If you look at human society, it is very easy, of course, to compare our warfare and territoriality with the chimpanzee. But that's only one side of what we do. We also trade, we intermarry, we allow each other to travel through our territory. There's an enormous amount of cooperation.
Interpretation
Human behavior encompasses both conflict and cooperation, similar to that of chimpanzees.
In this quote, Frans De Waal highlights the complexity of human society by comparing it to the behavior of chimpanzees. While we may engage in warfare and territorial disputes, we also exhibit significant cooperative behaviors such as trade, intermarriage, and allowing free movement within our territories. This duality emphasizes that, like our closest relatives, we possess both competitive and collaborative instincts, suggesting that cooperation plays a crucial role in our societal dynamics.
In practice
In a debate about human nature, this quote can illustrate the importance of cooperation in society.
As in a Russian doll, however, the outer layers always contain an inner core. Instead of evolution having replaced simpler forms of empathy with more advanced ones, the latter are merely elaborations on the former and remain dependent on them. This also means that empathy comes naturally to us. It is not something we only learn later in life, or that is culturally constructed.
Sometimes I read about someone saying with great authority that animals have no intentions and no feelings, and I wonder, 'Doesn't this guy have a dog?'
Experiments with animals have long been handicapped by our anthropocentric attitude: We often test them in ways that work fine with humans but not so well with other species.
Being both more systematically brutal than chimps and more empathetic than _x000D_ bonobos, we are by far the most bipolar ape. Our societies are never completely peaceful, never completely competitive, never ruled by sheer selfishness, and never perfectly moral.
Human morality is unthinkable without empathy.
I have often noticed how primate groups in their entirety enter a similar mood. All of a sudden, all of them are playful, hopping around. Or all of them are grumpy. Or all of them are sleepy and settle down. In such cases, the mood contagion serves the function of synchronizing activities.
It's always interesting about God because it's like all of the religions in the world say that they pray to the same God, and yet they ask that same one God to divide itself up and agree with this one and fight against that one.
The aim of torture is to destroy a person as a human being, to destroy their identity and soul. It is more evil than murder.
With the passage of time, as well as the social evolution and genetic exchange, we ended up putting our conscience in the color of our blood and the salt of our tears.
INTERPRETER, n. One who enables two persons of different languages to understand each other by repeating to each what it would have been to the interpreter's advantage for the other to have said.
I think people have to set up little battles. They have to demonize people whom they disagree with or feel threatened by. But it's the ideological framing of the debate that scares me.
Africa is less a wilderness than a repository of primary and fundamental values, and less a barbaric land than an unfamiliar voice
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