Frans de Waal
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Part 2 of a two part Interview conducted September 11, 2013

Link to audio podcast.

Transcript checked by Dick Overfield.

Frans de Waal, he's a Dutch-American biologist who has been named among Time Magazine's "100 Most Influential People," He is the Charles Howard Candler professor of Primate Behavior in the Emory University psychology department in Atlanta, Georgia, he is the director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, and is the author of numerous books including Chimpanzee Politics andOur Inner Ape. His latest, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates. His research centers on primate social behavior, including conflict resolution, cooperation, inequity aversion, and food-sharing.

R.K.: And in terms of cooperation, you've done studies that showed that monkeys not only cooperate to achieve common goals, but they'll even help other monkeys, or other primates when they're not going to be rewarded themselves. When they're already fed they'll help another monkey, or whatever get food. Sharing work is required and you also found that in elephants, right?

F.W.: Yeah. We did experiments on chimpanzees because around the year two thousand everything changed for humans, in a sense, that until that time we were called selfish and competitive and we had selfish genes and all of this and the whole image of human species and all other species was that of competition and selfishness.

Around the year two thousand, all of a sudden, the neuroscientists and the anthropologists and the economists, they all started saying, well, humans are actually much more cooperative than we thought and less selfish than we thought and they have a sense of fairness and they are cooperative even when they don't get benefits from it, and so on.

The human species, all of a sudden, became quite altruistic, but usually it was added right after that that other animals of course were just as selfish as we had always thought they were. So that was a big change in the perception of humans, but also there was, all of a sudden, this implication that other animals were quite different. People started doing experiments at that time with chimpanzees to see if they cared about the well being of somebody else and they actually did not find anything. So they set up experiments in which one chimpanzee would pull an apparatus that would feed himself and his neighbor, and so on, and the chimpanzees were not doing that really.

There were not paying attention to it very much and the conclusion was that, yes, humans are the only altruistic animals. And then we set up an experiment where we did away with the whole apparatus that people have been using because we assumed that the chimps might not have understood the apparatus. So we said, well, if they don't understand it then of course it's not a real test of what they want to do for somebody else.

So we set up a much simpler experiment where you put two chimpanzees side-by-side. They can exchange food for tokens. So they get a bucket-full of tokens, bits of plastic basically, of different colors and one color, if they hand the token to us, they get food, but the neighbor who sits next to them gets nothing.

The other color, if they hand it to us, they get food, but the neighbor also gets the same piece of food and so the one who does the exchanging, for that chimp it doesn't make any difference, he will always get some food for what he does with us, but the only difference is one color feeds only himself, the other color feeds the two of them. What did we find? We found that chimps over time started to prefer the pieces, the color that would feed the two of them. So they did care about the well being of others.

They developed a preference for that and we have done many more experiments since and other people have done experiments since and now the perception is that, yes, chimpanzees do actually care about the well being of others and are not as entirely selfish as people had assumed.

R.K.: Now, you said early in the interview that people who think that humans are better are elitists. Why do you think it is that people feel the need to say that humans are better and different and more unique? All this research is showing that it's really a matter of degree.

F.W.: Yeah. Well that's a very old debate. Darwin of course already said that, something along the lines that however vague the cognitive differences are between humans and apes, or humans and other animals, they are a matter of degree. That's what he said and there has always been these two sides to the issue. It's that one group, mostly biologists, who will say that is continuity and then another group, mostly social scientists who don't work really with animals, saying that there is this huge difference.

Basically, I think all of the evidence of the last thirty, forty years of studies on animal behavior and animal cognition support the view that there is continuity. There are a few areas of difference and we talked about that, like language, and so on. So there are areas of difference and you can concentrate on those, or not if you want to, but overall, by and large, there is a lot of continuity.

R.K.: But that wasn't my question. I am already buying that, that there's continuity. My question is, why do you think people need to think otherwise? Why do people take this elitist approach and need to say that humans are unique and that there is this discontinuity in your terms? What is it about some people that they need to separate themselves from your work?

F.W.: That's a question for the human psychologists so to speak. Why are some people insecure about human species and feel that you need to emphasize how different and how special you are and other people don't feel that need. I always, since I give so many lectures on animal behavior, always feel there are two kinds of people; there are people who feel that they are very close to animals.

Certainly, if you go to give a lecture at a zoo like I often do, the zoo caretakers and the curators and everyone who works at the zoo, feels very close to animals and so that kind of audience basically assumes that we are animals. We are very close to them and we are very similar to them.

But you will find many people in this world who feel close to animals and don't have any trouble if you say your emotions are similar to your dog's emotions, or the other way around. They don't feel insulted at all. They think it's only logical that human feelings and emotions are very similar to those of other animals.

And then there's an entirely different category of people and you're wondering about their psychology, but I cannot really answer what their psychology is like. But there is an entirely different category of people who insist on that they are different. That is something that comes up at a certain age because you never find children who think like that. So you will never find, let's say, a five year, or six year old child who, if you ask them about animals, of course they think they're close to animals, that animals have feelings, and so on. But it's after a certain age, probably after adolescence, that one category of people becomes very stubborn about the idea that humans are totally different and totally special and I don't know what that is and why that happens.

It's not something that you are born with necessarily. So I suspect it's a product of indoctrination and it's probably indoctrination that comes from either religion, or some other areas. But it is of course an old religious position to say that humans are totally different. Humans have souls and animals don't have souls. So some people buy into that indoctrination and some people don't. That's basically the difference.

R.K.: Okay, this is the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show WNJC 1360 AM out of Washington Township reaching metro Philly and South Jersey sponsored by OpEdnews.com. If you're coming in to the middle of this interview, I am speaking with Frans de Waal. He is a biologist who has been named in Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People. He has been studying primates for almost forty years. He is the author of about ten books, the latest one is, The Bonobo and the Atheists; In Search of Humanism Among the Primates, and we have been talking about his bottom-up ideas about morality and ethics. Where I want to go with this is you have had some debates with both religious people and with atheists and you can disagree with both of them and you have got your own take on it. Can you talk about where this is all fits in? How you address people who believe in God and the top-down approach to morality versus atheists who don't believe in any of that?

F.W. informs Rob that he needs to step awy from the phone for a few minutes.

R.K.: Okay, so I am going to keep talking. The reason I got really interested in Dr. de Waal is because I have this theory that the bottom-up approach is changing the way our culture works and I also have beliefs that bottom-up is the way that indigenous tribal people have lived for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years, and what he brings to the table is this idea that... ideas about caring and cooperation and helping each other have been around, not for hundreds of thousands, not for one or two million years, but for even tens of millions of years even a hundred million or more years and it's built deeply into our DNA and our genetic structure. So that's where I am going to go with this conversation next and hopefully he will be back in just a moment and we will continue this conversation.

I am going to be including in the podcasts... if you can go to the podcasts at opednews.com/podcasts and you will find my interview there with Dr. de Waal. I will have a link to his TED Talk which has videos of his studies with the monkeys with the cucumbers and the grapes, links to his website and it's...this is fascinating stuff and I think, I am not sure that I agree with him in that there is nothing to learn from the primates. I think what we can learn from them is what we have forgotten and I will get back to him on that in just a moment. In terms of the billionaires, I love what he had to say about that because...

F.W.: Alright.

R.K.: Alright. I was continuing the conversation all by myself talking about my approach to bottom-up and how I believe we are transitioning from a top-down world to a more bottom-up world and that we've come from that and what is really exciting to me is what you say is basically that this bottom-up way of being has been around. It's deep in our DNA and in our genes and it goes back a hundred million, or more years. Maybe, if it is birds, how far back do birds go?

F.W.: Well, the split between mammals and birds is like two hundred million years ago.

R.K.: Two hundred million years ago. Amazing!

F.W.: So the bottom-up view is of course very much a biological view and neuroscience is also very much a bottom-up science at the moment. So the thinking is that we see structures from above, so to speak, so we think for example that our behavior is based on reasoning and that we have reasons to do this and reasons to do that, but often our behavior is based on intuitions and emotions that we barely control and we automatically choose this, or choose that and then afterwards we come up with wonderful reasons of why did this, of why we married that person, or we come up with all these good reasons, but actually our decisions are not necessarily produced by that kind of reasoning.

So that's the view, that is becoming very popular, actually also in psychology, that we are sort of bottom-up creatures.

But you asked about religion and atheism, and so on. So the reason the book is called, The Bonobo and the Atheists, is because there's a group of neo-atheists at the moment who are very anti-religion. So religion is all wrong and it's not just that God doesn't exist. That's not the only issue they have. It's that they think religion is really morally corrupt and you should fight against religion and also that science is the answer to everything.

Science will solve all the problems in the world. So in my book, I argue against that in the sense that I think it's fine to be an atheist. I myself am not a believer and I think you can be moral and be an atheist. I think those two things can very well go together, but I don't believe that we should be trashing religion the way they are because for me the puzzle is why do all human societies have religions?

There are no human societies without a religion, or without a belief in the supernatural which to me means that it does something for us, that it's something important to the human species and their societies. So the question for me is not so much does God exist, or not exist, which is not a question that I can answer, but why do we have religions and what do religions do for us? What is the function of them in society? And that's for me the more important issue. So that's an issue that I address in the book also.

R.K.: Why do we have religions? How do they function?

F.W.: Well, religions have a very important social function. They bring people together. We also know from research that people who are religious usually are healthier so it has beneficial health effects. It certainly has beneficial social effects.

And so first of all, it has a social function and probably also religions are important for human morality in the sense that they enforce it and stimulate it and provide narratives for it and guide it in certain directions. And so even though I don't believe that religions are the source of morality, I don't think they invented morality, they became an important sort of support system for human morality and that's the thing that intrigues me.

The few societies have kicked religion out, they have not been particularly moral societies. Remember the communists, Stalin and Mao Tse Tung and Pol Pot? They kicked religion out aggressively and Stalin even executed more than thirty thousand priests and bishops at some point, and so they have not been the most shining examples of morality. And so I am not sure what society would look like without religion and would they be good societies, or bad societies? That's a question that I am struggling with: how important religion is for morality.

R.K.: So it makes me wonder when an individual, be it human, or primate, acts from tendencies that are genetically endowed, that's bottom-up and it's deep within the person. When a person embraces morals, that's external. It would seem to me that this bottom-up, internal upwelling way of behaving and seeing would be more powerful and more deeply rooted and I wonder if there's been any way of looking at that and to look at that. There is a lot written about how, as we move into this century, we're moving to a shallower, more distracted way of way being and there's a book called, The Shallows, and I wonder if this externalized, top-down way leads to a shallower level of function in terms of that.

F.W.: Well, you said morality is external, but you know I think human morality... yes, we do have a set of rules so to speak for society that you are supposed to follow and you could consider that external, but the reason we can follow these rules is partly because we are endowed with certain tendencies. So you can say for example, we want to have a society in which fairness operates, but the only reason you can say that is that people have already a sensitivity to fairness.

If you would go to a bunch of sharks, who have no concept of social relationships, or fairness, and you would explain that they need to be more fair in how to distribute the food for example, they would have no clue about what you are talking about because they have never had any reactions in that regard. So the reason we can talk about taking care of others and being empathic to others and following social rules and being sensitive to fairness and so on; the reason we can impose that there now are moral systems and talk about it is precisely because people have all these sensitivities already. They have already, when they were children, experienced lots of situations that they found to be unfair and to be fair and so on. So even if morality is looked at as a set of rules that comes from the outside, it is very much related to how we are as a species and how our psychology is constructed and those are biological facts basically.

R.K.: Are there different religions that reverberate more with the bottom-up aspects of morality than other religions?

F.W.: Yeah. I think the general feeling is that Buddhism is more in tune with that line of thinking. Actually I will soon have a debate with the Dalai Lama. In the book I describe my first discussion with the Dalai Lama about those kinds of issues. The Dalai Lama has just recently published a book about ethics without religion and so I think Buddhism is more in tune with this because they also feel that there is continuity between a species, of course. So in Eastern religions the soul can travel between you to a cat and from a cat to a frog and from a frog to a human and so that's a very different way of looking at nature than the Western view which is a very hierarchical view where humans are on top of everything.

R.K.: Yes. Hierarchical is certainly a top-down way of seeing things. So another thing I am very interested in is how connection is tied together with this. Can you talk about your research in terms of how primates and humans connect to each other and the dimensions of connection?

F.W.: What do you mean? Literally, how we humans connect with animals?

R.K.: Not necessarily humans with animals, I mean animals with animals, or people with people, but it seems to me in the research you're doing in terms of looking at mirror neurons and caring and empathy, they all tie to the ways and the dimensions of connection between individuals within a species.

F.W.:Yeah. Mirror neurons are a very important part of the story in the sense that they blur the line between your own body and somebody else's body. Actually you know, the mirror neuron discovery is very interesting because they were discovered not in humans. Many people now think that they're so important to humans, but they were discovered in macaques in a laboratory in Italy. The first discovery actually had to do with the human-animal connections because what they did, they did experiments where a human reaches with his hand for an object and the monkey sees that and the monkey mirror neurons respond to that in exactly the same way as when the monkey itself reaches for the same object. So for the mirror neurons, and that's why they're called mirror neurons, the monkey's own movement is equivalent to somebody else, a human, reaching for the same object, and so for the monkey the monkey mirror neurons doesn't make a distinction between their own movement and somebody else's movement and that's actually done in a situation where the monkey identifies itself with a human. And so the thinking is that mirror neurons can be used within the species, but they can also be used outside the species if the movements are similar enough, or the motorics are similar enough.

R.K.: And you've written about how dogs have empathy and when a person is crying, or demonstrating pain, or suffering.

F.W.: Yeah. There are of course an enormous amount of stories on this. There's even now some experimental evidence. So, of course many people know that dogs respond to your emotions, but recently a team in the U.K. has done research where they ask a person in the family to cry, or to say that they're in pain, to act like that and then they see how the dog in the house responds. And the dogs actually do approach them, put their head in their lap, lick their faces, and things like that, and so the dog shows empathic responses. It's... by the way, it's the same experiment that people have done with children, with young children, and they show very similar responses.

R.K.: What I have been looking at in doing my radio show, looking at this bottom-up transition, is to try to get a big picture idea of how our core roots apply to this. Now, I believe we are transitioning from a top-down world that was created when we became attached to land and farming, when civilization evolved and that we're kind of transitioning back a bit towards a more bottom-up way because of the internet, because it has changed the way people think and interact with each other. Do you have any thoughts about that?

F.W.: You mean the role of technology in this?

R.K.: Yes.

F.W.: I don't know. I do feel that social media, for example, they exploit our general tendency to be social and so it's not that social media invents anything new. What they do is they capitalize on our tendency to be interested in each other and to want to stay in touch with certain people. So I'm not sure that the technology... the technology makes certain contacts possible, but they don't necessarily substantially add to it. So I'm not sure that technology is going to change the world in that regard except to make the world smaller. That's for sure, that you can stay in touch with people who are far away.

R.K.: Is there any research on using any of these kinds of technologies with primates?

F.W.: No. People have tried that. People have given iPads to orangutans and stuff like that, but they don't do much with it. They use them as a toy basically.

R.K.: You mention a lot, Hieronymous Bosch, because you grew up in the town of Bosch and you imagine his painting, "The Garden of Earthly Delights," and you say in your New York Times editorial, "Bosch seems to have depicted humanity in its natural state, while reserving his moralistic outlook for the right-hand panel of the triptych in which he punishes -- not the frolickers from the middle panel -- but monks, nuns, gluttons, gamblers, warriors, and drunkards"" Where do you go with that? What are you thinking he is saying there and how does it tie in with your work with primates?

F.W.: Well, the nice thing about the triptych by Bosch, which is called "The Garden of Earthly Delights," is that it seems to depict humanity before "The Fall." So the general view...because the middle panel has like a thousand human figures who are engaged in all sorts of erotic acts and eating, hanging around and stuff like that, and the...

R.K.: Acting like Bonobos.

F.W.: Yeah, acting like Bonobos. ...and the middle panel is often interpreted as paradise, but paradise without any "Fall." So there was no original sin and people were not aware of good and evil so to speak, and that's what you see in the middle panel and that's not necessarily a bad situation.

The bad situation comes in the right hand panel where Hell is and the right hand panel punishes not the people from the middle panel, but as you said, gamblers and monks and greedy people, and so on, and so the view is that Bosch was sort of playing around with the idea of what would happen to humanity if we had never heard of good and evil and we had never had "The Fall" and never had original sin and so on.

So it's a very interesting speculation and Bosch is often of course presented as a moralizing painter, but in this case he was sort of speculating where morality came from and how important it is.

R.K.: What interests me is that I've been doing a series of interviews about psychopaths and sociopaths and then you're referring to Bosch's painting of gluttons and gamblers and warriors and drunks and I wonder if there is a primate analog to psychopaths and sociopaths.

F.W.: May I interrupt for a second? I need to...in five minutes I need to step out of my office because...

R.K.: Okay, we we're wrapping up, just near the end right now.

F.W.: So sociopaths and psychopaths- I always find them an interesting category because they have...as smart as anybody else, but they don't have the emotional components of empathy, so to speak. We've actually done research on that, but we don't have the numbers of primates that you would need. So in humans, one percent of the population is estimated to be a sociopath. So if you work with chimpanzees and you have twenty five chimps, as I do, what are the chances of you, even if chimps have the same frequency so to speak, what are chances that you find one of those? And so in humans of course, in human society, we have millions of people and so you can have a whole collection of sociopaths and study them, but that is not really possible for us.

R.K.: So what are your anecdotal observations about primate psychopaths and sociopaths?

F.W.: No, we don't have really anecdotal observations. We have tried to rate their personalities the same way you do with humans, but we are really not at the point that we could claim that there is some similarity there.

R.K.: So there's nothing? You just said you were starting to do some work with it. I'm just curious what can glean...what you've gleaned so far.

F.W.: No, we did some work on personality ratings which is the way in humans you rate personalities and then you can find the dimension that is called "psychopathy" and that is the sort of stuff we have been doing. We have not been looking for a psychopath, or something like that.

R.K.: Okay. So what are the similarities? What do you find and how about how they function with each other?

F.W.: Well, we have not found specific individuals that we would call psychopaths and so I am not sure we have that kind of similarity.

R.K.: Oh! You haven't found any?

F.W.: No.

R.K.: That's an interesting statement right there. Wouldn't you say?

F.W.:No, no. No, but it's as I said, we don't have the numbers and humans you're dealing with millions of people and of course thenyou're going to run on occasion people who are like that, but we don't have the numbers. If you work like I do with twenty-five chimpanzees, the chances of you finding it, even if the frequency is the same as in humans is just very low.

R.K.: So you think they're out there but you haven't found them.

F.W.: They may be out there. Yeah.

R.K.: Okay, anything you want to wrap up with now?

F.W.: No, no I think we covered pretty much everything.

R.K.: Alright, it's been a great interview, thank you so much