Frans De Waal Quotes

[ ... ] the best guarantee for world peace would be an extraterrestrial enemy.

Being both more systematically brutal than chimps and more empathetic than
bonobos, we are by far the most bipolar ape. Our societies are never completely peaceful, never completely competitive, never ruled by sheer selfishness, and never perfectly moral.

Popular culture bombards us with examples of animals being humanized for all sorts of purposes, ranging from education to entertainment to satire to propaganda. Walt Disney, for example, made us forget that Mickey is a mouse, and Donald a duck. George Orwell laid a cover of human societal ills over a population of livestock.

Male chimpanzees have an extraordinarily strong drive for dominance. They're constantly jockeying for position.

Harold Laswell's famous definition of politics as a social process determining "who gets what, when, and how," there can be little doubt that chimpanzees engage in it. Since in both humans and their closest relatives the process involves bluff, coalitions, and isolation tactics, a common terminology is warranted.

If you look at national economies today, for example, the American economy, the European economy, the Indians, the Chinese, we're all tied together. If one of them sinks, the rest are going to sink with them and if one floats, the rest are lifted up. I find that very interesting.

What is the largest land mammal doing with three times as many neurons as our own species?

If I were God, I'd work on the reach of empathy.

Sometimes I read about someone saying with great authority that animals have no intentions and no feelings, and I wonder, 'Doesn't this guy have a dog?'

Not unlike Lorenz's emphasis on knowing the whole animal, Imanishi urged us to empathize with the species under study. We need to get under its skin, he said, or as we would nowadays put it, try to enter its Umwelt.

Moreover, not unlike presidential candidates who hold babies up in the air as soon as the cameras are rolling, male chimps vying for power develop a sudden interest in infants, which they hold and tickle in order

Dog owners who stare into their pet's eyes experience a rapid increase in oxytocin - a neuropeptide involved in attachment and bonding. Exchanging gazes full of empathy and trust, we enjoy a special relationship with the dog.42

Very long ago our ancestors had moral systems. Our current institutions are only a couple of thousand years old, which is really not old in the eyes of a biologist.

The more self-aware an animal is, the more empathetic it tends to be.

Why not assume that our humanity, including the self-control needed for livable societies, is built into us? Does anyone truly believe that our ancestors lacked social norms before they had religion? Did they never assist others in need, or complain about an unfair deal? Humans must have worried about the functioning of their communities well before the current religions arose, which is only a few thousand years ago.

Humans became easy prey when they moved from the forest to the savanna, which deprived them of the option of climbing trees to flee predators. This shift made it necessary for the men to actively protect the women and their babies. Only as a result of this protection were women able to give birth in shorter intervals, perhaps once every two or three years. This meant that they could produce offspring about twice as frequently as apes. I would be willing to bet that this rapid reproduction is one of the reasons why we dominate the world today, and not the apes.

Lorenz was the charismatic, flamboyant thinker - he didn't conduct a single statistical analysis in his life - while Tinbergen did the nitty-gritty of actual data collection.

Experiments with animals have long been handicapped by our anthropocentric attitude: We often test them in ways that work fine with humans but not so well with other species.

We have a tendency to describe the human condition in lofty terms, such as a quest for freedom or striving for a virtuous life, but the life sciences hold a more mundane view: It's all about security, social companionships, and a full belly. There is obvious tension between both views, which recalls that famous dinner conversation between a Russian literary critic and the writer Ivan Turgenev: 'We haven't yet solved the problem of God,' the critic yelled, 'and you want to eat!

Status competition and the opportunistic making and breaking of alliances that marks political strife. For this, we have to go to the males, also in the elephant. For

The whole reason people fill their homes with furry carnivores and not with, say, iguanas and turtles, is because mammals offer something no reptile ever will. They give affection, they want affection, and respond to our emotions the way we do to theirs.

If you want to design a successful human society, you need to know what kind of animal we are. Are we a social animal or a selfish animal? Do we respond better when we're solitary or living in a group?

He prefers to point with a stick and will go out of his way to bring one with him, thus anticipating our test and his self-invented need for a tool. But

If you are a cooperative animal, you need to watch what you get. If you, or even a whole community, invest in something but then a few individuals receive a much larger return, it's not a good arrangement. If it happens consistently, it's time to look for an arrangement that is more beneficial. That's why we're so sensitive to how rewards are being divided.

The fact that the apes exist and that we can study them is extremely important and makes us reflect on ourselves and our human nature. In that sense alone, you need to protect the apes.

We are so logic-driven that we can't stand the absence of it.

Female bonobos form a strong sisterhood. They rule through female solidarity.

American naturalist William Morton Wheeler made the English term popular as the study of "habits and instincts."11

The role of inequity in society is grossly underestimated. Inequity is not good for your health, basically.

If you ask anyone, what is morality based on? These are the two factors that always come out: One is reciprocity, ... a sense of fairness, and the other one is empathy and compassion.

There has been so much underestimating of animal cognition that to perhaps overestimate it, as I probably do, is probably a healthy reaction.

Most men probably wouldn't want to live the lives of bonobos. They're constantly clinging to their mothers' apron strings. They lack the ability to make decisions about their own fates, something that we and male chimpanzees practically consider our birthright.

The common argument that men are naturally polygamous and women naturally monogamous is as full of holes as Swiss cheese.

Would anyone test the memory of human children by throwing them into a swimming pool to see if they remember where to get out? Yet

[T]he term 'nonhuman' grates on me, since it lumps millions of species together by an absence, as if they were missing something. Poor things, they are nonhuman! When students embrace this jargon in their writing, I cannot resist sarcastic corrections in the margin saying that for completeness's sake, they should add that the animals they are talking about are also nonpenguin, nonhyena, and a whole lot more.

Competitiveness is just as much a part of our nature as empathy. The ideal, in my view, is a democratic system with a social market economy, because it takes both tendencies into account.

We would much rather blame nature for what we don't like in ourselves than credit it for what we do like.

There are many reasons for kindness, and religion is just one of them.

Such cases deserve attention since they show that apes do not have to be prompted by experimental conditions concocted by us humans to plan for the future. They do so of their own accord.

A species's cognition is generally as good as what it needs for its survival.

Exclusive homosexuality is not very common in nature.

We need to separate the process of evolution - which is, indeed, a self-serving process - and the actual motivations of animals.

Many economists are great believers in the idea that everything in nature is competitive and that we should set up a society which is competitive to reflect that. Anyone who cannot keep up, well, too bad.

Ultimately these battles are about females, which means that the fundamental difference between our two closest relatives is that one resolves sexual issues with power, while the other resolves power issues with sex.

When we see a disciplined society, there is often a social hierarchy behind it. This hierarchy, which determines who can eat or mate first, is ultimately rooted in violence.

The development of family entities enables men to cooperate far more effectively. Instead of constantly competing for the women with other men, each man essentially has a partner assigned to him, one with whom he can establish a family.

Empathy probably started out as a mechanism to improve maternal care. Mammalian mothers who were attentive to their young's needs were more likely to rear successful offspring.

In other words, what is salient to us - such as our own facial features - may not be salient to other species.

Chimps don't have language. Humans actively instruct others about how things should be done. Chimpanzees probably pick up cultural traditions by observation.

On August 16, 1996, when an eight-year-old female gorilla named Binti Jua helped a three-year-old boy who had fallen eighteen feet into the primate exhibit at Chicago's Brookfield Zoo. Reacting immediately, Binti scooped up the boy and carried him to safety. She sat down on a log in a stream, cradling the boy in her lap, giving him a few gentle back pats before taking him to the waiting zoo staff. This simple act of sympathy, captured on video and shown around the world, touched many hearts, and Binti was hailed as a heroine. It was the first time in U.S. history that an ape figured in the speeches of leading politicians, who held her up as a model of compassion.

It is hard to get animals which normally pay little attention to each other to do things together. One can teach dolphins to jump simultaneously out of the water precisely because they show similar behavior spontaneously, but try to make two domestic cats jump together and you will fail.

Why should caring for others begin with the self? There is an abundance of rather vague ideas about this issue, which I am sure neuroscience will one day resolve. Let me offer my own "hand waving" explanation by saying that advanced empathy requires both mental mirroring and mental separation. The mirroring allows the sight of another person in a particular emotional state to induce a similar state in us. We literally feel their pain, loss, delight, disgust, etc., through so-called shared representations. Neuroimaging shows that our brains are similarly activated as those of people we identify with. This is an ancient mechanism: It is automatic, starts early in life, and probably characterizes all mammals. But we go beyond this, and this is where mental separation comes in. We parse our own state from the other's. Otherwise, we would be like the toddler who cries when she hears another cry but fails to distinguish her own distress from the other's. How could she care for the other if she can't even tell where her feelings are coming from? In the words of psychologist Daniel Goleman, "Self-absorption kills empathy." The child needs to disentangle herself from the other so as to pinpoint the actual source of her feelings.

I was raised Catholic. Not just a little bit Catholic, like my wife, Catherine. When she was young, many Catholics in France already barely went to church, except for the big three: baptism, marriage, and funeral. And only the middle one was by choice.

Their earlier poor performance had had more to do with the way they were tested than with their mental powers. Elephants

The thinking is that we started evolving language not by speaking but by gesturing.

As far as the environment is concerned, I am becoming pessimistic because I do not see anybody stepping up and taking the long view approach. It seems like we're stuck in a tragedy of the commons where everyone is trying to contribute as little as possible to get out of this situation.

In every language, labels for adulterous women are far worse than those for similarly adventurous men. When a woman is a "a slut," a man is merely a skirt chaser.

Cognition is the mental transformation of sensory input into knowledge about the environment and the flexible application of this knowledge.

Deep down, creationists realize they will never win factual arguments with science. This is why they have construed their own science-like universe, known as Intelligent Design, and eagerly jump on every tidbit of information that seems to go their way.

There's actually a lot of evidence in primates and other animals that they return favors.

The eyeless tick climbs onto a grass stem to await the smell of butyric acid emanating from mammalian skin. Since experiments have shown that this arachnid can go for eighteen years without food, the tick has ample time to meet a mammal, drop onto her victim, and gorge herself on warm blood. Afterward she is ready to lay her eggs and die.

While the matriarch operates on the basis of knowledge, the rest of the herd operates on the basis of trust.

Personally, I think it is possible to build a society that is moral on a nonreligious basis, but the jury is still out on that.

Charles Darwin himself had written a whole tome about the parallels between human and animal emotional expressions.

Humanity is actually much more cooperative and empathic than [it's] given credit for.

They were generally run by young men who mocked authority and preached egalitarianism yet had no qualms about ordering everyone else around and stealing their comrades' girlfriends.

Of amazing intelligence, they learn quickly and remember easily with few repetitions. There is often an uncanny understanding of what is wanted and needed of them at any given time. Bred to love people, they bond very tightly to their owners.24 Instead

One aspect we might focus on during this moratorium is an alternative to overly cerebral approaches.

Typically, the young male spreads his legs to show his erection - a sexual invitation - making sure that his back is turned to the other males or that, with his underarm leaning on his knee, one of his hands loosely dangles right next to his penis so that only the wooed female can see

En route to such trees and get up before dawn, something they normally hate to do.

Along with people in other creative professions, such as artists and musicians, many scientists experience this transcendence. I do so every day. For one, it's impossible to look an ape in the eye and not see oneself. There are other animals with frontally oriented eyes, but none that give you the shock of recognitions of the ape's. Looking back at you is not so much an animal but a personality as solid and willful as yourself.

I'm personally a nonbeliever, so I'm struggling with if we really need religion.

Our northern brethren buried their dead, were skilled toolmakers, kept fires going, and took care of the infirm just like early humans. The fossil record shows survival into adulthood of individuals afflicted with dwarfism, paralysis of the limbs, or the inability to chew. Going by exotic names such as Shanidar I, Romito 2, the Windover Boy, and the Old Man of La Chapelle-aux-Saints, our ancestors supported individuals who contributed little to society. Survival of the weak, the handicapped, the mentally retarded, and others who posed a burden is seen by paleontologists as a milestone in the evolution of compassion. This communitarian heritage is crucial in relation to this book's theme, since it suggests that morality predates current civilizations and religions by at least a hundred millennia.

You should know as much as you can about the human species if you have a hand in designing human society.

One can take the ape out of the jungle, but not the jungle out of the ape.

We start out postulating sharp boundaries, such as between humans and apes, or between apes and monkeys, but are in fact dealing with sand castles that lose much of their structure when the sea of knowledge washes over them. They turn into hills, leveled ever more, until we are back to where evolutionary theory always leads us: a gently sloping beach.

It seems safe to say that apes know about death, such as that is different from life and permanent. The same may apply to a few other animals, such as elephants, which pick up ivory or bones of a dead herd member, holding the pieces in their trunks and passing them around. Some pachyderms return for years to the spot where a relative died, only to touch and inspect the relics. Do they miss each other? Do they recall how he or she was during life?

Sociobiology, E. O. Wilson

The sturdiest pillars of human morality are compassion and a sense of justice.

Very ancient parts of the brain are involved in moral decision making.

Our societies probably work best if they mimic as closely as possible the small-scale communities of our ancestors. We certainly did not evolve to live in cities with millions of people where we bump into strangers everyone we go, are threatened by them in dark streets, sit next to them in the bus, and give them the finger in traffic jams.

Are we open-minded enough to assume that other species have a mental life? Are we creative enough to investigate it? Can we tease apart the roles of attention, motivation, and cognition? Those three are involved in everything animals do; hence poor performance can be explained by any one of them.

I think we need to start thinking about grounding our moral systems in our biology.

Having spent all my life among academics, I can tell you that hearing how wrong they area is about as high on their priority list as finding a cockroach in their coffee. The typical scientist has made an interesting discovery early on in his or her career, followed by a lifetime of making sure that everyone else admires his or her contribution and that no one questions it. There is no poorer company than an aging scientist who has failed to achieve these objectives.

Animals should be given a chance to express their natural behavior.

We justify the inequalities by saying some people are just better and smarter than others and the strong should survive and the poor can die off.

If there is any form of contagion that is adaptive, it is the immediate response to the fear of others. If others are fearful, there may be good reason for you to be fearful too.

So, don't believe anyone who says that since nature is based on a struggle for life, we need to live like this as well. Many animals survive not by eliminating each other or keeping everything for themselves, but by cooperating and sharing. This applies most definitely to pack hunters, such as wolves or killer whales, but also to our closest relatives, the primates.

To endow animals with human emotions has long been a scientific taboo. But if we do not, we risk missing something fundamental, about both animals and us.

The term 'alpha female' originated in my field of animal behavior, but has acquired new meaning. It refers to women who are in charge, for example, by flirting and dating on their own terms. It is also used maliciously for a loud-mouthed, controlling woman who has no patience with deviating opinions.

Studies of reconciliation in primates have demonstrated that if the relationship value increases between two parties they are more willing to make peace.

Socialism cannot function, because its economic reward structure is contrary to human nature.

Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously gave us the 'God is dead' phrase was interested in the sources of morality. He warned that the emergence of something (whether an organ, a legal institution, or a religious ritual) is never to be confused with its acquired purpose: 'Anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose.'

This is a liberating thought, which teaches us to never hold the history of something against its possible applications. Even if computers started out as calculators, that doesn't prevent us from playing games on them. (47) (quoting Nietzsche, the Genealogy of Morals)

Male bonobos really don't fit the human male ideal.

Our brains have been designed to blur the line between self and other. It is an ancient neural circuitry that marks every mammal, from mouse to elephant.

Conventions are often surrounded with the solemn language of morality, but in fact they have little to do with it.

In a world divided by chimpophiles and bonobophiles, we all had a good laugh when Stephen peeled his banana. (62)

This is more like the scientists I know. Authority outweighs evidence, at least for as long as the authority lives.

The label derives from comparative psychology, the name of a field that traditionally has viewed animals as mere stand-ins for humans: a monkey is a simplified human, a rat a simplified monkey, and so

Even the staunchest atheist growing up in Western society cannot avoid having absorbed the basic tenets of Christian morality. Our societies are steeped in it: everything we have accomplished over the centuries, even science, developed either hand in hand with or in opposition to religion, but never separately. It is impossible to know what morality would look like without religion. It would require a visit to a human culture that is not now and never was religious. That such cultures do not exist should give us pause.