Sapolsky on primate sexuality part two: required viewing for the horny

Here's part two of Stanford's Robert Sapolsky incredibly fascinating and illuminating lecture on primate sexuality (I posted part one last week). Sapolsky is a great lecturer: funny and engaging, and his material will make you rethink your relationship with your bits. Required viewing for anyone who has ever been horny, or who ever plans to be.

Prof. Robert Sapolsky on the Neurobiology of Primate Sexuality: Part 2 (Thanks, Avi!)

• [Moriarty]

  “Primate sexuality” in its various incarnations is probably the biggest industry on Earth. Bigger than fight or flight stimulators, even.

• [mdh]

  @2 -his credibility is out the window

  Which side of that window are you on again?

• [Avi Solomon]

  MP3s of both Sapolsky lectures:
  http://www.megaupload.com/?d=QKD65SNY

• [Anonymous]

  Not cat piss. Excretions from the anal glands of civet cats.

  http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/style/tmagazine/21chanel.html?ref=tmagazine

  Yeah, probably no pheromones in that. Urban legend!

• [Anonymous]

  One of my absolute favorite lecturers. He has a great series out by the Teaching Company.

• [Purly]

  Wikipedia says cologne is primarily ethanol: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eau_de_Cologne

• [Cledog]

  eau de cologne is not made from cat piss, it’s made from essential oils of plants, easy to find out with a simple google search if you’re interested. Since he is teaching urban myth and wives tales as fact, his credibility is out the window as far as I’m concerned. He is an interesting speaker, but I wouldn’t believe a word he says.

• [TEKNA2007]

  Sapolsky is a genius. I love to listen (but you better do the requiring reading, he’s not going to wait for you to catch up). Thanks for turning me/us on to him.

• [Daemon]

  #2 – For quite a few years now cologne has been a generic term for all male perfumes, and a major category of them used to be made from animal secretions. It’s called “musk”. They only stopped due for economic & ethical reasons.

  And a lot of guys have described the smell of cologne as “cat piss”. You may have noticed that he was saying that not a lot of guys liked the smell of cologne.

• [Jerril]

  #12 – I’m guessing you’re one of those people who reads the contents of cough syrup, and says “oh, it’s mostly water, must be garbage”?

  Don’t mistake the transport and storage medium for the active ingredients.

  Many extracts intended to be applied to human skin are purely ethanol. Ethanol evaporates quickly at human skin temperature, leaving behind the alcohol-soluble extracts and no residual dampness or greasiness.

• [BarkingSpider]

  @ #2 Cledog

  Remind me not to have you take notes for me when I miss class.

  He never says that cologne is made of cat piss. What he says is that he’s been trying to find out (maybe using primary sources and not just Google?) and has not yet been able to. He then asks the class if anyone knows. A student responds that her mom said that’s it’s made from the pheromones of male cat urine. He repeats that answer for the class so everyone can hear it, saying that that it is “reputed” that it is made from cat piss.

  So not only does he say he doesn’t know, he offers the cat piss answer given by the student as a reputed origin of cologne.

  I’m not all the way through the lecture yet, but there’s a lot of great thought provoking material there. It would be a shame to throw it out based on not listening to him closely enough.

• [Anonymous]

  I wish more of my lecturers had been like this.

• [Matthew Sanborn Smith]

  Thank you. I had planned to be horny this evening. Thanks to your posting of this video, I won’t need to reschedule.

• [Jerril]

  Correcting myself:

  “Many extracts intended to be applied to human skin are mainly ethanol”

  blarg.