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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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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.
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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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Religion may have become a codification of morality, and it may fortify it, but it's not the origin of it.
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Most exotic animals are not particularly interested in people, which makes it hard to provoke them. Human-rearing gets them used to and sometimes imprinted on humans, which makes them potentially dangerous.
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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.
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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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Female bonobos form a strong sisterhood. They rule through female solidarity.
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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Science is not inherently good.
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Being both more systematically brutal than chimps and more empathetic than bonobos, we are by far the most bipolar ape. Our societies are never completely peaceful, never completely competitive, never ruled by sheer selfishness, and never perfectly moral.
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I call the notion that we are nothing but killer apes the Beethoven fallacy. Beethoven was disorganized and messy, and yet his music is the epitome of order.
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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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The fact that the apes exist and that we can study them is extremely important and makes us reflect on ourselves and our human nature. In that sense alone, you need to protect the apes.
Frans de Waal
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There's actually a lot of evidence in primates and other animals that they return favors.
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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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We, who think like animals living in small groups, must structure a global world. We believe in universal human rights and believe racism and war are wrong. On the other hand, it is our nature to be cooperative and loving almost exclusively with the members of the group to which we feel we belong.
Frans de Waal
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We are territorial, power-hungry and even more brutal than chimpanzees.
Frans de Waal
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The enemy of science is not religion... . The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma.
Frans de Waal
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Male bonobos really don't fit the human male ideal.
Frans de Waal
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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