Quotes from Frans de Waal

Their bonding over birds went way beyond the way John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev bonded over Pushinka, a little dog that the Soviet leader sent to the White House.

Such cases deserve attention since they show that apes do not have to be prompted by experimental conditions concocted by us humans to plan for the future. They do so of their own accord.

In 1964 the American president Lyndon B. Johnson, standing before the press on the lawn of the White House, lifted one of his beagles up into the air by its floppy ears. The incident caused an outcry. Huge piles of hate mail arrived at the White House.

Not unlike Lorenz's emphasis on knowing the whole animal, Imanishi urged us to empathize with the species under study. We need to get under its skin, he said, or as we would nowadays put it, try to enter its Umwelt.

Primates are in fact natural conformists. Not only do they imitate, they also like to be imitated.

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

In a similar study, human adolescents going out with a date were instructed to mimic their date's every move, such as picking up a glass, leaning an elbow on the table, or scratching their head. The date reported liking him or her much better than those whose date acted independently. They don't realize why they feel differently, but evidently on some level we regard imitation as a compliment. It

We now know that dogs and horses yawn in response to human yawns—dogs do so even if they only hear their owner yawning—and that yawns often spread among monkeys in a group. We

American naturalist William Morton Wheeler made the English term popular as the study of "habits and instincts."11

Para sobrevivir necesitamos comer, hacer el amor y criar. La naturaleza ha hecho que todas estas actividades nos resulten placenteras, de modo que nos entregamos a ellas con facilidad y de manera voluntaria.

Mead stresses the universality of male competition, stating that "in every known human society, the male's need for achievement can be recognized." Men, to feel fulfilled and successful, need to excel at something—to be better at it than other men and better than women.13

Since the average person fears public speaking more than death, subjects in a study were asked to address an audience.

Afterward all participants were invited to spit into a cup, which allowed scientists to extract a hormone associated with anxiety. They found that with confident speakers, the audience followed every word, feeling relaxed, but with nervous ones, the speaker's discomfort rubbed off on the audience. The hormone levels of speakers and audiences converged the way they did between vole mates.35

Whereas sympathy is by definition positive, empathy doesn't need to be, especially if the capacity to understand others is turned against them.

What we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning. —Werner Heisenberg (1958)1

Typically, the young male spreads his legs to show his erection—a sexual invitation—making sure that his back is turned to the other males or that, with his underarm leaning on his knee, one of his hands loosely dangles right next to his penis so that only the wooed female can see

The label derives from comparative psychology, the name of a field that traditionally has viewed animals as mere stand-ins for humans: a monkey is a simplified human, a rat a simplified monkey, and so

Neuroimaging studies indicate that imitating people of one's own gender activates reward centers in the brain, whereas imitating people of the opposite gender does not. This doesn't necessarily mean that the brain is in charge, because it too reacts to the environment. But it does suggest that evolution has equipped our young with a feel-good bias to conform to their gender.

La comunicación permite a los miembros de una especie reunirse y coordinar sus vidas tanto en un sentido positivo, por ejemplo, en las tareas cooperativas de las abejas o de las jaurías de perros salvajes, como en un sentido negativo, por ejemplo, cuando un ruiseñor macho canta a pleno pulmón para mantener a los rivales fuera de su territorio.

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.

ethology's focus was on behavior that develops naturally in all members of a given species.

One aspect we might focus on during this moratorium is an alternative to overly cerebral approaches.

homosexual, most humans may be at the heterosexual end, but every bonobo is totally bi, or a perfect Kinsey

We learned postmortem that in addition to a massively enlarged liver, Amos had several cancerous growths. Even though his condition must have been building for years, he had acted normally until his body couldn't hold out any longer. Any hint of vulnerability might have meant loss of status, which is why males tend to hide weaknesses and act stoic around their rivals.