More ‘Just Like Us Stories’ from Frans de Waal
That was out of the question, he said, and besides, their [chimpanzee] society would not suit me: it was much too harsh for a human being.
That was out of the question, he said, and besides, their [chimpanzee] society would not suit me: it was much too harsh for a human being.
My brother-in-law was a shepherd for a decade and wrote this wonderfully artful memoir about the experience. His pet peeve was that people would not infrequently ask him, “Aren’t sheep very stupid?” His ready answer was, “They’re smart enough to be successful sheep.” I am reminded of this by the fact that the incredibly prolific …
Just as dogs might have been domesticated to be submissive to humans hominins might have been selected to be submissive to the interests of their groups.
Ordinarily, the principle of parsimony in evolutionary biology refers to the assumption that similar traits in closely related living species, in this case, chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans all derive from our common ancestor. Frans deWaal and Christopher Boehm have argued respectively that empathy and the capacity for conflict resolution are traits shared by all three …
Having determined that the various mental illnesses were all reflective of evolved segments of normal emotion, and that the majority of these illness – the anxiety and depression disorders – reflected motivation by aversion to the fears of separation and being trapped, I concluded that much of normal human behavior is inhibitory of primate aggression …
