Apes and dolphins: primates and cetaceans. Could any creatures appear to be more different? Yet both are large-brained intelligent mammals with complex communication and social interaction. In the first book to study apes and dolphins side by side, Maddalena Bearzi and Craig B. Stanford, a dolphin biologist and a primatologist who have spent their careers studying these animals in the wild, combine their insights with compelling results. Beautiful Minds explains how and why apes and dolphins are so distantly related yet so cognitively alike and what this teaches us about another large-brained mammal: Homo sapiens.

Noting that apes and dolphins have had no common ancestor in nearly 100 million years, Bearzi and Stanford describe the parallel evolution that gave rise to their intelligence. And they closely observe that intelligence in action. The authors detail their subjects’ ability to develop family bonds, form alliances, and care for their young. They offer an understanding of their culture, politics, social structure, personality, and capacity for emotion.

Maddalena Bearzi is the President and co-founder of the Ocean Conservation Society, Director of the Los Angeles Dolphin Project and is a visiting scholar in the Departments of Anthropology and Biological Sciences, at UCLA. She holds a BS degree from University of Padova, Italy and a Ph.D. in Biology from UCLA. Maddalena has studied dolphins and whales and other animals in many parts of the world; her main focus at the moment is on dolphins and other marine creatures in the Santa Monica Bay and nearshore Southern California waters.

Visit Maddalena’s website and the Beautiful Minds website.

Copies of “Beautiful Minds” will be sold at the event.

The Beckman Institute Auditorium is at 400 S. Wilson Ave., Pasadena (Between Del Mar and California).

Parking is free after 5 p.m. in Parking Structures 1 and 2 on the west side of Wilson Ave.

The Beckman Institute is building 74 on the Caltech interactive map.