
Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test
How Behavior Evolves and Why It Matters
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Narrated by:
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Jaime Lamchick
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By:
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Marlene Zuk
About this listen
Longlisted for the 2023 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
A lively exploration of animal behavior in all its glorious complexity, whether in tiny wasps, lumbering elephants, or ourselves.
For centuries, people have been returning to the same tired nature-versus-nurture debate, trying to determine what we learn and what we inherit. In Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test, biologist Marlene Zuk goes beyond the binary and instead focuses on interaction, or the way that genes and environment work together. Driving her investigation is a simple but essential question: How does behavior evolve?
Drawing from a wealth of research, including her own on insects, Zuk answers this question by turning to a wide range of animals and animal behavior. There are stories of cockatoos that dance to rock music, ants that heal their injured companions, dogs that exhibit signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and so much more.
For insights into animal intelligence, mating behavior, and an organism’s ability to fight disease, she explores the behavior of smart spiders, silent crickets, and crafty crows. In each example, she clearly demonstrates how these traits were produced by the complex and diverse interactions of genes and the environment and urges us to consider how that same process evolves behavior in us humans.
Filled with delightful anecdotes and fresh insights, Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test helps us see both other animals and ourselves more clearly, demonstrating that animal behavior can be remarkably similar to human behavior, and wonderfully complicated in its own right.
©2022 Marlene Zuk (P)2022 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
[Zuk] watches and writes with a sense of wonder, curiosity, and the abiding recognition that our own human lives only make sense in light of the behavior of other species…Zuk’s lovely book feels like a cabinet of curiosities whose details remind us to pay attention to the behaviors around us every day.—Rob Dunn, Science
Zuk has a knack for weaving in complex scientific theories without ever slowing down the pace, and her vivid descriptions render her wonder contagious…This one's full of fun.—Publishers Weekly
Consistently entertaining…Fascinating stories from a knowledgeable, humorous guide. Another winner from Zuk.—Kirkus Reviews
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You Can’t Taste Soy Sauce with Your Testicles!
- By Jefferson on 03-22-24
By: Ashley Ward
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The Evolution of Beauty
- How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World - and Us
- By: Richard O. Prum
- Narrated by: Dan Woren
- Length: 13 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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In the great halls of science, dogma holds that Darwin's theory of natural selection explains every branch on the tree of life: which species thrive, which wither away to extinction, and what features each evolves. But can adaptation by natural selection really account for everything we see in nature? Yale University ornithologist Richard Prum - reviving Darwin's own views - thinks not.
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Excellent Ornithology then a PC Polemic
- By Fred on 10-08-18
By: Richard O. Prum
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Life on Other Planets
- A Memoir of Finding My Place in the Universe
- By: Aomawa Shields PhD
- Narrated by: Aomawa Shields PhD
- Length: 10 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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As a kid, Aomawa Shields was always bumping into things, her neck craned up at the sky, dreaming of becoming an astronaut. A year into an astrophysics PhD program, plagued by self-doubt and discouraged by a white male professor who suggested that she—a young Black woman who also loved fashion, makeup, and the arts—didn’t belong, she left astronomy and pursued acting professionally for a decade, before a day job working for NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope drew her back to the stars.
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I’m in love with this book!
- By Evelyn on 07-21-23
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The Father
- Made in Sweden, Part I
- By: Anton Svensson, Elizabeth Clark Wessel - translator
- Narrated by: Richard Coyle
- Length: 16 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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How does a child become a criminal? How does a father lose a son? An epic crime novel with the excitement of Jo Nesbo's Headhunters and the narrative depth of We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Father is inspired by the extraordinary true story of three brothers who committed 10 audacious bank robberies in Sweden over the course of just two years. None had committed a crime before. All were under 24 years old. When their incredible spree had come to an end, all of them would be changed forever as individuals and as a family.
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Great based-on-reality drama and storytelling.
- By Sarah D. on 01-16-20
By: Anton Svensson, and others
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Maus Now
- Selected Writing
- By: Hillary Chute - editor
- Narrated by: Fred Berman
- Length: 12 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman is one of our most influential contemporary artists; it’s hard to overstate his effect on postwar American culture. Maus shaped the fields of literature, history, and art, and has enlivened our collective sense of possibilities for expression. A timeless work in more ways than one, Maus has also often been at the center of debates, as its recent ban by the McMinn County, Tennessee, school board from the district’s English language-arts curriculum demonstrates.
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Different than I thought
- By Ilovedogsledding on 12-12-22
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Water
- A Biography
- By: Giulio Boccaletti
- Narrated by: Giulio Boccaletti
- Length: 14 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Spanning millennia and continents, here is a stunningly revealing history of how the distribution of water has shaped human civilization. Giulio Boccaletti - honorary research associate at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford - shrewdly combines environmental and social history, beginning with the earliest civilizations of sedentary farmers on the banks of the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates Rivers.
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Understand Built-Environment Governance~Know Water
- By Tom on 05-11-22
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The Art of More
- How Mathematics Created Civilization
- By: Michael Brooks
- Narrated by: Nick Afka Thomas
- Length: 9 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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In this captivating, sweeping history, Michael Brooks makes clear that mathematics was one of the foundational innovations that catapulted humanity from a nomadic existence to civilization, and that it has been instrumental in every subsequent great leap of humankind: from charting the movements of celestial bodies to navigating the globe to tracking the dissemination of viruses.
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Wow!
- By Cinski446 on 07-12-22
By: Michael Brooks
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She Has Her Mother's Laugh
- The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity
- By: Carl Zimmer
- Narrated by: Joe Ochman
- Length: 20 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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She Has Her Mother's Laugh presents a profoundly original perspective on what we pass along from generation to generation. Charles Darwin played a crucial part in turning heredity into a scientific question, and yet he failed spectacularly to answer it. The birth of genetics in the early 1900s seemed to do precisely that. Gradually, people translated their old notions about heredity into a language of genes. We need a new definition of what heredity is and, through Carl Zimmer's lucid exposition and storytelling, this resounding tour de force delivers it.
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Changed this strict genetic determinist's mind
- By Anonymous User on 06-11-18
By: Carl Zimmer
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The 108 Upanishads
- An Introduction
- By: Roshen Dalal
- Narrated by: Suchitra Gupta
- Length: 16 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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This book is a thoroughly researched primer on the 108 Upanishads, philosophical treatises that form a part of the Vedas, the revered Hindu texts. These Upanishads contain the most crystallized bits of wisdom gleaned from Hinduism. Roshen Dalal explains the concepts at the core of each Upanishad clearly and lucidly. Moreover, her vast, diverse philosophical and theological readings add priceless scholarly context to this comprehensive and fascinating volume.
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Obsessive categorization
- By Hasan on 01-19-20
By: Roshen Dalal
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Alice
- Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker
- By: Stacy A. Cordery
- Narrated by: Alex Picard
- Length: 19 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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From the moment Teddy Roosevelt's outrageous and charming teenage daughter strode into the White House—carrying a snake and dangling a cigarette—the outspoken Alice began to put her imprint on the whole of the twentieth-century political scene. Her barbed tongue was as infamous as her scandalous personal life, but whenever she talked, powerful people listened, and she reigned for eight decades as the social doyenne in a town where socializing was state business.
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Interesting but sometimes infuriating
- By Info Seeker on 05-16-23
By: Stacy A. Cordery
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The Mercenary
- A Story of Brotherhood and Terror in the Afghanistan War
- By: Jeffrey E. Stern
- Narrated by: Ray Corasani
- Length: 10 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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In the early days of the Afghanistan war, Jeff Stern was scouring the streets of Kabul for a big story. He was accompanied by a driver, Aimal, who had ambitions of his own: to get rich off the sudden infusion of foreign attention and cash. In this gripping adventure story, Stern writes of how he and Aimal navigated an environment full of guns and danger and opportunity, and how they forged a deep bond. Then Stern got a call that changed everything.
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Important and thrilling read
- By Justin on 07-15-23
By: Jeffrey E. Stern
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The Order
- By: Kevin Flynn
- Narrated by: Gibson Frazier
- Length: 20 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Two courageous investigative journalists deliver an insider’s account of the “silent brotherhood”—the most dangerous radical-right hate group to surface since the Ku Klux Klan. They claim to be patriots, as American as apple pie, but they are this nation’s deadly brotherhood—hate groups that package their alienation against the federal government under such names as the Aryan Nation, the Order, and other white supremacist militias.
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Not very interesting
- By Anonymous User on 03-05-25
By: Kevin Flynn
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The Manuscripts Club
- The People Behind a Thousand Years of Medieval Manuscripts
- By: Christopher de Hamel
- Narrated by: John Lee, Christopher de Hamel
- Length: 17 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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The illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages are among the greatest works of European art and literature. We are dazzled by them and recognize their crucial role in the transmission of knowledge. However, we generally think much less about the countless men and women who made, collected and preserved them through the centuries, and to whom they owe their existence. This entrancing book describes some of the extraordinary people who have spent their lives among illuminated manuscripts over the last thousand years.
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Manuscripts Through the Centuries
- By Tbaley on 12-02-23
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The West
- A New History in Fourteen Lives
- By: Naoíse Mac Sweeney
- Narrated by: Shaheen Khan
- Length: 14 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Prize-winning historian Naoíse Mac Sweeney delivers a captivating exploration of how “Western Civilization”—the concept of a single cultural inheritance extending from ancient Greece to modern times—is a powerful figment of our collective imagination. An urgently needed emergent voice in big history, she offers a bold new account of Western history, real and imagined, through the lives of fourteen remarkable individuals.
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Extraordinary!!
- By Carlos Forray on 10-03-23
Good information, but reader distracts from it.
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