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Armies are a purely human invention. Most soldiers who go to war nowadays don't even do it because they're inherently aggressive.

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
Soldier
Army
Armies
War
Inherently
Human
Purely
Humans
Nowadays
Even
Soldiers
Aggressive
Invention

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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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Humans have a lot of pro-social tendencies.
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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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The enemy of science is not religion... . The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma.
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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.
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To endow animals with human emotions has long been a scientific taboo. But if we do not, we risk missing something fundamental, about both animals and us.
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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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Humanity is actually much more cooperative and empathic than [it's] given credit for.
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The more self-aware an animal is, the more empathetic it tends to be.
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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.
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There is little evidence that other animals judge the appropriateness of actions that do not directly affect themselves.
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Male bonobos really don't fit the human male ideal.
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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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Most men probably wouldn't want to live the lives of bonobos. They're constantly clinging to their mothers' apron strings. They lack the ability to make decisions about their own fates, something that we and male chimpanzees practically consider our birthright.
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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.
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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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Female bonobos form a strong sisterhood. They rule through female solidarity.
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Studies of reconciliation in primates have demonstrated that if the relationship value increases between two parties they are more willing to make peace.
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Future benefits rarely figure in the minds of animals.
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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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