Evgenia Timonova everything is like a biography of animals. Evgenia Timonova: “A registry office in the shape of a bowl looks like a collective amoeba

Evgenia Timonova

Everything is like animals

Elena Pastukhova

Why do we age and how can we prevent it? Do all organisms age the same way? Is there a gene for longevity and what animals will help us find it? How can advances in modern genetics delay aging? What genetic engineering experiments are being carried out by scientists in search of a cure for aging? Elena Pastukhova, Candidate of Biological Sciences, Associate Professor of the Department of Radiation Biology, Chelyabinsk State University, will tell about this.

Vladimir Chistyakov

What is the idea behind the telomeric theory of aging? Who and when formulated the basic concepts of this theory? Why do our cells stop dividing? Doctor of Biological Sciences, Chief Researcher of the Academy of Biology and Biotechnology named after. D. I. Ivanovsky SFU, Vladimir Chistyakov will tell you what explains and how the telomeric theory of aging is applied, what are the successes of its application in practice and how relevant it is today.

Evgenia Timonova

Everything is like animals

Biologists try to speak cautiously about homosexuality. On the one hand, the homosexual behavior of animals is a 1500 times proven fact. On the other hand, it is not clear what is behind this fact. What if this is not homosexuality, but homosociality, and we have already promised everyone here? With the third, whatever you say on this topic, there will definitely be hysteria and scandal. Do not believe me - read the comments to our most calm and impartial release.

Yuri Deigin

It's time to throw off the blinders of groupthink and recognize that aging is a program honed by group selection. And only when we know the enemy by sight, we will be able to defeat him. Otherwise, pretending that it does not exist, we will continue to look for another geroprotector that prolongs the life of mice by the same 20–30%, or starve in the hope of another 5–6 years of life.

Evgenia Timonova

Everything is like animals

The issue will be of more interest to Y-chromosome carriers. Zhenya talks about the evolution of penises - who was the happy owner of the first one and what they turned into among representatives of different classes (reptiles, birds, mammals).

Yuri Deigin

What is aging? Programmed murder. What about menopause? programmed castration. Two mechanisms of population control that genes have honed over billions of years. Why do genes treat us so cruelly? For the same reason they do everything else - to maximize the integral of their reproduction over time.

Evgenia Timonova

Photo: Serge Fenenko, Facebook

From what, in fact, "Everything is like animals" grew? From the idea that biology, the bestiary is a universal metaphor for all aspects of being human. That is, everything that you see in a person has some kind of rhyme in the animal world. And everything that we see in animals has some echo in what we consider to be purely human. And the search for these rhymes, consonances, reflections is fantastic.

When you realize that it’s a pity to spend your life on making money, everything suddenly starts to add up.. The boring work disappears, people appear who help to do what you, it turns out, have wanted all your life. Just at one moment you feel like a ball in a pinball, which is launched, and he went. That is, nothing here depends on your will, it just really develops somehow by itself. And suddenly you realize that the dream of doing my own program was in early childhood, when I watched "For the Animal Guys". As a child, I had an indecent baggage of biological knowledge, and I really wanted to share it. Then it all faded into the background and now suddenly surfaced. Take it and do it.

With ethology, the science of innate forms of behavior in animals and humans, not everything is so simple.. Its methods can be called scientific with some stretch. An ethological hypothesis about human behavior is very difficult to test for falsification. Before the creation of ethology, it was assumed that all animal behavior is dictated by conditioned and unconditioned reflexes. But Konrad Lorenz proved that animals are born with complex patterns in their heads. For example, chickens. If they are shown a cross-shaped figure, they fall and shrink into a ball, because the cross looks like a predator diving from above. And if a newborn, who is still weakly focused, is shown successively three circles, one larger than the other, then the baby closes his eyes, hides - this is also a reaction to the sharp approach of a predator. And there's a lot of this nonsense. And how much these ancient programs dictate our behavior is an interesting question.

Of course, there are questions of different levels of complexity. The first issue was about the prostitution of penguins - everything is transparent there and there is nothing to invent. And the next, second issue, about axolotls and ascidians, about eternal childhood and about the fact that adults are more primitive than children - this is my author's story. There is a thesis, an antithesis, and you do the synthesis yourself, which is the most thrilling thing.

Then about the "inner hamsters" - why we procrastinate.

Or, for example, why do people switch from the estrous cycle to the menstrual cycle? According to one theory, to stretch the period of dominance inversion. In primates, females are usually suppressed, males dominate. And the female becomes significant only at the moment when she has estrus, that is, estrus, because at that time she is transformed. There are rare exceptions, such as bonobos and vervets, whose females have learned to constantly show signs of ovulation. That is, they have developed hypersexuality in themselves. It seems to their males that she is constantly ready, that she is constantly a queen.

We generally moved from the estrous cycle, when estrus is once a year, to the menstrual cycle, when ovulation is once a month, but no one knows on which day. And that same female mystery that everyone is talking about is hidden ovulation, which makes you desirable and alluring at any moment, whether you can conceive or not.

But this is just one of many theories. Therefore, one can never say that this is so - and nothing else. Aplomb and categoricalness infuriates everyone, and me too. It is more important for me not to claim the ultimate truth, but to teach people how to build bridges between people and animals.

Ideas come from the head. While you are preparing one program, about five others appear. Now we already have ideas for twenty programs ahead, and they appear more.

For example, when we were preparing a program about vervets, reading about the levels of hierarchy in males, I remembered the comedy “Only Girls in Jazz”. Cuttlefish and some coral fish have such a mating strategy: ordinary males control the harem of females and fight for it with each other, but there are still small males who do not shine at all in a fair fight. So, they mimic females, they have such a female color, and crawl into the harem, where they fertilize everyone they want. Accordingly, they pass on their ability to the next generations. Again, a vagrant plot. And now we are making a video about it.

We spend five days on one series: four of them I'm digging through the internet, collecting a thousand times more information than I need for a six-minute scenario. On the last night I write the script, send it. The director makes corrections and wishes, when there are three stories, we meet in Moscow, Minsk or Kyiv and shoot. Then he takes it all to his place in Holland - or now in Portugal, and they mount it there. Now we are just thinking about what to do next with this, because it is clear that the topic is good and there is no end in sight. You look at the growing list of topics, and your hands itch. We are going to go shoot everything on location now, go to the savannah and shoot live. So far, without a professional operator, together. I don't know what we're filming there, we'll try. Now the program is in the state of "whoever catches me, I will be whose." We do not get into negotiations very actively, we do not spam, somehow we don’t want to act in the spirit of “buy my collection of poems”.

“Everything is like animals” - a popular science YouTube channel about the biological causes of human behavior - was founded on June 10, 2013. The creators of the channel are the author and presenter Evgenia Timonova(Russia) and director and producer Sergey Fenenko (, Holland). In November 2014 they were joined by artist Andrey Kuznetsov (Akuaku) and cameraman Oleg Kugaev. On July 15, 2016, the channel received a YouTube Silver Play Button for reaching the milestone of 100,000 subscribers. In October 2015, “Everything is like animals” was awarded the Russian Tech in Media award in the Best Popular Science Blog category. In January 2015, Evgenia Timonova was nominated for the “For Loyalty to Science” award of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation.

“Everything is like animals” tells about what Nikolai Nikolayevich Drozdov was delicately silent about. But someone has to! Watch selected programs below and all of our episodes on YouTube- channel “Everything is like animals”. Read about us, animal lovers and cannibals, on the site “Everything is like animals” and write to us at vsekakuzverei[dog]gmail.com.

01 Animal grin of patriotism

Our most viral video, though not from a good life. About how to manipulate people with the help of altruism, patriotism and other bestial instincts. Beware, this release contains a brain drain!

02 Sexual selection: what women want

Why on earth women's whims rule the world, how to get real power over the opposite sex, why a bone was removed from a human penis and what will happen if men learn to give birth - in the first issue of our Atlantic season.

03 Why are we naked?

Why is man a naked ape? Well, why a monkey, of course. Homo sapiens, genus Homo, family hominids, parvoorder narrow-nosed monkeys, detachment primates. But why naked?

04 Homo sapiens: causes and causes of homosexual behavior

Biologists try to speak cautiously about homosexuality. On the one hand, the homosexual behavior of animals is a 1500 times proven fact. On the other hand, it is not clear what is behind this fact. What if this is not homosexuality, but homosociality, and we have already promised everyone here? With the third, whatever you say on this topic, there will definitely be hysteria and scandal. Do not believe me - read the comments to our most calm and impartial issue.

05 How do you know if your girlfriend is cheating on you?

It is traditionally believed that males are naturally polygamous, while females, on the contrary, prefer one partner. However, the female sex violates this tradition right and left. Why, why and how you can guess it in our most ripping issue yet.

06 Where does love grow from?

Why men love female weakness, why lovers lisp so disgustingly, why dogs try to lick you exactly on the lips, and how pedomorphs will defeat pedophiles - in our most child-loving issue.

07 Let's be fair: altruists versus freeloaders

Why is reputation so fragile and revenge so sweet? What makes detective stories interesting and public showdowns exciting? Why do we need envy, where do we get speech from and what does all this have to do with reciprocal altruism - in our issue, subtly hinting that the sense of justice also appeared long before man.

09 Lion, asshole animal

If you have ever seen people, you have noticed that people remind someone all the time. And they are especially proud if they are told that they look like a lion. And it's a little weird. Because the lion… well, how should I put it… In general, the lion is an asshole animal.

M.B.: Good evening!

E.T.: Hey!

M.B.: Are we really like animals?

E.T.: No, of course not all.

M.B.: Is it hard to find common ground?

E.T.: It is difficult then to choose from all the insane amount found what you want to do first. These are not necessarily some points that point directly to the origin, but the number of connections is infinite, because the number of forms of these connections is infinite.

M.B.: Confucius said that everything in the world is interconnected. If my memory serves me right, he said that everything in the world is denoted by one word - "relationship".

Is it possible to list the brightest and most memorable points of contact between us and animals?

E.T.: Of course not. It's impossible. The main methodological problem is to choose one thing. It's like standing in front of a giant field of flowering poppies and asking you to choose the most beautiful one.

M.B.: Why poppies?

E.T.: We have just been invited to the Orenburg Reserve - to the place where the Przhevalsky horses are now being introduced practically for free keeping. We were already there in the fall, it was terribly cold. In this reserve, insanely hospitable people, they felt obliged all the time and invited to come in May, when poppies, irises, tulips would bloom in the steppe. I didn’t manage to go, unfortunately, only my operator went and poisoned me with photographs of the fields.

M.B.: Where are naturalists taught?

E.T.: Nowhere. This is some kind of innate accentuation. And what kind of education you will turn it into is another question.

M.B.: That is, you can go into journalism, for example, like Zatevakhin?

E.T.: No, Zatevakhin is quite a biologist by training. There is some methodological difference between biologists and naturalists: naturalists are born, biologists are made. I didn't manage to get a biology degree because in my third year the naturalist screamed in me - at the moment when we had to cut the frogs. I couldn't do anything with myself.

As a child, you go out into the clearing, and there are bugs, butterflies, grass grows, and you don’t need any sandbox. And all this magical world that you see fascinates you endlessly. At the age of 9, I already knew that I would study at the Faculty of Biology.

My parents constantly "fed" me with books, they are my engineers. They were very pleased that it was so interesting to me, but they didn’t really understand what exactly, so they dragged everything about animals. And among other things, they brought a textbook for universities - a workshop on laboratory, on the dissection of vertebrates. There were just frogs and mice. I have only read one detailed manual on how to open a frog and test for spinal reflexes.

I was practically hysterical, because I extrapolated this monstrous description to the fact that every year at every university a huge number of students cut up a huge number of frogs just to make sure that when they cut off her skull and let the acid go, her paw contract because it is controlled by the spinal nerves and not by the brain. Just for this! This senseless cruelty of the world just killed me. This book then disappeared somewhere, and I completely forgot about it. Then I went to the Faculty of Biology, and suddenly, in the third year, this childhood nightmare surfaced in me, and I realized that I couldn’t. Now I would like to come up with something...

M.B.: Would you take matters into your own hands?

E.T.: No, I am generally the enemy of victory over myself. It seems to me that any victory over oneself is a road to hell. You can always agree with the system, bend it for yourself. To say, for example, that I will not cut frogs, here, take a bribe. It turns out that I did not kill the frog, I killed myself. You cannot get over it. So I left the biological faculty and went to the philological faculty, to psychology. Everything came in handy in the end. This is to the question of what naturalists grow out of.

M.B.: And what are the main tasks of a naturalist?

E.T.: Good question. I have no idea. As far as I can see my naturalist friends, they are all busy with the same thing: they are trying to express their endless admiration for the living world.

M.B.: But here, it turns out, not only admiration, but also popularization?

E.T.: This is what it is.

M.B.: No, you can admire separately from popularization.

E.T.: But you can't directly broadcast admiration.

E.T.: Yes. And this needs to be explained. It's like Dostoevsky: "understand, forgive and love." In order for a person to love nature, it is necessary that he understand it.

M.B.: I saw one of your programs here, you were there in the company of a Madagascar cockroach named Urgant.

My dad was a serpentine. Stretching butterflies on wet sand, huge aquariums with Madagascar cockroaches - food for tarantulas, tarantulas - all this was in wet withered foliage. I almost fainted from all this. I don't like butterflies, dragonflies and insects in general. And you are standing in the program and very nicely contacting this cockroach. Lack of disgust for this - natural? Since childhood, we have a stereotype that cockroaches are a minus.

E.T.: So you yourself answered your own question - stereotypes.

M.B.: So your engineering parents loved cockroaches?

E.T.: Once again: you are born a naturalist. If, for example, I had some kind of twin brother, not a naturalist, but just looking at me, he would have a stereotype that cockroaches are not disgusting.

M.B.: Do you have any living creatures in your life that you feel squeamish about and don't like?

E.T.: I really don't like ticks and I'm afraid of them.

M.B.: That's where you got it.

E.T.: This is my childhood trauma. As a person from Novosibirsk, I just feel panic. I have been in Moscow for 10 years, at first I simply could not force myself to go to the forest in the spring because of this. But it cannot be said that this is some kind of innate horror. No, not innate, you just live a couple of decades in Siberia, and that's it.

M.B.: The most difficult conditions for filming? High, low, deep, cold, hot?

E.T.: This is the swamp of Belovezhskaya Pushcha, where we went in the morning to look for beavers. The fact that ticks is fine, but how many mosquitoes are there! I even roughly understand why we did not find beavers. The beaver is a smart animal, it's only some idiots from Moscow who can come there.

M.B.: Don't beavers get bitten by mosquitoes?

E.T.: Mosquitoes bite everyone, you have to live somehow.

M.B.: But there are also repellents.

E.T.: Very funny. You have probably seen videos of deodorants when a man splashes himself and women run after him. Here we were not just sprayed with repellents, we were constantly spraying, this was enough for about five minutes. Then this cloud flew off ten centimeters from you and hung, rattling. Five minutes passed and they were back. And since we were with a camera, it was interesting to capture some of the magical changes in a cute face. I once commented: "Here are beaver dams, here is a former hut, here they sharpened a little donkey," - and each next plan was filmed by a slightly different person. In the end, I was a completely declassed element, sitting in a swamp.

M.B.: Antihistamines should have been taken immediately.

E.T.: They were not at the cordon where we lived, but there was a tincture of fun.

M.B.: What is it made of?

E.T.: From fungus fungus. This is awesome stuff. This mushroom in Latin is called Phallus impudicus - "indecent phallus". This is such a "witch's egg", a rare spherical mushroom. It spends most of the phase of the fruiting body in the form of an egg ...

M.B.: He looks indecent!

E.T.: Yes, and when this egg breaks through, the fungus grows up to 35 centimeters in three hours. He really shoots. And he smells at the same time, his spores are carried by flies.

M.B.: This is a joke of nature. This mushroom is a copy of the male penis.

E.T.: But only in appearance, not in smell. How we found it: we drove into the forest on our "loaf", and the head of the scientific part of Belovezhskaya Pushcha pulled his nose and said: "It smells of Merry." I've read a lot about this mushroom, but I've never seen it. That goo that's coated on top of him stinks absolutely unbelievably. And the mushroom was not visible, because it was all covered with flies, which first ate it, and then spread its spores. The smell is very strange, very pungent, but I can't call it unpleasant. It's like the smell of durian. Everyone thinks he's disgusting, and I even like him somewhere.

M.B.: Yes, they either love it or hate it.

E.T.: By the way, there is probably some correlation between rejection or, conversely, favor for strange smells and disgust in general. Because I like fun, I like durian. I've never sniffed a skunk.

M.B.: It's great to be unusual.

E.T.: I've never been different, so I don't take it as anything out of the ordinary.

M.B.: Was it high, low, cold, deep?

E.T.: Yes. It's cold and deep. We filmed Proteus in the caves of Croatia. This is an absolutely amazing amphibian - a neotenic larva of a cave salamander. Do you know axolotls? These are such aquarium larvae with smiling faces and bushy external gills - very cute creatures. So, if the axolotl is such a cheerful fool, then the proteus is a Taoist animal, a blind translucent creature.

M.B.: Half worm, half reptile.

E.T.: It looks like a very elongated fungus mushroom.

M.B.: By the way, yes. And the axolotl is a very cute creature.

E.T.: So these proteas live in the only place on Earth - in karst caves in the Dalmatian Alps. And we went there to pick them up. This was my first cave diving and this requires a separate certification. Croats are very vigilant, because there are really very difficult conditions. I have a good certificate, I convinced them all that I can dive. I read about this water, it was written that +15 is normal. And it turned out to be +6, and we had to go down 60 meters, because there are definitely proteus. It's very deep. Before that, I went the deepest at 40 meters. And we were very lucky that Proteus was at 20 meters.

M.B.: And he sits on the walls of the cave?

E.T.: Yes, this is something incredible: there is nothing there, you go into this stone gut, and there is just some kind of space.

M.B.: And why proteus nature? Who feeds on them? What do they eat?

E.T.: In nature, there is no question "why". There is just a cave, no one lives in it. There is a little food in it, once a week some cave shrimp swims there, and it is quite possible to eat it. If you have a very slow metabolism, you will have enough for a month. Proteus may not eat for 10 years. If the shrimps do not swim at all, he will sit for 10 years, and not in suspended animation, in a normal state.

M.B.: Some rats don't drink at all, I forgot what they are called.

E.T.: Naked digger?

M.B.: No, I mean real rats. Well, not the point. So what?

E.T.: We found this Proteus, he was sitting in the middle of nowhere. It is absolutely transcendent, simply indescribable. I knew what it was, in detail, but nevertheless, just some kind of sacred awe covers him. Daos is complete.

M.B.: Did you even feed him?

E.T.: There was a sign "Do not feed Proteus". I froze then in a way that I never froze. We sat there for only half an hour, and then I could not get warm for two hours, although it was +35 outside.

M.B.: And about the roast, can you?

E.T.: We filmed in Africa. It was great there. This is generally happiness - to shoot animals in Africa. It is like a self-assembled tablecloth, and animals are beautifully laid out on it.

M.B.: Did any of the animals offend you during filming?

E.T.: No one offended, but they bit, of course. In general, there were a lot of stories with close contact, but they were all pleasant.

M.B.: And who bit? Hit with a paw by accident?

E.T.: A 300-kilogram dolphin somehow fell on me.

M.B.: Thank God it's on the side.

E.T.: From above it would be, of course, unpleasant. Or periodically someone jumps on, this is a common thing.

M.B.: And who do you trust to edit and review your programs? You yourself prepare, write the script, compose, think over the concept. Do you understand in all this why you need an editor, or someone who writes reviews?

E.T.: Because the facts need to be verified by a specialist in this particular field.

M.B.: That is, when you were filming about Proteus, did you give the material to a Proteus specialist?

E.T.: Yes.

M.B.: Where do you take them?

E.T.: I have a good friend Sasha Gatilov, the owner of the Moscow Zoo's paddling pool, he is responsible for all the amphibians. There are also familiar Croatian biologists who specialize in proteas.

M.B.: In general, there are no problems in finding a specialist in a particular animal? Or have you ever experienced this?

E.T.: Sometimes it happens that there is simply not enough time. Therefore, one has to somehow urgently look for, for example, an ornithologist, a migration specialist in a panic mode. But when you know three scientists, you know a huge number of scientists.

M.B.: I understand what it's about. The most contacting ones are, probably, cynologists? Are there areas of zoology where scientists are more closed or open about what kind of animals they work on?

E.T.: No, there is no such correlation. These are all completely individual things.

M.B.: I noticed that you very often appeal to beavers.

E.T.: Yes? I didn't pay attention.

M.B.: Is this the whole list of favorites, or is there someone else?

E.T.: Even orangutans, langurs are thin-bodied monkeys, which are considered sacred in India, the reincarnation of the monkey-like deity Hanuman. And they look absolutely spiritual.

M.B.: Friends, if you have seen even one picture from India, langurs are such a group of monkeys sitting around temples.

E.T.: As a rule, just no. Much more Indian macaques sit around the temples, these are rather unpleasant animals, to be honest.

M.B.: So not all monkeys are cuddly?

E.T.: Not everyone.

M.B.: And a couple more?

E.T.: Elephants.

M.B.: Why?

E.T.: It's impossible to explain. They are incredible.

M.B.: Cool - they can't jump, it's so funny. There are things that do not fit in my head: the infinity of the Universe, for example, a creature that cannot jump, and so on. I am terribly happy when I meet some such facts.

E.T.: Regarding elephants, I still have a personal motive - I worked for a week on the Thai island of Lanta as an elephant breeder's assistant, and I was trusted to wash the elephant every morning. It was the happiest week that year for sure.

M.B.: Is it true that one should not think that elephants are a priori good animals?

E.T.: They are generally bad animals. It all depends on the situation. No, they are actually kind. There are some situations in which they show aggression towards each other, but this is such "official" aggression, because it is necessary. If a person behaves towards them correctly, without violating social structures, they are friendly. We somehow made a fool of ourselves - we drove in our jeep, "cutting" the herd.

M.B.: Are you immortal, or what?

E.T.: We did not notice that there was still the second part of the herd, they walked slowly. And we drove a jeep between these two halves. Well, we drove and drove, they didn’t even try to trample us, but then they all went out onto the road and trumpeted after us. We practically heard everything they told us.

M.B.: It's like showing the middle finger.

E.T.: Yes. By the way, about the kindness of elephants. The chief elephant breeder of Moscow spoke about the fact that on average 12 elephant keepers per year die in the world.

M.B.: Keeper - is it from to keep, "keep"?

E.T.: Yes.

M.B.: When I rode an elephant, I was uncomfortable. It was the first time in Thailand. I hated the way he drove him.

E.T.: It's horrible.

M.B.: This hook, which is used to drive an elephant, looks vandal.

E.T.: Elephants have a great sense of everything, and just the methods of training elephants on elephant farms are completely based on the suppression of the elephant's personality. He must be constantly afraid.

M.B.: But when we swam across some body of water in Cambodia, everything was amicable there.

E.T.: It's like with dolphins.

M.B.: Just about them my next question. I treat them like sacred animals after I swam with them, hugged them. It changes the outlook. In my life I have done several programs about dolphins, and everything is not enough for me. Thanks to your program, I first learned that the dolphin "has a strict taboo on penetrating the overhead spheres." So they don't swim in caves?

E.T.: Yes.

M.B.: Why?

E.T.: Because he needs constant access to the surface. Dolphins that were too curious to swim somewhere where they could not immediately get up for a breath, as a rule, died.

M.B.: And the selection has done its job, won't they swim into the cave?

E.T.: Yes. But because they are indeed very intelligent, they are able to soften their rigid behavioral constructs. For example, a dolphin that has lived in captivity for a long time knows that everything is possible.

M.B.: It's like cats.

E.T.: Yes Yes.

M.B.: Another of your quotes: "Modesty is the road to the unknown."

E.T.: It's not mine, unfortunately. I just heard it too.

M.B.: The humblest animal, in your opinion?

E.T.: I can name the most impudent - synanthropic macaques.

M.B.: Indian?

E.T.: In general, any macaques that live with a person. These, in my opinion, are the only mammals that I fear. They are not gentlemen.

M.B.: What about humble animals?

E.T.: I'm trying to figure it out. This is already some degree of anthropomorphization of animals beyond my control.

M.B.: Let's ask the opinion of our listeners on this matter. What abilities of animals can we envy?

E.T.: You can't envy anyone at all.

M.B.: Okay, admire.

E.T.: Admire everyone.

M.B.: What in us, then, should animals envy?

E.T.: Probably the pace and direction of evolution. We control our own evolution. We have two directions of evolution, animals have one. They do not have such a powerful species culture. We are undergoing biological and cultural evolution, and cultural for us is already a more significant factor.

M.B.: Which animal recognizes itself in the mirror?

E.T.: Many who.

M.B.:"The humblest animal is the sloth," listeners write. What do you think?

E.T.: Those are completely different categories. Sloth just doesn't care.

M.B.: The most pleasant and most unpleasant to the touch and smell of animals?

E.T.: The most pleasant to the touch, probably, dolphins. The Dolphin Stupid you fall into is a wonderful state.

M.B.: I call it enthusiastic idiocy. Even though the world is collapsing outside - you don't care, you're with the dolphins.

E.T.: We were just aunty with our dolphin artist, and Vitya Lyagushkin, who was a videographer at our second release, walks past us and coldly throws: “Ah, dolphin stupid,” and went on.

M.B.: For some reason, I call them leather ones, and putting my own meaning into it. And the most unpleasant animal to touch or smell?

E.T.: On the smell - already, which is afraid of you. If he is properly frightened, he releases a fetid liquid. It's quite an exotic experience these days. They stink, of course, unbearably.

M.B.: They are not the most pleasant to the touch.

E.T.: Feels normal. By the way, we once discussed with familiar naturalists why cockroaches are disgusting, but the same beetles are not. And we agreed that it was probably a matter of translucency. They are also slightly transparent. And crickets are the same. And this is where some anxiety comes in. When insects are clearly defined, this does not happen.

M.B.: I'm afraid to disappoint you. It seems to me that this is grief from your mind. For example, I have the same reaction to beetles as to cockroaches.

E.T.: This is clear. We did not talk about insectophobia then. But where do we get it from? And so they considered that some non-obviousness due to translucency is disturbing.

M.B.:"Koala is the humblest animal," writes a listener.

E.T.: The koala is simply the dumbest of mammals. I can't do anything about the fact that the koala's brain was practically reduced. She has a large skull, and inside a small brain nut. With their diet, they have no competitors, no one hunts them, so they do not need brains at all.

M.B.: What animals do people love the most and is it mutual love?

E.T.: Dogs, of course.

M.B.: And if we consider wildlife?

E.T.: The only ones who are interested in us as a species are dolphins.

M.B.: The entire Internet is replete with the fact that in addition to people, dolphins also have sex for pleasure. It's true?

E.T.: Also in India they are recognized as individuals, they have names and something else. There are 5 facts about dolphins that make our specialists shake. As a rule, all that is known about dolphins is everyday mythology. With names it's not so simple, they have a call sign whistle. That is, they do not call it a name, but somehow self-identify.

M.B.: And what about sex?

E.T.: The fact is that we do not have reliable methods for determining the level of pleasure.

M.B.: How did we find out about dolphins then?

E.T.: They have it written on their faces.

M.B.: The lion is also written.

E.T.: By a number of indirect signs, one can determine when animals are not having functional sex, but simply for fun. This is an absolutely ingenious invention - to screw pleasure into the process of reproduction. As soon as an animal begins to experience pleasure in what leads to reproduction, its reproductive success immediately increases. Because it is much more pleasant to have sex when you like it than when you don't care or don't like it. So, of course, it immediately took hold.

M.B.: Do animals love like people?

E.T.: They have attachments that cannot be explained by anything other than emotions. The animal may even be of a different species, which we often observe in captivity.

M.B.: And in the wild?

E.T.: In the wild, this is more difficult to fix.

M.B.: Is the maternal instinct the same as in humans?

E.T.: The fact is that it is almost impossible to control instinct. There is a lot of terminological confusion here. We and animals have parental behavior. Some part of it is made up of instincts - rigid, rigid constructions. That is, something happened to you in the outside world, and you respond to it in a completely fixed, automatic way. And the only legitimate instinct left in people is to raise their eyebrows at the unexpected appearance of a pleasant person you know, whom you did not expect to meet.

M.B.: And opening the mouth when we paint eyelashes?

E.T.: No, this is some kind of motor stereotype.

M.B.: Do animals have a midlife crisis?

E.T.: Hard to say. There is such a direction, which is called something like biomarketing, when, based on the patterns of development of living systems, these patterns are transferred to some business structures. And sometimes they come to quite interesting conclusions. I think there was a case with Ford where things went awry and a biomarketer came to them and said they were now in what is now the equivalent of 80 years in the life of giant tortoises. Her period of turbulent turtle life is over, and ahead is a long, endless old age. Her body is rebuilt from intensive to less intensive metabolism. Therefore, you need to be a little patient.

M.B.: Program time ends. Short question: if a lion and a polar bear start fighting, who will win?

E.T.: Friendship.

M.B.: Thank you. Our guest was Evgenia Timonova, the author and host of the program "Everything is like animals."

E.T.: Thank you!

Today we will talk about what the program “Everything is like with animals” and its leading biologist Evgenia Timonova teaches.

To begin with, we note that these videos are made at a high technical level, quite informative and attractive. The only remark to the presenter is that she speaks very quickly and quietly, and it is difficult for the viewer to catch the whole meaning of what was said. Perhaps this was done on purpose so that the process of throwing false information - mines in the information field, was successful. When you start to take shorthand and calmly analyze her speech, you can see those pitfalls that are hidden behind a beautiful outer shell.

The main idea of ​​the videos is to tell about “who people are like” – to draw parallels between the behavior of people and animals. However, the authors do not just cite factology from the animal world (which is very interesting in itself), but persistently from series to series (although in some they contradict themselves) they try to justify the most perverted behavior of people by the fact that supposedly our ancestors did this, which means we it is possible and convince us that there is no fundamental difference between man and animals, and, as a result, all attempts to build a just society are groundless and senseless, and will not lead to anything good, because we all supposedly have a struggle for a place under the sun, t .e. intraspecific and interspecific competition.

However, you and I must understand that this is far from being the case, and in confirmation a lot of wisdom from the past has come down to us (Socrates, Diogenes, Pushkin, Tsiolkovsky, Tolstoy, Efremov). All these people, even at that difficult time, understood that society could and should be organized differently and, without losing heart, passed this vision on to us with their written heritage. In modern times, thanks to the Law of Time project, more and more people are beginning to come to the same conclusions and choose for themselves a conscious path to transform society through a change in morality (fortunately, in our time, all the knowledge necessary for this is on the Internet).

Let's look at one of the series, which is called "Animal Grin of Patriotism."

In this video, the presenter talks about the manifestations of altruism in the animal world, using the example of bees, ants, wasps, naked mole rats, in which it is related, because. they are born from the same mother. This animal altruism manifests itself in those cases when they have neighbors and inter-group competition begins, which is a rallying factor for the original group.

“The best cement for a team is an external threat. And this rule works for absolutely all social animals, and of course it worked for our ancestors, because someone, but our ancestors suffered. Because the antagonism and aggressiveness between the groups of ancient people was so high that their whole life, by the way, was short, it passed in constant conflicts with neighbors ... Thus, we passed a very strict control on the ability to sacrifice ourselves ... Tribes survived in all this bloodbath who had genes of selflessness and the ability to give their lives for the good of their tribe ... But having turned into modern people, we have overtaken ourselves in our development and our current laws and moral standards are much more humane than our instinctive behavior, which simply does not have time to change so quickly and therefore largely preserved the animal grin of the Paleolithic. And many valuable adaptations that helped us survive then are now just useless atavisms, or even worse. This is what happened with the combination of war and altruism, which no longer helps us survive in tribal wars for lack of such, but has turned into a very convenient tool for manipulating people, especially if there are a lot of these people at once.

“Motherland is just a territory, it cannot be a mother”, “Always call it protection, even if you are going to attack”, “Patriotism is on one pole, xenophobia on the other. They don’t exist without each other”, “Altruism is created to protect relatives” “If some people who are not your relatives start to become brothers to you, and you yourself begin to be called the son of abstract concepts and compare your neighbors with something that causes disgust, keep in mind, you are expected to act altruistically. But since all this is false data, neither you nor your real loved ones will benefit from such actions ... "

In the description of the video, the authors provide a link to Leo Tolstoy's article "Patriotism or Peace?" (which, by the way, we recommend everyone to read). In this article, he rather criticizes nationalism and Nazism - the desire to exalt his fatherland over other countries and peoples at their expense (by enslaving them and increasing his territory).

“If an American desires the greatness and prosperity of America preferred over all other peoples, and exactly the same desires an Englishman, and the same desires a Russian, and a Turk, and a Dutchman, and an Abyssinian, and a citizen of Venezuela and the Transvaal, and an Armenian, and a Pole, and a Czech , and they are all convinced that these desires not only should not be hidden and suppressed, but that one can be proud of these desires and should develop them in oneself and others, and if the greatness and prosperity of one country or people cannot be acquired otherwise than to the detriment of another or sometimes many other countries and peoples, then how could there not be a war.”

Undoubtedly, Lev Nikolaevich is right, such “patriotism” is evil, because it gives rise to competition among nations and, as a result, war and does not answer the question of how to peacefully coexist with all countries and peoples on planet Earth. But such “patriotism” is pseudo-patriotism, because a person who wants war for his country does not really want its prosperity. No matter how great an empire is, if it is not built on justice, sooner or later it will be erased by another stronger and greater empire. And so it will continue until humanity in its development comes to the realization of the senselessness of intraspecific and interspecific competition and does not realize its role as God's vicars on Earth. Such pseudo-patriots as Fedorov, Kurginyan, Zhirinovsky and others are currently pumping the negative matrix of pseudo-patriotism.

Sociobiologists do not consider such facts from the global evolutionary and historical process that refute their theories. For example, there is evidence that about 1-3 thousand years ago, on the territory of the East European Plain (ancient Russia), people very rarely died a violent death, which indicates that they learned to live peacefully among themselves, and they did not have the need to constantly fight for survival with their neighbors (for more on this, see the work of the VP of the USSR “Psychological Aspect of the History and Prospects of the Present Global Civilization”).

In a fairly general theory of management, there is a description of two principles of concentration of management: a block and a conglomerate, which differ in the principles on which new regions are combined into one whole. The conglomerate is aimed at destroying the management in the regions - competitors and including their fragments in its composition, suppressing the intelligence of the population. An interregional block differs from a conglomerate in that the vectors of goals of the regions that have joined it are included in the general vector of goals, in other words, the interests of the regions begin to be taken into account. Thus, management is carried out in a coordinated and conflict-free manner. The regional civilization of Russia-Russia-USSR (as well as Persia-Iran) has since ancient times developed according to the block principle:

In addition, making hasty conclusions, not wanting to understand history, governance and ideologies, the authors of the videos “Everything is like animals” equated in their analysis the aggressor countries (for example, Germany in the 40s) and the liberator countries (including the USSR) who fought for the right to life for their children (moreover, a decent life, and not the miserable right to be service personnel for the distillation of resources for those who staged this war). Revision of such concepts as communism, Trotskyism, capitalism, Bolshevism, etc. we carried out in the previous article.

In general, these pseudo-scientific theories, without making a difference between man (read animal) and Man, play into the hands of liberalism and fascism and contribute to the development of permissiveness in society, degradation and extinction under the guise of protecting the rights and freedoms of the individual.

An attempt to equate a person with animals is not new - this phenomenon was called social Darwinism and one of its ideological representatives - Lev Nikolaevich Gumilyov with his metrologically untenable theory of passionarity (which is assessed from the standpoint of BER in the work "Dead Water"). However, the authors of these ideas cannot teach us anything good, because do not provide an answer to a number of vital questions for society: how does the biological species "man (potentially) intelligent" differ from other biological species; what is the norm for the organization of his psyche; how to achieve such a culture of mental activity, so that humanity is in harmony with itself, the biosphere and other species?

Our view of the human psyche is briefly reflected in the video “Types of mental structure”:

If a person does not seek answers to these questions, then he generates all sorts of false hypotheses and theories convenient for him to justify his lack of will, justifying any deviation from the norm, allegedly by the animal nature of man. For example, in one of the episodes, the authors justify homosexuality by saying that in all cases it is supposedly the result of a congenital abnormality (which, by the way, also happens, but quite rarely) and supposedly it cannot be treated in any way, although our Russian psychotherapist Goland successfully treats this disorder. In another series, drug addiction and hedonism (life for pleasure) are justified.

And of course, without understanding sociology, the authors in one of the series equated communism with a totalitarian slave system, hinting that if you manage to build a “just” society, then you will have to pay a monstrous price for personal freedom and such a society will be nothing better than dystopia...

Conclusion: in general, the programs “Everything is like animals” have useful information, but you need to watch them, filtering the grains from the chaff. In our time, it is not enough to be a specialist in any one science, everyone needs to understand sociology and management so that we cannot be fooled by pseudoscientific false theories.