Frans De Waal Quotes
Top 92 wise famous quotes and sayings by Frans De Waal
Frans De Waal Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Frans De Waal on Wise Famous Quotes.
The enemy of science is not religion ... The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma.
Denmark has incredibly low crime rates, and parents feel that what a child needs most is frisk luft, or fresh air. The
The common argument that men are naturally polygamous and women naturally monogamous is as full of holes as Swiss cheese.
There's a long tradition in Western thought that humans are not shackled by biology, whereas animals are pure instinct machines.
Drosophila has long been our main workhorse in genetics, yielding insight in the relation between chromosomes and genes.
There is so much resistance to the idea of animal culture that one cannot escape the impression that it is an idea whose time is come.
Food-deprived chickens that were not particularly good at noticing the finer distinctions of a maze task.5
The role of inequity in society is grossly underestimated. Inequity is not good for your health, basically.
It wasn't God who introduced us to morality; rather, it was the other way around. God was put into place to help us live the way we felt we ought to.
We need to separate the process of evolution - which is, indeed, a self-serving process - and the actual motivations of animals.
American naturalist William Morton Wheeler made the English term popular as the study of "habits and instincts."11
There has been so much underestimating of animal cognition that to perhaps overestimate it, as I probably do, is probably a healthy reaction.
We justify the inequalities by saying some people are just better and smarter than others and the strong should survive and the poor can die off.
In other words, what is salient to us - such as our own facial features - may not be salient to other species.
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.
While the matriarch operates on the basis of knowledge, the rest of the herd operates on the basis of trust.
Male chimpanzees have an extraordinarily strong drive for dominance. They're constantly jockeying for position.
If faith makes people buy an entire package of myths and values without asking too many questions, scientists are only slightly better.
Perhaps it's just me, but I am wary of any persons whose belief system is the only thing standing between them and repulsive behavior.
This is more like the scientists I know. Authority outweighs evidence, at least for as long as the authority lives.
In fact, it has been proposed that absolute neuron count, regardless of brain or body size, best predicts a species' mental powers.61
If both parties have a stake in the other, the chances of them killing each other are going to be reduced.
Morality, after all, has nothing to do with selflessness. On the contrary, self-interest is precisely the basis of the categorical imperative.
Would anyone test the memory of human children by throwing them into a swimming pool to see if they remember where to get out? Yet
If we look straight and deep into a chimpanzee's eyes, an intelligent self-assured personality looks back at us. If they are animals, what must we be?
Rather than reflecting an immutable human nature, morals are closely tied to the way we organize ourselves.
One aspect we might focus on during this moratorium is an alternative to overly cerebral approaches.
In a world divided by chimpophiles and bonobophiles, we all had a good laugh when Stephen peeled his banana. (62)
There are so many ways to account for negative outcomes that it is safer to doubt one's methods before doubting one's subjects.
Religion may have become a codification of morality, and it may fortify it, but it's not the origin of it.
We are by far the most contradictory of all primates. An animal with this much internal conflict has never lived on this earth.
A chimpanzee who is really gearing up for a fight doesn't waste time with gestures but just goes ahead and attacks.
When someone brutally kills someone else, we call him "animalistic." But we consider ourselves "human" when we give to the poor.
Although elephants are far more distantly related to us than the great apes, they seem to have evolved similar social and cognitive capacities.
We would much rather blame nature for what we don't like in ourselves than credit it for what we do like.
Conventions are often surrounded with the solemn language of morality, but in fact they have little to do with it.
Cognition is the mental transformation of sensory input into knowledge about the environment and the flexible application of this knowledge.
Would we have evolved the same technical skills and intelligence without these supremely versatile appendages?
The primate laugh is given in playful contexts, and as such has a strong similarity to the human laugh.
Armies are a purely human invention. Most soldiers who go to war nowadays don't even do it because they're inherently aggressive.
There is little evidence that other animals judge the appropriateness of actions that do not directly affect themselves.
Ironically, torture requires empathy, too, in the sense that one cannot deliberately inflict pain without realizing what is painful.
Charles Darwin himself had written a whole tome about the parallels between human and animal emotional expressions.
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.
Their earlier poor performance had had more to do with the way they were tested than with their mental powers. Elephants
In other words, both macaques and rats volunteer for tests only when they feel confident, suggesting that they know their own knowledge.
Cognitive evolution is marked by many peaks of specialization. The ecology of each species is key. The
In the same way that humans have a "handy" intelligence, which we share with other primates, elephants may have a "trunky" one. There