Quotes from Frans de Waal

Along with people in other creative professions, such as artists and musicians, many scientists experience this transcendence. I do so every day. For one, it's impossible to look an ape in the eye and not see oneself. There are other animals with frontally oriented eyes, but none that give you the shock of recognitions of the ape's. Looking back at you is not so much an animal but a personality as solid and willful as yourself.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Emotions help us navigate a complex world that we don't fully comprehend. They are our body's way of ensuring that we do what is best for us.

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

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny.

There are many ways to process, organize, and spread information, and it is only recently that science has become open-minded enough to treat all these different methods with wonder and amazement rather than dismissal and denial. So,

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

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.

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

Emotions may be slippery, but they are also by far the most salient aspect of our lives. They give meaning to everything.

Emotions evolved, in short, for their capacity to induce adaptive reactions to danger, competition, mating opportunities, and so on. Emotions are action-prone. Our species shares many emotions with the other primates because we rely on approximately the same behavioral repertoire.

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

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.

Feelings arise when emotions penetrate our consciousness, and we become aware of them.

Humanity's special place in the cosmos is one of abandoned claims and moving goalposts.

Cognition is the mental transformation of sensory input into knowledge about the environment and the flexible application of this knowledge.

Ironically, torture requires empathy, too, in the sense that one cannot deliberately inflict pain without realizing what is painful.

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

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!