When We Talk About Animals Archives - Page 5 of 5

Ep. 2 – Peter Godfrey-Smith asks: What can the octopus teach us about consciousness?

For decades, radio astronomers have combed the skies for signals from alien life. But according to our guest, Dr. Peter Godfrey-Smith, we’ve overlooked a form of intelligence so remote from ours it might as well be alien. It’s our evolutionary cousin, the octopus, a sea-dwelling mollusk that made headlines in 2016 for escaping from a New Zealand aquarium through a drain pipe. Because our most recent common ancestor was so simple and ancient, says Godfrey-Smith, the octopus represents an independent experiment in the evolution of minds and complex behavior. It confronts us with a mind in many ways radically different from our own, with which humans have nonetheless managed to make contact. Diving with cephalopods has led him to wonder: what might these strange creatures have to teach us about consciousness?

“The whole picture that we inherit from earlier philosophical traditions of a body as something that is semi-distinct from the mind, something that is steered around by a central controller…is very much put into question by the octopus, which has such a different relationship between the control systems and the thing being controlled, the material body itself,” says Dr. Peter Godfrey-Smith.

Ep. 1 – Natalie Kofler asks: What role should humans play in editing nature?

A few years ago, our guest, molecular biologist Dr. Natalie Kofler, was completing her postdoctoral training at Yale University. She was actively using CRISPR gene-editing techniques to study the mammalian cardiovascular system to try to develop better tools to treat human vascular diseases. While attending talks on conservation biology at the Yale School of Forestry, she started to wonder: Could the invasive emerald ash borer be genetically edited with these same techniques to save American ash trees? Could coral reefs be genetically edited to be more resilient to warming waters? Should humans develop and use these technologies to change nature? If so, how? And who gets to decide?

*“This goes well beyond just using expertise and intellect,”* Dr. Natalie Kofler says. “This is about … what is important to our world, what kind of future we are trying to create, and what our relationships look like with other humans and with the other species that we share our planet with.”

Ep. 0 – Coming Soon: When We Talk About Animals

When We Talk About Animals is a Yale University podcast devoted to exploring the big questions animals raise about what it means to be human. On each episode, we bring you a conversation with a leading thinker whose work has furthered human understanding of what animals think and feel, questioned how our society commonly talks about and treats other creatures, and/or challenged us to rethink our place in the animal kingdom. We’ll be hosting field biologists, filmmakers, neuroscientists, sociologists, journalists, philosophers, artists, legal scholars, historians and other thinkers to speak on one of the most interdisciplinary and morally pressing topics of our time. The series is supported by Yale University’s Human Nature Lab and produced by the Yale Broadcast Studio. Listen and subscribe on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, or Stitcher.