Witnessing two chimpanzees fight and then reconcile began Dr. de Waal’s exploration into the inner lives and emotions of primates.
Frans de Waal was just starting his career in primate research in the mid-1970s when he watched a male chimpanzee aggressively confront another at a zoo enclosure in the Netherlands. Awhile later, the chimp calmed down and held his palm up, a gesture of reconciliation. The two chimps hugged.
“I hate the so-called ‘ivory tower’ of science and feel that I have an obligation to communicate with the general public,” said Dr. de Waal, a longtime professor of psychobiology at Emory University in Atlanta and a research scientist at the school’s Yerkes National Primate Research Center , a primate found in central Africa. A bird slammed into the walls of her glass enclosure at a British zoo.gently picked up the stunned bird and took it to the top of the tallest tree in her habitat.
Dr. de Waal stressed that such behaviors should not be viewed as just simple versions of human interactions. Instead, he said, they should be regarded as a different, but equally rich, array of emotions and social learning that includes passing on knowledge and sharing a sense of community and generational continuity.“The possibility that empathy is part of our primate heritage ought to make us happy, but we are not in the habit of taking pride in our nature,” he wrote in a 2005in New Scientist.
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