Quotes from Frans de Waal

In every language, labels for adulterous women are far worse than those for similarly adventurous men. When a woman is a "a slut," a man is merely a skirt chaser.

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.

an insuppressible power drive,

Would anyone test the memory of human children by throwing them into a swimming pool to see if they remember where to get out? Yet

food-deprived chickens that were not particularly good at noticing the finer distinctions of a maze task.5

That's another thing about the emotions: they make us take sides.

Jolted by a twentyfold increase in testosterone, a bull changes into a sort of spinach-eating Popeye, a self-confident jerk ready to fight anyone in his path.

Emotions belong as much to the body as to the mind.

defined self-socialization: "The process whereby children influence the direction and outcomes of their development through selective attention, imitation, and participation in particular activities and modalities of interaction that function as key contexts of socialization.

When we are considering species like the apes, which are aptly known as "anthropoids" (humanlike), however, anthropomorphism is in fact a logical choice. Dubbing an ape's kiss "mouth-to-mouth contact" so as to avoid anthropomorphism deliberately obfuscates the meaning of the behavior. It would be like assigning Earth's gravity a different name than the moon's, just because we think Earth is special.

Language-trained apes often give the impression that they regard themselves as almost human, such as when, while sorting pictures of humans from those of other animals, they put their own portrait on the human pile. They obviously sympathize with the people that surround them: they want to fit in, and to be like them.

The reality is that we are bodies born from other bodies, bodies feeding other bodies, bodies having sex with other bodies, bodies seeking a shoulder to lean or cry on, bodies traveling long distances to be close to other bodies, and on.

La auténtica empatía humana no se centra en uno mismo, sino que se orienta en el otro.

Priority of access to food is an important function of dominance. Since most dominance interactions and virtually all agonistic episodes [conflicts] between adult females and males occur in feeding contexts, I find much less meaning in dominance occurring in the non-feeding context. Moreover, there is no difference."26

We humans will be diminished if we cannot even protect the animals closest to us, who share almost all of our genes, and who differ from us only by degree.

En vez de convertir a la humanidad en la medida de todas las cosas, tenemos que evaluar a las otras especies por lo que son ellas mismas. Al hacerlo, estoy seguro de que descubriremos muchos pozos mágicos, incluyendo algunos que por ahora están más allá de nuestra imaginación.

what else is cognition but information processing? Cognition is the mental transformation of sensory input into knowledge about the environment and the flexible application of this knowledge.

No self-respecting scientist would talk of "souls," but to deny animals any intelligence and consciousness came close enough.

Young female primates are as infant-obsessed as girls, whereas male interest in infants reflects an almost technical curiosity rather than a nurturing tendency. Young male chimpanzees often carry babies in an awkward manner without letting them cling to their bodies as ape babies love to do. I have watched in horror as young males inspect a small infant by stretching its limbs to the limit, sticking their big fingers down its throat, or making it the object of a tussle with a male peer.

Ernst Mayr characterized the Cartesian view of animals as dumb automatons.2

The object of empathy is understanding. The object of sympathy is the other person's well-being." Whether based on empathy or not, animal succorance is the functional equivalent of human sympathy, expected only in species that know strong attachment. I am not speaking here of anonymous aggregations of fish or butterflies, but the individualized bonding, affection, and fellowship of many mammals and birds.

Nuestros sentimientos de felicidad dependen de la comparación entre los ingresos propios y los ajenos.

Power is all around us, continuously confirmed and contested, and perceived with great accuracy. But social scientists, politicians, and even laypeople treat it like a hot potato. We prefer to cover up underlying motives. Anyone who, like Machiavelli, breaks the spell by calling it like it is, risks his reputation. No one wants to be called "Machiavellian," even though most of us are.

en route to such trees and get up before dawn, something they normally hate to do.