- Science
- The Loom
Animal Friendships: My cover story for Time magazine
I’ve got a story on the cover of the latest issue of Time. It’s about the evolutionary origins of friendship. For a number of scientists, friendship–in a deep sense of the word–is not limited to our own species. The fact that friendship may be a widespread biological phenomenon could help us better understand why it has such a positive effect on our own health.
If you’re interested in the scientific literature, the best way in–and the way I first started to get familiar with it–is this review in the latest issue of Annual Review of Psychology by Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, two of the world’s leading primatologists.
One thing that I delve into in the story is the question of just how widespread animal friendship really is. We don’t know, in large part because scientists haven’t done that many long-term field studies on wild animals. When scientists do watch dolphins or baboons for decades, they can see some bonds between unrelated individuals that last for long stretches. (Yet another value that comes from slow-cooked science.) On the other hand, what may look like friendship may just be anthropomorphic projection. In the article, I explain that a lot of cross-species “friendships” may be nothing like the kind seen in, say, chimpanzees. (As for the adorable dogs are on this week’s cover of Time, I note that the evidence about man’s best “friend” is quite thin.)
My story is behind a paywall, so you’ll need to subscribe or pick up a copy at a news stand. For a sense of the piece, here are the first few paragraphs–