When the Dutch naturalist Frans de Waal began researching chimpanzee behavior in the 1970s, he saw that his academic training was not suitable for addressing it and ended up studying Political and Social Sciences. It seemed to him the only way to understand the struggle for power, strategies and alliances that he observed in an outdoor colony of these primates at the Burgers zoo, located in Arnhem, in the east of the Netherlands. He concluded that it is not brute force and the direct exercise of power, but mediation in conflicts, coalition management and flexibility, that marks the life of an ape leader.
The publication in 1982 of his book Chimpanzee politics (Alianza Editorial, 1993) made him famous, and he knew how to combine popularization with scientific rigor in the rest of his works. He died this Thursday in Atlanta (United States) at the age of 75, his family confirmed his death on Saturday to the Dutch newspaper NRC explaining that the cause of death was stomach cancer.
The success of his work reduced the distance between humans and apes, and his observations included examples that lingered in memory. Like the death of the chimpanzee Mother, in the same Burgers Zoo. It happened in 2016, she was 59 years old and, according to the primatologist, “her personality was exceptionally strong and dominant, so that no male who aspired to power could avoid her.” Mother He in turn consoled his fellow human beings and mediated in case of conflict. On other occasions, De Waal challenged the reader and the viewer—because his appearances in the media were frequent—to ask themselves what we are. His answer, after having dedicated some 10,000 hours to observing chimpanzees, bonobos or capuchin monkeys, is that “they are more similar to humans, and vice versa, than we believe,” according to what he wrote in the pages of the same diary. Or as he added later: “I've taken the monkeys up a bit and I've taken the people down a bit.”
In another of his books, titled The monkey inside us (Tusquets Editores, 2007), De Waal questions the place that the human being occupies as a species in nature. His theory is that we not only share with great apes the desire for power, territoriality, manipulation or the fight for sex. It seems to him that we have inherited the generosity, altruism and solidarity that characterize human nature from our closest relatives. How do you defend it? Suggesting that bonobos can show a kind behavior and with empathy, patience and sensitivity. Because of this, they are also a good model for analyzing human morality.
At work Do we have enough intelligence to understand the intelligence of animals? (Tusquets Editores, 2016), there are multiple examples of animal cooperation and empathy. Once again, it rethinks the intelligence of humans and animals. And in Different (Tusquets Editores, 2022) examines issues such as gender identity, sexuality, gender violence and friendship. Here, he argues that biological evolution contributes to a more culturally nuanced understanding of gender.
Francisco Bernardo María de Waal was born in the Dutch town of Bolduque into a family of six children. As a child he raised animals in the garden of his house and studied Biology at the universities of Nijmegen and Groningen. He received his doctorate from Utrecht in 1977, and between 1975 and 1981 he researched at Burgers Zoo. Married to Catherine Marin, they had no children and he was a professor of Psychology at the American University of Emory, Atlanta (Georgia), and director of a great ape research center. Very prolific, he published books on human existence, emotions, intelligence and religion. He also in scientific journals such as Nature and Science.
In 2007 it was included by the magazine time between the 100 people who shape our world, and always put a lot of effort into emphasizing that behavior is more than a series of tendencies considered basic: that men are more competitive and women pay more attention to social relationships. He maintained that there are natural behaviors that go beyond their evolutionary usefulness. In an interview with NRC He explained this position by remembering that if people push a whale stranded on the sand back to the sea, they do so out of empathy: “We have not evolved to save marine mammals.” After residing for more than four decades in the United States, he adopted that nationality along with his wife. In 2014 he was a professor at the Dutch universities of Utrecht and Maastricht and pointed out that biology should work hand in hand with other disciplines, such as psychology or neuroscience.
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