20/01/2018 An Interview with Frans de Waal

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An Interview with Frans de Waal

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03
JAN
2018

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In November 2017, world-renowned primatologist, ethologist and author of

numerous books Frans de Waal was interviewed by John Richardson, the
founding Executive Director of the Blackstone Ranch Institute. They spoke
about what humans can learn from other primates, some of de Waal’s
favorite anecdotes and the very real possibility of extinction for many
nonhuman primate species. John Richardson also reviewed de Waal’s book
titled Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?for Voices for
Biodiversity in September 2017.

Reading your recent book raised a lot of interesting questions in my

mind. You have worn a lot of different hats and had many incarnations
that are not captured in your official titles. How do you like to be
identified?

I trained as a biologist and ethologist in the Netherlands, and then came to

the U.S. in 1981. I specialized as a primatologist and worked at a primate
center in Wisconsin for 10 years. For the last 25 years, I’ve worked here at
Emory University, mostly with chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys but also
with bonobos and elephants.

One of the things that struck me in your recent book — and perhaps it’s
one of the reasons you have such a popular following — is that you
really include human beings in the larger conversation about primates.

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You’ve done a lot of work over the years to identify and explain the
behavioral commonalities between us and other species, primarily
primates. What is the biggest message for your human audience?

For me, the main message is aimed at people in the humanities, psychology,
social sciences, business, philosophy and so on, because those people very
often start from the assumption that humans are special and incomparable
with other species, whereas I think humans are animals and in many ways
we act like animals.

Even the things that we are most impressed with about ourselves, like
morality and culture, we can draw parallels with other species. We all share
an evolutionary background, and I want to shake up the humanities and
anthropology, which live in this illusionary, pre-Darwinian world that is, in
my view, more religious than scientific. I want them to come to grips with
the idea that we are basically animals.

The same message is also coming from neuroscience. When I started, that
was not much the case, but nowadays neuroscientists very often work on
rats and other species, and they are drawing all sorts of parallels. They
basically say that a rat brain has the same parts as the human brain and that
it functions in very similar ways, so the message of similarity is also coming
from neuroscience in a massive way.

How do you assess the impact of your message? Do you get the sense
that minds are opening up in a significant way?

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I would say that in the last 30 years or so things have changed dramatically.
30 years ago if you had said that human biology affects our behavior, that
genes affect our behavior, or that males and females may be different in
their brains and in their behavior, it would have been extremely
controversial and received very angry reactions. I think that was maybe
logical after World War II, when people were sensitive to any implication of
what genes meant for humanity. People were very sensitive and didn’t want
to hear that kind of message.

I have seen that perspective change dramatically, from audiences who were
skeptical or critical of comparisons with animals — certainly scientific
audiences were very skeptical — to people basically taking our similarities
to other animals for granted today. There may still be a remnant of people
who don’t want to hear that kind of message, but a lot of people are now
very open to comparisons between humans and animals, and to the idea that
genes may affect behavior.

How do you assess the intelligence of human beings versus other species
and versus other primates? With all the work you’ve done with chimps
and other primates, have you developed a sense of how they view us,
how they assess us?

To the first question, I would say that socially and emotionally we are not
very different. I don’t necessarily see humans as smarter in the social
domain than chimpanzees. But in terms of abstract thinking and deduction,
and especially anything that relates to language, I see fewer parallels with
other species. Language is a special, complex capacity that humans have
and it affects everything about us, including our cognitive structures. From a
very young age, words start to affect the way we think.

In terms of how we interact with each other — how we deal with

friendships, with rivals or with conflict in the family — I don’t see us as
necessarily smarter socially or emotionally than the apes I work with.

We now have increasing evidence for all the things that we thought animals
could and could not do. In the last 25 years, there have been claims that only
humans can do this, only humans can do that. For example, that only
humans have theory of mind or only humans can plan ahead. We now know
that none of these claims are actually true.

The other question you asked was how animals look at us?

What have you learned about that? You have been working with
animals for a long time.

Well, that very much depends on which animals you mean. Animals that
live with humans and are raised by humans often consider themselves
almost human. There is a famous story about Kanzi the bonobo who was

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used in language research. When asked to put a photo of himself in a pile

with monkeys or with humans, he put himself with the humans.

Then there are animals that are more distanced from us. My chimpanzees at
Yerkes, for example, are not raised in human homes, they are raised by their
own moms in the group. They live with chimps and are much more
chimpanzee than human, I would say. Hopefully they look at us as friends.
Most of us are their friends — we give them food and we move them around
and things like that. Sometimes they look at us as rivals. Young males may
look at male students as rivals, and they may try to get to them or impress
them. They sometimes look at us as sexual partners, almost. There are apes
who are sexually attracted to humans. That’s the ones in captivity, who I
don’t think consider themselves humans at all.

The wild ones have no reason to have a special relationship with us, other
than fearing us. That is why in field work — work in the wild — it takes
researchers a long time to get close to the apes, because their first reaction is
to run away. Apes in the field are generally afraid of humans, for very good
reasons. Only reluctantly and after years when nothing bad happens will
they be willing to accept humans hanging around.

One of the reasons I love books like yours is the anecdotes. There are
these extraordinary moments, where suddenly something unexpected
happens. I am wondering if there are a couple of these moments that
were particularly meaningful to you or illustrative of what it means to
demonstrate animal intelligence.
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All the research we do starts as an anecdote. I know there are scientists who
look down on anecdotes and say you shouldn’t use them, but all the big
discoveries we have made in our field started out as a little story. Someone
might say, “I saw a chimpanzee use a twig to get ants,” and before you know
it, it becomes serious research and we do experiments and so on.

In my case, the event that had the most impact on my thinking was a
reconciliation I did not expect. I saw a big fight in the colony of
chimpanzees that I worked with at a zoo in the Netherlands. My task was to
study aggressive behavior, so I followed the whole fight. Many hours later,
there was a big commotion and the chimpanzees were hooting and hollering,
but it was not aggressive. In the middle of the commotion, there were two
chimpanzees who embraced. I went home that day thinking about it and not
understanding it until it came to my mind that the two chimps who had
embraced were the same two chimps who had been at the center of the
major fight earlier in the day. That’s when it clicked and I thought, “Wow,
that’s what they were doing!” They were reconciling after the fight and
everyone was excited about it. Meaning that the whole group understood
what was going on — other than me, the scientist. That’s how I discovered
that chimpanzees reconcile after fights. Since then, I have seen it thousands
of times and I am not the only one — many people have done research on
reconciliation behavior. It is now very much an accepted behavior, even
though people were skeptical at the time I proposed it. They saw it as
anthropomorphic to call it reconciliation, and asked me to call it “post-
conflict contact” or something like that. We now have a lot of data that there
is actual reconciliation that serves to maintain the bonds between
individuals. That is one anecdote that had a major impact on my thinking
about primate behavior.

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Many environmental indicators are in the red zone now and many of
our ecosystems are in deep trouble. It seems that just as we’re on the
verge of extinguishing a range of species, people like you are able to
make the case that animals have their own intelligence, and therefore
have as much right to be here as we do. Where do you see us in this race
against time to save different species?

The right to be here is of course the right of every organism, even every
plant. There are animals that we would rather get rid of like mosquitoes but
even they have the right to be here. Even if you removed all the mosquitoes,
I don’t think it would be a solution to our problems. I think every organism
has the right to existence.

But it is also true that we tend to focus on certain organisms — they are
usually called flagship species. Like when you go to a jungle where there
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are tigers and everyone focuses on the tigers even though there are tons of
other animals in that jungle that also deserve protection. In conservation, we
are often focused on charismatic species that everyone likes such as
orangutans, tigers, chimpanzees and elephants. We hope that by protecting
them, we are protecting a whole lot of other species in the ecosystem that
are also in need of protection.

I think the sort of data I provide on behavior and cognition helps with that,
in the sense that it makes people more appreciative of how special all
animals are. I also focus on animals that are considered particularly smart,
like elephants and apes. But you can also focus on some insect or little bird
and the deeper you delve into its behavior, the more it becomes what Nobel
Prize winner von Frisch said: it becomes “a magic well.” The deeper you
go, the more you get out of it — and the data keeps coming, it keeps getting
more complex. He said that about the honeybee dance and [pioneer animal
behaviorist] Don Griffin said the same about echolocation in bats. And the
more complex it gets, the more admiration we have for that kind of capacity.
I think that is true for almost every species. I focus on chimpanzees and they
are very human-like, so we can easily understand all the things they do —
because we are like chimpanzees, our bodies are like those of chimpanzees
and so on. But species that are more distant from us, like the bat, have very
special capacities, too.

It is interesting to me that we are more impressed with capacities that relate

to ours. For example, tool use and language are human capacities and for
ages we have been trying to teach language to apes and other animals to see
how far they get. We are very impressed when they can do some of it
because language is our thing. It is the same with tool use. There have been
a lot of tests on animals about tool use — even on animals who would never
use a tool in the wild. They are tested on tool use because that is something
we are good at.

We have a very anthropocentric view of animal cognition: we are impressed

by things that we can do well. At the same time, we are sort of satisfied that
animals cannot do them as well as we can. If their language and tool use
skills are not up to ours, we are satisfied with that. But there are all these
other capacities out there — such as memory, orientation, echolocation and
camouflage — that are very special. There are all kinds of special capacities
out there that are extremely complex and that people tend to overlook
because they are not the sort of thing that we do.

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How worried are you about extinction?

For primates, we have a lot of things to worry about. They will probably
survive in certain reserves but even in those there is a lot of poaching going
on. Outside of reserves, I am not sure they will survive. There is an
enormous amount of habitat destruction going on. For example, orangutans
are facing the palm oil industry and the burning of their forests. I am not
sure what is going to be left. Just look at maps of how the forest has
dwindled over the years. The predictions are that 50 years from now, there
will be no wild orangutans left. There may be a few left in some reserves —
if we are lucky — and there will of course be a few left in zoos.

I sometimes get upset by people who are against zoos because we now live
in a time where if I were an orangutan, I would probably prefer to be in a
zoo. If you look at pictures of these poor apes clinging to a little tree, all that
is left from the burning of the forests, the luckiest apes are usually brought
to a sanctuary in Borneo or Sumatra. They cannot go back to the wild. They
had a very miserable life — they either die or are taken to a sanctuary. It is
horrible that we have reached this situation, where it is almost better to be in
a good zoo than in your own original habitat.

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