Hello everyone, and welcome to Talk Nerdy.

Today is Monday, September eighth, twenty twenty five, and I'm the host of the show, Doctor Kara Santa Maria, And as always, before we dive into this week's episode, I want to thank those of you who make Talk Nerdy possible.

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This week's top patrons include Anu Badavaj, Chuck Blell, Daniel Lang, David J.

E.

Smith, Joseph Lemore, Mary Neva, Brian Holden, David Compton, Gabriel F.

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Thank you all so very much.

All Right, this week I had the opportunity to chat with doctor Shirley c.

Strom.

She's a professor of anthropology and a professor of the Graduate Division in the School of Social Sciences at the University of California, San Diego.

She's also the director of and I hope I'm pronouncing this somewhat correctly, the USO in Ghiro Baboon Project in Kenya.

This is her second book that I had the opportunity to speak to her about.

It's called Echoes of Our Origins, Baboons, Humans and Nature.

So, without any further ado, here she is doctor Shirley c.

Strong.

Well, Shirley, thank you so much for joining me today.

It's a pleasure to have you ask me to be part of your podcast.

Yeah, I'm excited to talk about your new book, Echoes of Our Origins, Baboons, Humans and Nature.

So you have been doing anthropology for some time before we get into the book, and like kind of the big takeaways from a really rich career of research, I would love to learn just a little bit more about you.

Did you kind of go a traditional route in your academic training?

Was it all anthropology from the start or was it a bit meandering to get to where you are now?

Right?

So, when I went to Berkeley in the mid nineteen sixties, all I knew was that I wanted to have a better approach to looking at human behavior, and I sampled a lot of things biology, criminology, psychology, and then anthropology, which is cultural anthropology.

But when I had my first back then it was called physical anthropology with the person who became my mentor, Sherwood Washburn, it was just what I was looking for.

And because it was so long ago, it's really hard to imagine we knew so little about primates, but we really did.

So he was talking to a thousand students in Wheeler Hall, which probably doesn't exist anymore, and you could hear a pin drop.

He was just so captivating.

And then so for me, the physical anthropology, the evolutionary perspective, really rang a bell.

But after that I started thinking about would I do archaeology, would I do paleoanthropology, And you know, I just didn't want I wanted behavior, and I didn't want to sit in the hot sun with a little toothbrush excavating things.

And at that time there were only two places that did primate behavior.

One was Berkeley because of Sherwood Washburn, and one was Harvard because one of his students was there, IRV.

DeVore.

So I just decided to stay at Berkeley, and the rest is history.

Although initially I thought that I would go to the field study baboons, get my PhD research done, and then come back and have an academic career.

But I really loved the challenges that baboons offered me, and so I ended up taking a job.

Washburn said to me, because I had several job offers, if you want to have a family, go to uc San Diego, and if you want to have a career, go to UCLA.

And I didn't have any idea about having a family then.

But what I really liked about UCSD was that I said I didn't have any colleagues there, and they said, well, who are your colleagues?

And I said, the baboons are my colleagues and they said okay.

And again, it was so long ago.

No one believes that we just shook hands.

Right now, A contract is a huge thing.

But also they gave me a permission to go into the field as much as I wanted to, as long as I didn't take my salary with me, which was fine because the students got a lot of different people instead of just me over and over again.

So I don't think I had a straight line, but it got me to where I wanted to be in terms of looking directly at the behavior of the baboons.

And there were issues then about a baboon model.

I don't know if I should go into that now.

But yeah, yeah, I'm curious when you say there were issues with a baboon model.

Is that because most people sort of believe that we are evolutionarily too far away from baboons to learn anything about ourselves.

Is it because you know, the chimps have been all the rage when it comes to this kind of research.

Well, it turns out that back then it was really baboons and not chimps.

Only came later, and then after chimps, bonobos and so forth, because at that time there were three field studies of baboons, whereas all the others had only one field study, one in Ambasalli National Park, one in Nairobi National Park, and one in Southern Africa.

And the interesting part was that when they came together, these three scientists, they seemed to think that baboons shared despite the different and species subspecies and the difference in location, that baboons really did share a lot in common with each other.

And the baboon model was actually an idea that emerged from that Baboons represented what would face a puny primate going out from the forest, which is the main primate habitat, out into the savannah, which baboons and humans are the two most successful of all the primates who've tried it.

And not only that, but at that time it also appeared that they were using the baboon model to not just to interpret human evolution, early human evolution, but also to begin to interpret what all primates share.

And I was interested.

I didn't want to do baboons initially, I wanted to do Pattis monkeys because they're another example of a species that had left the forest and gone into and survived successfully at that time.

Now they're nearly extinct, but anyway, at that time survived in a savannah habitat, but they had a totally different social organization.

And even though they'd only been watched for six months, my mentor, Sherwood Washburn, said they've been done, and why not do baboons.

And he was one of the people of the three people of scientists.

He studied baboons in Ambaselli Yellow Weapons in Ambaselli National Park, and he was one of the people responsible for the baboon model.

And at that point, you know, I was just a graduate student, lowly graduate student, and so I decided I would go and study baboons.

But I wanted to use some of the techniques that were already prevalent in captive research.

And I also learned later that the only the males were identified as individuals.

And although I always say that I stand on their shoulders, which I do, nobody at that time thought that that was a problem, which just shows how different it is today.

Oh yeah, I mean, how how common was it for there to be women scientists in the field at.

That time time?

There were there was Jane Goodall and that was really it.

But anthropology was considered a feminist discipline because there were so many women scientists who played a role, especially in cultural anthropology.

So you had Margaret Meade and Ruth Benedict, and at the time it was really considered a discipline that women could join.

And I must say that after me and around the same time, there were more women who came into the field, and now there are more women than men who are studying primate behavior.

You know, it's interesting.

I come from psychology.

I'm a clinical psychologist, and my field is very similar.

Right.

It started out heavily men.

It's now you know, pretty much dominated by women, both in practice and in the act academic sphere.

But as I was just speaking with my my podcast guest just last week, the timing of your episode is really interesting.

I had doctor Christine Webb on last week and she, you know, is in the Environmental Studies department at NYU, but studies human behavior and ape behavior.

And we were talking about how sure you had Jane Goodall, sure you had Diane Fosse.

You had these incredible women who really did inspire generation of women to join into this sort of academic approach, But all of the decision makers were still men.

All of the structures were still men and really, as we often see when it comes to you know, the patriarchy, the water that we swim in early and you yourself, I'm curious your experience of this, but early pioneers who break glass ceilings often feel pressure to sort of do it like the men do in order to sort of not rock the boat so much and be able to you know, stay in the department, to be able to maintain an academic position.

And so you end up seeing sort of even though women are doing the research early on, very often they're doing the research the way the men did it, because otherwise they might get kicked out.

So that's an interesting point.

And I have to say that the department I joined, I was at that time only well there was a cultural anthropologist who was a woman, but she left she became an administrator, so I was the only woman in the department, And because I spent so much time in the field, I didn't experience the negative masculinity that others after me have experienced.

And I think right now it's yeah, were swimming in the waters of the patriarchy.

I should also say that both of the women that you name, Jane Goodall and Diane Fosse, they were not trained as scientists and therefore.

Right they didn't have PhD in the field.

Jane Goodall eventually got a PhD.

Diane Fosse never did.

She was a physical therapist.

And for Jane Goodall, it was Lewis Leaky who didn't want someone to go out who had a mind cluttered by science, which was the wrong thing to say, but inadvertently it did the right thing, which is made both of them think more about what they were seeing.

And I think that's what I did.

Although I made up my mind that I was going to identify all the individuals, I didn't know if the differences that were slowly coming out then about primates were because of a bias among the researchers or whether it really did represent baboons, for example.

And so because I was using quantitative methods, it meant that I didn't My eyes were not attracted just to the splashy mail aggression.

The other point about why baboons were so appealing and at that time, and also they ended up being on the cover of so many biology textbooks, although I haven't been able to find a good example of that because it was so long ago.

They were the only and I think still remain one of the few cases where you could see how evolution shaped male baboons for aggression.

So they have twice the size of females, They have a big mantle of hair that can stand erect.

They have these sharp canines that are really not suitable for ripping flesh.

They're very brittle, but they had modified premolars so that every time someone a baboon opened and closed his mouth, the back of the cop canines got sharpened.

So it was very appealing to think about this relationship between evolution and the anatomy and the behavior.

And one of the first things I saw, I mean, my NSF proposal.

I think when one of the reasons I got it was because at the end I was going to experimentally remove all the males and see what happened.

But by the time I got halfway through the study, I already knew that it wasn't the way the baboon model suggested, which was a very male dominated males did all the policing and the protection and all of that kind of thing, and that although males had the anatomy of aggression, actually aggression is very risky, and instead I saw these sophisticated baboons using social strategies, not aggressive strategies of competition and defense.

So the fact that I had seen a female hierarchy what made me a darling of the second wave feminists at the time, because their interpretation was that women do science differently, and there's a meeting.

It's an investigation that I've done on the side for many, many years, and it resulted in a book called Primate Encounters, which was funded by the Winnegren Foundation, and what it made me realize was that it's not that women do science differently, it's that culture has a huge effect on how men and women do science.

And the reason I say that is that Japanese scientists who in the fifties were asking the kind of questions that are labeled feminist questions in US science, but they were doing it way before the seventies and eighties and they were all men.

Yeah, that's interesting, but there was something in the culture that made them look at the animals in a different way.

Yeah.

I think it's it's such an important point because I mean, it's a bummer that we have to caveat it that way, because I think that we are so trained in thinking that if we say something like oh, women tend to do it this way, that people assume that's an essentialist perspective, that like, somehow they are biologically predisposed or their brains are telling them to do no, no no.

So much of this, so much of all of the ways that gender roles enact in society is because of the way we were treated from the time we were born, Right, It's because of the way that our parents talk to us.

It's because of the way that gender roles were made normative in television and radio and the books that we read, and we are teachers treated us and so yeah, you know, you can't separate the culture from the decision making or the experiences of the different genders, especially in a setting like academia or like we could even say field work, where there are so many variables involved.

Right, you are a Western scientist and a Western woman who is doing field work in West Africa, you know, in sub Saharan Africa, in an area where the gender norms.

Sometimes you probably see things that are very recognizable from a gender norm perspective, and sometimes you probably see things that are like, oh wow, it's not like that in the States.

Yeah, yeah, I need to tell you about this one documentary I've made lots called Beauty and the Beast, and it's set out to show how different women did their primate studies.

And I didn't agree with everything that my colleague, my women colleagues, were saying, but it didn't really matter because I had my own perspective and my voice of saying what it was.

And then the team shot the footage and in England in the editing room, they decided to switch the story and it ended up being all about women studying primates because of their repressed maternal instinct and exactly exactly, And so that started me on this long journey about how do our ideas about primate society change and what is the role of when and what is the role of culture, and also thinking about media production as media being gatekeepers.

I don't do social media.

I did teach a class last spring called Conservation and the Media, and I made it social media so that the students could learn from me about conservation and I could learn from them about social media, and what I learned just horrifying me.

I don't know how they even have time to do any assignments or read any books.

Well, they don't read books anyway, So I don't do social media.

But I'm really interested in how portrayals of primates in the media have changed over the last well, I don't want to say fifty years, but at least the last forty years.

Yeah, I mean leaving off the last ten years when social media has ascended to such a great degree.

Yeah.

Yeah, Oh, it's fascinating.

It makes you wonder, really, I mean, somebody who has had a career that has spanned you know, different zeitgeist.

I guess we could say, especially when it comes to, you know, where we are politically, where we are from a governmental perspective.

You know, I'm curious.

Obviously, there are some areas that we could point to where we say we are way more progressive than we were historically, and that we've made, you know, huge strides, But there must be areas where you're going like, come on, like, how come it's the same as it was in the sixties, in the seventies.

Yeah, and although women have made great strides in science, well, I'm not going to being in Kenya makes it possible for me to control my Trump news.

Yeah, so I and Kenya isn't it much better.

It just doesn't have so far to fall.

Yeah, it isn't that interesting.

And sometimes when it's sort of it's the thing you grew up in, it feels so much more personal.

I've definitely noticed that when I've traveled in places where there's still a lot of geopolitical strife, but it does feel I think the point you made is a really important one.

It feels like nobody expected this, This wasn't supposed to happen in the US, and also this was home.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, So science has really changed over the period my career.

You know, when I started, I was trained as an ethologist, which was a particular it's like a behaviors tradition and psychology where you can't think about mind or emotions or any of those kind of things.

It's just behavior.

I was trained that way, but I was also allowed to spend my time, like the first three months, just familiarizing myself with the animals, trying things out.

Now it's all about testing hypotheses.

Most of them are ones that you already know the answers to, because otherwise you wouldn't be able to keep the funding program going, and it doesn't allow the freedom that I had at the beginning.

And I also realized that had I started, if I started now, I wouldn't have accomplished as much on the community side as I managed to accomplish, because people's expectations are so different now than they were before.

And also the population is so much larger than it was.

I mean, Kenya's population when I first came here in nineteen seventy two was only five million people.

Now it's close to sixty million people.

Wow.

Yeah, and that's a big change, Yes.

A big change.

So there's been a change in science, there's been a change in population, there's been a change in expectations.

And it really depends on which period you're talking about what the answers are going to be, because the answers to any question you ask me will be different depending on whether it was when I first started watching baboons in the live, when I was watching baboons, now when I'm watching baboons.

It's really it's really changed.

It's fascinating to think.

So how would you say that you mostly split your time?

I mean, are you spending the vast majority of your time in Kenya?

Has it sort of ebbed and flowed over the years.

So I now split my time between Kenya for eight months and California for four months.

Although I retired in twenty twenty one, I continued to teach and I still I love that part.

I really love to see the light bulbs go on and off.

Maybe for the students, but I don't have to go to faculty meetings.

I don't have to decide about graduate students or any of that, so it's your pleasure.

When I first started, I alternated years.

I always went for the summer, but I alternated for the first couple of years, a year in the field, a year at the university, a year in the field, and a year at the university.

But once I married my husband that was nineteen eighty three, then I needed to spend the way I just said.

I mean eight months in Kenya and four months in California.

And that has been both a problem and also a benefit.

The problem is that I feel pretty disconnected every time I go back to California.

Things have changed so much, But I feel privileged in that I really do have baboons as colleagues, and I've been able to watch on the sidelines.

I haven't studied people, but you can't be in a country for so many decades and not have some ideas about what people are doing.

And I before I translocated the baboons in nineteen eighty four, there were Kikuyu farmers who were coming and buying land.

And then after translocation, I've been next to mass I pastoralists and watching how they've changed as well.

And so that's given.

That's the benefit of having been somewhere and being able to absorb I guess all these changes that are happening around you in these quite marginal communities.

Yeah, yeah, how I'm curious.

You know the sort of experience that you've had, and did you set out to have an experience?

You knew that you were going to be traveling to Kenya to study baboons, right, you knew that you were going to be looking at this animal and trying to draw inferences, trying to understand more about behavior by observing these animals.

Did you know early on how much your relationship with the local people, how much your relationship with the land, was going to influence your perspective.

I had no idea, and I think that I say, I'm not a victim of circumstances.

I'm a beneficiary of circumstances because I just zigzagged from one thing to the other.

At the Wenegrand Symposium International Symposium, most of the people who were there and there were only twelve of us, had zigzagged and only one person had thought about having a primate study since the time they were little.

I sort of got carried along because after so many years, I'd formed a huge attachment to the baboons, and it took me a while to realize that I could be attached to them and still do good science.

And because I'm attached to the baboons, it's all about people.

It's always a human problem, and the animals suffer, and that's why I was able to try different techniques.

And I think there was an epiphany for me before translocation, when I was walking from little farm to little farm.

They're called shambas here that the baboons had just visited and had decimated because when they go in, they're not like elephants who do huge damage in one night, but they they have great hands, and they can take plants apart and decide not to eat any of the plant, but they've destroyed it anyway.

And up until that point, I really hated the farmers because they were against the baboons, and I saw them as the enemy.

But an experience I had with one farmer and his wife and he made me tea and offered me the last maize cob that they had from their shamba, from their little farm, and I realized then that people also have rights.

And as I've gotten older and more mature in my thinking, I can't say who has the right to what, But what I do think is that people have expanded so much and have increased their population for all sorts of reasons, and animals have been the ones who suffered.

And so my husband, who developed community based conservation here in the early seventies, he talked about and now talks about coexistence.

And I think that that was the time that I changed my mind about who had the right.

Did the farmers have the right or did the baboons have the right.

And when you think about the farmers, you then have to think about the Massa who came in much later, the Ogiek who were there, the hunter gatherers, and the yaku up by where the baboons are now, and it just is like an endless regression.

Who really has the right?

I don't have the answer to that, but I saw that it was important to be able to compromise.

And I mean, I now think that wealthy people or wealthy countries have to create options for people who are marginalized and who I mean if you put any of us in a situation where it's a decision between saving a tree or putting food on the table for your family for the next day, I don't know anybody who's going to choose the saving the tree over the family, right, And so I really think it's up to wealthy nations and wealthy individuals to create options so that these marginal people can make a choice and have a better option or a better choice because of the options.

Yeah, it's so interesting to think about this, not just the richness of your career, but the insights that have been gleaned throughout your experience.

And I'm curious in writing this book, is this remind me this is your second book?

Yes, it's yeah, Okay.

I didn't think that I had a book in me, a trade book, but my husband insisted, and I wrote it over twelve years and I'm very happy with it.

But the twelve years of writing it, the first one was nineteen eighty seven.

It was called almost Human and this one sort of recant my entire career.

Yeah, so I'm sorry I interrupted.

I went no, not at all.

I mean, first of all, that makes me feel much better about the fact that I am not as I don't know.

I also am trying to write and it is going very slowly.

Ye, but it's you know, how does one fit their entire career into three hundred pages?

That's that's a question I can't answer.

I don't know how easily you can answer.

I mean, you did it, but how do you describe how one does it?

I'm curious.

You know, how did you choose what to include and what to leave out?

You know, how much of that conversation that we've been having about the people, about the landscape, about your relationship to these animals did you include?

And how did you go about even I would say, like choosing the structure and the format of the book.

So I tried many different ways to organize the book, because the kind of social complexity and socio ecological complexity that I now see in Baboons would just turn off any reader.

Originally, I decided that this was all about going to be all about baboons and nothing about me.

And then I was convinced by people that nobody wants to read about baboons.

I mean, I thought everyone loved baboons.

Now baboons have a terrible reputation, so nobody's going to read book about baboons.

But they said you needed some hooks, and in the end, I decided that I would simply do it chronologically, so that as I discover a level of complexity that wasn't talked about before, then I would talk about it then, and then I'd go to the next step.

And the nice thing was that I did write most of the book over these twelve years using the baboons as landmarks.

I mean, there were landmarks in my uncovering of the social skill and social complexity that baboons have.

And then I ended up having to include more of me, which didn't feel good, but I did it.

And during those twelve years there were some questions that I didn't have answers to.

But by the time I was done writing the book, I had answers to those questions because I was able to add twelve years of experience to the book.

So I don't know, I really didn't think I had another book in me and it took me a long time and it's gone through many edits, Yeah, from only baboons to Baboons and me.

And I think I did include my relationship with people and with the landscape, and it's not the focus of the book, but it is included.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean what a tall order trying to figure out exactly how to distill these things down, but also with the right amount of time and like you said, you know, unanswered questions, being able to dig a little bit deeper into some of those stories, I could see.

I could see it sort of coming together somewhat naturally.

Oh.

Yes, it's a it's a ton of work, and that's not lost on me.

You know.

I'm curious here before we wrap up, because we're kind of coming to, uh, to the end of the conversation, are there any Are there any of those behaviors or any of those sort of insights or takeaways that you would like to highlight.

I don't I don't love doing an interview with folks the way that they're often done, where it's like, oh, here's the press release, and here they're like kind of recommended questions, and you know, I don't want you to have to tell the same stories a thousand times when you're doing press around your book.

So instead, I guess I'll ask you, is there anything that you're you know, often not asked about, or is there anything that you maybe putting yourself in the shoes of kind of your standard listener to the podcast, who maybe has never even traveled to the African continent, who maybe has never even witnessed or observed a baboon except on film or in a zoo, you know, is there some something that you think is really important for us to know.

Yeah, well, first of all, I would like to dispel the bad reputation that baboons have right now, because social media concentrates on the conflict between baboons and people in South Africa.

And these creatures are they were they in Cape Town.

They've been ruined by people not of their own making.

They I don't know how I can summarize this, but basically, they naturally use higher quality food, and human food is that it's got more nutrition, bigger packages, lots of vitamins and minerals.

And at the time I was doing a crop rating study, I actually tried to measure how much time it would take to get as much natural food as you would have in one maze cob, and that was more than two hours.

So baboons have plenty of time to sit around and wait for the right moment.

So that's one thing that it's usually a problem with people and people's behavior, even though it's cultural, and it's the animals who end up suffering.

The second thing I'd like to say is that we tend to look at other wild animals for our own worse behavior, and looking at baboons, I joke and I say that I'd rather have a baboon as president than whoever the current president is, because baboons can't lie, cheat, or exploit each other, and they have without language symbols, material culture, and cooperation, they have the equivalent of a social contract in which they follow the golden rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, because they need each other in order to survive.

And that's something that we've not absorbed.

So I'd like to make sure that people understand that our worst behaviors, humans' worst behaviors are because of our unique skills, not because of what we share with others.

And then the final thing would be that I think it's unreasonable to expect that the earliest humans were not as smart and sophisticated as the living baboons are, which would rewrite how we start out.

We tend to have what's called human exceptionalism, thinking that humans invented everything, And of course we didn't invent everything.

But even though you find some original behaviors in other species, doesn't mean that it hasn't been changed for humans.

And I just don't believe that the earliest humans were not as smart as and sophisticated as baboons are.

So those are my three things.

I love it, And so I'm curious, what's you know, what you're up to now?

What's next for you?

You're there in Kenya right now?

Do you plan to to keep on going, to just maintain this schedule for as long as you possibly can.

I have fused back, and that makes it really difficult for me to follow the baboons because what were game trails before have now over the years, become huge erosion gullies and most of this top soil has washed away.

So if the baboons go down one of these big gullies, I will never be able to I can go find a way to get down and to get up, but by the time I get up, there far far away and I can't catch up with them.

So I think that my field time, even though I do go back once a year, I have lots of data in Nairobi and I'm working on that, but I'm handing over to younger scientists the field site and so I go, I look and I do the community kind of things that I developed over the years with the community, which is especially the women's group Twila Tenabo.

But I think that it's time for me to not hand over the project, but hand over the field side of the project to young people who can keep up with the babboons.

And so you have your own students through the university, or how do you work with these younger scientists.

I initially tried to find one person who would take it over, and it was actually an idea that a French postdoctoral student who came out to do some work provided for me, which was you're never going to find the one person who's interested and has funding.

Is true, lots of interest but no funding.

So why not try and put together a group of younger scientists.

And that's what I've done.

One was one of my students, another one is in the Cognitive Science department at UCSD right now, and the third one is one of the women who took my place when I was spending all this time in the field with my baboon colleagues.

And what's nice is that they all know how to write the kind of grants that get funded not in this environment but anyway in the past.

But they really care about understanding baboons, which and they some of them care about the community as well, which is really important to me.

Yeah.

Yeah, Oh well, gosh, what a fascinating and rich and fulfilling career you've had, and you continue to have also two books which you never expected to be able to share these insights with us.

The newest book is called Echoes of Our Origins, Baboons, Humans and Nature, by doctor Shirley C.

Strom.

Shirley, thank you so much for being here with us today.

You're welcome, and thank you for having.

Me absolutely and everybody listening.

Thank you for coming back week after week.

I'm really looking forward to the next time we all get together to talk.

Nerdy