Desmond Morris, 98, Dies; Zoologist Saw Links Between Humans and Apes - The New York Times

June: Welcome to Kindred Minds. I'm June, a primatologist who has spent the better part of my career watching our closest relatives and coming back to tell you what I've seen — and what science has discovered — about how remarkably like us they truly are. Today's episode is one I've been sitting with for a while, because the stories landed close to home in ways I didn't quite expect. We're going to talk about apes that shatter our assumptions about social intelligence, about what a tiny bone in an ancient skull tells us about how we first stood up and walked, about the biology that binds us to every other primate on this planet, and about two towering human figures whose lives were devoted to that bond — and who we lost recently. Before we dive in, a warm thank you to the sponsors who make this show possible: Ada, who helps clients integrate A I into their workflows in meaningful ways; Ago Consulting — pronounced "Ahh-Go" — silicon development consultants working across A I all the way to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a remarkable portfolio of businesses across the silicon industry. These are people building the future, and I'm glad they're on our side. Alright — let's get into it. June: So let's start with something that genuinely stopped me in my tracks this week. A headline crossed my desk that read — and I love this — "Great Apes Shatter Human Models of Social Intelligence." And I thought, yes. Yes, they do. The study behind that headline, covered by Neuroscience News, builds on a growing body of research into how great apes — chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans — navigate their social worlds. And what researchers keep finding is that the frameworks we built to describe human social cognition? They keep breaking when we apply them to apes. Not because the apes fall short — but because they exceed what the models predicted. June: Here's what I mean. For a long time, there was a working assumption in cognitive science that something called "theory of mind" — the ability to understand that other individuals have their own beliefs, intentions, and knowledge that differ from your own — was essentially a human specialty. Maybe uniquely human. And then we started watching apes more carefully. Studies over the past two decades have shown that chimpanzees track what other individuals can and cannot see. They understand when a dominant rival is watching and when they aren't — and they change their behavior accordingly. They don't just respond to what is, they model what others know. That is a profound cognitive act. June: But the more recent work goes further. It looks at how apes handle complex, shifting social hierarchies — who is allied with whom, who just fell out of favor, who might be a useful friend next week even if they're not useful today. And what researchers are finding is that apes perform these social calculations with a sophistication that our existing models — models built around human social cognition — genuinely struggle to capture. They're not simpler than us. In some of these social domains, they're operating in ways we're still working to fully describe. June: And I think there's something important to sit with there. For so long, the story we told was: humans are at the top, and everything else is a lesser version of us. But the more carefully we look, the more we see that great apes have their own forms of intelligence — deep, functional, evolutionarily refined — that aren't lesser. They're different, and sometimes they're extraordinary in ways we didn't anticipate. The apes didn't fail our tests. Our tests failed the apes. And now, slowly, gratifyingly, the science is catching up. June: Now. Let's talk about a story that connects to something even more ancient — something that happened millions of years before the first chimpanzee, before the first human, before this particular branch of the primate family tree even existed in the form we know it. Because this week there was also a fascinating piece in Popular Science about an extinct ape — and what its inner ear can tell us about how we learned to walk upright. June: The inner ear. Of all the places to find a clue. But here's the thing — deep inside your skull, coiled up in a structure called the cochlea and surrounded by the three semicircular canals, is one of the most sensitive balance systems in the animal kingdom. Those canals are filled with fluid, and when you move, that fluid shifts, and your brain gets constant, real-time information about where you are in space. And the size and orientation of those canals is directly related to how an animal moves — how it balances, how it positions its head, whether it walks on four legs or two. June: So when paleontologists find a fossil ape skull that's intact enough to image the inner ear — which is rare, and lucky — they can actually make inferences about how that animal moved. The study in question looked at the inner ear of an extinct ape species, and what they found adds texture to a question that has fascinated scientists for generations: bipedalism, walking upright, is one of the defining traits of our lineage. But it didn't appear out of nowhere. It evolved, gradually, across millions of years, in bodies that were already experimenting with different ways of moving through their world. June: And here's what I find so moving about this. When we look at that tiny coiled structure in a skull that's millions of years old, we're looking at the same biological architecture that exists in your ear right now. The same solution to the same problem — how do you keep your balance, how do you know where you are — refined across deep time, passed down through an unbroken chain of living things, all the way to you. That's not a metaphor. That's literally what happened. You carry that history in your head. June: Okay. Let's talk about the biology that holds all of this together. Because the stories I just shared — apes with social intelligence that breaks our models, ancient skulls with inner ears that echo our own — they point to something that I think is worth saying clearly and carefully: we are not separate from the other primates. We are one of them. We are a great ape. And the evidence for that is written in our D N A. June: Here's the number I never get tired of saying. Humans and chimpanzees share somewhere between 98 and 99 percent of their D N A. Depending on exactly how you measure it — coding sequences, the whole genome, including regulatory regions — the figure varies a little, but it hovers in that remarkable range. That means that if you sat down and compared the biological instructions that build a human body to the instructions that build a chimpanzee body, the overwhelming majority of those instructions are identical. The same proteins. The same developmental pathways. The same basic architecture. June: And it's not just chimpanzees. We share about 98.7 percent of our D N A with bonobos — our other closest relative. Around 98 percent with gorillas. Roughly 96 to 97 percent with orangutans. And even with more distant primate relatives — macaques, baboons, spider monkeys — the shared genetic heritage is profound. The further back you go on the evolutionary tree, the more the percentage drops, but the shared recipe is always there. The same basic cellular machinery. The same fundamental molecular language. June: What does that mean in practice? It means the same hormones course through our veins and theirs. Oxytocin — the molecule associated with bonding, trust, the warm feeling of connection — is present in chimpanzees and bonobos and gorillas and humans. Cortisol, the stress hormone, spikes in apes under social pressure just as it does in us. The neural architecture for emotion, for social recognition, for fear and comfort and grief — it's all there, built from the same blueprints. June: And this is exactly what the bonobo research published this week in Communications Biology — in the journal Nature's family — speaks to. The study looked at what drives female power in bonobos. Bonobos are fascinating because they are one of the only great ape species where females regularly hold social dominance — or at least resist male aggression so effectively that females shape the social order in real, measurable ways. The question is: how? What are the actual mechanisms? June: What the researchers found points to coalition-building — females forming alliances with each other, supporting each other in conflicts, creating social networks that function as a form of collective power. It's not size. Female bonobos are physically smaller than males. It's not individual dominance in a one-on-one sense. It's the network. The relationships. The social intelligence to build and maintain alliances over time. Sound familiar? It should. Because the same dynamics — coalition politics, social network power, the strength of relationships — are central to human social life too. Same recipe. Different species. Same fundamental game being played. June: And now I need to slow down, because today's episode carries something heavier than usual. Because in the same week that all of these stories arrived, we also got the news that two of the most important figures in our understanding of great apes — two people who shaped how science and the world see our primate relatives — are no longer with us. June: Desmond Morris died at the age of 98. If you've ever read "The Naked Ape" — published in 1967 — you've encountered his work. Morris was a zoologist who made an argument that, at the time, was genuinely provocative: that humans are, at root, a species of ape. Not a special exception to nature. Not elevated above biology. An ape. A naked, peculiar, extraordinarily successful ape. He studied human behavior with the same observational tools a zoologist would bring to any other animal, and what he found was that our postures and gestures and social rituals looked remarkably like those of our primate relatives. He wrote about it with wit and directness, and the world largely wasn't ready for it. Some people were outraged. But the science backed him up. He helped pull the curtain back on our own nature, and that is a gift that keeps giving. June: And then — and I still find this hard to say — Jane Goodall died at the age of 91. Jane Goodall. I don't think I can overstate what her work meant — not just to primatology, not just to science, but to the way human beings understand our relationship to the living world. She arrived at Gombe Stream in Tanzania in 1960, with little more than binoculars, a notebook, and an extraordinary capacity for patience. And she watched. She watched chimpanzees for months before they accepted her presence. She gave them names — something the scientific establishment of the time found deeply uncomfortable, because naming implied individuality, and individuality implied inner lives, and inner lives were supposed to be ours alone. June: And then she watched a chimpanzee she called David Greybeard pick up a grass stem and use it as a tool to extract termites from a mound. Tool use. In a non-human animal. When she reported this to her mentor, Louis Leakey, he sent back a now-famous telegram: "Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as humans." That moment cracked open the scientific conversation in a way it has never fully closed. June: What Jane Goodall gave us wasn't just data — though the data were extraordinary. Decades of behavioral records, observations of chimpanzee culture, warfare, cooperation, grief, joy. What she gave us was permission to look at another animal and say: there is someone there. Not a human. But a someone. A mind, a social life, a history. She spent the rest of her long life fighting to protect them — and to protect the forests they live in, and the planet that holds all of us. She never stopped. Right up until the end, she was traveling, speaking, urging people to act. She was 91 years old, and she was still showing up. June: I think about what it means that both of these figures — Desmond Morris and Jane Goodall — devoted their lives to the same essential argument: that the boundary between us and the other animals is permeable. That intelligence and feeling and social life are not our private property. That when you look into the eyes of a chimpanzee or a bonobo or a gorilla, you are not looking at an imitation of a human. You are looking at a relative. A close one. June: Morris made that argument with science and wit and a little bit of deliberate provocation. Goodall made it with sixty years of sitting very still in a forest and watching, and then standing up and speaking for what she'd seen. They came at it differently. But they were pointing at the same truth. And I think the world is a little more honest about our place in nature because of both of them. June: Morris once said — and I'm paraphrasing — that humans spend an enormous amount of energy convincing themselves they are not animals, when all that energy might be better spent understanding what kind of animals they are. That's the work, isn't it? That's what Goodall did. That's what the researchers studying bonobo politics and ape social cognition are doing. That's what paleontologists teasing out balance signals from ancient inner ears are doing. Understanding what kind of animals we are. And finding, every time, that the answer is: the same kind as them. Kin. June: We're almost at the end, and I just want to hold this for a second. This week handed us stories about apes whose social intelligence breaks our models, about ancient inner ears that whisper secrets about our first upright steps, about female bonobos building power through alliance and relationship, about two extraordinary people who gave their lives to saying: look at them, look how close they are, look how much we share. And threading through all of it is the same quiet, insistent truth that this podcast exists to tell. We are not the top of a ladder. We are part of a family. A living, breathing, sometimes grieving, often astonishing family. The intelligence is not ours alone. The feeling is not ours alone. And this planet — this one planet — belongs to all of us equally. June: Kindred Minds, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. If this episode moved you or taught you something, please share it with someone you think would love it — and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Show notes with links to all the stories and studies we talked about today are available the link in show notes. Stay curious. Take care of each other. And I'll see you next time.