Top 50 Frans de Waal Quotes

Many economists are great believers in the idea that everything in nature is competitive and that we should set up a society which is competitive to reflect that. Anyone who cannot keep up, well, too bad.

Following rules is, of course, the reason the dog is man’s best friend is because the dog follows rules, and they actually do experiments on that, is that how well certain breeds of dogs follow rules, and how much they internalize them. And so many hierarchical animals, obviously they follow rules.

Darwin wasn’t just provocative in saying that we descend from the apes – he didn’t go far enough. We are apes in every way, from our long arms and tailless bodies to our habits and temperament.

Religions have a strong binding function and a cohesive element. They emphasize the primacy of the community as opposed to the individual, and they also help set one community apart from another that doesn’t share their beliefs.

Future benefits rarely figure in the minds of animals.

War is evitable if conditions are such that the costs of making war are higher than the benefits.

Although elephants are far more distantly related to us than the great apes, they seem to have evolved similar social and cognitive capacities.

There’s a long tradition in Western thought that humans are not shackled by biology, whereas animals are pure instinct machines.

Chimpanzees have very strong preferences and aversions that are completely personality-linked. The people who are unsuccessful in working with chimpanzees are those who take this personally.

Unlike the primate hand, the elephant’s grasping organ is also its nose. Elephants use their trunks not only to reach food but also to sniff and touch it. With their unparalleled sense of smell, the animals know exactly what they are going for. Vision is secondary.

Sometimes I read about someone saying with great authority that animals have no intentions and no feelings, and I wonder, ‘Doesn’t this guy have a dog?’

Deep down, creationists realize they will never win factual arguments with science. This is why they have construed their own science-like universe, known as Intelligent Design, and eagerly jump on every tidbit of information that seems to go their way.

After World War II it was decided that, in order to prevent the Germans and the French from having another war, it would be better to tie them together into one economic pact so they would invest in each other and have mutual stakes. Until now, that has worked to prevent warfare between the two.

The more self-aware an animal is, the more empathetic it tends to be.

Religion may have become a codification of morality, and it may fortify it, but it’s not the origin of it.

I was raised Catholic. Not just a little bit Catholic, like my wife, Catherine. When she was young, many Catholics in France already barely went to church, except for the big three: baptism, marriage, and funeral. And only the middle one was by choice.

If you look at national economies today, for example, the American economy, the European economy, the Indians, the Chinese, we’re all tied together. If one of them sinks, the rest are going to sink with them and if one floats, the rest are lifted up. I find that very interesting.

It is well known that apes in the wild offer spontaneous assistance to each other, defending against leopards, say, or consoling distressed companions with tender embraces.

I am personally not against keeping animals at zoos, as they serve a huge educational purpose, but treating them well and with respect seems the least we could do, and with ‘we’ I mean not just zoo staff, but most certainly also the public.

The intuitive connection children feel with animals can be a tremendous source of joy. The unconditional love received from pets, and the lack of artifice in the relationship, contrast sharply with the much trickier dealings with members of their own species.

Human morality is unthinkable without empathy.

People want to work with somebody who feels shame, who worries about the perceptions of others. Dishonesty is something we don’t like in others.

Bonobo studies started in the ’70s and came to fruition in the ’80s. Then in the ’90s, all of a sudden, boom, they ended because of the warfare in the Congo. It was really bad for the bonobo and ironic that people with their warfare were preventing us from studying the hippies of the primate world.

The whole reason people fill their homes with furry carnivores and not with, say, iguanas and turtles, is because mammals offer something no reptile ever will. They give affection, they want affection, and respond to our emotions the way we do to theirs.

Chimps don’t have language. Humans actively instruct others about how things should be done. Chimpanzees probably pick up cultural traditions by observation.

If you look at human society, it is very easy, of course, to compare our warfare and territoriality with the chimpanzee. But that’s only one side of what we do. We also trade, we intermarry, we allow each other to travel through our territory. There’s an enormous amount of cooperation.

Personally, I think it is possible to build a society that is moral on a nonreligious basis, but the jury is still out on that.

Empathy probably started out as a mechanism to improve maternal care. Mammalian mothers who were attentive to their young’s needs were more likely to rear successful offspring.

The enemy of science is not religion. Religion comes in endless shapes and forms… The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma.

We need to separate the process of evolution – which is, indeed, a self-serving process – and the actual motivations of animals.

You should know as much as you can about the human species if you have a hand in designing human society.

I was born in Den Bosch, where the painter Hieronymus Bosch named himself after. And so I’ve always been very fond of this painter who lived and worked in the 15th century.

Very long ago our ancestors had moral systems. Our current institutions are only a couple of thousand years old, which is really not old in the eyes of a biologist.

I describe in ‘Chimpanzee Politics’ how the alpha male needs broad support to reach the top spot. He needs some close allies and he needs many group members to be on his side.

It is hard to get animals which normally pay little attention to each other to do things together. One can teach dolphins to jump simultaneously out of the water precisely because they show similar behavior spontaneously, but try to make two domestic cats jump together and you will fail.

Male chimpanzees have an extraordinarily strong drive for dominance. They’re constantly jockeying for position.

Male bonobos really don’t fit the human male ideal.

If one bird foraging in a flock on the ground suddenly takes off, all other birds will take off immediately after, before they even know what’s going on. The one who stays behind may be prey.

I have often noticed how primate groups in their entirety enter a similar mood. All of a sudden, all of them are playful, hopping around. Or all of them are grumpy. Or all of them are sleepy and settle down. In such cases, the mood contagion serves the function of synchronizing activities.

Religion looms as large as an elephant in the United States, to the point that being nonreligious is about the biggest handicap a politician running for office can have, bigger than being gay, unmarried, thrice married, or black.

There is little evidence that other animals judge the appropriateness of actions that do not directly affect themselves.

There has been so much underestimating of animal cognition that to perhaps overestimate it, as I probably do, is probably a healthy reaction.

When humans behave murderously, such as inflicting senseless slaughter of innocents in warfare, we like to blame it on some dark, ‘animalistic’ instinct.

Experiments with animals have long been handicapped by our anthropocentric attitude: We often test them in ways that work fine with humans but not so well with other species.

The role of inequity in society is grossly underestimated. Inequity is not good for your health, basically.

Science is not inherently good.

A chimpanzee who is really gearing up for a fight doesn’t waste time with gestures but just goes ahead and attacks.

One thing bothered me as a student. In the 1960s, human behavior was totally off limits for the biologist. There was animal behavior, then there was a long time nothing, after which came human behavior as a totally separate category best left to a different group of scientists.

I was too restless as a boy to sit through an entire mass. It was akin to aversion training. I looked at it like a puppet show with a totally predictable story line. The only aspect I really liked was the music.

Humans have a lot of pro-social tendencies.