Isabel Behncke

Scientist, MPhil Cambridge, PhD Oxford. Ethology of human apes & other social animals. I explore & integrate, bonobos laugh. Gruter & TED Fellow. Chile’s Presidential advisor on strategy for science, innovation, technology and knowledge. Love nature & culture, wildness & arts. Based in NYC & Chile. Instagram: isabel_behncke —— Long bio: What makes us human? What does it really mean to be a social animal? And how can these Q’s help humans live win-win with the rest of nature? Knowing our past help us situate our present - & co-create our future. Looking at other animals help us understand ourselves - & our place in the web of life. I am an explorer ethologist by training and essence. I like going to the field, & attempting to look at life at the eye - with my own eyes. To be a story-watcher, to let the complexity of life unfold. I ask questions, travel, observe, think, integrate, & then tell people what I found. I go there, and back. Voy, y vuelvo. I am from Chile, where I learnt to love mountains, exploration & wild things. I was educated in the UK (Oxford, Cambridge & University College London) in behaviour, evolution & ecology. In deep time, complexity, living systems. And a hearty side of British influences, from the Lunar Society to Monty Python & Eddie Izzard. I started working in rainforest conservation in Northern Patagonia. Frustration with our failure to look after nature made me want to understand human nature better - & go back to origins. I then trained as a field primatologist working on the evolutionary roots of social behavior in humans & other animals. Field research led me to walk 3,000+ km in the steamy jungles of Congo observing the social behavior of wild bonobo apes - our closest living relatives. For my PhD I did the first comprehensive study of adult play of bonobos in the wild. The research site was Japanese-directed Wamba, DRC, longest running bonobo site in the world. Chronic bloodshed in Congo meant that at the time I was the first western person to do research there in more than 20 years. Paradox happens to me a lot. Like going into the Heart of Darkness to study play. Or studying matriarchal & most peaceful of great apes -they don't tend to die at the hands of their conspecifics- in a country torn by sexual violence & war. Soon after Congo went to Burning Man & realised it was also adult play of apes in the wild. Instead of jungle, it was desert. Instead of knuckle-walking hairy apes, there were biped naked apes. I continue going every year; collective phenomena make great primatology field-sites. I cannot undo seeing us as social animals. We are embedded in societies & in nature. In my research I saw that play behaviour is like our 'Adaptive Joker' - an ancient wildcard which changes value according to context. It might hold the key to our capacity to adapt to a changing world. The biology of fun is serious business. I apply an evolutionary & complex systems lens to try derive insights onto human behaviour & the modern challenges we face. I ask questions such as why we go to festivals, how can we design rituals for modern life, why trust requires risk-taking, & crucially why is it that the more digital we get, the more understanding of nature (& human nature) we need. Basically I use the Origin of Species to think about the Future of Species. I am currently working on my first book, which is science (human evolution, ethology & primatology) told through adventure travel (field diaries written while in Congo jungle) & sprinkled with classic rock references. Would love to hit notes in an ancient fireside non-fiction storytelling, but with the Rolling Stones, Latin poetic-realism & Darwin as part of the hearth. I enjoy public engagement in different forms (e.g. TED, WIRED, UN, G20, BBC, Nat Geo), concerning questions of how humans & other animals create, connect, play & adapt. Sometimes I curate & co-host 'intellectual safaris' (expeditions of intellectual & geographic exploration) academic conferences & ideas festivals. I like collaborating with thinkers, doers, artists, scientists, explorers. I lived 15 years in the UK (including 3 years of fieldwork in Congo). Now I'm based in NYC & Chile. Night owl, animal person, occasional flaneuse. No allergies. I love reality and the complexity of the world, and think we would be better off embracing it rather than trying to reduce it. I think context, interactions, & trade-offs. Exploration-then-integration is my favored methodology. I am an Associate Professor at the Research Centre for Social Complexity (CICS) in UDD, Santiago Chile, & Fellow of the Bay area based Gruter Institute for research on human behavior & institutions. I’m advising government in my home country. I’m Presidential advisor for Chile’s long term strategy in science, technology, innovation & knowledge. BSc Zoology (UCL), MSc Wildlife Conservation (UCL), MPhil Human Evolution (Cambridge), DPhil Evolutionary Anthropology (Oxford). Gruter & TED Fellow.