Nautilus

A Crowdsourced Expert Interview

In “Metaphors Are Us,” biologist and neurologist Robert Sapolsky made a good case for why symbolic thinking may be the key feature separating humans from our nearest animal relatives. But that essay didn’t end the discussion, which spilled onto social media and continued there. So Nautilus’ special media editor, Rose Eveleth, solicited questions from readers for Sapolsky via Twitter, and he was good enough to give us these answers:

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from Nautilus

Nautilus7 min read
The Feminist Botanist
Lydia Becker sat down at her desk in the British village of Altham, a view of fields unfurling outside of her window. Surrounded by her notes and papers, the 36-year-old carefully wrote a short letter to the most eminent and controversial scientist o
Nautilus13 min read
The Shark Whisperer
In the 1970s, when a young filmmaker named Steven Spielberg was researching a new movie based on a novel about sharks, he returned to his alma mater, California State University Long Beach. The lab at Cal State Long Beach was one of the first places
Nautilus9 min read
The Invasive Species
Several features of animal bodies have evolved and disappeared, then re-evolved over the history of the planet. Eyes, for example, both simple like people’s and compound like various arthropods’, have come and gone and come again. But species have no

Related Books & Audiobooks