Robert Sapolsky: Are Humans Just Another Primate?
Posted Jul 7, 2011, 8:13 AM UTC
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His famous class "Human Behavioral Biology", one of the most popular at Stanford, has been posted on iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/human-behavioral-biology/id404310362#
After the intro, the next few classes are a review of basic biology that you might find dry if you already know the material (or are just not interested), but it gets exciting again starting with lecture 15 when he applies all those tools to human behavior.
The lecture on religion is not included because it's too controversial.
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The lecture on religion is not included because it's too controversial.
I'd like to see that one.
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Sent via PM. (audio only)
If anyone else wants it, PM me.
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Thank you very much!
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I've just started watching the entire series on Youtube.
It's a nice refresher on the content packaged in an interesting perspective!
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Wow. His beard is substantially more glorious now than in the last lecture I saw him give.
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Oh me, oh my! Thanks for introducing me to documentary heaven! I'm guessing you're familiar with fora.tv already?
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I am now! Thank you.
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Watched the whole thing. Fascinating.
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I find he has a progressive, and refreshing perspective. Acknowledging our biological quirks give us so much more power to minimize the bias introduced into our decision making by our biology, and to better understand inter-cultural, and inter-personal difference.
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Watching Sapolsky is always fun...he appears as though he's going to be giving a dry, boring talk (as a guy with a similar beard, we're sort of expected to be less than exciting) but his deadpan delivery is always a hoot. Thanks for the link.
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I didn't watch the video, but humans are definitely primates.
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It's a talk about behavior, not classification.
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Oh, in that case, we are definitely primates. Especially when it comes to mating.
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Except that we wear condoms.
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Actually what he calls the "Wellesley effect" is not that cut and dry established. More recent research in menstrual synchrony with humans show that the original data didn't prove anything statistically, and the predicted results has since not been repeated.
Yeah I was thinking this was a myth.
Well, since the effect in model animals is most pronounced when no males are present, it could just be the case that it is nearly impossible to meet no (pheromones of) humans males during the experiment.