In the wake of the this year’s World Science Festival, which took place at the beginning of June in New York City, Robert Lamb, host of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind Podcast has posted a series of interviews he conducted with some of the speakers at this year’s festival, including anthropologist Barbara J. King, whose research focuses on animal emotion and cognition, as do her many books, including How Animals Grieve, Personalities on the Plate, and her latest, Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion, Expanded Edition.

For the festival, King participated in a panel moderated by physicist Brian Greene exploring the evolutionary origins of religious thought in human beings and other primates titled “The Believing Brain: Evolution, Neuroscience, and the Spiritual Instinct.”

In the interview Lamb revisits the topics discussed in the panel, exploring the vital function that religious or spiritual thought has played in the development of primate social interactions, from apes to people. The conversation with King starts about 53 minutes in, but the other interviews are interesting as well and segue nicely into King’s discussion.

Check it out on the Stuff to Blow Your Mind website or find out more about Barbara J. King’s books on the Press website.

For more than half a decade King has also contributed to NPR’s 13.7 Cosmos and Culture blog, which was unfortunately decommissioned recently, but not before King had a chance to post a round up of her ten favorite contributions over the years, which are still available on the NPR website.

You can also follow her on Twitter @bjkingape.