THE YOUNG male chimps at Burgers' Zoo in Arnhem were fighting again. They were running round their island, teeth bared, screaming. Two in particular were battling until one definitively won, and the other lost. They ended up, apparently sulking, high in widely separate branches of the same tree. Then young Frans de Waal, who was observing their wars for his dissertation, saw something astonishing. One held out his hand to the other, as if to say "Let's make it up." In a minute they had swung down to a main fork of the tree, where they embraced and kissed.
He did not hesitate to call this what it was: reconciliation. What was more, it was essential if the group was to cohere and survive. The word, though, scandalised his tutors. Studying primates in those days, the mid-1970s, was mostly a matter of recording violence, aggression and selfishness. Those were the "animal instincts" that human beings were supposed to rise above. Animals did not have the feelings or understanding to let bygones be bygones. On Chimp Island, it was all tooth and claw.
But Dr de Waal had seen that hand reaching out, and it changed his work for good. He determined to give the scientific sceptics the evidence they demanded--hundreds of experiments, hours of video and reams of data--to prove that every emotion humans felt, other primates felt too. When he looked into the eyes of a chimpanzee, an intelligent and self-assured personality looked back. Darwin had felt the same when he saw tickled chimps laugh, just as his children did. His most blinkered opponents were the 20th-century behaviourists, who reduced animals to machines and their laughter to "vocalised panting".
Over decades, working mostly at Emory University in Georgia as professor of primate behaviour and delivering joke-filled TED talks in his deadpan Dutch way, he slipped his ideas into the mainstream of science. He chose his species carefully: chimpanzees, bonobos and capuchins, the first two differing by a mere 1.5% from the DNA makeup of humans. Chimpanzees he knew well, since before working at the zoo he had befriended two who lived, oddly, in Nijmegen University's psychology department. Bonobos intrigued him because they had little of the admitted aggression of chimps, but were peaceable to the point of making love, not war, almost all the time. (As a bit of a hippy himself, virtually as hairy in the 1970s as a bonobo, he warmed to that.) What if he could convince people that their better instincts--altruism, co-operation, peacemaking--were as innate to them as violence was, and "animal" too?
The notion of fairness was a good example. Other primates, too, demanded equality of treatment and reward, and his proof was recorded in a video that swiftly went viral. Two capuchins were put in adjacent cages and given the same task, to hand stones out to a researcher. At first, both were rewarded with a slice of watery cucumber. But then one was rewarded with a grape. The slighted monkey noticed, and got uneasy. When it happened again the monkey went wild, hurled its slice of cucumber out of the cage, shook the bars and did its best to grab the bowl of grapes from outside. An Occupy Wall Street protest, right there.
Politics was a field his subjects excelled at, and in surprisingly subtle ways. Savagery played no part in chimpanzee leadership contests. Instead, deals were struck and alliances nurtured, with gifts of food or the favours of certain females. The alpha male in a group, he noted, was by no means always the biggest or strongest, but the best at plotting. A chimp Machiavelli, in short. All this he laid out in "Chimpanzee Politics" (1982), the first of 17 popular books he wrote on primate behaviour, which Newt Gingrich, a bumptious speaker of the House, declared should be read by all congressional freshmen.
Dr de Waal himself had embraced America from his first settling in, in Wisconsin in 1981, to his happy move to the woods of Georgia ten years later, where he held "simian soirees" for his students. America was a great place to push his cause, but its basis had been firmly laid in the Dutch polders where he had fished as a boy--not to eat his catch, but to keep them and watch them live. Though he came to focus on primates, his study of animal feelings had started with fire salamanders and sticklebacks.
Beyond co-operation, which he liked to prove by showing two chimpanzees hauling a heavy box they could not shift alone, he also saw instances of sheer altruism: the matriarch chimp Penny, too old to walk, helped across an enclosure and into a tree by other females, or a group of males licking the wounds of a defeated warrior. He saw males providing child care when females were absent, even slowing their pace through the forest to let the little one keep up. Same-sex sex was common, and anything went; there was no intolerance. Perhaps most moving was the clear empathy of a female bonobo called Kuni who, finding an injured bird, climbed to the top of the tallest tree with it and spread out its wings to encourage it to fly.
Whether such primates could have a moral conscience, let alone moral certainty, he doubted. The chief difference between them and humans was that humans constructed stories, like Aesop's fables, to justify how they acted. Armed with that justification, they often attempted to impose their moral values on different peoples. Other primates did not try, and typically showed out-groups only their rough side.
Summing up his own work, he thought he had raised apes up a bit and brought humans down. There was still that topmost layer of human achievement, like the piano pieces he loved to play, which was, of course, to be treasured. But he treasured as much what he saw when the covid-19 lockdowns ended: human beings delighting in simple group togetherness, looking at real faces, touching each other, in their primate nature. #
This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.economist.com/obituary/2024/03/20/frans-de-waal-taught-the-world-that-animals-had-emotions
Articles | Sections | Next |