TXST doctoral student receives prestigious grant for primate research : Newsroom - news.txst.edu

June: Welcome to Kindred Minds. I'm June, a primatologist who has spent way too many hours crouched in forests watching monkeys do things that make me rethink what it means to be human — and honestly, I wouldn't trade a single muddy minute of it. This show is where I bring you true, carefully sourced stories about our primate relatives — the ones that make you lean forward and think, wait, they do that too? Today we've got a lot to dig into: political alliances that would feel right at home in any workplace drama, a heartbreaking story about the rarest apes on earth, and some genuinely exciting science about who gets to shape the future of primate research. The thread running through all of it, as always, is this: we are not as separate from the rest of the primate family as we like to think. And huge thanks to today's sponsors — Ada, who helps clients integrate A I into their workflows; Ago Consulting, pronounced "Ahh-Go," your silicon development partner from A I to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a portfolio of businesses across the silicon industry. We wouldn't be here without them. Alright, let's get into it. June: So let's start with something that stopped me in my tracks this week, because it touches on one of my favorite questions in primatology — the question of why primates, including us, are so absolutely riveted by social drama. There's a new study out on long-tailed macaques, and the researchers did something elegantly simple. They showed these monkeys short video clips. Some clips showed social conflict — fighting — and some were more neutral. And what they found was striking. The macaques could not look away from the conflict footage. They were glued to it. Sound familiar? But here's where it gets really interesting. The monkeys weren't equally riveted by all conflict. They were most captivated when the individuals fighting were monkeys they actually knew. Familiar faces, familiar drama — that's what held their attention longest. And that mirrors something we see in humans so precisely that it's almost uncomfortable. We don't just love drama in the abstract. We love drama involving people we know, or people we feel we know. It's why we're more interested in a neighborhood dispute than a war in a distant country, even if the distant war is objectively more consequential. It's not a flaw — it's a feature of a deeply social brain. The macaques showed something else too. Individuals who were lower in the social hierarchy watched the conflict most intently. And that makes a lot of sense when you think about it from a survival standpoint. If you're low-ranking, you are more vulnerable. Knowing who's fighting, who's winning, who's shifting in power — that information could genuinely protect you. You need to track the political landscape carefully because you have less cushion if you get it wrong. Higher-ranking individuals could afford to look away more. And then there were the more anxious individuals — those with what you might call a high-strung temperament — who actually averted their gaze from the conflict. Again, something we recognize. Some people doom-scroll, some people actively avoid the news. The macaques are doing the same calculus. What this study tells us is that the social attention systems in our brains — the ones that make us watch, track, and analyze conflict — are ancient. They didn't appear with the internet or with reality television. They were shaped by millions of years of living in complex social groups where knowing who's on top, who's falling, and who's fighting could mean the difference between thriving and getting hurt. Long-tailed macaques diverged from our lineage a very long time ago, and yet here we are, sharing this deeply wired fascination with social information. That's not coincidence. That's kinship. June: Now I want to talk about something that connects beautifully to that — because if watching conflict is one piece of the social puzzle, actively navigating it is another. And primates, it turns out, are extraordinarily sophisticated political players. A new study has been looking at same-sex sexual behavior in primates — and before you picture something salacious, let me tell you, this is really a story about alliance-building, strategy, and social intelligence. Researchers have found that in multiple primate species, same-sex sexual interactions serve a very real social function. They help individuals build and cement alliances that can then translate into higher rank and better mating opportunities. Think of it as a social currency. Grooming is the classic version of this — you groom me, I owe you, we're bonded, we back each other up. Same-sex sexual behavior appears to operate in a similar register. It's a form of social bonding that creates trust and reciprocity, and in the competitive world of primate hierarchies, those bonds are genuinely powerful. What I love about this research is that it reframes how we think about behavior that might seem puzzling or incidental. Primates aren't just reacting to their environment — they're playing long games. They're making social investments. They're thinking, in some meaningful sense, about relationships and what those relationships can do for them. Bonobos are perhaps the most famous example of this — they use sexual behavior broadly as a social tool, to reduce tension, resolve conflict, and build community cohesion. But the new research suggests this is more widespread across primate species than we previously appreciated. And when we zoom out and look at humans, we see something similar in our long social history — complex, flexible social bonding strategies that go beyond simple reproduction. The capacity to form alliances, to use social behavior strategically, to recognize that relationships have long-term value — these are not uniquely human inventions. They are part of our shared primate inheritance. We have deep roots in this kind of social complexity, and understanding those roots helps us understand ourselves. June: Okay, this next part is where I want to talk about the biology underneath all of this — the shared recipe, as I like to call it — because I think it helps us really feel, not just intellectually acknowledge, how close we are to the other primates. Let's start with D N A, because the numbers are genuinely astonishing. We share roughly 98 to 99 percent of our D N A with chimpanzees. Think about what that means. The entire difference between a human being and a chimpanzee — all the language, all the technology, all the art and grief and philosophy — fits into about one to two percent of the genome. And it's not just chimps. We share around 97 percent of our D N A with gorillas, and roughly 96 percent with orangutans. These aren't distant cousins we share a great-great-great-grandparent with. In evolutionary terms, this is close family. The same genes that build our brains are building theirs. The same molecular instructions that shape our social instincts, our capacity for attachment, our emotional responses — those instructions are running in primate bodies all over this planet. We have the same basic architecture. The same neurotransmitters. Serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin — the chemicals that make you feel bonded to someone you love, or anxious in a crowd, or elated when something goes right — primates have those too, and they work in remarkably similar ways. When a chimpanzee mother cradles her infant, the oxytocin flooding her system is chemically the same as what floods a human mother's. When a macaque watches a fight involving someone it knows, the social attention circuits lighting up in its brain are the evolutionary ancestors of the circuits lighting up in yours when you check your phone to see what's happening with people you care about. This is what I mean by a shared recipe. It's not metaphor. It's molecular reality. Now, there's exciting news on the research front that speaks to this directly. A doctoral student at Texas State University has just received a prestigious grant for primate research — and this matters because it signals that the next generation of scientists is being supported to go deeper into exactly these questions. What makes primate cognition work? How do the biological systems we share with other primates shape behavior, emotion, intelligence? Every time a young researcher gets the resources to ask those questions rigorously, we all benefit. We understand ourselves better. We understand our relatives better. And we're better equipped to protect them. June: Which brings me to the part of today's episode that I have to be honest with you — it's the one that hit me hardest this week, and I've been sitting with it for days. The Tapanuli orangutan. If you haven't heard of them, let me tell you a little about who they are before I tell you what's happening. The Tapanuli orangutan — Pongo tapanuliensis — is the most recently recognized great ape species, only formally described to science in 2017. They live exclusively in a small patch of forest in the Batang Toru ecosystem in North Sumatra, Indonesia. And when I say small, I mean it. Their entire range is around 1,000 square kilometers. The estimated population when they were first described was fewer than 800 individuals. Eight hundred. That means there are fewer Tapanuli orangutans alive on this earth than there are people in a small apartment building in a big city. They are the rarest great apes in the world. And this week, there are fears — serious, documented fears — that some of them may have been swept away in catastrophic flooding in Sumatra. The Batang Toru region experienced severe floods, and conservationists and researchers on the ground are deeply worried. We don't yet have full information about how many animals may have been affected. But even the loss of a handful of individuals from a population of fewer than 800 is not a rounding error. Every single Tapanuli orangutan is a significant fraction of their entire species. I want you to feel the weight of that for a moment. This is a great ape. An animal with whom we share the vast majority of our D N A. An animal that uses tools, that has a culture, that has social bonds, that has an inner life we are only beginning to understand. And there are fewer than 800 of them. And floods are rising. Now here's the thing I want to hold alongside the grief — because I think it matters. There are people who love these apes. Researchers who have devoted their careers to understanding and protecting them. Local conservationists in Sumatra who are on the ground right now, checking, looking, hoping. The fact that we even know the Tapanuli orangutan exists as a distinct species is because scientists cared enough to look closely. The fact that we're worried about the floods is because a global community of people is paying attention. That care is real. It's not nothing. But it needs to become more, and faster. June: And that brings me to something that genuinely lifted my heart this week, because we need that too. Washington University in St. Louis has just announced a new initiative specifically designed to save primates and transform global conservation approaches. This is significant not just because conservation initiatives are good — though they are — but because of the framing. Transforming global approaches. That's not tinkering at the edges. That's recognizing that what we've been doing isn't enough, and committing to do something structurally different. Details are still emerging about exactly what this initiative will look like in practice, but the commitment is real and the institution behind it is serious. And it comes at a moment when we desperately need it. More than half of all primate species are currently threatened with extinction. More than half. These are our closest living relatives — the animals who share our biology, our social instincts, our capacity for emotion and learning. And we are losing them at a rate that should make all of us stop and reckon with what we're doing. But I keep coming back to something that I genuinely believe: the fact that we know, the fact that we care, the fact that researchers are being funded and initiatives are being launched and people all over the world feel something when they hear about a flood threatening the last 800 Tapanuli orangutans — that is the hopeful part. Humans have a remarkable capacity for empathy across species lines. We recognized ourselves in the macaque watching a fight. We recognized ourselves in the orangutan mother. That recognition is powerful. It can drive change. The question is whether we let it. June: So that's what I'm carrying with me today. A macaque who can't look away from drama involving faces it knows. Primates playing long alliance games that echo through human history. A doctoral student getting funded to ask the deep questions. The rarest great apes in the world, in danger from rising waters. And a new commitment, at Washington University and beyond, to do more. What ties all of it together — the thing I always come back to on this show — is that intelligence, feeling, social complexity, the drive to survive and belong and understand — none of that is ours alone. It never was. We are one family, spread across species and continents, all running a very similar biological recipe, all navigating the same beautiful and sometimes brutal world. Kindred minds, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. If today's episode gave you something to think about, I'd love for you to share it with someone who might feel the same way. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and the links and sources for everything we talked about today are in the show notes. Stay curious. Take care of each other — all of each other.