It can be quite hard to understand that emotions play a fundamental role in our evolutionary biology. This is mainly because emotional science historically focused on the negative aspects of emotions such as anger and fear. Dacher Keltner paid a second visit to the podcast with the publication of his excellent new book Awe. We have difficult emotions which cause us all kinds of problems, but they can also be seen in a prosocial, evolutionary light. Fear and anger can help to save us in a life threatening situation. Love, friendship and wonderment, or as Dacher calls it, awe, help to bind us hu ..read more

Training in science is built on theory and evidence. The hope is that scientific theory turns into reproduceable results. In the case of medicine, finding evidence is the search for the holy grail. Bu the ivory towers of academic practice often do not sit easily in the muddy waters of the world of day to day clinical medicine. Our guests today found a different way of helping people with life limiting illness through finding ways of communicating outside of the clinical setting.  Dr Sammy Winemaker, Associate Clinical Professor in Family Medicine at McMaster University, Canada. She is a p ..read more

The themes of belonging, community and urban regeneration, well known to the listeners of Survival of the Kindest Podcast, are central to the work of this week’s guest, Dr Sophie Yarker, recommended by Dr Simon Lennane. Sophie is a Research Fellow based in the Manchester Institute for Collaborative Research on Ageing, working on the Ageing in Place in Cities project. She has a PhD in Human Geography which looked at the nature and extent of local belonging and attachment to place in the context of urban regeneration. Her research interests are around how we can build more inclusive urban neighb ..read more

Carey Sipp To be fully present, to make best use of the incredible potential we all possess, to make the most of what it is to be human, we need a deep sense of belonging and connection. This is something that arises out of our family, our friends and our community. Too often, the development of these deep trusting relationships is marred by traumatic experiences of childhood. But these experiences do not define the people who have them. None of us want to be judged by anything other than the best parts of ourselves. People with adverse childhood experiences are not defined by them. Carey Sipp ..read more

Neil Mantel is a very old friend, not just that he is ancient like me, but we have known each other for nearly 40 years. We met on bleary eyed walks in the early morning around the hills of the village where we lived, having both been woken up by young babies far to early, taking the opportunity to give our respective partners a break at the same time as walking the dogs.  Neil was a school teacher, and an extraordinary one at that. I know he was a great teacher because my 3 children all passed through his classroom. Inspired by the remarkable educator Ken Robinson, his path to being a te ..read more

60: Kristoffer Robin Haug - Big Problems, Easy to Solve - Green Politics in Norway "It’s hard in Norway, and this may be because we get so much of our national money from oil and gas. There's an expression; never expect a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding." Norwegian Green Party politician Kristoffer Robin takes Julian through where Green Politics is at this moment in time, and where he thinks it is pointing. Having grown from scientists who have seen and fully understood the situation we are in as a species, and as a planet, Green parties have often ..read more

63: Dr Rod Gritten - Part of Nature "We're part of nature, we're all nature and we've done a damn good job of trying to get away from that." This week Julian talks to ecologist Dr Rod Gritten, the former Head of Ecology of Snowdonia National Park. Since becoming enthralled with spiders as a young boy, Rod has always been invested and connected in the environment and the ecosystem. He has a deep understanding of how it is now, how it could be, and how human health is deeply connected to the health of nature. Despite the impressively gloomy outlook for our environment, this conversation is posit ..read more

53: MINI SERIES - Ep 2 of 3: How and Why Social Health Impacts Disease ''How the world we live in, the things around us, the things in our head, the people around us, how all of that kind of stuff gets into our bodies and changes the way the genome functions'' In part two of our mini series focusing on how and why social health impacts disease Julian talks to Prof Steve Cole about how stress, isolation and its associated living conditions, has a cellular level impact on our bodies. Having discovered in his some of his earliest research that gay men with HIV in the closet were getting sick and ..read more

57: Lisa Keefauver - Holding Space and Bearing Witness "I think we are craving in our pain a way to feel less alone. And sometimes that can't come from the people closest to us because they're in pain too." CW Rape Our guest this week, Lisa Keefauver, is a grief and empathy expert. In this extraordinarily tender and moving podcast Lisa talks to Julian about her career and her life which have led her to her current work now, educating people on how to be there for those in grief, and how as a society we can better accommodate those who are grieving. Follow Survival of the Kindest on Twitte ..read more

47: Dr Saul Ebema - An Agent of Light ''I longed for a sense of community, for people you can talk to, for people you can dream with and try to figure out this thing called life.'' Dr Saul Ebema is someone who stays with you long after you have heard him talk. The work that he does now is enough of an accolade to make him an inspirational person; as a hospital chaplain completing his PhD in meaning making at end of life, he realised that there wasn’t enough out there for chaplains, and no place to share what they knew. What he started then has now grown into a movement which is educating every ..read more