Top 100 Frans De Waal Quotes
#1. I think there's some evidence that we're empathic by nature. There is some evidence from studies of babies and young children that they resonate with the pain of others, and there's some work by Frans de Waal that other primates also resonate with the pain of others.
Paul Bloom
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
Frans De Waal
#6. 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
#7. True empathy is not self-focused but other-oriented. Instead of making humanity the measure of all things, we need to evaluate other species by what they are.
Frans De Waal
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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.
Frans De Waal
#11. 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
#12. The kingmaker. He regained both prestige and fresh mating opportunities.
Frans De Waal
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. In humans, the family prevents infanticide. Next to language, the core family, consisting of a mother, a father and children, is the greatest difference between us and other primates.
Frans De Waal
#16. 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
#17. In 1952 the father of Japanese primatology, Kinji Imanishi, first
Frans De Waal
#18. Perhaps it's just me, but I am wary of any persons whose belief system is the only thing standing between them and repulsive behavior.
Frans De Waal
#19. In a world divided by chimpophiles and bonobophiles, we all had a good laugh when Stephen peeled his banana. (62)
Frans De Waal
#20. What is the largest land mammal doing with three times as many neurons as our own species?
Frans De Waal
#21. 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.
Frans De Waal
#22. But those stories inspire observations and experiments that do help us sort out what's going on. The science fiction novelist Isaac Asimov reportedly once said, "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny.
Frans De Waal
#23. There has been so much underestimating of animal cognition that to perhaps overestimate it, as I probably do, is probably a healthy reaction.
Frans De Waal
#24. 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
#25. Ernst Mayr characterized the Cartesian view of animals as dumb automatons.2
Frans De Waal
#26. 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
#27. This suggests that for our species, too, the cerebellum is critically important.63
Frans De Waal
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. The more self-aware an animal is, the more empathetic it tends to be.
Frans De Waal
#31. Ethology's focus was on behavior that develops naturally in all members of a given species.
Frans De Waal
#32. I consider dogmatism a far greater threat than religion per se.
Frans De Waal
#33. Below I describe two examples, one concerning self-awareness and the other culture, both concepts that, whenever mentioned in relation to animals, still send some scholars through the roof. Armchair
Frans De Waal
#34. Cognition is the mental transformation of sensory input into knowledge about the environment and the flexible application of this knowledge.
Frans De Waal
#35. I think we need to start thinking about grounding our moral systems in our biology.
Frans De Waal
#36. One can take the ape out of the jungle, but not the jungle out of the ape.
Frans De Waal
#37. 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.
Frans De Waal
#38. 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
#39. Dogmatists have one advantage: they are poor listeners.
Frans De Waal
#40. One aspect we might focus on during this moratorium is an alternative to overly cerebral approaches.
Frans De Waal
#41. 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
#42. There are beautiful examples of art done by chimpanzees in human care.
Frans De Waal
#43. 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
#45. Male bonobos really don't fit the human male ideal.
Frans De Waal
#46. Food-deprived chickens that were not particularly good at noticing the finer distinctions of a maze task.5
Frans De Waal
#47. Jolted by a twentyfold increase in testosterone, a bull changes into a sort of spinach-eating Popeye, a self-confident jerk ready to fight anyone in his path.
Frans De Waal
#48. 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.
Frans De Waal
#49. I am personally not against keeping animals at zoos, as they serve a huge educational purpose, but treating them well and with respect seems the least we could do, and with 'we' I mean not just zoo staff, but most certainly also the public.
Frans De Waal
#50. 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.
Frans De Waal
#51. 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
#52. Robin Hood had it right.Humanity's deepest wish is to spread the wealth.
Frans De Waal
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. Octopuses have hundreds of suckers, each one equipped with its own ganglion with thousands of neurons. These 'mini-brains' are interconnected, making for a widely distributed nervous system. That is why a severed octopus arm may crawl on its own and even pick up food.
Frans De Waal
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. Without agreement on rank and a certain respect for authority there can be no great sensitivity to social rules, as anyone who has tried to teach simple house rules to a cat will agree.
Frans De Waal
#62. I have often noticed how primate groups in their entirety enter a similar mood. All of a sudden, all of them are playful, hopping around. Or all of them are grumpy. Or all of them are sleepy and settle down. In such cases, the mood contagion serves the function of synchronizing activities.
Frans De Waal
#63. 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.
Frans De Waal
#64. There is little evidence that other animals judge the appropriateness of actions that do not directly affect themselves.
Frans De Waal
#65. If we look straight and deep into a chimpanzee's eyes, an intelligent self-assured personality looks back at us. If they are animals, what must we be?
Frans De Waal
#66. 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
#67. [ ... ] the best guarantee for world peace would be an extraterrestrial enemy.
Frans De Waal
#68. 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.
Frans De Waal
#69. 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
#70. We are born with impulses that draw us to others and that later in life make us care about them.
Frans De Waal
#71. Rather than reflecting an immutable human nature, morals are closely tied to the way we organize ourselves.
Frans De Waal
#72. 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.
Frans De Waal
#73. Exclusive homosexuality is not very common in nature.
Frans De Waal
#74. 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
Frans De Waal
#75. Aristotle's scala naturae, which runs from God, the angels, and humans at the top, downward to other mammals, birds, fish, insects, and mollusks at the bottom.
Frans De Waal
#76. 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
#77. Human morality is unthinkable without empathy.
Frans De Waal
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. The common argument that men are naturally polygamous and women naturally monogamous is as full of holes as Swiss cheese.
Frans De Waal
#81. 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.
Frans De Waal
#82. 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
#83. There is so much resistance to the idea of animal culture that one cannot escape the impression that it is an idea whose time is come.
Frans De Waal
#84. 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
#85. A species's cognition is generally as good as what it needs for its survival.
Frans De Waal
#86. I call the notion that we are nothing but killer apes the Beethoven fallacy. Beethoven was disorganized and messy, and yet his music is the epitome of order.
Frans De Waal
#87. 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
Frans De Waal
#88. I'm personally a nonbeliever, so I'm struggling with if we really need religion.
Frans De Waal
#89. The primate laugh is given in playful contexts, and as such has a strong similarity to the human laugh.
Frans De Waal
#90. 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
Frans De Waal
#91. 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
Frans De Waal
#92. One thing bothered me as a student. In the 1960s, human behavior was totally off limits for the biologist. There was animal behavior, then there was a long time nothing, after which came human behavior as a totally separate category best left to a different group of scientists.
Frans De Waal
#93. There are many reasons for kindness, and religion is just one of them.
Frans De Waal
#94. 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
#95. The hamadryas baboon is a harem holder where one male mates with multiple females.
Frans De Waal
#96. 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
#98. Chimpanzees have very strong preferences and aversions that are completely personality-linked. The people who are unsuccessful in working with chimpanzees are those who take this personally.
Frans De Waal
#99. I think the sense of fairness in humans is very strongly developed, and that's why we react so strongly to all the bonuses received by Wall Street executives. We want to know why they deserve these benefits.
Frans De Waal
#100. 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.
Frans De Waal
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