Quotes from Frans de Waal

Taken by themselves, emotions are pretty useless. Simply being fearful doesn't do an organism any good. But if a fearful state prompts an organism to flee, hide, or counterattack, it may well save its life. Emotions evolve, in short, for their capacity to induce adaptive reactions to danger, competition, mating opportunities, and so on. Emotions are action-prone.

Verbal labeling is not part of emotions communication. Language helps us discuss sentiments, but it doesn't play much of a role in how they are generated, expressed, or felt. Yet modern emotion research has placed language front and center.

Considering how much animals act like us, share our physiological reactions, have the same facial expressions, and possess the same sort of brains wouldn't it be strange indeed if their internal experiences were radically different?

The ugly sister of gratitude is revenge, an emotion equally concerned with the squaring of accounts, but in a negative sense.

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.

Lo que nos dicen las personas de sus sentimientos a menudo es incompleto, a veces manifiestamente falso, y siempre viene modificado para consumo público.

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.

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

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

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

This suggests that for our species, too, the cerebellum is critically important.63

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

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

To enter the United States, I had to fill out a form declaring that I was neither a communist nor a homosexual—a requirement that was dropped only in 1990.

Cognitive evolution is marked by many peaks of specialization. The ecology of each species is key. The

What we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning. —Werner Heisenberg (1958)

Sociobiology, E. O. Wilson

There is in fact no data demonstrating that men are more hierarchical than women. The only difference one study reported is that when people are put together in same-gender groups, men settle on a rank order more quickly than women. Women do eventually always form one, however.

But surely the simplicity of an explanation is no necessary criterion of its truth."17

Ironically, the study of animal cognition not only raises the esteem in which we hold other species, but also teaches us not to overestimate our own mental complexity. We

A curious case that warmed this old ethologist's heart was that of a mathematics professor at a California university who was accused of peeing against a colleague's office door. The two male professors were said to have had a dispute that escalated to a "pissing contest." After someone had found puddles in the hallway, school officials set up a camera and captured the urinating professor on video.

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

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

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.