Frans De Waal Research Articles

A personal tribute to Frans De Waal (1948–2024), who inspired the philosophy of animal minds

A personal tribute to Frans De Waal (1948–2024), who inspired the philosophy of animal minds

In memory of our mentor: Frans de Waal (1948-2024).

The world lost a towering figure when primatologist Frans de Waal passed away on March 14,2024. Many are aware of his multitude of contributions to the field. His ability to see what animals were actually doing changed how we viewed first primates, then other species. He shared these insights through both traditional scientific outputs, such as journal articlesand scientific presentations, and less common outputs, such as 15 books and two TED talks viewed millions of times. What may be less well known is his impact as a mentor. Here, 25of us who were Frans' graduate students, postdocs, and long-term research assistants share his personal impact on our lives.

Justice and Related Matters in the Legacy of Frans de Waal

Initially, we critically examine the current state of knowledge in the field of Philosophy of Biology pertaining to empathy as a subject of scientific investigation. Subsequently, we delve into the constraints associated with empathy in some primates, including humans, recognizing it as a socially situated and evolved attribute. Additionally, we explore its potential as a political asset among humans. In light of these findings, we reevaluate the dichotomy between perspectives that emphasize altruism and egoism as fundamental principles in the biological and ontological senses. Lastly, we put forth the scientifically defendable idea that significant connections exist between empathy and the concept of justice.

Fairness: from the guts to the brain – a critical examination by Atlantic fellows of the Global Brain Health Institute

In January 2023, the Global Brain Health Institute (GBHI) at UCSF hosted an online salon to discuss the relationship between fairness and brain health equity. We aimed to address two primary questions: first, how is fairness perceived by the public, and how does it manifest in societal constructs like equity and justice? Second, what are the neurobiological foundations of fairness, and how do they impact brain health? Drawing from interdisciplinary fields such as philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, the salon served as a platform for participants to share diverse perspectives on fairness. Fairness is a multifaceted concept encompassing equity, justice, empathy, opportunity, non-discrimination, and the Golden Rule, but by delving into its evolutionary origins, we can verify its deep-rooted presence in both human and animal behaviors. Real-world experiments, such as Frans de Waal’s capuchin monkey study, have proven enlightening, elucidating many mechanisms that have shaped our neurobiological responses to fairness. Contemporary cognitive neuroscience research further emphasizes the role of neuroanatomical areas and neurotransmitters in encoding fairness-related processes. We also discussed the critical interconnection between fairness and healthcare equity, particularly its implications for brain health. These values are instrumental in promoting social justice and improving health outcomes. In our polarized social landscape, there are rising concerns about a potential decrease in fairness and prosocial behaviors due to isolated social bubbles. We stress the urgency for interventions that enhance perspective-taking, reasoning, and empathy. Overall, fairness is vital to fostering an equitable society and its subsequent influence on brain health outcomes.

Different: What apes can teach us about gender, by Frans de Waal

Different: What apes can teach us about gender, by Frans de Waal

Humans police the expression of sex and gender much more than other primates do

Apes give us a better understanding of gender behaviour and identity in humans, says Frans de Waal . Once we start hunting for variation, it may turn out to be more common than we thought, he tells Rowan Hooper

Deep Culture

Deep Culture

Where We Fit in the Firmament

Where We Fit in the Firmament

Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality

Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality

The Origins of Behavioural Public Policy

The Origins of Behavioural Public Policy

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal

Reviewed by: Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal John Skalko Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), 340 pp. Frans de Waal's 2016 Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? is an exciting read into the baffling and brilliant world of what goes on inside non-human animal heads. Given the sheer number of studies published in the late twentieth century on animal cognition, de Waal does an amazing job presenting many of them in a highly readable fashion with just enough detail to understand the importance and rigorous facets of the research (or in some cases not so rigorous), but without making the detail overwhelming. The extensive bibliography at the end of the book provides ample material for any curious reader interested in further research regarding any of the scientific studies. Much of what is presented in the book would present a big challenge for any contemporary Cartesians who may hold, as Descartes did, that animals are mere automata. If non-human animals are self-moving machines devoid of cognition, then how do chimpanzees learn to stack boxes high enough to reach objects overhead? De Waal tells the famous story of Sultan the chimpanzee who accomplished such a feat without any prior training or teaching (65). Further, if non-human animals have no emotions, then what of the two bottlenose dolphins who came to the rescue of a third after the explosion of a stick of dynamite (133)? De Waal's book presents many challenges for the Cartesian mechanistic view of animals. Most people today, however, need not be persuaded that that the Cartesian view is wrong. On a popular level the overwhelming view is that there is no significant difference in kind between the cognition of non-human [End Page 309] animals and that of man. It is this view that de Waal himself espouses throughout the book, and for which he provides much evidence, although at times his phrasing sounds a bit like dogmatic worship of Darwin. Nevertheless, if Darwin is right, he is right. And given the contemporary biological and psychological courses of study, Darwin appears to be the most reasonable view. But an older, middle view, between the extremes of Cartesian automata and Darwinian cognitivism has been forgotten by many scholars. This is the view of the Aristotelian tradition. Aristotle held a more nuanced view of animal cognition: animals are not mere machines devoid of cognitive states, but neither do they possess all of the same kind of mental faculties that man has—"In all animals other than man there is no thinking or calculation but only imagination."1 In the footsteps of Aristotle, Avicenna and Aquinas also did much to develop a rich account of animal cognition. De Waal seems to be completely unaware of the middle ground of the Aristotelians concerning animal cognition. Most of the case studies de Waal mentions remain perfectly compatible with the Aristotelian tradition (albeit, perhaps in its more developed forms): ravens have cognitive perspective-taking (147–48); apes imitate other apes (153–54); thrushes cognize ahead in gathering food for their young (205–6); rats remember in which part of a maze they encountered chocolate before (211); and wasps recognize the faces of other wasps (70–71). But various challenges remain for the Aristotelian. De Waal provides various cases of what he takes to be reasoning in non-human animals. Many of these cases are not reasoning in the Aristotelian sense: reasoning (for the Aristotelian) is coming to know another proposition from two prior propositions that are known. De Waal mentions Sadie, a chimpanzee who could cognize when a box had a fruit in it and when another box did not: [The experimenters] placed an apple in one [box] and a banana in another. After a few minutes of distraction, Sadie saw one of the experimenters munching on either an apple or a banana. This experimenter then left, and Sadie was released to inspect the boxes. She faced an interesting dilemma, since she had not seen how the experimenter had gotten...

Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves by Frans de Waal

Book Review| January 01 2021 Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves by Frans de Waal de Waal, Frans, Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves (London: Granta Books, 2019), 326 pp. Thibault De Meyer Thibault De Meyer Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2021) 27 (1): 109. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-8723129 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Thibault De Meyer; Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves by Frans de Waal. Common Knowledge 1 January 2021; 27 (1): 109. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-8723129 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsCommon Knowledge Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2021 Duke University Press2021 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: LITTLE REVIEWS You do not currently have access to this content.

"Mama’s Last Hug: Animal and Human Emotions" by Frans de Waal, 2019. [book review

"Mama’s Last Hug: Animal and Human Emotions" by Frans de Waal, 2019. [book review

Beyond the 3 Rs to a More Comprehensive Framework of Principles for Animal Research Ethics.

We have produced a framework of general moral principles for animal research ethics in a book, Principles of Animal Research Ethics, which is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in fall 2019. This book includes a detailed statement and defense of our framework along with critical commentaries on our work from seven eminent scholars: Larry Carbone, Frans de Waal, Rebecca Dresser, Joseph Garner, Brian Hare, Margaret Landi, and Julian Savulescu. In the present paper, we explain the motivation for our project and present our framework of principles. The first section explains why a new framework is both needed and timely, on the basis of six important developments in recent decades. The second section challenges assertions of an unbridgeable gulf dividing the animal-research and animal-protection communities on the issue of animal research. It does so, first, by indicating common ground in the core values of social benefit and animal welfare and, then, by presenting and briefly defending our framework: three principles of social benefit and three principles of animal welfare. These six principles, we argue, constitute a more suitable framework than any other that is currently available, including the canonical 3 Rs advanced in 1959 by William M. S. Russell and Rex L. Burch.

Minding Animals in the Old and New Worlds. A Cognitive Historical Analysis

Minding Animals in the Old and New Worlds. A Cognitive Historical Analysis

Testing the limits of behavior analysis: A review of Frans de Waal'sAre we smart enough to know how smart animals are?

In “Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?” de Waal (2016) summarizes field studies and experiments that demonstrate a huge number of examples of complex behavior in many animal species. His avowed aim is to challenge the views of both lay people and scientists about the limits of intelligence of other species and to demonstrate much closer similarity in the achievements of other species to those of humans, thus undermining claims of human uniqueness. His general explanatory scheme is to infer human‐like cognitive processes in other species to explain complex behavior, at least when this is supported by other evolutionary considerations. This review suggests how behavior analysis might explain some of the phenomena outlined by de Waal, indicates where its explanatory system may need to expand and develop to encompass a wider range of behavior, and points to similarities as well as differences between the explanatory scheme used by de Waal and that of behavior analysis.

On Cognitive Evolution

The author outlines some philosophical advances that Frans de Waal has made in relation to scientific methodology and our understanding of cognitive evolution.

Ape imagination? A sentimentalist critique of Frans de Waal’s gradualist theory of human morality

This essay draws on Adam Smith’s moral sentimentalism to critique primatologist Frans de Waal’s gradualist theory of human morality. De Waal has spent his career arguing for continuity between primate behavior and human morality, proposing that empathy is a primary moral building block evident in primate behavior. Smith’s moral sentimentalism—with its emphasis on the role of sympathy in moral virtue—provides the philosophical framework for de Waal’s understanding of morality. Smith’s notion of sympathy and the imagination involved in sympathy is qualitatively different from animal sympathy. I argue that Smithian sympathy includes the ability to represent propositional attitudes and take into account multiple perspectives which are then synthesized into a singular impartial perspective. Furthermore, Smithian moral judgment requires the capacity for emotion regulation and moral self-cultivation, or the ability to shape and control one’s reactive attitudes. Taken together, these capacities far outstrip the capacities of animals, disrupting de Waal’s gradualism.

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal

Book Review| April 01 2018 Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal de Waal, Frans, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (London: Granta, 2016), 336 pp. Charles Foster Charles Foster Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2018) 24 (2): 325–326. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-4362691 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Charles Foster; Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal. Common Knowledge 1 April 2018; 24 (2): 325–326. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754X-4362691 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsCommon Knowledge Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2018 by Duke University Press2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Bottom-up morality: The basis of human morality in our primate nature

This is an interview with Frans de Waal who gave the Kohlberg Memorial Lecture at the AME Conference in St. Louis in November 2017. Frans de Waal’s research with non-human primates documents that primates share our tendencies towards fairness, reciprocity, loyalty, self-sacrifice, caring for others, strategies for conflict avoidance and for conflict resolution and repairing the social fabric. Findings show that primates, especially our nearest relatives, Chimpanzee and Bonobo, intentionally shape their communal interactions, often to the benefit of the whole community. Humans share this evolved primate nature, grounded in mammalian biology of maternal instinct and infant attachment. These provide the deep basis of human morality, which is marked by its own extensions, such as inter-personal moral discourse and consensus, detailed public justifications and philosophical critique, abstraction and universalization. The evolutionary view promotes a bottom-up morality which needs to be fully considered when discussing moral development, moral engagement and moral education.