Here’s Frans de Waal talking about some jackdaws that, when Frans was a child, excited him in a way that led to his eventual unusual career. Frans studies chimps, bonobos, macaques, capuchin monkeys, and other of our close relatives. He wants to understand how and why they (and we) do some of the impressive things they (and we) do every day.
ABOUT THIS LITTLE VIDEO SERIES—This is part of a series of sessions we (David Hu and I, and a film crew) recorded at Georgia Tech. We assembled a little group of scientists (including David) who are renowned for looking at questions others might overlook, and doing research in inventive, clever ways.
The question we asked them: “What happened when you were a kid that somehow led—much later—to your doing unusual science?”
The scientists: David Hu, Suzana Herculano-Houzel, Frans de Waal, Nicole Sharp, Diego Golombek, and Olga Shishkov. Follow the links on their names to begin exploring some of their work!
A FURTHER NOTE ABOUT THIS SERIES: These little videos are not quite as good as they ought to have been, due to curious decisions made by the video editor. The most obvious of those strange decisions was to dose everything with goopy, slightly distracting music. The editor also objected to some of the content of the videos, deeming them somehow too offensive to record. The lesson we learned: choose our video editor more carefully.