Quotes from Frans de Waal

Position in the male hierarchy is only one factor in the mating game. The other one is female preference.

The power of autobiographical memories lies in their specificity. Colourful and alive, they can be actively called up and dwelled upon. They are reconstructions - which us why they are sometimes false - yet so powerful that they are accompanied by an extraordinary sense of their correctness.

We know our own inner states imperfectly and often mislead both ourselves and those around us. We're masters of fake happiness, suppressed fear, and misguided love.

The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind. —Charles Darwin (1871)

This was a natural step, because whereas behaviorists were mostly psychologists, ethologists were mostly zoologists. They discovered that behavior is not nearly as fluid and hard to define as it might seem. It has a structure, which can be quite stereotypical, such

Diego, a giant tortoise, single-handedly saved his species from extinction. As one of the few surviving representatives of his kind, he was moved from an American zoo to a breeding program on the Galápagos Islands, in Ecuador. Diego's unrelenting mating efforts helped raise the number of these tortoises from just fifteen to two thousand. One hundred years old, Diego keeps going.

The credo of experimental science remains that an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If we fail to find a capacity in a given species, our first thought ought to be "Did we overlook something?" And the second should be "Did our test fit the species?

Lo que interpretamos como un sentimiento de culpa en las personas a menudo es, igual que en los perros, una manera de evitar consecuencias negativas, más que la evidencia de una distinción profunda entre lo correcto y lo incorrecto.

This is clearly not so. Pigeons, for example, do better than humans at mentally rotating visual images, and some birds have an amazing memory for the location of hidden objects. Clark's nutcrackers store up to 33,000 seeds in caches distributed over many square kilometers and find most of the caches again months later.28As someone who occasionally forgets where he has parked an item as large and significant as his car, I am impressed by these peanut-brained birds.

The study of human psychology usually relies on the use of questionnaires, which are heavy on self-reported feelings and light on actual behavior. But I favor the reverse. We need more

Charles Darwin's well-known observation that the mental difference between humans and other animals is one of degree rather than kind.

The study of human psychology usually relies on the use of questionnaires, which are heavy on self-reported feelings and light on actual behavior.

At international meetings, Americans and Brits often mistake the extraordinary privilege of being able to speak in their mother tongue for intellectual superiority. Because no one is going to disagree with them in broken English, they are rarely disabused of this notion.

Recognition of this parallel between anatomy and behavior was a great leap forward, which is nowadays taken for granted.

The dominant hypothesis remains that we carry the mark of Cain. For example, in his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature, the Canadian-American psycholinguist Steven Pinker proposed that humanity needs civilization to keep its destructive instincts under control. Since his theory works only if our forebears were hyperaggressive characters, Pinker went for the chimpanzee as ancestral model and cheerfully swept bonobos under the rug, calling them "very strange primates.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.