Frans de Waal, who found the origin of morality in monkeys, dies at the age of 75

Frans de Waal, who used his study of the inner lives of animals to build a powerful argument that apes think, feel, strategize, transmit culture and act based on moral sentiments – and that humans are not as special as many of us would like to remember – died Thursday at his home in Stone Mountain, Georgia. He was 75.

The cause was stomach cancer, said his wife, Catherine Marin.

Professor de Waal, a psychologist at Emory University in Atlanta and a research scientist at the school’s Yerkes National Primate Research Center, took issue with the common use of the word “instinct.” He saw the behavior of all sentient beings, from crows to humans, as being on the same broad continuum of evolutionary adaptation.

“There are no uniquely human emotions,” he argued in a 2019 New York Times guest essay. “Like organs, emotions have evolved over millions of years to perform essential functions.”

The ambition and clarity of his thinking, his skills as a storyteller and his prolific output made him an exceptionally popular figure for a primatologist – or for a serious scientist of any kind. Two of his books: “Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?” (2016) and “Mommy’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves” (2019) were bestsellers. In the mid-1990s, when he was Speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich included Professor de Waal’s first book, “Chimpanzee Politics” (1982), on a reading list for Republican House freshmen.

Novelists Claire Messud and Sigrid Nunez both told The New York Times that they liked his writing. The actress Isabella Rossellini hosted a conversation with him last year in Brooklyn. Great philosophers such as Christine Korsgaard and Peter Singer wrote long and thoughtfully reactions to his ideas.

Professor de Waal’s influence was so great that The Times credited his work with unleashing “a flood of debate about animal sexuality” and helping to popularize the term “alpha male”, although none of these achievements had much to do with the core of his ideas.

His interest in what is shared emotionally and morally between species was stimulated in the mid-1970s, early in his career, when he saw one male chimpanzee confront the other rawly, then calm down and extend his hand, palm upwards. , in a peace offering, after which the monkeys hugged and cared for each other. After further investigation, he concluded that the episode demonstrated a desire and ability to reconcile after fighting.

He found even more striking evidence that animals other than humans have empathy and a sense of fair play in the early 2000s when he worked with psychologist Sarah Brosnan. The scientists designed an experiment in which two monkeys were given cucumbers for completing a task. Then one monkey was given a grape and the other a less tasty cucumber. The one who got the cucumber started refusing to cooperate, even swinging the vegetable back to the researcher. Some animals who got the better end of the deal refused their grape.

Many of Professor De Waal’s animal anecdotes were moving. He wrote about a bonobo named Kuni who once picked up an injured starling, climbed a tree, spread the bird’s wings and then released it so it could fly. “She tailored her help to the specific situation of an animal that was completely different from herself,” wrote Professor de Waal in his 2005 book: “Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are.”

These types of episodes indicated that primates had cognition, Professor de Waal said. Other monkey behaviors – young females receiving maternal training, for example – indicated something even more impressive: that monkeys were able to learn, remember and pass on new skills across generations, meaning that different communities could develop their own cultures had.

All this language was unusual among scientists, and some objected. Donna Haraway, not a researcher of primates but of primatologists, argued that Professor de Waal tended to imagine a world in which “primates became model yuppies” – that he was, in other words, engaged in a kind of projection. A common argument against Professor de Waal’s work was that he anthropomorphized non-human animals.

Professor de Waal responded that the real problem was not anthropomorphism – apes and humans have many similarities that warrant comparison, with similar brains and psychological traits – but instead a human exceptionalism that rejected even the possibility of human behavior in other animals, as well as in animals. such as traits in humans. He called this trend “anthropodenial.”

For Professor de Waal, his critics missed out on good news: morality turned out to be deeply rooted in our evolutionary past.

Franciscus Bernardus Maria de Waal was born on October 29, 1948 in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, a city in the southern Netherlands, and grew up in nearby Waalwijk. His father, Jo, was a banker, and his mother, Cis (van Dongen) de Waal, ran the house and raised six sons.

Frans kept fish as pets as a child, and by his college years he had a kitten named Plexie, which he said he regularly engaged in interspecies playdates with a puppy.

When he was 22, Frans attended the wedding of his brother Wim, who was good friends with a young Frenchwoman he had met after they were randomly assigned as pen pals at school. When they met, Frans and the Frenchwoman, Mrs. Marin, fell in love immediately. A year later they moved in together.

During Frans’s early years in academia, a job studying macaques led him to develop a specialty in monkeys. He started working as a chimpanzee researcher in 1975 at Arnhem Zoo, in the east of the Netherlands. He received his Ph.D. in biology from Utrecht University in 1977.

He and Mrs. Marin married in 1980 to make it easier for them to move to the United States as a couple. The following year, Professor de Waal took a job at the Wisconsin Primate Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

He published thirteen books, and at his death wrote another, about how our thinking about animals has evolved over time. John Glusman, the vice president and editor-in-chief of WW Norton & Company, Professor de Waal’s publisher, said in an email that the company planned to release the book next year.

In addition to Mrs Marin, Professor de Waal also leaves behind his brothers Ferb, Wim, Hans, Vincent and Steven.

Professor De Waal’s sympathy for monkeys was not lost on the animals themselves.

At Arnhem Zoo, a female chimpanzee, Crested, was unable to breastfeed sufficiently, causing all her babies to die. Every time one died, she would rock back and forth, cling, refuse food, and scream. Not long after, another female chimpanzee with even more persistent health problems gave birth at the zoo.

Professor de Waal had an idea. He started training Kuif to handle a bottle.

It was difficult to teach Tintin not to drink the milk himself. When baby chimpanzee Roosje was first placed on a straw bed in her living room, Kuif looked away from her almost performatively.

Then Kuif approached the bars, where a concierge and Professor de Waal were watching her. She kissed them and looked up at them, as if asking permission. The two people waved their arms and told them to pick up Roosje. She did – and she became the most caring mother Professor de Waal could imagine.

“After this adoption, Kuif showered me with the greatest affection,” recalls Professor de Waal in his book “Mama’s Last Hug.” “She reacted to me like I was a long lost relative, wanting to hold both my hands and whining desperately when I tried to leave. No other monkey in the world did that.”