Transcript

Okay, I have to admit, I've given a lot of talks over the years, but never in a venue where they urged large amounts of alcohol consumption beforehand. So this is new terrain for me. Also. I've lived in San Francisco for years and never even knew there was an eerie Street, and just merely being in this space here, I feel like much more of a hipster than I've ever been in my entire life. So I'm gonna milk this for all it's worth. Okay, I've had sort of a dual career over the years, half a neurobiologist, half a primatologist. I spend about half my time living in a lab and mucking around with neurons and sticking genes in them and such, and then about half my time studying baboons in a national park in East Africa. And if you spend enough time sort of going back and forth between the two, eventually you begin to look at humans fairly strangely. They really do take on a different quality. I mean, you, you obviously wonder about everybody's neurotransmitter levels. 

But you you look at other guys and you wonder if their if their canines are longer than yours, and you usually conclude that they are or you you spend a lot of time looking at people's rear ends and calculating like how much anesthetic you would need to Dart them. But what I what I thought I would talk about tonight is sort of if you spend time studying the brain basis of behavior, the evolutionary basis. All after a while, it's really a challenge. This, ultimately, this question of thinking about humans. Are we just another primate? Are we just a collection of neurons where to play a place us in the biological world? So I thought I would sort of give somewhat of an overview of where we fit in, and the answer is, we keep being just like every other species out there, until you look a little bit closer, what we'll see here is, as I present this material, there's sort of three basic challenges, and the first one is recognizing the domains in which there's nothing fancy about us whatsoever. We are just like every other species out there. Some of the time.