Word: rww
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...RWW: As I approached the end of high school I wrote endless letters in the hope of finding a position in a national park in Africa. I ended up spending nine months living in western Zambia in a national park at the age of 17. It was about the size of Switzerland, and it had about 20 people living in it. It was a wonderful introduction to the bush, and since then I have been traveling to Africa almost every year. I went to Oxford University and studied zoology because it was a great way to be able to continue...
...RWW: The training that you get at a typical university like Oxford is directed at ensuring that conclusions are based on generalizations across many individuals, many samples, many populations. What Jane Goodall did was to stress the interest and the value in looking at individual differences. She introduced me to a community of 50 chimpanzees where, in order to understand the way that the society worked, one had to pay attention to each individual personality, each individual family, and each individual’s strategies for negotiating their complex social world...
...RWW: Oh, similarities between chimpanzees and undergraduates, you mean? Well, chimpanzees like to show off by making a lot of noise and roaring about, and occasionally undergraduates will do the same...
...RWW: When I study chimpanzees, I sometimes try to survive on chimpanzee foods for a whole day, and the short story is that you end up being very hungry. I slowly realized that there must be something very special about cooked foods compared to raw foods, and I was astonished to find that within the nutritional literature, there is very little said about the consequences of cooking for the amount of calories that we get in our food. It took me some time to assemble all of the relevant information to be able to show that this...
...RWW: I think the one I’m looking forward to most is that it’s been shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times science book prize for this year, so I’m invited to go attend the ceremony. But I’ve been able to speak about this in interesting places around the world, like Salamanca in Spain and Alexandria in Egypt. I think perhaps the Alexandria experience was greatest because that was a conference where the aim was to bring evolutionary thinking to a culture in which there is tremendous resistance...