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Humans have a lot of pro-social tendencies.

Frans de Waal

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Frans de Waal
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: October 29
Ethologist
Non-Fiction Writer
Primatologist
Psychologist
University Teacher
Zoologist
Den Bosch
Frans B M de Waal
Frans B. M. de Waal
F. de Waal
Humans
Tendencies
Social

More quotes by Frans de Waal

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When we are bad, we are worse than any primate that I know. And when we are good, we are actually better and more altruistic than any primate that I know.
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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.
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The enemy of science is not religion... . The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma.
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I think we need to start thinking about grounding our moral systems in our biology.
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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.
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You should know as much as you can about the human species if you have a hand in designing human society.
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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.
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Male bonobos really don't fit the human male ideal.
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Popular culture bombards us with examples of animals being humanized for all sorts of purposes, ranging from education to entertainment to satire to propaganda. Walt Disney, for example, made us forget that Mickey is a mouse, and Donald a duck. George Orwell laid a cover of human societal ills over a population of livestock.
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Morality, after all, has nothing to do with selflessness. On the contrary, self-interest is precisely the basis of the categorical imperative.
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The more self-aware an animal is, the more empathetic it tends to be.
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The primate laugh is given in playful contexts, and as such has a strong similarity to the human laugh.
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The chimpanzees could tear me apart in no time. They're many times stronger than we are.
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Science is not inherently good.
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The development of family entities enables men to cooperate far more effectively. Instead of constantly competing for the women with other men, each man essentially has a partner assigned to him, one with whom he can establish a family.
Frans de Waal
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Dogmatists have one advantage: they are poor listeners.
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There is little evidence that other animals judge the appropriateness of actions that do not directly affect themselves.
Frans de Waal
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Octopuses have hundreds of suckers, each one equipped with its own ganglion with thousands of neurons. These 'mini-brains' are interconnected, making for a widely distributed nervous system. That is why a severed octopus arm may crawl on its own and even pick up food.
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In Africa, we have the bush meat trade, which means that, on a very large scale, animals are being killed in the forests and sold in the cities as a luxury food.
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There's actually a lot of evidence in primates and other animals that they return favors.
Frans de Waal