously interdisciplinary thinker, an incredibly productive scientist, and a pioneer in the systematic comparison of chimpanzee and human capacities. Mike is a Distinguished Professor in the department of Psychology & Neuroscience at Duke University, where also holds appointments in Evolutionary Anthropology, Philosophy, and Linguistics. He is the author of growing list of influential books, including the recent Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny and a new book coming out this fall titled The Evolution of Agency.

In this conversation, Mike and I talk about how he came to study both children and chimpanzees. We discuss the challenges of working with each of these groups—and the challenges of comparing them. We talk about some of the key concepts that have figured prominently in Mike’s work over the years—like joint attention and false belief—and well as some of the concepts he’s been elaborating more recently—including norms, roles, and agency. We also discuss Vygotsky and Piaget; how humans got started down the path toward intense interdependence and cooperation; and what Mike thinks he got wrong earlier in his career.

Lots in here, folks—let’s just get to it. On to my conversation with Dr. Michael Tomasello. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:30 – Early in his career, Dr. Tomasello was affiliated with the storied Yerkes Primate Center.

5:00 – Major works by Lev Vygotsky (in translation) include Mind in Society and Thought and Language.

7:00 – A video about some of the early work of Wolfgang Kohler.

10:30 – Dr. Tomasello is the Emeritus Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.

17:00 – A chapter outlining some key results of “looking time” (or “preferential-looking”) experiments in developmental psychology.

21:00 – A recent article by Cathal O’Madagain and Dr. Tomasello about “joint attention to mental content.”

25:00 – A paper by Holger Diessel on demonstratives and joint attention.

25:00 – A video describing work that Dr. Tomasello and colleagues have carried out on chimpanzee theory of mind. A 2019 general audience article summarizing the state of this research.

28:00 – Dr. Tomasello’s book on child development, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny, was published in 2018.

31:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Tomasello on the importance of roles in human cognition and social life.

34:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Tomasello on the psychology behind the human sense of obligation.

35:00 – A paper of Art Markman and C. Hunt Stillwell on “role-governed categories.”

36:00 – A paper by Christophe Boesch on “cooperative hunting roles” among chimpanzees.

38:00 – A very recent paper by Dr. Tomasello, “What is it like to be a chimpanzee?”

39:15 – A study<...

Welcome back, friends! Apologies for the brief delay in getting this episode out. We’re now happily back on track and super stoked for what we have coming up—starting with today’s episode.

Lots in here, folks—let’s just get to it. On to my conversation with Dr. Michael Tomasello. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:30 – Early in his career, Dr. Tomasello was affiliated with the storied Yerkes Primate Center.

5:00 – Major works by Lev Vygotsky (in translation) include Mind in Society and Thought and Language.

7:00 – A video about some of the early work of Wolfgang Kohler.

10:30 – Dr. Tomasello is the Emeritus Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.

17:00 – A chapter outlining some key results of “looking time” (or “preferential-looking”) experiments in developmental psychology.

21:00 – A recent article by Cathal O’Madagain and Dr. Tomasello about “joint attention to mental content.”

25:00 – A paper by Holger Diessel on demonstratives and joint attention.

25:00 – A video describing work that Dr. Tomasello and colleagues have carried out on chimpanzee theory of mind. A 2019 general audience article summarizing the state of this research.

28:00 – Dr. Tomasello’s book on child development, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny, was published in 2018.

31:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Tomasello on the importance of roles in human cognition and social life.

34:00 – A recent paper by Dr. Tomasello on the psychology behind the human sense of obligation.

35:00 – A paper of Art Markman and C. Hunt Stillwell on “role-governed categories.”

36:00 – A paper by Christophe Boesch on “cooperative hunting roles” among chimpanzees.

38:00 – A very recent paper by Dr. Tomasello, “What is it like to be a chimpanzee?”

39:15 – A study<...

Previous Episode

The ABCs of writing systems

Have you ever pondered the letter P, or maybe reflected on the letter R? As in, thought about their structures, their shapes, and how they came to be. I, to be honest, had not. I have never given these letters—or any other letters—much thought. But that’s what we’re up to today. In this episode, we’re looking across the world’s hundred plus scripts and asking some basic questions: How are they alike? How do they differ? And why do they have the shapes that they do?

My guests are Dr. Yoolim Kim and Dr. Olivier Morin. Yoolim is a Psycholinguist at the Korea Institute at Harvard University, and Olivier is director of the Minds and Traditions research group (aka ‘The Mint’) at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany. Olivier and Yoolim, along with other colleagues, have recently launched a new online game called Glyph. You can play right now. It asks players to help describe, break down, and classify the characters of dozens of writing systems around the world.

Here, we talk about Glyph and what Yoolim and Olivier hope to learn from it. We do a bit of ‘Writing Systems 101’ and shine a spotlight on two scripts with fascinating origin stories: Hangul, the Korean script which was devised in the 15th century and Vai, a script invented in Liberia in the 19th century. We also talk about how universal cognitive factors shape writing systems and about whether the writing system you use shapes how you think. Finally, we discuss the earliest writing systems and what they were used for; the myth that the alphabet is the most advanced type of writing system; and the understudied—but not uncommon!—phenomenon of “biscriptalism.”

If you enjoy this episode, be sure to check out Glyph. It sounds super fun and engrossing—and I’ll definitely be playing it myself!

On to my conversation with Dr. Yoolim Kim and Dr. Olivier Morin. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

2:30 – You can sign up to play Glyph and watch a video about the game here.

6:30 – The International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA.

10:00 – In addition to writing, Dr. Morin’s group at the MPI has also studied coin designs and other aspects of visual culture.

16:30 – A paper by Dr. Morin and colleagues about writing as one of many kinds of “graphic codes.”

18:40 – An explanation of the international laundry symbols.

19:50 – A video about how Egyptian hieroglyphs were decoded. A website where you can see your name written in Egyptian hieroglyphs.

24:50 – An article laying out five major types of writing system, distinguished by the linguistic unit they encode.

27:40 – More information about Hangul and Vai.

33:00 – A pioneering early paper by Mark Changizi and colleagues about the origins of letter shapes.

34:00 – A research paper by Dr. Morin about how cognitive biases for cardinal shapes and vertical symmetry shape letter forms.

37:30 – A cuneiform tablet, which shows how the script has a distinctive three-dimensional “wedge-shaped” quality.

41:30 – A research paper by Dr. Morin and colleagues on how the Vai script seems to have gotten simpler over its short history. A general audience treatment of the same study by co-author Piers Kelly.

42:00 – A research paper by Dr. Helena Miton and Dr. Morin about what determines the co...

Next Episode

A smorgasbord of senses

The world is bigger than you think. I don’t mean geographically, though maybe that too. I mean in terms of its textures and sounds and smells; I mean in terms of its hues and vibrations. There are depths and layers to the world that we don’t usually experience, that we might actually never be able to experience. Our senses just aren’t wired to take it all in. We’re simply not tuned to all the dimensions of reality’s rich splendor. But there is a way we can appreciate these hidden dimensions: with a flex of the imagination, we can step into the worlds of other creatures; we can try out different eyes and noses; we can voyage into different perceptual universes. Or at least we can try.

My guest today is Ed Yong, author of the new book An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Arounds Us. Ed is a science writer for The Atlantic and the author of an exceptional earlier book on the microbiome called I Contain Multitudes. This new book tours the wide diversity of animal senses. It asks what it’s like to be a bat, sure, but also what it’s like to be a star-nosed mole, a manatee, or a mantis shrimp. Informed by some truly extraordinary science, the book considers how it might feel to electrolocate around the ocean, to hear through the threads of a web, or to be tugged by the earth's magnetic field.

There’s a lot of praise I could lavish on this book, but I’ll just say this: it really makes you feel more alive. Reading it makes everything, in fact, seem more alive. It makes the world seem richer, more vivid, somehow more technicolor and finely textured. It makes you realize that every organism, all the creatures we share this planet with, possesses a kind of vibrant genius all their own.

After this episode we will be on a short holiday, and then we’ll be gearing up for Season 4. If you have guests or topics you want us to cover, please send us a note. And, of course: if you’ve enjoyed the show so far, we would be most grateful if you would leave us a rating or a review. I know I say this all the time, and it’s probably a bit annoying: but it really, truly helps, and I would personally, very much appreciate it!

Alright friends, now to my conversation with Ed Yong. Enjoy!

A transcript of this episode is available here.

Notes and links

3:30 – One of our earlier audio essays—'Me, my umwelt, and I’—profiled von Uexküll and his concept of an Umwelt.

6:00 – The classic Nagel article ‘What is it like to be a bat?’; Mike Tomasello’s recent variant, ‘What is it like to be a chimpanzee?’, which we discussed just last episode.

10:00 – One of many articles by Ed about COVID-19. He was awarded a Pulitzer prize for his coverage of the pandemic.

14:30 – A popular article on proprioception.

19:00 – A research article on the evolution of opsin proteins.

20:00 – A primer on echolocation.

25:00 – A brief article on heat-sensitive pits in snakes.

26:30 – An academic article about the “star” of the star-nosed mole. A video showing the star-nosed mole in action.

31:00 – A popular article about the eyes of starfish.

32:00 – A collection of research articles about the Ampullae of Lorenzini.

35:00 – A very recent article about spider webs as “outsourced” hearing.

38:00 – A