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Frans de Waal has been studying primate behavior for five decades. Some of his many important observations concern the evolution of morality and how much we have in common with the animal kingdom.
The idea that animals are always in conflict with each other and competing for resources is “totally false,” de Waal says.
Other primates, particularly chimpanzees and bonobos, have demonstrated a range of traits and tendencies generally considered human, including empathy, friendship, reconciliation, altruism, and even adoption.
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FRANS DE WAAL:
Frans de Waal is a Dutch/American biologist and primatologist. He teaches at Emory University and directs the Living Links Center for the Study of Ape and Human Evolution, in Atlanta, Georgia. He is known for his popular books, such as Chimpanzee Politics (1982), Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape (1997), and The Age of Empathy (2009). He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences.
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TRANSCRIPTION:
People sometimes describe nature as a dog-eat-dog world. Some biologists describe nature as a battlefield where selfish tendencies tend to prevail. And from the point of view of morality, of the evolution of morality, there is very little room. What they mean is that all they see is competition. I win, you lose, winning is better than losing and so on. This is totally false. I have struggled all my life against this kind of characterization of animal society, because just like human society, it is based on both a lot of friendship and cooperation. We would like to deny this connection that exists between us and animals. Certain tendencies, such as a sense of fairness, empathy, caring for others, helping others, following the rules, punishing individuals who break the rules, all of these tendencies can be observed in other primates. And they say these are the ingredients we use to build a moral society.
The full spectrum of both very positive and very negative behaviors can be observed in other animals. Animals can be heroic and truly selfless and we have actively tested our chimpanzees. We carried out an experiment in which a chimpanzee can choose between two options. One option rewards only himself, the other option rewards himself and a partner sitting next to him. And our chimpanzees preferred the latter option. They prefer a task where they can reward the partner as well as themselves. Primates form a very cooperative society in general. The reason they live in groups is because they cannot survive alone. They therefore need companions who support them, with whom they live together, who help them find food, who warn them against predators. And they have long-term friendships in their society, just like humans. There are many studies on how animals provide favors to each other. And if you think about how that works, it has to be based on gratitude. Like you do something for me, and I do something to you in return. There must be some sort of emotional mechanism in there. And there are descriptions in nature of people who, for example, have freed a whale caught in a net, and they describe how the whale doesn't just swim away. The whale comes back to all these people and nuzzles them or lifts them out of the water, and then it disappears, and they feel the whale expressing gratitude for everything that happened. So there are all kinds of signs that animals have this ability.
In the 1970s, I discovered that chimpanzees make up after a fight. Many animals have this process where a relationship is disrupted by fighting, but the relationship is still valuable to you, so you need to do something to fix what happened to it. When I saw in chimpanzees that they sometimes kissed and kissed after fights, and later in bonobos, I saw that they had sex after fights. I immediately understood that reconciliation was common, and later, of course, many other studies found reconciliation not only in primates, in elephants and dolphins, in wolves, in goats. And adoption is also typical. For example, in the Tai forest, in Ivory Coast, there is documentation of 10 cases of adoption by males, adult males, who adopted an orphan chimpanzee. The chimpanzee therefore loses its mother, chimpanzees depend on their mother for at least eight years of their life…
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