Quotes from Frans de Waal

At the time, science had declared humans unique, since we were so much better at identifying faces than any other primate. No one seemed bothered by the fact that other primates had been tested mostly on human faces rather than those of their own kind.

Emotions often know better than we do what is good for us, even though not everyone is prepared to listen.

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

This book [...] demonstrates something we had already suspected on the grounds of the close connection between apes and man: that the social organization of chimpanzees is almost too human to be true.

the best guarantee for world peace would be an extraterrestrial enemy.

If people laugh at primates at the zoo, they do so, I suspect, precisely because they're unsettled by the mirror held up to them.

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.

The possibility that empathy is part of our primate heritage ought to makes us happy, but we're not in the habit of embracing our nature. When people commit genocide, we call them "animals". But when they give to the poor, we praise them for being "humane". We like to claim the latter behavior for ourselves.

There are lots of wonderful cognitive adaptations out there that we don't have or need. This is why ranking cognition on a single dimension is a pointless exercise. Cognitive evolution is marked by many peaks of specialization. The ecology of each species is key. The

In a world divided by chimpophiles and bonobophiles, we all had a good laugh when Stephen peeled his banana. (62)

Human beings evolved to reverberate with the emotional states of others, to the point that we internalize, mostly via our bodies, what is going on with them. This is social connectivity at its best, the glue of all animal and human societies, which guarantees supportive and comforting company.

Instead of being a surface phenomenon in our expanded neocortex, moral decision-making apparently taps into millions of years of social evolution.

Our desire for sharp divisions is at odds with evolution's habit of making extremely smooth transitions.

Ayn Rand, the Russian-American novelist and would-be philosopher, needed such boring heavy tomes full of bloodless characters to make her case. Her main point was that we are unalloyed individualists, but she had to work hard to convince us, because deep down everyone knows that this is not who or what we are. Rather than a description of our species, Rand offered a counterintuitive ideological construct.

Primates arouse a certain nervousness because they show us ourselves in a brutally honest light, reminding us,.....that we are mere 'naked apes.

biology is usually called upon to justify a society based on selfish principles, but we should never forget that it has also produced the glue that holds communities together.

It seems safe to say that apes know about death, such as that is different from life and permanent. The same may apply to a few other animals, such as elephants, which pick up ivory or bones of a dead herd member, holding the pieces in their trunks and passing them around. Some pachyderms return for years to the spot where a relative died, only to touch and inspect the relics. Do they miss each other? Do they recall how he or she was during life?

it's hard to fool an ape. One reason for that is the absence of distraction by the spoken word. We attach such importance to verbal communication that we lose track of what our bodies say about us.

We are so logic-driven that we can't stand the absence of it.

Harold Laswell's famous definition of politics as a social process determining "who gets what, when, and how," there can be little doubt that chimpanzees engage in it. Since in both humans and their closest relatives the process involves bluff, coalitions, and isolation tactics, a common terminology is warranted.

Harry Harlow, a well-known American primatologist, was an early critic of the hunger reduction model. He argued that intelligent animals learn mostly through curiosity and free exploration, both of which are likely killed by a narrow fixation on food. He poked fun at the Skinner box, seeing it as a splendid instrument to demonstrate the effectiveness of food rewards but not to study complex behavior.

The bonobo would first of all urge the atheist to stop "sleeping furiously." There is no point getting all worked up about the absence of something, especially something as open to interpretation as God.

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.

we are not the only ones who knew a Stone Age: our closest relatives still live in one. To stress this point, a "percussive stone technology" site (including stone assemblies and the remains of smashed nuts) was excavated in a tropical forest in Ivory Coast, where chimpanzees must have been opening nuts for at least four thousand years.31 These discoveries led to a human-ape lithic culture story