If we look straight and deep into a chimpanzee's eyes, an intelligent self-assured personality looks back at us. If they are animals, what must we be?
Frans de WaalTags: intelligence humanity chimpanzees primates
Being both more systematically brutal than chimps and more empathetic than 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.
Frans de WaalThe enemy of science is not religion... . The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma.
Frans de WaalI sometimes try to imagine what would have happened if we’d known the bonobo first and the chimpanzee only later—or not at all. The discussion about human evolution might not revolve as much around violence, warfare and male dominance, but rather around sexuality, empathy, caring and cooperation. What a different intellectual landscape we would occupy!
Frans de WaalTags: empathy cooperation warfare evolution violence caring patriarchy male-dominance frans-de-waal matriarchy
I felt like a toilet frog during the last three decades of the preceding century. (38)
Frans de WaalTags: alienation frogs australia
Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously gave us the ‘God is dead’ phrase was interested in the sources of morality. He warned that the emergence of something (whether an organ, a legal institution, or a religious ritual) is never to be confused with its acquired purpose: ‘Anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose.’
This is a liberating thought, which teaches us to never hold the history of something against its possible applications. Even if computers started out as calculators, that doesn’t prevent us from playing games on them. (47) (quoting Nietzsche, the Genealogy of Morals)
Tags: nietzsche transformation alturism repurposing
In a world divided by chimpophiles and bonobophiles, we all had a good laugh when Stephen peeled his banana. (62)
Frans de WaalTags: peeled banana bonobos stephen-colbert the-colbert-report
Perhaps it's just me, but I am wary of any persons whose belief system is the only thing standing between them and repulsive behavior.
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