Frans de waal quotes

Religion may have become a codification of morality, and it may fortify it, but it's not the origin of it.

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

The hamadryas baboon is a harem holder where one male mates with multiple females.

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

If both parties have a stake in the other, the chances of them killing each other are going to be reduced.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

People want to work with somebody who feels shame, who worries about the perceptions of others. Dishonesty is something we don't like in others.

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

Science is not inherently good.

As in a Russian doll, however, the outer layers always contain an inner core. Instead of evolution having replaced simpler forms of empathy with more advanced ones, the latter are merely elaborations on the former and remain dependent on them. This also means that empathy comes naturally to us. It is not something we only learn later in life, or that is culturally constructed.

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.

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

Most exotic animals are not particularly interested in people, which makes it hard to provoke them. Human-rearing gets them used to and sometimes imprinted on humans, which makes them potentially dangerous.

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.

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

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?

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 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.

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.

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".

The possibility that empathy resides in parts of the brain so ancient that we share them with rats should give pause to anyone comparing politicians with those poor, underestimated creatures.

Morality, after all, has nothing to do with selflessness. On the contrary, self-interest is precisely the basis of the categorical imperative.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Future benefits rarely figure in the minds of animals.

It is not only visitors to the zoo who are fascinated but uneasy in the presence of chimpanzees; the same is true of scientists. The more they learn about these great apes, the deeper our identity crisis seems to become. The resemblance between humans and chimpanzees is not only external. 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?

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!

The intuitive connection children feel with animals can be a tremendous source of joy. The unconditional love received from pets, and the lack of artifice in the relationship, contrast sharply with the much trickier dealings with members of their own species.

The chimpanzees could tear me apart in no time. They're many times stronger than we are.

When it comes to social interaction, the chimpanzees appear to be just as intelligent as we are.

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.

Wild groups of chimpanzees attack their enemies like gangs. What they completely lack, precisely because of their strong territorial behavior, is a friendly relationship with their neighbors.

Although elephants are far more distantly related to us than the great apes, they seem to have evolved similar social and cognitive capacities.

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.

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

The original form is the contagion of fear and alarm. You're in a flock of birds. One bird suddenly takes off. You have no time to wait and see what's going on. You take off, too. Otherwise, you're lunch.

There is little evidence that other animals judge the appropriateness of actions that do not directly affect themselves.

Human morality is unthinkable without empathy.

The primate laugh is given in playful contexts, and as such has a strong similarity to the human laugh.

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

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.

You should know as much as you can about the human species if you have a hand in designing human society. Of course, I'm not saying that you can derive moral rules from nature - that's deriving an ought from an is, as the philosophers say - but you do need to know what kind of animals we are if you want to design a stable society.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Contrary to general belief, humans imitate apes more than the reverse. The sight of monkeys or apes induces an irresistible urge in people to jump up and down, exaggeratedly scratch themselves and holler in a way that must make the primates wonder how this otherwise so intelligent species has come to depend on such inferior means of communication.

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

Robin Hood had it right.Humanity's deepest wish is to spread the wealth.

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.

It is well known that apes in the wild offer spontaneous assistance to each other, defending against leopards, say, or consoling distressed companions with tender embraces.

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.

Exclusive homosexuality is not very common in nature.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Dogmatists have one advantage: they are poor listeners.

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.

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.

We are territorial, power-hungry and even more brutal than chimpanzees.

We, who think like animals living in small groups, must structure a global world. We believe in universal human rights and believe racism and war are wrong. On the other hand, it is our nature to be cooperative and loving almost exclusively with the members of the group to which we feel we belong.

You need to indoctrinate empathy out of people in order to arrive at extreme capitalist positions.

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.

Humans have a lot of pro-social tendencies.

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.

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

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.

We are by far the most contradictory of all primates. An animal with this much internal conflict has never lived on this earth.

I've argued that many of what philosophers call moral sentiments can be seen in other species. In chimpanzees and other animals, you see examples of sympathy, empathy, reciprocity, a willingness to follow social rules. Dogs are a good example of a species that have and obey social rules; that's why we like them so much, even though they're large carnivores.

After World War II it was decided that, in order to prevent the Germans and the French from having another war, it would be better to tie them together into one economic pact so they would invest in each other and have mutual stakes. Until now, that has worked to prevent warfare between the two.

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.

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.

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?

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

When someone brutally kills someone else, we call him "animalistic." But we consider ourselves "human" when we give to the poor.

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

I describe in 'Chimpanzee Politics' how the alpha male needs broad support to reach the top spot. He needs some close allies and he needs many group members to be on his side.

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

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.

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.