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Frans de Waal

Frans de Waal Books

Primatologist

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“The human smile derives from the nervous grin found in other primates. We employ it when there is a potential for conflict, something we are always worried about even under the friendliest circumstances. We bring flowers or a bottle of wine when we are invading other people’s home territory, and we greet each other by waving an open hand, a gesture thought to originate from showing that we carry no weapons. But the smile remains our main tool to improve the mood. Copying another’s smile makes everyone happier, or as Louis Armstrong sang: “When you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you.”

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Book:Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves
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“The possibility that empathy is part of our primate heritage ought to makes us happy, but we're not in the habit of embracing our nature. When people commit genocide, we call them "animals". But when they give to the poor, we praise them for being "humane". We like to claim the latter behavior for ourselves.”

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Book:Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are
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“The idea of conformism among animals is increasingly supported for social behavior as well. One study tested both children and chimpanzees on generosity. The goal was to see if they were prepared to do a member of their own species a favor at no cost to themselves. They indeed did so, and their willingness increased if they themselves had received generosity from others—any others, not just their testing partner. Is kind behavior contagious? Love begets love, we say, or as the investigators put it more dryly, primates tend to adopt the most commonly perceived responses in the population.”

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Book:Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
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“Reprimanded children sometimes can’t stop smiling, which risks being mistaken for disrespect. All they’re doing, though, is nervously signaling nonhostility. This is why women smile more than men, and why men who smile are often in need of friendly relations. One study explicitly looked at this underdog quality of the smile in pictures taken right before matches in the Ultimate Fighting Championship. The photographs show both fighters defiantly staring at each other. Analysis of a large number of pictures revealed that the fighter with the more intense smile was the one who’d end up losing the fight later that day. The investigators concluded that smiling indicates a lack of physical dominance, and that the fighter who smiles the most is the one most in need of appeasement.”

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Book:Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves
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“I seriously doubt that the smile is our species’s “happy” face, as is often stated in books about human emotions. Its background is much richer, with meanings other than cheeriness. Depending on the circumstances, the smile can convey nervousness, a need to please, reassurance to anxious others, a welcoming attitude, submission, amusement, attraction, and so on. Are all these feelings captured by calling them “happy”? Our labels grossly simplify emotional displays, like the way we give each emoticon a single meaning. Many of us now use smiley or frowny faces to punctuate text messages, which suggests that language by itself is not as effective as advertised. We feel the need to add nonverbal cues to prevent a peace offer from being mistaken for an act of revenge, or a joke from being taken as an insult. Emoticons and words are poor substitutes for the body itself, though: through gaze direction, expressions, tone of voice, posture, pupil dilation, and gestures, the body is much better than language at communicating a wide range of meanings.”

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Book:Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves
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“His reaction looked very much like anger, with threatening gestures, raised voice, and a purple face. But his anger was triggered by apprehension and was mixed with hope that some good discipline might keep me from being so stupid again. It sure did! My point here is that every display of emotion needs to be judged in a wider context. A single label rarely suffices. To call my father's state "angry" fails to do it justice without also mentioning love and worry.”

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Book:Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves
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“Taken by themselves, emotions are pretty useless. Simply being fearful doesn't do an organism any good. But if a fearful state prompts an organism to flee, hide, or counterattack, it may well save its life. Emotions evolve, in short, for their capacity to induce adaptive reactions to danger, competition, mating opportunities, and so on. Emotions are action-prone.”

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Book:Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves
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“Emotions are observable and measurable, reflected in bodily changes and actions. Since human bodies are the same across the globe, emotions are by and large universal, including what happens to us when we fall in love, have fun, or get mad. That is why we never feel emotionally disconnected even in a country where we don’t speak the language. Feelings, on the other hand, are private experiences, varying from place to place and from person to person. What one person experiences as pain, another may feel as pleasure. There is no simple one-to-one mapping between emotions and feelings. Every language has its own concepts to describe subjective states, and people bring different backgrounds and experiences to how they feel and why.”

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Book:Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves
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“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 so on. Would life be worth living without these connections and the emotions they arouse? How happy would we be, especially given that happiness, too, is an emotion?”

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Book:Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are
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“[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)”

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Book:Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
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“It seems safe to say that apes know about death, such as that is different from life and permanent. The same may apply to a few other animals, such as elephants, which pick up ivory or bones of a dead herd member, holding the pieces in their trunks and passing them around. Some pachyderms return for years to the spot where a relative died, only to touch and inspect the relics. Do they miss each other? Do they recall how he or she was during life?”

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Book:The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates
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“En nuestra especie, la atracción por la juventud tiene sentido debido a nuestro vínculo de pareja que conduce a familias estables. Las mujeres jóvenes están más disponibles y son más valiosas por la larga vida reproductiva que tienen por delante. De ahí el eterno anhelo femenino por parecer joven a base de bótox, implantes, estiramientos faciales y demás.”

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Book:Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves
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“Todos los animales mutilan o matan a otros organismos. Ni el agricultor más orgánico puede evitar perjudicar los intereses de otras formas de vida al robar el hábitat de animales salvajes, erradicar insectos con pesticidas naturales y sacrificar plantas para el consumo humano.”

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Book:Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves
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“Having escaped the Dark Ages in which animals were mere stimulus-response machines, we are free to contemplate their mental lives. It is a great leap forward, the one that Griffin fought for. But now that animal cognition is an increasingly popular topic, we are still facing the mindset that animal cognition can be only a poor substitute of what we humans have. It can’t be truly deep and amazing. Toward the end of a long career, many a scholar cannot resist shining a light on human talents by listing all the things we are capable of and animals not. From the human perspective, these conjectures may make a satisfactory read, but for anyone interested, as I am, in the full spectrum of cognitions on our planet, they come across as a colossal waste of time. What a bizarre animal we are that the only question we can ask in relation to our place in nature is “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the smartest of them all?”

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Book:Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
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“Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously gave us the ‘God is dead’ phrase was interested in the sources of morality. He warned that the emergence of something (whether an organ, a legal institution, or a religious ritual) is never to be confused with its acquired purpose: ‘Anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose.’ This is a liberating thought, which teaches us to never hold the history of something against its possible applications. Even if computers started out as calculators, that doesn’t prevent us from playing games on them. (47) (quoting Nietzsche, the Genealogy of Morals)”

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Book:The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates
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“Nosotros evolucionamos a partir de comedores de fruta arborícolas - de ahí nuestros ojos frontales, nuestra visión de color y nuestras manos prensoras-, pero nuestro tamaño y nuestras aptitudes especiales nos confieren un porte depredador. Probablemente es por esto por lo que nos llevamos tan bien con nuestras mascotas favoritas, que son dos carnívoros peludos.”

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Book:Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves
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“Siamangs—large black members of the gibbon family—swing high up in the tallest trees of the Asian Jungle. Every morning, the male and female burst into spectacular duets. Their song begins with a few loud whoops, which gradually build into ever louder, more elaborate sequences. Amplified by balloonlike throat sacs, the sound carries far and wide. I have heard them in Indonesia, where the whole forest echoed with their sound. The siamangs listen to one another during breaks. Whereas most territorial animals need only to know where their boundaries run and how strong and healthy their neighbors are, siamangs face the added complexity that territories are jointly defended by pairs. This means that pair-bonds matter. Troubled pairs will be weak defenders, while bonded pairs will be strong ones. Since the song of a pair reflects their marriage, the more beautiful it is, the more their neighbors realize not to mess with them. A close-harmony duet communicates not only “stay out!” but also “we’re one!” If a pair duets poorly, on the other hand, uttering discordant vocalizations that interrupt one another, neighbors hear an opportunity to move in and exploit the pair’s troubled relationship.”

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Book:Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
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“Contrary to general belief, humans imitate apes more than the reverse. The sight of monkeys or apes induces an irresistible urge in people to jump up and down, exaggeratedly scratch themselves and holler in a way that must make the primates wonder how this otherwise so intelligent species has come to depend on such inferior means of communication.”

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Author:Frans de Waal
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