Quotes About Frans de Waal

Notwithstanding the claims of ethologists such as Frans de Waal, 46 there is nothing corresponding to the apparatus of government – in the very broadest sense – in animals.

The enemy of science is not religion... . The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Below I describe two examples, one concerning self-awareness and the other culture, both concepts that, whenever mentioned in relation to animals, still send some scholars through the roof. Armchair

This suggests that for our species, too, the cerebellum is critically important.63

Charles Darwin himself had written a whole tome about the parallels between human and animal emotional expressions.

Sociobiology, E. O. Wilson

But surely the simplicity of an explanation is no necessary criterion of its truth."17