TRIBUTE. Power-hungry and brutal like chimpanzees, but also compassionate and erotic like bonobos: the ambivalence of humans lies entirely in their primate nature, says primatologist Frans de Waal in this interview he gave us in October 2006, in #716 Science and the future. We invite you to find this text in full here, in honor of the scientist who died on March 14, 2024 at the age of 75.
“There are many paths to success”
Sciences et Avenir: You have described the very political relationships between monkeys, their bonds between mother and child, their empathy or their sex life. In “The Monkey in Us” you claim to shed light on human psychology. Is it really relevant?
Frans de Waal: Like many primatologists in the United States, I work in a psychology department? at Emory University in Atlanta. So I’m used to talking about human behavior with colleagues. In Europe, research has focused on molecular biology so much that primate specialists may disappear even before their subject of study! There is a mental continuum between apes and us. Thus, to explore our species’ place in nature, to understand the behavior of our ancestors, observing our cousins is valuable. According to geneticists and paleontologists, chimpanzees and bonobos are closest to us. Without being able to decide between one or the other at the moment.
Read alsoVIDEOS. Interviews with primatologist Frans de Waal
Do you think the animal in us is better than we thought?
Strangely enough, humans tend to recognize themselves only in chimpanzees, who are notorious for their aggressive pursuit of power and sex. As if we are unable to see the other side of our animality, the “bonobo” side. The sympathy and empathy that prevails between them – from happy goons to unbridled bisexuality – play an equally important role and are part of our biological heritage!
Frans de Waal was a professor at Emory University in Atlanta and directed the Living Links Center at the Yerkes Primate Center. Educated in the Netherlands, the country of his origin, he is the author of several works, including Bonobos, the joy of being a monkey (Fayard, 1999), family album (Fayard, 2003), the monkey in us (Fayard, 2006) or even La Last hug (Links That Free, 2019).
How do you account for the discouraging, “erroneous” view you say we’ve gotten about human “nature” over the past forty years?
After World War II and its parade of atrocities, evolutionary theories naturally focused on aggression and its animal origins. This vision was already supported in the West by the entire Christian movement, according to which everything bad comes from nature.
Stronger: in the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan extolled the benefits of predation for society and the economy, evolutionists proved them right! Like Richard Dawkins, who sees selfishness as a driver of change rather than a flaw that drags us down. “Scratch an altruist: you’ll see a hypocrite bleed,” added biologist Michael Ghiselin.
At that time there was great confusion. Just because natural selection is a “cruel and merciless” process of elimination does not mean that it must produce “cruel and merciless” creatures. It favors, pure and simple, organisms that survive and reproduce. However, they can promote their genes by being less aggressive and more cooperative. There are many paths to success.
So would morality be a product of biological evolution?
The good side of a person is not caused by civilizational or religious “varnish”. If all people are driven only by their own interests, as advocates of individualism keep repeating, why does a newborn cry when he hears another baby cry? This is where empathy begins. We are born with impulses that lead us to others, lead us to care for them. And the behavior of our primates shows us that these impulses are natural and very ancient. It took the discovery of bonobo habits in the 1980s to open our eyes.
“Great Apes Sympathize”
How far does animal empathy go?
Great apes sympathize. It’s not uncommon for them to watch over an injured companion, slow down when another can’t keep up, tend to each other’s wounds, or gather fruit for an elder who has stopped climbing. How can we see pure hypocrisy in this? Great apes have been observed coming to the aid of members of another species, such as this Kuni bonobo, who one day delicately attempted to lift an injured starling back to its feet and then send it flying from a treetop. That empathy can arise from the monkey in us we should rejoice, but it is hardly in our habits to open the arms of our nature. It took a monkey to save a member of our species to realize this. It was 1996: Binti Jua, an 8-year-old female gorilla, came to the aid of a 3-year-old boy who had fallen nearly six meters in the primate enclosure at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago. The video went around the world.
Doesn’t regret mean its opposite, sadistic pleasure?
Being able to understand others means we also know how to make them suffer. Compassion and cruelty depend on an individual’s ability to understand the effect of his attitude on others. I have seen chimpanzees doing harm for fun: luring chickens with food to hit or sting them, perfecting the rules of this cruel game by changing roles, etc.
According to ethologist Konrad Lorenz, what sets humans apart is their lethality?
Chimpanzees—deeply territorial, I don’t hesitate to say “xenophobic”—commit murderous raids on their neighbors, but also infanticide. Further observations of hyenas, lions, langurs – small monkeys with long tails – or dolphins show that if killing a member of their species is unusual, it is also a widespread reality in the animal world. This means that chimpanzees, macaques, rhesus, bonobos and humans are also capable of reconciliation.
Does our appetite for power also have archaic roots?
Yes, as evidenced by observations of our primate cousins. As a young, long-haired student in the 1970s, I was unprepared for this discovery. Human behavior was seen as completely flexible: not natural, but cultural. However, my chimpanzees exhibited all of our archaic tendencies.
My observations helped me look at our behavior in the light of evolution. Unlike those of our politicians, the chimpanzees’ machinations to gain power are shameless, undisguised. As biologists, we talk about neither intentions nor emotions when we read Prince by Machiavelli was invaluable to me in understanding what I observed.
Chimpanzees take politics very seriously. Coalitions and alliances play a vital role. No male can rule alone for long because the group as a whole can take anyone down. Staying on top—having access to food and women—requires them to work constantly, between the need to vigorously assert their dominance, satisfy their supporters, and avoid mass revolts. Hierarchy is widespread in the animal world, inequality has deep roots.
“The Contradiction Between Our Social Organization and Our Sexuality”
Do monkeys have some sense of justice?
In the laboratory, I have shown that small capuchin monkeys reject unequal reward, that is, they refuse to complete the same task if they are paid in cucumbers while their peers are paid in grapes. Which leads me to say that if communism failed because of a truncated vision of humanity, stripped of its thirst for competition, pure and hard capitalism runs into a misunderstanding of the demands of social empathy.
According to you, an empathic bonobo strategy would eradicate infanticide. Why ?
American primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has shown that langurs obscure possible paternity when breeding partners, which reduces infanticide. Because males usually tend to kill the offspring of a sexual rival to ensure the fecundity of the female as quickly as possible.
Bonobos have also established a sexualized, female-dominated society in which paternity remains unclear. Disadvantage? Males do not invest in parental care at all. And female bonobos have pregnancies so close together that they sometimes end up weaning two young at once. They climb trees with one little one under their belly, the other hanging behind their back. This is an excessive burden.
The bonobos pushed the incomplete family to its ultimate limit. Our own development took another direction. Our success as a species is closely linked to abandoning the bonobo lifestyle and more tightly controlling the expression of our sexuality. Our masterstroke was the creation of a nuclear family.
It’s a very politically correct view, isn’t it?
Our essential difference from monkeys lies in the establishment of pair relationships, where men and women take care of their children together.
Thanks to the nuclear family, almost all males can reproduce and no longer have to fight like brutal chimpanzees for access to females. They are also more confident about their paternity and therefore more inclined to invest in parental care, unlike carefree bonobos.
Patriarchy can be understood as a simple extension of the assistance that males provide in caring for their offspring. The family allowed us to transfer the attachment of males to their children to a degree not known in other primates, and thus opened the way to a form of cooperation. This is the key to the incredible level of cooperation that characterizes our species and its societies. Men were able to unite with their sexual rivals to contribute to the common good, prepare great enterprises, conquer the world, form armies, etc. !
Would this explain why the control of sexuality has become an obsession in our societies?
To the extent that in certain cultures and religions, removing part of the female genitalia or assimilating the sexuality of sin is part of the customs. Of course, we do not follow all the restrictions to the letter, but they represent the ideal. However, if women’s fidelity were the goal of nature, their sexual appetite would be limited to the period of fertility, and this phase would be signaled by visible attributes.
Instead, nature has created a female sexuality that is almost impossible to contain. The argument that men are polygamous and women are monogamous is as “holey as Swiss cheese”. What we actually see is a contradiction between our social organization revolving around the mononuclear family and our sexuality.