Frans De Waal Quotes & Sayings

In 1952 the father of Japanese primatology, Kinji Imanishi, first — Frans De Waal

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! — Frans De Waal

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

When humans behave murderously, such as inflicting senseless slaughter of innocents in warfare, we like to blame it on some dark, 'animalistic' instinct. — Frans De Waal

I was born in Den Bosch, where the painter Hieronymus Bosch named himself after. And so I've always been very fond of this painter who lived and worked in the 15th century. — Frans De Waal

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

The hamadryas baboon is a harem holder where one male mates with multiple females. — Frans De Waal

In fact, it has been proposed that absolute neuron count, regardless of brain or body size, best predicts a species' mental powers.61 — Frans De Waal

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

Sultan would first jump or throw things at the banana or drag humans by the hand toward it in the hope that they'd help him out, or at least be willing to serve as a footstool. — Frans De Waal

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. — Frans De Waal

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. — Frans De Waal

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. — Frans De Waal

To neglect the common ground with other primates, and to deny the evolutionary roots of human morality, would be like arriving at the top of a tower to declare that the rest of the building is irrelevant, that the precious concept of "tower" ought to be reserved for the summit. — Frans De Waal

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. — Frans De Waal

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. — Frans De Waal

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

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

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. — Frans De Waal

If you look at human society, it is very easy, of course, to compare our warfare and territoriality with the chimpanzee. But that's only one side of what we do. We also trade, we intermarry, we allow each other to travel through our territory. There's an enormous amount of cooperation. — Frans De Waal

In other words, both macaques and rats volunteer for tests only when they feel confident, suggesting that they know their own knowledge. — Frans De Waal

I think we need to start thinking about grounding our moral systems in our biology. — Frans De Waal

Religion looms as large as an elephant in the United States, to the point that being nonreligious is about the biggest handicap a politician running for office can have, bigger than being gay, unmarried, thrice married, or black. — Frans De Waal

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

One can train dolphins to jump synchronously because they do so in the wild, and one can teach horses to run together at the same pace because wild horses do the same. — Frans De Waal

There are so many ways to account for negative outcomes that it is safer to doubt one's methods before doubting one's subjects. — Frans De Waal

War is evitable if conditions are such that the costs of making war are higher than the benefits. — Frans De Waal

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. — Frans De Waal

Ernst Mayr characterized the Cartesian view of animals as dumb automatons.2 — Frans De Waal

Armies are a purely human invention. Most soldiers who go to war nowadays don't even do it because they're inherently aggressive. — Frans De Waal

Human morality is unthinkable without empathy. — Frans De Waal

Darwin wasn't just provocative in saying that we descend from the apes - he didn't go far enough. We are apes in every way, from our long arms and tailless bodies to our habits and temperament. — Frans De Waal

Cognitive evolution is marked by many peaks of specialization. The ecology of each species is key. The — Frans De Waal

The evolutionary struggle for survival is really a self-serving series of blows and stabs, and yet it can lead to extremely social animals like dolphins, wolves or, for that matter, primates. — Frans De Waal

Empathy as a complex emotion is different. It requires awareness of the other person's feelings and of one's own reactions. The appropriate reaction may not be to cry when another person cries, but to reassure them, or even to leave them alone. — Frans De Waal

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. — Frans De Waal

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. — Frans De Waal

One can take the ape out of the jungle, but not the jungle out of the ape. — Frans De Waal

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

Chimps cannot tell us anything about peaceful relations, because chimps have only different degrees of hostility between communities. Whereas bonobos do tell us something; they tell us about the possibility of having peaceful relationships. — Frans De Waal

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. — Frans De Waal

Scientists are supposed to study animals in a totally objective fashion, similar to the way we inspect a rock or measure the circumference of a tree trunk. Emotions are not to interfere with the assessment. The animal-rights movement capitalizes on this perception, depicting scientists as devoid of compassion. — Frans De Waal

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. — Frans De Waal

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. — Frans De Waal

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. — Frans De Waal

Animals should be given a chance to express their natural behavior. — Frans De Waal

There are beautiful examples of art done by chimpanzees in human care. — Frans De Waal

We are born with impulses that draw us to others and that later in life make us care about them. — Frans De Waal

Very ancient parts of the brain are involved in moral decision making. — Frans De Waal

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. — Frans De Waal

If one bird foraging in a flock on the ground suddenly takes off, all other birds will take off immediately after, before they even know what's going on. The one who stays behind may be prey. — Frans De Waal

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. — Frans De Waal

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. — Frans De Waal

Unlike the primate hand, the elephant's grasping organ is also its nose. Elephants use their trunks not only to reach food but also to sniff and touch it. With their unparalleled sense of smell, the animals know exactly what they are going for. Vision is secondary. — Frans De Waal

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

When we are bad, we are worse than any primate that I know. And when we are good, we are actually better and more altruistic than any primate that I know. — Frans De Waal

Imagine you're a writer, and you have decided to offer your readers a firsthand account of the politically correct primate, the idol of the left, known for its "gay" relations, female supremacy, and pacific lifestyle. Your focus is the bonobo: a close relation of the chimpanzee. You — Frans De Waal

Bonobo studies started in the '70s and came to fruition in the '80s. Then in the '90s, all of a sudden, boom, they ended because of the warfare in the Congo. It was really bad for the bonobo and ironic that people with their warfare were preventing us from studying the hippies of the primate world. — Frans De Waal

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. — Frans De Waal

Socialism cannot function, because its economic reward structure is contrary to human nature. — Frans De Waal

Werner Heisenberg put it, "what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." Heisenberg, a German physicist, made this observation regarding quantum mechanics, but it holds equally true for explorations of the animal — Frans De Waal

Females avoid conflict. They are afraid of violence. The males, on the other hand, are less averse to strife. But once conflict breaks out, the males are much better at reconciling. In a study done in Finland, children who had quarreled were asked how much longer they intended to be angry at one another. The boys proudly said: "Oh, at least one or two days." The girls said "forever". — Frans De Waal

Female bonobos form a strong sisterhood. They rule through female solidarity. — Frans De Waal

Denmark has incredibly low crime rates, and parents feel that what a child needs most is frisk luft, or fresh air. The — Frans De Waal

In the same way that humans have a "handy" intelligence, which we share with other primates, elephants may have a "trunky" one. There — Frans De Waal

If two closely related species act the same under similar circumstances, the mental processes behind their behavior are likely the same, too. The alternative would be to postulate that, in the short time since they diverged, both species evolved different ways of generating the same behavior. — Frans De Waal

The initial animosity between divergent approaches can be overcome if we realize that each has something to offer that the other lacks. We may weave them together into a new whole that is stronger than the sum of its parts. — Frans De Waal

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. — Frans De Waal

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? — Frans De Waal

It wasn't God who introduced us to morality; rather, it was the other way around. God was put into place to help us live the way we felt we ought to. — Frans De Waal

Human reflection is chronically overrated, though, and we now suspect that our own reaction to food poisoning is in fact similar to that of rats. Garcia's findings forced comparative psychology to admit that evolution pushes cognition around, adapting it to the organism's needs. — Frans De Waal

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. — Frans De Waal

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. — Frans De Waal

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

One cannot master set research tasks if one makes a single part the focus of interest. One must, rather, continuously dart from one part to another - in a way that appears extremely flighty and unscientific to some thinkers who place value on strictly logical sequences - and one's knowledge of each of the parts must advance at the same pace.15 The — Frans De Waal

I felt like a toilet frog during the last three decades of the preceding century. (38) — Frans De Waal

I sometimes try to imagine what would have happened if we'd known the bonobo first and the chimpanzee only later - or not at all. The discussion about human evolution might not revolve as much around violence, warfare and male dominance, but rather around sexuality, empathy, caring and cooperation. What a different intellectual landscape we would occupy! — Frans De Waal

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. — Frans De Waal

Chimpanzees, typically, kiss and embrace after fights. They first make eye contact from a distance to see the mood of the others. Then they approach and kiss and embrace. — Frans De Waal

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. — Frans De Waal

Drosophila has long been our main workhorse in genetics, yielding insight in the relation between chromosomes and genes. — Frans De Waal

Dogmatists have one advantage: they are poor listeners. — Frans De Waal

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. — Frans De Waal

The enemy of science is not religion ... The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma. — Frans De Waal

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 — Frans De Waal

If faith makes people buy an entire package of myths and values without asking too many questions, scientists are only slightly better. — Frans De Waal

In Africa, we have the bush meat trade, which means that, on a very large scale, animals are being killed in the forests and sold in the cities as a luxury food. — Frans De Waal

Sociobiology, E. O. Wilson — Frans De Waal

There's a long tradition in Western thought that humans are not shackled by biology, whereas animals are pure instinct machines. — Frans De Waal

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. — Frans De Waal

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

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

But surely the simplicity of an explanation is no necessary criterion of its truth.17 — Frans De Waal

A chimpanzee who is really gearing up for a fight doesn't waste time with gestures but just goes ahead and attacks. — Frans De Waal

Ethology's focus was on behavior that develops naturally in all members of a given species. — Frans De Waal

Religions have a strong binding function and a cohesive element. They emphasize the primacy of the community as opposed to the individual, and they also help set one community apart from another that doesn't share their beliefs. — Frans De Waal

Rather than reflecting an immutable human nature, morals are closely tied to the way we organize ourselves. — Frans De Waal

Closeness to animals creates the desire to understand them, and not just a little piece of them, but the whole animal. It makes us wonder what goes on in their heads even though we fully realize that the answer can only be approximated. — Frans De Waal

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

Future benefits rarely figure in the minds of animals. — Frans De Waal