Timonova Evgenia is a domestic scientific journalist. She also works as a TV presenter, naturalist, and is considered an active popularizer of science. Since 2013, he has been running a popular blog called “Everything is like animals.”

Biography of the journalist

Timonova Evgenia was born in Novosibirsk in 1976. She fell in love with nature in early childhood. At the zoo, she studied in a circle of young naturalists and won victories at biological Olympiads of various ranks.

After graduating from school, she entered Tomsk University. Timonova Evgenia studied at the Faculty of Biology. In her third year, a serious reassessment of values ​​occurred in her worldview, when she realized that she was more of a naturalist than a biologist. As a result, she transferred to the philological faculty of the Pedagogical University in Novosibirsk. Received a diploma in Psychology and Literary Studies.

Working on television

Timonova Evgenia, whose biography is discussed in this article, immediately after university went to work for Novosibirsk television. She began her career in a program called “Dear Pleasure.”

In 2000, the girl took an important step by moving to Moscow. Here she began working in the field of advertising journalism. She mastered the specialty of a copywriter and soon became a creative director.

She also worked in the countries of the former USSR. For example, in 2006 she headed the Kiev women's magazine, which was called LQ. She worked as editor-in-chief for about a year.

In 2012, Evgenia Timonova won the “Best Work in Russia” competition. At the ceremony, the heroine of our article met its organizers, among whom was Sergei Fenenko, who at that time headed a Dutch advertising agency. Together with him, she came up with her project “Everything is like animals.”

All about animals

Her youthful fascination with animals and biology played a defining role in her career. The program “Everything is like animals” by Evgenia Timonova began to talk about biology, human nature, evolution and its connection with the animal world in a popular science format.

This turned out to be a real video channel, which Timonova began to run regularly on the Internet. Here she specializes in the original parallels she draws between the behavior of animals and people, talks about the principles and root causes of our behavior, and answers many questions that concern not only children, but also adults. For example, why are we naked, where did love come from, why are grandmothers needed, what do women want, why do pimples hypnotize us and scare holes.

The video is designed for the widest audience of almost any age and education. It is especially interesting to watch because it also contains an entertaining component. In this she fully tries to comply with the principle - while entertaining, enlighten.

Channel "Everything is like animals"

Evgenia Valentinovna Timonova started her own channel on the Internet in the spring of 2013. An individual style for him was developed by a Dutch company, which Fenenko helped her contact. At the end of 2014, the famous cameraman Oleg Kugaev and artist Andrey Kuznetsov joined the project.

The very first season was filmed in a regular studio against a green screen. The second was filmed entirely in Kenya. The program's episodes were dedicated to wildlife. After that, most seasons were dedicated to a specific country. Thus, the program “Everything is like animals” has already visited New Zealand, Indonesia, Portugal, India, Croatia, and Australia. A separate season was dedicated to Russia.

Well-known domestic biologists were involved as reviewers. For example, Stanislav Drobyshevsky, Alexander Panchin, Alexander Markov, Alexander Sokolov.

In 2016, the program “Everything is like animals” began airing on the Living Planet channel, which is part of the VGTRK holding. At the moment, the project already has more than one hundred thousand subscribers on the Internet.

The most popular episode of the show was called "Animal Grin of Patriotism." It was devoted to the mechanisms of military propaganda. It had several million views. In 2015, the channel “Everything is like animals” received an award at the competition for innovative journalism in the category “Best Popular Science Blog”.

Show seasons

At the moment, eight seasons of the show “Everything Like Animals” have been filmed. The very first one was called "The Beginning". It contained issues about penguins, the art of mimicry, female secrets of primates, procrastination, lions, mantises (this, by the way, is Timonova’s favorite insect that lives in her home), and spiders. In all these issues, the author tried to draw parallels between the behavior of people and wild animals.

The second season was called “Around Kenya in 20 days”, and the third “Anywhere”. There were issues about dolphins, bison and beavers.

The fourth season was entirely devoted to human evolution. Timonova talked about sexual selection, the origin of love, massage and gossip. The title of the fifth season is "In Asia", and the sixth - "In Russia". It paid special attention to marmots, fur seals and seals, foxes, Przewalski's horses, the domestication of cats and the taming of dogs.

The team of the project “Everything Like Animals” filmed the seventh season in India, and the latest eighth season in Australia. It has episodes called "Chuck Norris Among Crocodiles," as well as episodes dedicated to the venom, milk and eggs of platypuses, the characteristics of coral reefs, the amazing sharks and why we love their meat so much, the unique Australian animal wombat, which has an original intelligence and intelligence, kangaroos and dangerous Australian jellyfish.

Personal life

The personal life of Evgenia Timonova is developing very successfully. In 2015 she got married.

Her husband was the artist Andrei Kuznetsov, known for his collaboration with the animation studio "Pilot". He himself is the director of several animated films: “How the Snake was Deceived”, “The Trickster Raven”, “The Adventures of the Fox”, “Pumasipa”, “The Scientist Bear”, “The Brave Man”. All of them are included in the animated series "Mountain of Gems", dedicated to the fairy tales of the peoples of Russia.

As a production designer, he participated in the creation of the domestic hand-drawn cartoon "South of the North" and the cartoon "About Ivan the Fool." Currently, Kuznetsov, together with Timonova, is working on the project “Everything is like animals.”

completedViewed: 18228

Prostitution, lies and patriotism: everything is like animals

• The date of the: 23.07.2015
• Time: 12:00-13:00

• Video
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Answers (18)

Good afternoon, dear viewers, listeners and readers of the NHS.
We are starting a live broadcast with naturalist Evgenia Timonova about how everything we see in animals has some echo in what we consider purely human.

Iva Avrorina:Today is World Dolphin and Whale Day. I think you had several programs about dolphins.

Answer

Yes, we had two programs about dolphins: “Dolphin: Buddhist Animal” and “Bottlenose Dolphin: Sex, Drag, Rock and Roll.”

Iva Avrorina: How does Buddhism fit with “sex, drugs, rock and roll”?

Answer
They combine in a surprising way. He has the largest brain after a person, so it is necessary to manage it somehow. Therefore, a dolphin is as wide as a man is wide. On the one hand, it demonstrates some peculiarities of the behavior of biology, which can be metaphorically considered a privilege of a certain Buddhist view of the world, and on the other hand, it is a complete outlier, and “sex, drugs, rock and roll” ideally fits life outline of the average bottlenose dolphin. We talked about the bottlenose dolphin precisely as an ideal embodiment of the dolphin principle, i.e. this is such a 146% dolphin. It turned out to be a very fun episode.
This is the only release that our director completely disavows. He did not take part in its filming, did not bless its production.

Iva Avrorina: Why?

Answer
As a citizen of Holland and a bearer of European consciousness, he is categorically against keeping dolphins and marine mammals in general in captivity. I understand him very well. Dolphinariums, like people, are good, and there are much worse. A good dolphinarium is OK. The ones we filmed in, fortunately, were good (Lazarevsky, Gelendzhik and Utrish Dolphinarium). The dolphins there are in good condition, they have excellent condition, they reproduce - in principle, you can see from the dolphin whether he is good or bad. But this is rather the exception than the rule. Because most dolphinariums are machines for making money from animals. They are organized by businessmen, not biologists. Biologists are there only as service personnel. Businessmen, as a rule, do not stand on ceremony with people when they need money. Why they will stand on ceremony with the dolphins is unclear. So it's a pretty sad sight. Therefore, I was saddened by the prospect of Novosibirsk having its own dolphinarium. This doesn't seem like a good idea to me.
All dolphinariums are a compromise option. Even good ones. A new “gold standard” is emerging, or rather, for now it is a new technique, revolutionary; God willing, it will become the gold standard in many years. These are open dolphinariums like Dolphin Reef in Eilat, in Philadelphia, in my opinion, there are in Australia and Turkey. An open dolphinarium where dolphins come to socialize, feed or not feed, but at any moment they can swim away. This is a completely voluntary contact with a person. This is still a very rare practice, because it does not provide a guaranteed income - they may sail away and not return, and your money has sailed away. But this is the only good way to build relationships between humans and dolphins. And closed dolphinariums, especially in places where there is no sea... It’s the same story in Moscow, a dolphinarium is being built there, and people are very indignant about this.

Iva Avrorina: Weren't you embarrassed by filming at the dolphinarium?

Answer
It's a compromise thing. On the one hand, you need to show the dolphin where it has what, how its sonar works, how its fins are arranged, how it consists of what. Therefore, you need to have a dolphin in close proximity, and this can be done in a dolphinarium. He just jumps out on your head once a minute and all he does is show it to the camera: look what I have and what. Everyone feels good about this. But, on the other hand, everything I just said... Therefore, I have a complex attitude towards this.
I hope that the relationship between humans and dolphins will evolve in the same way that dolphins and humans evolved. They started with some primitive forms, poorly adapted to each other, and then gradually, gradually we may even reach some kind of symbiosis. But we are still at the beginning of the journey.

Peter:Which programs turned out to be the most popular? How do you explain the fact that these particular programs turned out to be of interest to the largest number of viewers? Do your expectations match what programs are watched the most?

Iva Avrorina: How many programs have you produced now?

Answer

Something around 40.

Iva Avrorina: Have you been filming for 2 years already?

Answer
Yes, a little over 2 years. Of course, our absolute record holder is the release “Animal Grin of Patriotism”. To be honest, I didn’t expect any kind of crazy resonance that it caused. It was very difficult to be born, it was some kind of thing that you just nurture and formulate with such difficulty, because it is very precise, very important. She tormented me that your Requiem. I just couldn’t find a place for myself for a week.

Iva Avrorina: Patriotism is something that is not accepted to be ironic now. The program talks about the fact that all the main manipulations in the media, propaganda that pump up patriotic frenzy are mechanisms that exist in nature, and is this pure physiology?

Answer
Underneath all this there is something that is unconscious to people, instinctive, natural, subconscious, whatever you want to call it... In biology it is very difficult to find an exact, absolutely appropriate term. Therefore, biologists treat this as - let's call it altruism. Although from the standpoint of a philosophical understanding of altruism, this is not entirely true. But we will use this term, because the more accurately you try to express what something means, the more mistakes you end up getting. There is only one iron rule in biology - that in biology there are no iron rules. Therefore, any precise definition is obviously incorrect. Therefore, altruism, but with the caveats that this is altruism in the biological paradigm. There is a powerful basis under our behavior. If we are not aware of it, we are slaves to this basis. Until a person understands at what level he is an animal, he cannot behave like a person. It is important to understand where you have some ancient keys, strings that can be pulled, and you will find yourself taken by the nostrils and led to where you do not want to go. Because your ancient programs are in effect. If you realize that you have them, then you understand that now I feel anger towards my neighbors, not because my neighbors are bad, but because I have a mechanism that makes me feel anger towards strangers. He mobilizes me, he forces me to treat my fellow tribesmen better, who before that, perhaps, I didn’t really like either, but then neighbors appeared who apparently want something from me. And this happens to me - here I rally, and here I start to fight. I experience this, but not because my neighbors are bad and my fellow tribesmen are good, but because I have a mechanism that makes me experience this. I realized this and I continue to live with it. I am a person who is aware of what is happening to him. It is very difficult to manipulate such a person, because when they take him by the reins and say, let's go, let's go, you will be our cannon fodder, he says, no, guys, I know how it works, and I will go to fight for my homeland, when I myself I decide that I need it.

Oleg :After the video about patriotism, did you have to fight off pro-Kremlin citizens for a long time? After all, the video was just released after the Crimean events and all URApatriotism, characteristic of the majority of the population at that time, was presented in a very unsightly light?

Answer

I was very frightened and alarmed by the wave of bestial hatred that arose in society. Moreover, in some surprising way, I did not correlate this with the events in Ukraine. On the one hand, I periodically fall out of the news field. On the other hand, this is some kind of thing that I personally couldn’t wrap my head around for a very long time - like, that the Ukrainians will fight with the Russians, well, stop it. This is the kind of thing that the brain resists to the last. Therefore, this message was rather aimed at revealing the European-Islamic conflict. When all this exploded on the territory of Russian-Ukrainian relations, it was a surprise for us. But the surprise is pleasant, because the fact that jingoism prevails in society is not entirely true. In fact, a much healthier thing is prevailing in society.

Iva Avrorina: Do you judge this by the reaction to this program?

Answer
Yes, both by the reaction to this program and by live communication. It is clear that people are very scared and uncomfortable, they feel that some kind of nonsense is happening. They all can’t understand why everything was fine with Ukraine just now, and then suddenly we are the most terrible enemies and we are being dragged into this meat grinder, and we don’t want to fight for a number of reasons. Firstly, these are Ukrainians, and secondly, we don’t want to fight at all. How did this happen and what to believe after that, if such constants collapse in a second. That’s why people were so happy, and there were so many thanks and likes.

Iva Avrorina: Propaganda mechanisms have worked at all times. This is an absolutely universal thing. Did you somehow watch this outside of Russia? Are there translation options?

Answer
We made subtitles in English. Then some guys called us and made subtitles in Hungarian, I think there are subtitles in German.

Iva Avrorina: What keys allow you to manipulate people's consciousness?

Answer
We have a gigantic need to unite.

Iva Avrorina: Is it at the level of instincts?

Answer
I would be careful when using the concept of instinct in relation to a person, because, like any definition in biology, it encounters a large number of counterarguments. There are quite a lot of authoritative researchers who say that humans do not have any instincts. Moreover, they are no longer found in almost anthropoid apes. How does instinct work? There is a certain situation that gives you a certain need. And there is some way to satisfy this need. For example, the instinct of procreation. I feel that it’s time for me to reproduce, I see a representative of the opposite sex and rush to him to reproduce with him. But chimpanzees don't do that anymore. The chimpanzee first looks at what the pack will say if I go to breed here. He understands that the flock will not approve, and they sit and do not reproduce. They want to, but society will not approve. Cultural mechanisms that impose restrictions on instincts already exist in animals. We have instincts, they give us some patterns, but what to do with them next is our free will, determined by our cultural level. But when these instinctive needs are given some cultural basis...
Patriotism is based on ancient good mechanisms that once allowed us to unite. What made man human was the ability to unite. We are a hypersocial species. We have a need to unite with our own against strangers - one of the main species-forming characteristics. When some kind of cultural basis is provided for this, when they say that patriotism is not only good, it is generally inevitable, you have no choice: you are either a patriot and cannon fodder, or a scumbag and a traitor, - a person understands that something not that. But all the slogans, all the cliches, all the ideology around says this, that, and that’s it, otherwise you’re bad. And people suffer. We explained that this is not entirely true. We have a need to love our homeland, to love our own, to unite - this is wonderful. But it is such a strong need that people who know how it works can take advantage of it. Everyone exhaled and felt normal.
It all started with an article by Tolstoy that I somehow came across, which, in my opinion, is called “Patriotism and Peace.” This is an absolutely fantastic text. This is so relevant... Tolstoy, without modern knowledge of genetics, without sociobiology, absolutely clearly outlined this scheme, why patriotism is a terribly dangerous thing in human history. Because love for your homeland, in the understanding of a patriot, necessarily implies the presence of an enemy who wants to somehow steal this homeland from you, destroy it, and generally has a very bad attitude towards you. This is a very clear diagram of the evolution of wars and parochial altruism, on the basis of which our brain is built. Tolstoy painted it superbly - inside and out. There is not a drop of biology there, but nevertheless there is neither subtracting nor adding directly to our output. Tolstoy is a mirror of Russian evolution :)

Iva Avrorina: What other record-breaking releases?

Answer
Our second record holder is “Lion is an asshole animal.”

Iva Avrorina: Did people fall for the provocation in the title?

Answer
Certainly. It was supposed to be the first issue, but we put it as the second. It was the kind of grenade that they throw, and then they come in on their own. This was where our program began. The second time to make a first impression, to produce the effect of a bomb exploding, and then sort people into friends and foes. We followed the path of such outrageousness and filmed my column.

Iva Avrorina: Was there a column in one of the glossy magazines?

Answer
In a matte :) women's magazine.

Iva Avrorina: In this issue you dispelled the myth of the lion as a hero, the king of beasts.

Answer
We have turned the traditional approach upside down, when we take an animal and use it as a metaphor. OK - now let's take a person as a metaphor for the qualities of an animal and see what matches up. A man who is an asshole coincides with a lion. It matches exactly, down to the details.

Iva Avrorina: Did it fire?

Answer
We collected a lot of everything at once. Reaped the harvest of love and hate at once. So far us: you are a lion - an asshole animal. In principle, this is, of course, our dumbest release. In theory, it is different from everything we do. Now we see it a little as a curse of the program. Experts treat this as a joke and perceive us as a program that jokes like that. No, we are not that kind of program. We are a program that says serious things, also jokingly, but much more serious. After that we had 39 more issues that were completely different.
The Moscow Zoo loves us very much, the director of which contacted us just after the program about the lion. She said: guys, come and do whatever you want with us. We came to do what we want. And one absolutely wonderful lady, in my opinion, the head of the big cats section, also watched this program and said, they will come to us to do what they want - let them go throughout the zoo, but they can’t come to me. For a very long time, the whole zoo tried to persuade her: look at their other releases, see how good and smart they are. But we didn't have a second chance to make a first impression.
The third issue is about the theory of sexual selection. Absolutely smooth, one might say, elementary information. There is natural selection and there is sexual selection, which some researchers consider part of natural selection, while others, on the contrary, consider it the opposite process, and all the results of evolution are a compromise between natural and sexual selection. Sexual selection is usually carried out by females because they invest more in the offspring, so they are in the position of chooser. Therefore, males must be good, fighting, and do everything so that the females choose them. The females sit like modest hens, and it seems that nothing depends on them, but everything depends on them. But this is only in those species where females are engaged in raising offspring. Seahorses, phalaropes... in general, it’s different for birds. They do not have milk feeding, so the hatched children can be fed by either the mother or the father. Therefore, their relationships are slightly different and more often there are some kind of inversions. And then they have a modest gray male and females who circle around him so that he can reproduce with them and then run around with their children. Here we did not expect at all that there would be such a flurry of indignant letters from our male viewers.

Iva Avrorina: Why were they indignant?

Answer
For some reason, the men were terribly offended that the women here, it turns out, had given up orders. We were very happy about this. The outrage correlated with the cultural level of the respondents, such that reading their reviews was a lot of fun.

Catherine :To reduce a person to the level of an animal means to demonstrate your disrespect for both Man and God, who created him. A person has a Soul, an animal does not. And living by instincts means forgetting about the immortal soul. Do you even understand that you are humiliating the Human Race with your theories?

Iva Avrorina: Do you often encounter such accusations?

Answer

Creationists make up a certain percentage of our audience. These are people who cry, inject themselves, but watch our episodes in order to write this. It’s usually all caps lock - that you humiliate a person in the person of God, God in the person of a person, and it’s all about some kind of humiliation, insult. Every time I give lectures somewhere, I ask if there are creationists in the room, it would be interesting to see. No. It seems to me that these are some kind of creatures, bots, because I have never seen them among living people.

Iva Avrorina: Maybe they just don’t go to lectures?

Answer
Yeah, probably. This implies some level of obscurantism. But in fact, obscurantism has no religious affiliation. There are religious obscurantists who write GOD and accuse us of insulting this idea. And there are those who write everything in capital letters and also accuse us of insulting someone. All this, of course, is due to the fact that people know absolutely nothing about animals, they believe that they are some kind of unpleasant, dark, simply organized entities leading an unpleasant, vile life as animals, therefore any comparison with them is humiliating. This can only be cured by enlightenment, education and telling people what animals are, because it is an endless source of amazement.

Iva Avrorina: Do animals have obscurantism?

Answer
Animals do not have obscurantism. Animals have different learning abilities. There are animals that completely refuse to learn. This is for the highly organized. They have animal progressors. A female Japanese macaque has learned to wash sweet potatoes so she can eat them. She taught this to a certain part of her colony capable of learning. And half sat and ate washed sweet potatoes. And half of them looked and said that my grandfathers and fathers ate dirty sweet potatoes and I will eat dirty sweet potatoes. Apparently, this is some kind of analogue of animal obscurantism. But, in principle, no. Because it implies some kind of rich culture. Obscurantism is a loss of culture. To lose it, you must have it in principle.

Gennady:Do animals think about something during those moments when they are awake, but do nothing? When, for example, does a cat have no sleep in either eye and sits just staring into space? And in general, it’s even simple: is their life and activity accompanied by at least some kind of mental background or are these pure reflexes with a vacuum in the head?

Answer

Gennady asked a question that everyone has been working on for the last half century :) Of course, there is no exact answer to this.

Iva Avrorina: Can you tell us what cats are thinking about?

Answer
I can say anything, but to what extent will it correspond to reality... All sorts of data obtained by MRI and other methods of studying brain activity show that higher nervous activity, not related to the “stimulus-response” situation, is present in animals. Absolutely in primates. There is a category of talking monkeys that have been taught to use intermediary languages ​​(sign language, a system where they press keys with symbols). The Kandy Bonobos, for example, have a gigantic vocabulary. Or the gorilla Koko, wonderful and famous, already tells some essays about her feelings. About the fact that she looked at the dead kitten and felt sad. I drew this - I thought about death, about going somewhere and never returning.

Iva Avrorina: So this is already abstract thinking?

Answer
Yes. There are many levels of abstract thinking. This is already abstract thinking of a good level.
What exactly cats think is unknown. They're probably thinking something. I really like the answer of the poet Dmitry Vodennikov about this. He was once asked: what do you think about, Dmitry, when you are alone? He said that before, when I was young and handsome, I thought about my beauty, but now that it is gone, I just sit, staring blankly at the wall. Maybe something like this happens in cats :)

Tatiana :It is known that females of a number of animals, being fertilized, can, as it were, “freeze” pregnancy and postpone childbirth until “good times”, if their living conditions at the current moment are not favorable enough.
Why do you think the same quality has not developed in humans?

Answer

Because we can always make our conditions favorable. It is easier for a person to rebuild the world for himself than to rebuild his physiology.

Tatiana :In the photo you are with a skull (“Poor Yorick!”)
In connection with this question:
Is there such a thing in the animal world as the burial of the remains of dead relatives (members of a family, pride, pack, etc.), any specific behavioral reactions of animals that, to one degree or another, can be correlated with human rituals, or is such behavior purely “human”? invention"?
Thank you!

Answer

Elephants have a very interesting ritual. Funeral rites are best described among elephants.

Iva Avrorina: That is, not even in primates?

Answer
Primates also have a category of death; they are very concerned about the death of a fellow tribesman. The mother, who has lost her cub, sits with him for quite a long time, she tries to revive him. She is very sad. These are very heavy shots, they are so anthropomorphic. Empathy makes you suffer a lot.
But among elephants this has a ritualized character. They gather around their fallen kin. They first try to raise him while he is still alive, to somehow help him. When he is completely dying, they stand there sadly, and then throw branches at him and disperse. This is not every elephant, but there are cases described when the behavior was like this.
They have a very interesting reaction to the elephant skulls they find. This also indicates the level of thinking. An elephant's skull does not look like an elephant. The first time you see an elephant's skull, you won't know whose it was. And they recognize it, especially if it is the skull of some familiar elephant, a relative. There is evidence that they recognize their familiar elephants at the bone level. In any case, they show great interest in the skulls of their fellow tribesmen: they stand, sniff, flapping their ears - this means something very important to them.

Catherine :Have you filmed any programs here in Siberia? About whom?
Can we say that more similarities between humans and animals can be found if we are talking about animal species and people living in the same area? When similar traits appear not due to instincts, but due to humans borrowing tools for adapting to the environment from animals, for example?

Answer

We filmed animals in Siberia, yesterday we returned from the village. Barsukovo in the Maslyaninsky district, where we filmed the marmots. I've never seen them up close. There are quite a lot of them there.

Iva Avrorina: So you found them there?

Answer
Yes, we found it. We first found the game warden who found them before us. He showed us where these marmots were and told us what time they came out. The cameraman and I got up at 4 am and crawled there from ambush to film them. A relict species of marmot, the Kashchenko marmot, lives on the territory of the NSO. Previously they thought it was just a gray marmot. But in the 90s, a scientist came from Moscow and caught these marmots. A water-carrying vehicle would arrive and pour water into the marmot holes - there were gigantic, 100-meter-long underground passages. At some point, the hole was filled, the indignant marmots swam out, they were caught and taken to Moscow. In Moscow, they counted their chromosomes and found out that this marmot and the gray one have a different number of chromosomes. It turned out that this is the Kashchenko marmot, it has a very small range, and it must be protected, because no one else has it.

Iva Avrorina: What exactly interested you in marmots?

Answer
We were going to film marmots and fox cubs. But the little foxes hid from us in the nettles. We arrive home and tell my mother that they didn’t find the fox cubs, they were filming the marmots. Mom said that you should also take pictures of mice. I asked my mother what she knew about marmots. Mom says they stand along the road and whistle. I say: here, mom, the only thing you know about marmots is you know about gophers.
The marmot is the mammal with the longest hibernation period. When he is not sleeping, he is busy organizing himself a comfortable period of hibernation. This is a beast that has mastered the science of sleep. He sleeps up to 9 months a year - three quarters of his life. He devotes the remaining 3–5 months to providing himself with ideal sleeping conditions. Works to ensure that you can sleep well and sweetly later. He goes to bed not when it gets cold, but when he has worked up his 1.5 kg of marmot fat. If he has fed them up by mid-August, he will go to bed in mid-August. That is, it’s still summer, there are mushrooms all around, but he’s already given the groundhog and is sleeping. A very correct animal.
He is still so round, plump, lopsided, with a potbelly sitting on the marmot - the Chinese god Hotei is one and the same, sitting contentedly.
It is impossible to wake him up in winter. Sometimes they have unpleasant stories. They caulk the entrance to their hole, crowd 20 of them in there and sleep. Their body temperature is 4 degrees, the number of pulse beats is 6 per minute, i.e. they are in deep hibernation. If some ferret, a steppe polecat, who lives there, picks apart their hole and climbs inside, it will not come out until it has eaten everyone. He will simply live until spring, eat these marmots, and they will not wake up from this. They can only be raised by gradually increasing the temperature.
I really understand the marmots in this. There are mornings when they shake you and get you up, but you don’t, it’s better to eat, but I won’t get up.

Andrey :How does prostitution manifest itself in animals?

Answer

You need to watch the first episode of our program. This is how incentive mating for material reward is manifested.

Iva Avrorina: Was this your first show?

Answer
Yes. We modestly went out to look, looking out where to throw the grenade.

Iva Avrorina: First a program about prostituting penguins, then about a lion...

Answer
Yes. And then at some point we found our way, reduced the amount of “fried” food in our menu, and I think we did the right thing. There the first wave of accusations began that we were justifying the immoral behavior of people by saying that animals do the same.
We do not justify anything or anyone. We explain how this happens. We give a certain biological view of what is happening, of a certain phenomenon. This is just one of the planes that can be considered. There are also cultural, moral, social aspects. All of them must be taken into account when analyzing any human manifestation. We take on biology, some part of it, without claiming the ultimate truth. Because there are not so many ultimate truths in biology. All this is a current flow, all these are emerging concepts, all this is constantly updated with new data, especially now. Now there is such a powerful accumulation of data at the forefront of biology that no one has enough time to put meaningful theories behind it. There is Darwin's theory, the theory of evolution, which works perfectly and has not been refuted by anything. But there is no next, daughter theory yet, because there is no time for it to appear. Everyone is busy getting facts. And then they will formulate some new paradigm from this.

Anton:If you have time, can you clarify your point of view about obscurantism?
after all, a rich, rich, structured culture surrounds, well, without harsh words, the work of psychics, healers, and clairvoyants. From two TV channels to a huge industry, collections of prayers for bone suppression, and so on.
Isn't this obscurantism? but this is for sure - a large culture (in terms of volume)

Answer

This is a big subculture. It becomes a culture when it stands the long test of time, cultural qualifications. It's like a biological journal. You can publish a biological journal and write whatever you want there. It will be a biological journal, but it will not be peer-reviewed, it will not be supported by a reference group of people who are authoritative in this matter. That is, the cultural reference group does not support the culture of psychics and everything else. How can a subculture exist?

Alexei :I enjoyed watching your programs when they were published every Wednesday on the Obrazovac public page, but, unfortunately, your videos have been there for a long time. Tell me, are you planning to return there?

Answer

We are on summer holidays now. Don't send us to work, let us rest and film. We continue to be friends with Obrazovac. As our new issues come out, they publish them. We continue to film, we are filming now, but since there is complete silence on the Internet now and high-temperature hibernation, of course, you can upload it there, but there will be no joy from it. Therefore, we decided - now once a month, and in September we will start, including about marmots.

Iva Avrorina:Will there be only one Siberian issue, about marmots?

Answer

No, two. The second one will be about grandmothers.

Iva Avrorina: Grandmothers and the animal world?

Answer
Where did grandmothers even come from? We have grandmothers for a reason. Only three species of animals have grandmothers - us, killer whales and pilot whales. Pilot whales are the second largest dolphins, huge black-headed dolphins. Everyone knows killer whales; they are huge black and white dolphins, the largest. Pilot whales are the same ones that are beaten in Norway. I don’t know who you have to be to kill a dolphin, but who you have to be to kill the dolphin’s grandmother - I’m terrified of people from time to time.

Iva Avrorina: Is a grandmother the one who babysits her grandchildren? What is included in the concept of “grandmother” among dolphins?

Answer
The one who babysits her grandchildren because she has no biological choice. Menopause occurs only in us and in them - only three species. In all animals, females reproduce as long as they live. Less often in old age, of course.

Iva Avrorina: That is, cat owners are in vain hoping that at some age their cat will stop producing kittens 3 times a year?

Answer
If the cat is in good condition, is still cheerful and is still interested in doing this, she will give birth to more kittens. Not 3 times a year, but once a year, once every 2 years. Quite possibly. But we simply have no choice, we just turn it off, and that’s all, because we need grandmothers. And why - look in our issue, which will be in September.

Alexander :Hello. Evgeniya, first of all, thank you for the program “everything is like animals”! The topics that are raised in it are very relevant, the analogies drawn are vivid, but not brighter or more attractive than the beautiful presenter herself. Evgenia, question:
- what alternative ways to popularize science, notify people about achievements and discoveries, do you see in modern Russia offline (without the Internet and books)?

Answer

The more complex the brief, the more interesting the creative. I don’t know to what extent these are alternative methods, what is now developing is meetings, lectures, master classes, some kind of gatherings dedicated to discussing some problems. There is just a boom in this in Moscow now. Speeches by lecturers on various issues attract a huge number of people, people are very interested in it. A person comes who is an expert or simply a bearer of information about the issue, tells what he knows, and then discusses it all live with the audience. Knowledge is transferred very actively when it includes a subjective factor. Alexander Markov wrote three magnificent books. When he tells the same thing directly to himself, conveying it as a person, the same dry information, it has a much stronger impact, because we are empathic beings. We need live communication, this uses many more channels in us, everything said falls deeper to us and is absorbed better. However, your personal attitude to this or that issue is clearly visible. This is noticeable in the presentation of the material, in your signature irony. Is it easy to keep an open mind when preparing a show?

Answer

There is a scientific reality, a certain objective set of facts. And there is a certain attitude of mine that is necessary for this to cease to be a set of dry facts, but to become some kind of idea that can settle in the heads of people who watch it. Like an idea they agree or disagree with. They can form an attitude.
Our program began with the fact that we suddenly discovered that there was no program about animals that would be heard by everyone and would be of interest to everyone. There was once a program “In the Animal World”, a great program, in fact, remains so. But it is interesting only to people who are interested in animals in general, who will find a lot of interesting information even without this program. But how to interest the broad masses?

Iva Avrorina: Why interest them?

Answer
For absolutely selfish reasons. I want to live among happy people, at least among much happier people than they are now. It seems to me that being aware of your connection with nature, with animals, your natural beginning and, in general, this universal connection - this improves a person’s sense of self. When you’re not hanging like a spherical horse in a vacuum, it’s unclear what’s going on around you, something unpleasant and incomprehensible is swarming around, and here you are all with a capital “C”, having nothing to do with it. This makes people’s existence limited, dry and unpleasant, and provokes a lot of conflicts and negativity, primarily with themselves. Because they feel the animal nature in themselves, but deny it. Explain that we are all united, parts of this nature, harmonious parts, everything about us is not in vain. Some things, of course, could be corrected, but when you understand where it came from in you, you can already partially correct them.

Iva Avrorina: There is a lot of speculation on the similarities between humans and animals, on the one hand, and on the other, there are people who deny the animal nature in humans. Are you somehow destroying these things?

Answer
This was beautifully demonstrated in our episode on homosexuality. We weren't going to change the world. We wanted to convey just one very simple idea that homosexuality is natural, but homophobia is not. Because homophobes have the main argument that this does not exist in nature.

Iva Avrorina: Is there no homophobia in the animal world?

Answer
No, absolutely.

Iva Avrorina: What about bisexuality?

Answer
Some researchers consider this as a variant of the norm. Bonobo chimpanzees are all bisexual. Moreover, the term pansexualism was introduced there. They basically like everyone.
We have shown that homosexuality is natural, homophobia is unnatural. And the same people with the same enthusiasm came running to the comments and said that yes, it exists in nature, but we are not animals.
The only way to stop being an obscurantist is to accept it all, understand that everything is so, there is no need to resist. Until this happens, these changeovers continue: now we are animals, now we are not animals, now we are from God, now from someone else.

Answer

Well, okay, what are you saying, men are becoming... It would be enough to scrape together to parity.
Of course, this is a normal evolutionary process - a change in the role of the sexes of certain species depending on changes in the conditions of their existence. The same hyenas. It wasn’t like this from the very beginning that females were in charge.

Iva Avrorina: After the program about hyenas as a symbol of feminism, were feminists offended by you?

Answer
Of course they were offended. But not all feminists, but square-nest feminists who see that some hyenas - we should probably be offended just in case, we won’t think, look at what’s behind it, but we’ll just be offended. We always have this: whatever you say, the square-nested part of the audience will definitely be offended. This is one of the characteristic features of the program.

Iva Avrorina: Can you give another example of gender role reversal?

Answer
The most striking example is chimpanzees and bonobos. This is one species that has divided into 2 branches. Chimpanzees have priority for males, females in secondary roles. And bonobos have a matriarchy. Among them, females rule, adult sons are in the position of mama's boys all their lives. The same species lives on two banks of the same river. Somehow the conditions were such that some needed males to be in charge, while others needed females.

Iva Avrorina: They don't fight each other?

Answer
Fortunately, no. Otherwise, bonobos wouldn't have a chance, because women don't like to fight. Bonobos in any conditions begin to mate with a problem. And in this way all situations are resolved. Perhaps this could play some role in the conflict with chimpanzees. But probably not. Chimpanzees are still very aggressive.

But Timonova really has a lot of charm. We met with her in Moscow during a break between two expeditions to Australia and Kamchatka, in an oriental cafe. Evgenia ate pilaf and talked about homophobia, the worldview, evolution and sex - and it was charming and fascinating, like 10 episodes of “Everything Like Animals” in a row.

Your most popular release is still the early “Lion is an Asshole Animal” with a million views. Or “Sex in the Water,” where you are all so beautiful on the beach talking about the sex of sea creatures, various sea anemones and other creatures whose names I can’t pronounce. Is provocation your goal?

We do not carry out deliberate provocations. The principle of our program is to explain the behavior of people through the behavior of animals, so that people get to know themselves, get answers to their questions, or, conversely, ask questions to themselves. For example, we made the issue about homosexuality with examples of homosexuality among sheep as correct and balanced as possible: neither one nor the other. Therefore, in the comments to that issue, the main mood was confusion: where to run, who to beat?

Homophobes are surprised: where are THEY from in Chechnya?! You say: you like girls - what needs to be done with you, how to promote it so that you want to hug and kiss boys? This is biology, this is beyond “morality”. They don't give an answer. Why?

Good question! I tried to answer it in my recent column. Homophobia is irrational; one argument is funnier than the other. “This is unnatural” - we remember the same sheep and thousands of other species that are also “like this”. “Homosexual relationships do not produce offspring” - a lesbian couple can produce twice as many offspring as a traditional one, because there are two women, Captain. And in general, the current demographic problem of humanity is not population reduction, but, on the contrary, overpopulation.

Since we are talking about this, simple biological reproduction is the task of the animal world, and for us, if we consider ourselves the masters of this planet, social evolution, which is unique to us, is more important.

The key to the survival of the homo sapiens species today is ethics, which is not very good. Only ethics will allow us to avoid global wars and harmonize our relations with the space where we live.

The homophobes have been more or less dealt with; What about other aggressive preachers of unscientific views - creationists? What should I answer them?

Yes, you don’t have to answer anything special, whoever is listening to them.

Seriously, the scientific view of the world involves the use of the notorious “Occam’s razor”: if one set of facts is enough to explain one phenomenon, there is no need to invent something else. There are enough rational explanations for the origin of life here and development in this particular way.

Creationists are on fire for good reasons. It is difficult to agree that from inorganics accidentally organic matter arose, then it again accidentally RNA gathered, and off we went... Excuse me, the creationists say, only some three and a half billion years have passed, and from this mucus we supposedly emerged, so intelligent and beautiful? It is impossible to imagine the scale of this time.

In addition, we humans have a great need to contrast ourselves with other creatures. This, in fact, once shaped our species; We have very high intra-group cooperation and very tough interspecific competition. There are We, and there must be They - others who are worse, stupider, more unworthy of Us.

And therefore, when it is said: They are also Us, that man also comes from this primeval broth, that he did not descend from a monkey, but is a monkey, that we are not the crown of evolution, but one of its small branches, it happens, as they say, template break.

What creationists; Let's take linguists, serious people, bearers of scientific consciousness. They categorically deny the existence of intelligence and language in animals (We - They).

Is it true that the difference between the thinking of humans and other higher animals (not just primates) is not qualitative, but quantitative, that it is a matter of the amount of information that can be processed per unit of time?

- But we will never be able to prove this by imagining the inner world of a dog or gorilla.

Not “never”, but, unfortunately, we can’t yet.

There is the classic concept of Umwelt, introduced by Jakob Uexküll, a German biologist and animal psychologist, who described the “inner world” of the Ixodid tick. He has no vision, hearing, nothing, for him the whole world is the smell of butyric acid. This is his Umwelt. Fantastic for us are the umwelts of a praying mantis with its eyes, a bat with an echolocator - how can one imagine this?

- There is a well-known project to teach chimpanzees the language of the deaf and dumb - Amslen.

And there is also the failed project “Nim Chimpski”, in which a baby chimpanzee was taught this language, he seemed to have learned something, but it was at the level of ordinary training. The project was adopted by those who deny the existence of animal intelligence, and for a long time then they said: so that we don’t hear about this “animal language” anymore.

And the chimpanzee Washoe cursed: she transferred the meaning of the word “dirty” - “dirty” to “dirty” - “bad”. Linguist Svetlana Burlak, in her book “The Origin of Language,” describing this project, quotes a phrase composed by Washoe in the Amslen language: “dirty toilet devil.”

The same Washoe said “bird + water” about the swan. But primatologist Franz de Waal, who studied these chimpanzees, warns that these cases need to be checked and checked again, because, alas, they may turn out to be statistics, the result of the selective attention of the researcher.

- Okay, one monkey is “smart”, the other is “stupid” - isn’t this proof that They are like Us?

Still would. Moreover, cognitive differences do not only appear at such complex levels as proficiency in sign language. You can already say about mice - some are more intelligent, others less. Birds, fish - they all show differences in intelligence, and therefore its presence. Octopuses use tools. Wasps recognize human faces.

- For what?!

Well, actually our faces are deeply indifferent to them, but they recognize each other’s “faces” so well that they are able to apply this to other creatures.

Can we imagine our own immediate biological evolution, or will our fate now be determined only by social development?

We are on the verge of a quantum leap in our biological evolution.

Very soon we will learn to edit our genome - and then we will be able, roughly speaking, to do anything with ourselves. That is, the social - scientific and technological progress - will now determine the biological.

First, age-related diseases will be defeated, the main thing, in general, is our biological ugliness. All this neurodegenerative Alzheimer's is terrible, it shouldn't happen.

But from the point of view of evolution, this will just be bad: the old, sick should die, free up space and resources?

But here’s the trick: in our species, old individuals are not useless absorbers of resources, but bearers of useful experience, precisely the ethics that we talked about at the beginning and which will help us survive. The tradition of humanity is a very cool evolutionary adaptation!

- Let's finally have sex. Why is it a pleasure to reproduce?

In the matter of “pleasant” sexual reproduction, we hominids have already come to everything ready. We don’t know for sure about invertebrates, but fish definitely enjoy mating, they have a reward system, that’s all. In general, you need to start with the advantages of sexual reproduction - it provides genetic diversity that is impossible with hermaphroditism. Being a hermaphrodite is much easier: you don’t have to bother looking for someone... But diversity is a problem. And it was the mating of two individuals that was associated with neurotransmitter reinforcement, causing a subjective feeling of pleasure. And since dopamine is universal for all organisms, all organisms, accordingly, began to intensively mate and reproduce.

You are loved not only for your popular science facts, but also for the literary merits of your scripts. Are there any plans to take up writing in addition to video?

At one time, I switched from the biology department of Tomsk State University to the philology department of the Novosibirsk State Pedagogical University when I realized that science in its pure form was not my thing. Roughly speaking, I could not mindlessly cut the frog (I could cut it and eat it if necessary). I experienced some kind of simply Dostoevsky tossing: I could not, like others, collect collections of butterflies; against their life, these collections are worth nothing. The conveyor belt of death around biology as a science eventually pushed me away, I went to the philology department, and it was wonderful there...

- In short, will you write a book?

Yes, I’m already writing! But so far, with all our trips, with my rhythm, when I vomit into a thousand small cubs, it doesn’t work out. You need to sit down and write this.

The slogan “The program is about who we are like” is about our similarity with other animals. But how does a person fundamentally differ from them?

Probably still a speech. As we have already said, many animals have signaling systems, but all this is nonsense compared to the completeness, richness and uniqueness of human language. With the possibility of recording that very umwelt and passing it on through generations. We can look at the world through the eyes of hundreds of people who lived before us, taking just one book, the same “War and Peace”.

- What about equipment and technology? International Space Station?

An orangutan can make an extendable antenna out of sticks of different diameters. Hundreds of millions of years will pass and you will receive the ISS antenna.

Why people don’t like being compared to monkeys and hamsters, and what doesn’t suit Russians in a video about patriotism

For two years now, naturalist Evgenia Timonova has been inventing and running a regular video blog “Everything is like animals” - a program about what people are like. Five-minute popular science videos about transvestite cuttlefish and matriarchy among spotted hyenas gain tens of thousands of views on YouTube and once again remind RuNet users that man is, first and foremost, a part of nature. Timonova recently came to Kazan to give a lecture and talked with a BUSINESS Online correspondent about science and life.

“WHEN A PERSON SUFFERS, THEY HAVE A SUBCONSCIOUS DESIRE TO MAKE OTHERS SUFFER”

Evgenia, first of all, congratulations on your recent marriage. In this regard, the question is: what is it like to be married, knowing that love is just echoes of parental instinct fixed by evolution, and kissing is a rudimentary gesture reminiscent of how animals feed their young?

You can't take everything so seriously! What you feel towards your husband is your personal experience, and no science can fully explain it. And he’s not going to: unfortunately or fortunately, not everything consists of rational concepts. As soon as some scientist or person posing as a scientist begins to claim that he can explain everything with one hundred percent accuracy, you need to move away from him - most likely, he is a charlatan. Yes, there are those who, after watching our videos, run around with square eyes and do not understand how to live now and what to believe. I can only envy their gullibility and ability to completely immerse themselves in an idea. What we propose is only a hypothesis that explains some part of reality. Much remains behind the scenes.

- Are there many of them with square eyes?

In general, our blog is designed for adequate people with a healthy sense of humor. And I think that in reality no one is at a complete dead end. But at the same time, a significant part of the audience is faced with the problem of acceptance: at deep levels, the human self protests against identification with animals. We are accustomed to thinking that we are individuals, that we have a rich inner world, and such information pulls the rug out from under our feet: “You are offering me a theory according to which all my actions are dictated by base instincts, and I myself am a half-monkey, and even procrastinate How's the hamster? Who are you anyway?!” A similar reaction is typical for people who do not have sufficient knowledge and love for the world around them due to the lack of the same knowledge. Ignorance breeds fear: animals in the minds of many are dark, unpleasant creatures that have nothing to do with us. Except, of course, cats. And the task of our videos is to fill this information vacuum. The whole living world is a ladder, and you are one of its steps. You are not hanging in a vacuum, you are part of the system, and that’s great! When a person is cut off from everything, he does not understand himself and suffers, and when a person suffers, he has a subconscious desire to make others suffer. Hence, among other things, the aggression towards the blog’s creators. But this is normal background noise: if something can be misunderstood, someone is bound to misunderstand it.

- Are spectator attacks always unjustified and emotional, or are there scientifically substantiated claims?

The main thing is not even a remark, but a statement of fact on the part of scientific specialists: “You are simplifying everything very much.” And I agree with this. But this is a correct simplification: we are drawing a model of a complex circuit that follows the general outlines and does not contradict reality. Reduction in our case is inevitable, because an entertaining video with an interesting plot can hardly be made very deep. Although for those interested, we place links to the literature used below. Of course, some colleagues try to analyze a five-minute video from the standpoint of scientific work - in this case, you don’t even know what to answer them, because people simply do not understand what they just watched and what it is intended for.

You only took two courses in biology, then you began to study psychology and literary studies. Do dissatisfied colleagues use this as an argument in disputes?

Most of my colleagues are only happy for me, they say: what a blessing that you didn’t reach the diploma in your time. As a result, I became not a biologist, but a naturalist. A naturalist is a person of rather a humanitarian bent; he has biological skills, strung together with a humanitarian approach to the world. Yes, “Everything Like Animals” is not biology in the strict scientific sense, but it doesn’t have to be. If I had finished my studies, I would have become another armchair scientist, of which there are already a million. And now I am a specialist who can reach human hearts and minds with my talk about science, which is quite rare for most fellow biologists.

In general, my university education ended the moment we started killing mice and frogs. I realized that I simply couldn't. For me it was surprising: from the age of five I knew that I would be a biologist, I sifted through a gigantic amount of literature, I was never a muslin young lady, but here... I don’t know what happened. Now I have the idea of ​​returning and finishing my studies, but this will be a conscious step - I know that I need education for work. For example, if I go to the Maldives to photograph manta rays without a biologist diploma, I am a simple tourist with the appropriate set of rights, and if I have a diploma, I am already a member of a scientific expedition. And I’m glad that I came to this only now: when you have formed as a perceiving subject, you can calmly educate yourself in the classical traditions, without the risk of losing your non-standard view of things.

“Near-Patriotic Pathos leaves no choice: either you are a scoundrel and a traitor to your motherland, or you are going to be killed for nothing.”

- The most resonant video on the blog at the moment is “Animal grin of patriotism”. The video, in which you use examples from the lives of bees, ants and primates to criticize the rhetorical techniques of official propaganda, has received more than 900 thousand views and hundreds of angry comments. What irritates people the most?

A standard set of counterarguments: “we are not animals, but people, patriotism is good, you are encroaching on the sacred.” We didn’t try to make a perfectly correct video, we didn’t smooth out the wording, and the audience felt a real prick and learned the manipulations that are applied to them every day. For many, a defense mechanism has worked: when you are caught being provoked and refusing to think critically, there is nothing left but self-defense. Moreover, nowhere in the video is it said that patriotism is bad, it just shows quite clearly (I dare to hope so), albeit in a simplified way, the mechanism by which a person is taken by the nostrils and led to where he does not need to go. The near-patriotic pathos leaves no choice: either you are a scoundrel and a traitor to your homeland, or you are going to be slaughtered for nothing. Not for your homeland, but for the interests of people who don’t care about your needs.

- Is this video an attempt to speak out about the current conflict in which Russia is involved?

The most interesting thing is that I didn’t think about Ukraine at all when I wrote the script for the video - I then completely dropped out of the information field. Initially it was intended that it would be more about terrorism and Christian-Islamic contradictions. Therefore, when the video appeared against the backdrop of news about the DPR and LPR and all the commentators began to fight on this border, I was wildly surprised. It is clear that these are universal principles of propaganda, but it turned out to be such an accurate hit that it’s even somehow creepy. The comments show that most people are scared now: no one understands anything, no one really wants to fight.

- After the video, did the number of subscribers to the channel increase?

Yes, now we have more than 60 thousand people there. When I wrote and sent this script to the director, he said: “Very cool, although no one can handle such a cart for 15 minutes.” But we decided to film it anyway, because it is important and cool - whoever endures to the end is well done. Now the video has almost a million views, and this is only on the official channel. Some enthusiasts cut a “sausage” from our video, put the words of Putin and Kiselyov there, and the result was a propaganda piece with the correct voice-over text. At first we shamed them and banned them for violating copyrights, but then we got tired of them and resigned ourselves. The feeling as if you composed She's got it and then watch how the station labuks cover it (laughs). This remake also has almost a million views, moreover, it is spreading much faster than the original. People want some simple product, and they have great difficulty accepting statements that do not directly answer the questions “what to do?” and “where to go?” Moreover, this applies to both one side and the other. I read the comments and thought: wow, that’s where else I could find out what’s in the minds of my compatriots! We nurture hatred of the enemy because it allows us to be closer and more united, although it is quite possible to help people around us without doping in the form of hatred of our neighbors.

But after patriotism there was a video about homosexuality, where we consciously avoided any clues that could lead us to the side of gay propaganda or, conversely, discrimination. The topic is odious, just say “homosexuality” and everyone is ready to fight, but we have created some kind of masterpiece of correctness. And there are about 150 thousand views - not even close to patriotism.

- It hurts? Do you want quick fame?

I don't want it to be fast at all. On the one hand, explosions in traffic are pleasant: it means you have chosen a topic that satisfies some kind of public demand. On the other hand, in order to do well, you need to do what is interesting to you.

The video about patriotism has taken the blog format beyond the scope of a popular science program; now it clearly conveys a civic position. In this regard, a question about the video that “Everything is like animals” was made for the Dozhd channel. Against the background of footage of brawls in the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, you talk about the dominance of males in monkey troops, and when the narrative switches to “out-of-rank males,” a proud Khodorkovsky appears in the video. Is this also a conscious civic position? Don’t you think that this is the same excess as Kiselyov, embedded in a video about patriotism?

They called us from Dozhd and said: “We are preparing a program about parallels between Russia and Africa. Can you tell us about African animals that are similar to people in modern Russia?” In fact, in the video I talked about universal things: any parliament in any third world country - and I still believe that in some Holland, due to the cultural compensatory mechanism, it looks a little different - often behaves something like this. This is human nature. But then “Rain” superimposed its video sequence on my story. The out-of-rank male Khodorkovsky is, of course, very funny and absurd. So funny that we weren't even upset. We got on TV, saw what happened there, gained experience, and both sides left happy. By the way, this incident greatly affected my director’s sense of self-worth: he looked at the shooting and editing and said that he could have done it a thousand times better.

“HUG AN ELEPHANT AND CRY”

You filmed some of your video blogs in zoos, nurseries and dolphinariums. Have you thought about the ethical side of the issue?

This is a really difficult moment. It cannot be said that all dolphinariums are hells and chlorine prisons, but among them, undoubtedly, there are many prisons and hells. For example, with the dolphinarium, where we filmed bottlenose dolphins, we were lucky. The animals there are happy and friendly - they jump out of the pool towards you, caress you, and demand attention. I think if it had been bad for them there, the program would have been on a different topic and with a different mood.

-Are you doing something to solve the problem?

In Europe, the practice of closed dolphinariums has now been abandoned, and this is a natural formation of a culture of keeping animals. Conditions are improving gradually, although not as quickly as we would like. But believe me, if you visited a menagerie from the 19th century, you would cry for a week. 50 years ago no one knew how to feed or treat dolphins in captivity, but now they breed in dolphinariums and communicate with people. Of course, if the main goal is to make money, people always save to the detriment of all living things around them. But they are used to doing the same towards each other, so it is almost impossible to explain to a businessman that animals must be taken into account. I don't know how to solve this problem. I can say one thing: if we come across poor animal welfare, we definitely focus on this in the blog. For example, we recently spent three weeks filming elephants on Koh Chang Island, and it was just terrible. After all, everything is written on the elephant: you see the face, and there is the whole story of his life. You stand next to him in front of the camera to tell him how the trunk and the shock absorption system work, and at that moment you just want to hug him and cry.

By the way, about hugging. You have already said that people tend to sympathize only with cute animals. Apparently, in order to expand the boundaries of audience tolerance, you often appear on camera with a snake, a praying mantis, or a cockroach. Are there any animals that you don't like?

“A PROGRAM ABOUT ORANGUTANS WAS UNEXPECTEDLY MADE IN KALIMANTAN”

- “Everything is like animals” has been around for two years. How has the blog changed during this time?

For the first programs, the director simply took videos about animals from YouTube (according to the rule of fair use of media materials for educational programs, we are allowed to use other people’s amateur footage), and now we ourselves go to film on location. We were in Indonesia, Kenya, Belovezhskaya Pushcha, Croatia... A moment of spontaneity appeared: a program about orangutans was unexpectedly filmed in Kalimantan. They are very shy, and when we went there, we were sure that at best we would see a red shadow, but in fact the animals almost fell on our heads - in general, that’s what we needed. As a result, we wrote the script on our knees and did everything quickly. Although, in general, the preparation for filming has become much more thorough, and if before I wrote the text in a couple of days, now it sometimes takes me up to several weeks.

- Because the more subscribers a channel has, the greater the responsibility?

Because the more you know, the stronger the feeling that you don’t know enough. During the first videos about the lion or axolotl I had a basic set of knowledge and it was easy for me. But when you take on topics like reciprocal altruism, you bury yourself in such information that out of the entire studied array, perhaps five percent is needed for the plot. I just can’t stop until I dig through everything, because I’m interested and want to see the full picture. Then I send the script to the director, who says: “Well, no one will understand this, but here, of course, is an interesting moment, but not necessary,” and by the time of filming, not even this 5 percent remains.

By the way, another important change: we now have reviewers, and now specialist scientists look at the script before the director. With the same homosexuality, it turned out to be an enchanting story. First I sent a text to Alexander Markov (famous Russian biologist, paleontologist and popularizer of science- approx. ed.), who said “Wow! Well done! Be sure to tell me when it comes out!” I was wildly happy, because there is nothing higher than Markov’s praise, but just in case, I found another reviewer - an animal behavior specialist from the Moscow Zoo, who asked not to give her name. She stands on completely opposite positions, this whole tolerant topic is extremely unpleasant for her, but at the same time she is a responsible scientist who cannot sin against the truth. We corresponded with her for a week, and as a result, some controversial tendentious moments were removed from the plot. At first we had a gross bias towards anti-homophobia, but in the end we ended up with something more or less pretending to be objective.

- Is blogging your main job now?

Yes.

- Then tell me about your schedule.

My director lives in Portugal, so we make the programs on neutral territory. In order not to travel far for one or two programs (although this also happens, for example, in Belarus we made two programs, fed all the mosquitoes and had a wonderful time), we film in pools of 10 programs. First, I write them for several months, then we have a trip, then it’s all edited and published on the channel once every two weeks. We thought about releasing more often, but through testing we found out that each release has its own life cycle - just two weeks. At first it’s fresh, everyone shares the video on their pages and forwards it to friends, and the second week is usually spent on reflection. If you upload a new video earlier, the two videos will stick together, and the viewer will not have time to digest anything.

- Can parallels between people and animals be drawn endlessly? Is there a shortage of topics?

Which one is it! I don't know what to grab. You start to paint some kind of plot, 10 new branches are born.

- Can you tell us about your plans for the upcoming releases?

Well, we're posting Indonesia until August. There will also be manta rays and elephants, a story about methods of self-medication in animals... Probably, as a list, this does not look very interesting, so it’s better to just wait for their release.

“DO IT IN ALL STYLES, THERE IS ENOUGH MONEY!” AS THE MAIN URBAN PLANNING PRINCIPLE OF KAZAN

At a lecture as part of the “Red Pill” series, you said that the family center on the Kazanka embankment reminded you of a collective amoeba...

It is amazing! When amoebas are hungry, they stick together into one large body, shaped like a cup on a leg, and turn into spores in order to wait out difficult times in this form. I saw your registry office and even felt a little jealous: I got married at VDNKh, this is also a temple of all kinds of cultural symbols and fertile totems. I thought my husband and I showed off as much as possible, but after your “Kazan” I realized that this was not the limit ( laughs).

- What other buildings in Kazan surprised you?

The Palace of Farmers and the houses that are located next to it. You look from the other side of the river - absurdity, kitsch and deliberate decorativeness, but when you see it up close, you notice very interesting details. It is all cobbled together from the incongruous: a Gothic turret, under it are shutters from a village house, there are Atlanteans and griffins, antique columns located in an inverted order above each other... All this is cobbled together and looks simply fantastically funny, but I don’t have the language turns to say that this is bad. Moscow is also full of such kitsch, but it is impossible to look at it - everything was done somehow without love. Kazan is generally a very tolerant city; I will again draw a parallel with biology: here lichens, fungi and algae form a harmonious organism. Opposite the main building of your University there is a house that a merchant once built for his bride (Ushkova's house- approx. ed.). It is, of course, made with usedO better taste than the Palace of Farmers, but the trend is the same: our guide said that when the architect asked what style to build in, he was told: “Do it in all of them, there’s enough money!” I understand that this is generally the main urban planning principle here.

The last question is about evolution. What qualities of a modern person do you think are useful for survival and therefore should be fixed at the genetic level?

Probably our ever-increasing humanism and sensitivity towards all living things. Over time, we become more and more correct towards our neighbors - it seems to us that this is not happening very quickly, but believe me, by the standards of evolution, people develop simply With cosmic speed. What should save us is that we gradually become more and more kind, because it seems that we have no more chances.

Evgenia Timonova

Naturalist. Education: Faculty of Biology of TSU, Faculty of Literary Studies and Faculty of Psychology of NSPU. Author and presenter of the program “Everything is like animals” on the YouTube channel and the TV channel “Living Planet”

Actually, I don't like to write columns - I prefer to give lectures so I can see the eyes of living people. It seems like you don't care who you look at when giving a lecture in front of a large audience, but that's actually not the case. I always choose people with bright eyes and speak to them. Light - in the literal sense: gray, blue, green. It has long been noted that light-eyed people, compared to brown-eyed people, have better developed empathy and emotional intelligence: it is easier to establish contact with them, they are more willing to give feedback, they absorb information better and are generally ready for constructive dialogue. Yes, you yourself probably noticed this difference.

And now - pay attention inward. How are you feeling now? Well, except for the awkwardness for a person who was asked to write a popular science article, and he rubs in some kind of nonsense. It really depends on the color of your eyes: if they are dark, then they probably now reflect something similar to resentment, anger and other emotional reactions that signal a violation of ideas about justice. It’s written in them: “What is she talking about?!” If your eyes are light, then you were much less indignant, maybe you weren’t even indignant at all, although you were surprised, of course: “Yes, this is somehow a little strange, but there is something in it...” Surprise is an ephemeral emotion, it passes rapidly, and instead of it confidence appears - at first warm and pliable, but soon it grows stronger: “But in general, yes, it seems like the truth! How did I not notice this before? Although no, I noticed!

Now you are sitting in front of the monitor alone with this strange text, and its author is just a photograph, so you have absolutely nowhere to pour out your emotions. This is why I like giving lectures more than writing columns: the lecture clearly shows how the polarization of the audience occurs at this moment. Without wanting it, brown-eyed people begin to look around in a bad way, looking for someone about whom they can think: “Well, where is emotional intelligence here?! The mug is as dull as an udder!” Blue-eyed people, against the backdrop of a slight feeling of superiority, suddenly notice that brown-eyed people really look at them somehow unempathetically. And I myself, having fallen greatly in the brown eyes of the audience, but having risen in the blue ones, am getting into my hands a tool for manipulating several dozen people I don’t know. The lecture turns into a workshop, and then, with the help of a few simple techniques, you can leave the whole audience wound up and offended at each other and - especially - at me, or you can show the cards and figure out together what is happening.

Because these mechanisms are so deep, powerful and poorly understood, they become an ideal tool for inter-human manipulation.

The need to unite with one group and oppose another is so deeply wired that we don't even realize how much it influences us and the decisions we make. And if there were only one, there is a powerful unconscious basis under human behavior: innate, natural, animal, genetically determined. These are not instincts in their pure form (higher primates, including humans, no longer have them), not a strict prescription or a sentence - they are simply the path of least resistance, the usual paths of the neural circuit, trodden by thousands of generations of our ancestors. Thanks to them, some behavioral patterns are easier for us to learn than others: we fall for some things much more willingly, some things are difficult for us, and some things seem to appear in our heads on their own - like an inner voice.

All these innate psychological blanks, preparations for future behavior, greatly helped us survive in harsh prehistoric times, when there were few brains and many dangers. And now you can derive from them, if not benefit, then at least pleasure. But there is a dark side: because these mechanisms are so deep, powerful and poorly understood, they become an ideal tool for inter-human manipulation. And they are used not only by entertaining lecturers, but also by guys with worse goals.

The need to unite is the most powerful of these mechanisms, both in terms of impact and audience reach. Actually, the ability to unite in large groups is what made us human. For chimpanzees, the limit of a collective is approximately 50 individuals, for ancient humans - already 150, this is called Dunbar's number (the number of permanent social connections that one person can maintain. - Editor's note). A threefold increase in the group was needed in order to defeat another group and capture its resources: territory, food, reproductive females. A couple of million years of such practices have shaped Homo sapiens, a hypersocial species with intense intergroup competition.

Society is everything to us. True, not the whole society at once, but some part of it, that is, “our own”. We have a strong need to single out these “ours” from the endless human mass in order to unite with them. By what criteria it doesn’t matter. It could be family ties, aesthetic tastes, political preferences, language, religion, territory, or even eye color - history has known more absurd reasons. The main thing is to distinguish “us” from “strangers”.

We show devotion to our group through parochial altruism (altruism aimed only at “our own people.” - Note edit.). And we maintain cohesion through aggression towards an out-group, especially when it is located nearby and clearly, the heart senses, is up to no good. An interesting effect arises here: hostility towards strangers makes you treat members of your own group better. I may not have liked them that much before, but now I'm happy to give them my last shirt, and that's just the beginning. Ah, this oxytocin-dopamine (the so-called hormones of happiness. - Note ed.) Dolce et decorum (a line from Horace’s ode “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” in Latin - literally “It is sweet and honorable to die for one’s country.” - Note ed.), the heady euphoria of unity in the face of a common enemy. I want to hug and fight, I want brotherly love, enemy blood! But not because strangers are so bad and our own are so good, but because the ancient mechanisms of my psyche force me to experience all this.

Reflexes protect us from external dangers, and reflection protects us from internal ones.

In fact, any parochial (parochial - parochialism, focus on one’s own group. - Note ed.) a frenzy that unites members of one group against members of another - patriotic, liberal, religious, atheistic, homophobic, revolutionary, fanatical - acts on our psyche like PMS. He doesn’t care about facts, he despises rational arguments and therefore is able to pump you up with emotions so much that if you don’t turn your head on forcibly, then, at any time, you can really kill someone.

But if you understand the nature of what is happening, then it is better to sit, wait, please the world with the bilious maxims “PMS does not spoil the mood, it simply organizes events in the worst possible way” - and everything will pass. Reflexes protect us from external dangers, and reflection protects us from internal ones. People who are aware of what is really happening to them are less likely to commit actions that they have to regret, they are less susceptible to manipulation, they are not eager to cause good and punish evil, they are resistant to propaganda... they are only much less common. Although their number is growing: slowly in terms of human life, but very quickly in terms of evolution.

Parochial complex “devotion to one’s own ft. aggression towards strangers” is an ancient mechanism. It was not invented by us, not by our Paleolithic ancestors, and not even by the monkeys from whom they descended. It works in all social animals: dogs, rats, crows. Even in fish. Place a mirror in front of a male stickleback and he will become exhausted defending his territory from his reflection. But if you put another mirror on the side, he'll perk up again to see some nice guy fighting shoulder to shoulder with him.

This is completely normal for a stickleback - after all, it is just a fish without much self-awareness. Self-awareness appears only in some higher animals, which are able to recognize themselves in the mirror. In humans, this occurs at the age of about two years and persists throughout life, although the battles in the comments below show that adults sometimes completely lose the ability to recognize themselves in the mirror, apparently along with self-awareness. And here is the time to remind you that the eyes are also a mirror. Both yours and your opponent's - both brown and blue. Let's look at them more often and try to recognize ourselves in what we see every time.