Quotes from Frans de Waal

naturalist and anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin asked in 1902: "Who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?

While the matriarch operates on the basis of knowledge, the rest of the herd operates on the basis of trust.

Without emotions we wouldn't store memories, because it's the emotions that make them salient. Without emotions we would remain unmoved by others, who in turn would remain unmoved by us. We would be like ships sailing past each other.

I felt like a toilet frog during the last three decades of the preceding century. (38)

The eyeless tick climbs onto a grass stem to await the smell of butyric acid emanating from mammalian skin. Since experiments have shown that this arachnid can go for eighteen years without food, the tick has ample time to meet a mammal, drop onto her victim, and gorge herself on warm blood. Afterward she is ready to lay her eggs and die.

This is more like the scientists I know. Authority outweighs evidence, at least for as long as the authority lives.

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 recognition of the ape's. Looking back at you is not so much an animal but a personality as solid and willful as yourself.

Dolphins] produce signature whistles, which are high-pitched sounds with a modulation that is unique for each individual [...]. Females keep the same melody for the rest of their lives, whereas males adjust theirs to those of their closest buddies, so that the calls within a male alliance sound alike. (p. 262)

Denmark has incredibly low crime rates, and parents feel that what a child needs most is frisk luft, or fresh air. The

entrenched disbelief is oddly immune to evidence.

Empathic reactions are always stronger the more we have in common with the other and the closer we feel to them.20

The default mode of the human primate is intensely social, as reflected in our favorite activities, from attending sports matches and singing in choirs to partying and socializing.

Feelings happen when emotions bubble to the surface so that we become aware of them. When we are conscious of our emotions, we are able to express them in words and make others aware of them:

Emotions infuse everything with meaning and are the main inspiration of cognition, also in our lives.

Life goes on, as it should, but individuals are unique.

Perhaps religion is like a ship that has carried us across the ocean, having allowed us to develop huge societies with a well-functioning morality. Now that we are spotting land, some of us are ready to disembark

if two closely related species act the same under similar circumstances, the mental processes behind their behavior are likely the same, too. The alternative would be to postulate that, in the short time since they diverged, both species evolved different ways of generating the same behavior.

At birth, girl babies look longer at faces than do boy babies, who look longer at mechanical toys. Later in life, girls are more prosocial than boys, better readers of facial expressions, more attuned to voices, more remorseful after having hurt someone, and better at taking another's perspective.32 The same differences have been found in self-report studies of human adults.

Elephant altruism on the Kenyan plains. With her tusks, Grace (right) lifted the fallen three-ton Eleanor to her feet, then tried to get her to walk by pushing her. But Eleanor fell again and eventually died, leaving Grace vocalizing with streaming temporal glands—a sign of deep distress. Being matriarchs of different herds, these two elephants were likely unrelated.

In the third century, Tertullian of Carthage, an early Christian theologian, had a most unusual vision of heaven. While hell was a place of torture, heaven was a balcony from which the saved ones could watch hell, thus enjoying the spectacle of doomed souls frying in the fire.

Human reflection is chronically overrated, though, and we now suspect that our own reaction to food poisoning is in fact similar to that of rats. Garcia's findings forced comparative psychology to admit that evolution pushes cognition around, adapting it to the organism's needs.

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 co-operation. What a different intellectual landscape we would occupy!" , Our Inner Ape

Animals should be given a chance to express their natural behavior.

Imagine you're a writer, and you have decided to offer your readers a firsthand account of the politically correct primate, the idol of the left, known for its "gay" relations, female supremacy, and pacific lifestyle. Your focus is the bonobo: a close relation of the chimpanzee. You