The primatologist found parallels between human behavior and that of our evolutionary cousins.
Frans de Waal, the prolific Dutch-American primatologist and author whose research revealed the depth and breadth of emotion and intelligence in nonhuman animals, died from stomach cancer on March 14 in Stone Mountain, Georgia,
Frans de Waal holds a young chimpanzee at Burgers’ Zoo in the Netherlands, in 1979, where he began his primate studies.Born in the city of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands, in 1948, de Waal showed an early enthusiasm for animals, keeping a modest menagerie that included mice and jackdaws, relatives of crows. Some of the jackdaws, de Waal recounted in stories, would even fly to and from school with him each day.
At a career retrospective in 2014, he regaled the audience with a tale of how the chimps would become sexually aroused when female colleagues passed the enclosure. He and a male colleague sought to test this by dressing up as women—apparently eliciting little to no interest from the male chimpanzees. It was, he conceded, an imperfectly designed experiment.
In the field of animal emotion, de Waal made his biggest mark. The post-Darwin consensus on animal behavior steered away from anthropomorphizing, or attributing to animals any characteristics perceived as uniquely human. De Waal saw this as a form of “anthropo-denial.” In his view, the question wasn’t whether or not animals had emotions; rather, it was how to study them.
His work raised the profile of bonobos, the species he dubbed the “make love, not war” primate and called “peace-loving hippies.” “I talked openly about the sexual behavior,” he said. “At the time, American and Japanese scientists who worked on bonobos—they knew what they did, but they didn’t talk about it. They were too shy about it!” He noted that Americans would describe bonobos as “fairly affectionate. And you know, if I were affectionate like that in the streets of New York I would get arrested immediately!”
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