2024-03-17 20:15:12
by Telmo Pievani
The Dutch-born scientist was 75 years old. He had been at Emory University in Atlanta for more than thirty years
He was the chimpanzee whisperer. He knew them by name, he studied them, he loved them for everything they can tell us about human nature and at the same time for their uniqueness. Frans de Waal, the great ethologist of Dutch origins who spent more than thirty years at Emory University in Atlanta, died on March 14. The family announced the news yesterday, Saturday 16 March. Stomach cancer took him away at the age of 75.
If the social life of our closest African relatives is less enigmatic for us today, we owe it to him. After his doctoral research on aggression in macaques at the University of Utrecht (where he will return as a professor in 2013) and thousands of hours of observation on the life of chimpanzees in the Arnhem Zoo, he moved to the United States in the early 1980s. creating in Atlanta a hotbed for generations of ethologists. In 1982 he achieved international fame with a book on the political abilities of chimpanzees and their Machiavellian intelligence. His descriptions of the life of bonobos, the smallest (and most peaceful) chimpanzees that live in the Congo River basin, will become memorable.
Frans de Waal has investigated the emotions and cognitive and relational abilities of primates all his life: how they make peace and war; how they manage conflicts; how they express discomfort, shame, guilt; how they smile and deceive; how they cannot tolerate injustice; how matriarchs hold the group together; how they accept or challenge authority; how young people know how to innovate and how animal cultures are born and passed down. Starting from the fear of death and the imagination, already present in animals, he studies the origins of the religious sense. Above all, he was interested in empathy as a building block of cooperation and the human moral sense. He was not naive, he knew that we can be empathetic even with the worst intentions and that we inherit from evolution a mixture of altruism and violence, but he contested the idea that morality was a superficial veneer recently spread over an essentially bad human nature. .
An award-winning member of the major international scientific academies, faithful to experimental data and suspicious of theoretical speculations, a keen polemicist, he carefully handled the inevitable anthropomorphism of those who study other animals to look for similarities and differences compared to humans. After all, it is precisely because we are also primates and relatives of all the other species, in the great Darwinian tree of life, that we are able to understand the emotions of our chimpanzee cousins. In them there are sparks of humanity that we should recognize and respect, rather than suppress.
To honor him we read his numerous and exciting books, starting with the 2019 masterpiece: The Last Embrace. What animals’ emotions say about us (Raffaello Cortina, 2020). And then other classics, including The Monkey and the Art of Sushi (Garzanti, 2002) and, for Raffaello Cortina, The Bonobo and the Atheist (2013), Are we intelligent enough to understand the intelligence of animals? (2016) and Diversi (2022), where he had lucidly addressed gender issues from the primatologist’s point of view. De Waal was convinced that by studying the emotional background that we share with our fellow travelers on Earth, we can acquire valuable lessons for building a supportive society. We need it, in an era in which Homo sapiens seems not to have yet learned to manage the most destructive emotions.
March 17, 2024 (modified March 17, 2024 | 9:09 pm)
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