At 73, Frans de Waal has nothing left to prove in the world of primatology, of which he is one of the most eminent members. In Different (The Liberating Links, 480 pages, 25 euros), a book written during the pandemic, it shares decades of observation of great apes in their natural environment and in captivity – particularly our closest cousins, chimpanzees and bonobos. . He believes that“they hold up a mirror that allows us to approach the genre from a new angle”combining biology and culture.
Your first mainstream book was published in 1982, it was about chimpanzee politics. It was already about sex and power. Why have you broached the subject of gender this time?
The reason is that when I lecture on animal intelligence and emotions, and mention the differences between the sexes, people are curious. Not least because they hear in the media that gender is cultural, flexible, and that we can raise our children neutrally if we want to. The general public is skeptical about this, and they want to know what biologists think about it.
People are convinced that boys and girls are different, but they are also not convinced by the very deterministic biological discourse that came out of the 1970s, where behavior could be said to be “pre-wired” where we are “slaves to our genes”. And I think they’re right: it’s a very simplistic way of looking at biology, and we scientists are partly to blame for this misconception.
“The majority of alpha males protect the weakest, maintain peace and group cohesion. They have a very constructive role.
My belief is that you can never say a behavior is purely biological or cultural. Humans are animals, in which we always encounter interactions between the two dimensions. And I would say the same thing for other primates, especially chimpanzees and bonobos whose very long development involves a lot of learning and cultural influences.
In the great apes, contrary to popular belief, you write, “the males exercise less control than one imagines”. Didn’t the notion of alpha male, which you popularized, feed this prejudice?
People have this view that primates are necessarily male dominated. It’s a misconception that grew out of an early study of baboons in a zoo, where the males were clearly violent and dominant. I don’t see primates like that at all. First, because among our two closest relatives, chimpanzees are dominated by males, while among bonobos, females predominate. So it’s not that simple.
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