Barbara is emerita professor of anthropology at William & Mary and a freelance science writer and public speaker. The author of seven books, including the new Animals’ Best Friends: Putting Compassion to Work for Animals in Captivity and in the Wild, Barbara focuses on animal emotion and cognition, the ethics of our relationships with animals, and the evolutionary history of language, culture, and religion. Her book How Animals Grieve has been translated into 7 languages and her TED talk on animal love and grief has now received over 3 million views.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?”
Sentientism is "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.
We discuss:
00:00 Welcome
01:39 Barbara’s Intro

Biological anthropology, animal advocacy & writing
28 years in academia then freelance science writing & speaking
Animal cognition & animal-human relationships
Watching Jane Goodall & Dian Fossey go from scholarship to advocacy… doing fieldwork with apes…
“Soon it became clear I wanted to work for animals as well as on animals”

05:05 What’s Real?

Growing up in New Jersey
Raised Presbyterian, sent to church & sunday school
“It wasn’t really part of my identity”, more background & community
“My parents didn’t question that there was a god, that god was… in charge of us.”
“I fell into that… & then came college”
First person in the family to go to college. “I arrived with my Bible – within 2 or 3 semesters that was kind of exploded”
Taking theology & pre-med classes
Agnostic then atheist
Choosing evolution & science
Mum at 88: “I wonder if what I thought all those years is really true… is there a god?”
“I was never particularly interested in reconciling religion & science”
Refusing money from The Templeton Foundation… “I don’t accept the claim that there’s no agenda”
Religious ethical problems: Homophoba, sexism, fears of hell, human dominion
Writing “Evolving God”. Finding the earliest roots of religious expression in non-human animal imagination/rule-following/empathy/perspective-taking
Jane Goodall’s claim that chimpanzees feel awe & wonder
The universal “religious” sense
Frans de Waal
“I think that I am relentlessly naturalistic”
Working with primates
“Concentrically my circles began to widen”

...and much more. Full show notes at Sentientism.info and on YouTube.
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Thanks Graham.