Tag Archives: Templeton Book Forum

AAAS 2012 the last day, Feb. 20, 2012

Hopefully I’m still making some sense as it’s been an exhausting few days and I’m not even going to the parties or expected to attend the 6:30 am meetings.

This last day featured one of my favourite talks. It was called, “Good Natured: From Primate Social Instincts to Human Morality” and was given by Frans B. M. de Waal. What really made the talk fascinating were the video clips which illustrated de Waal’s experiments with various animals. (I’m miffed that I can’t find any of these clips to embed in this posting because just hearing or reading about the animal’s behaviour isn’t the same.)

The best I can do is offer is this brief clip of de Waal speaking with Carl Zimmer (science writer mentioned in my Jan. 13, 2012 posting about his book on science tattoos). Here’s de Waal describing his experiments with Capuchin monkeys and the discovery he and his colleagues made about the concept of fairness amongst monkeys,

(You can check out more video clips of events held by the Templeton Book Forum here.)

At his AAAS 2012 talk, de Waals featured clips of elephants working cooperatively or not. Apparently, some of the elephants discovered that they could trick their partners into doing all of the work while still receiving the reward. de Waal is careful to note that his work is with mammals.

The very last session I attended was titled, “Misreporting Fukushima: A Failure of Science Journalism with Global Repercussions?” My hat’s off to Tracey Brown (Sense about Science) who moderated the session. Thank you and your colleague for keeping on time and for managing to get as many as questions heard and answered as possible. (There were lineups of people trying to ask questions and I’ve seen moderators disappoint a significant percentage of the questioners in this type of situation.) Brown did something simple, she aggregated the questions and gave a warning (10 mins., I think) before she wrapped up the session.

As for the ‘misreporting’, it’s one of the topics that people can talk about forever. It was good to hear from scientists and journalists (from the UK, Germany, and China) and audience members (from Japan, Canada, US, India, etc.) and, as you might expect, many dissenting opinions and perspectives were offered. I very much appreciated the civil and thoughtful discussion.