baboons, stress, and overcoming hierachy in primate societies

Dr Robert Sapolsky is a professor of Neurobiology and Primatology at Stanford University. He travels to Kenya every year to study the behavior of wild baboons.

This is a story on his amazing study of a unique incident that happened with one of his baboon troops taken from a National Geographic film called ‘Stress: The Portrait of a Killer‘. I love the social implications of this.

this first clip is an introduction to dr. sapolsky and his work. sorry that it ends with a cliff-hanger, but if you’re enthralled, the second part is linked, on youtube…

but the amazing part is here:

…the implications are staggering, especially because of the willingness of our “leaders” in government, finance and the various resource extraction industries to kill us – their fellow human beings – by the millions in order to advance their business interests. they/we have already destoyed the niger river delta region, the amazon basin and now the gulf of mexico, if not the entire north atlantic and caribean as well. how can we change this? in the bible, jesus said that the meek shall inherit the earth. well, every inheritence is granted through death. what needs to die in order for humans to live self-directed, much-less-stressful lives? i think this study spells out the answer quite clearly.

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