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It’s no secret that humans and apes share a host of traits, from the tribal communities we form to our irrepressible curiosity. We have a common ancestor, scientists tell us, so it’s natural that we act alike. But not all of these parallels are so appealing: the chimpanzee, for example, can be as vicious and manipulative as any human.
Yet there’s more to our shared primate heritage than just our violent streak. In Our Inner Ape, Frans de Waal, one of the world’s great primatologists and a renowned expert on social behavior in apes, presents the provocative idea that our noblest qualities—generosity, kindness, altruism—are as much a part of our nature as are our baser instincts. After all, we share them with another primate: the lesser-known bonobo. As genetically similar to man as the chimpanzee, the bonobo has a temperament and a lifestyle vastly different from those of its genetic cousin. Where chimps are aggressive, territorial, and hierarchical, bonobos are gentle, loving, and erotic (sex for bonobos is as much about pleasure and social bonding as it is about reproduction).
While the parallels between chimp brutality and human brutality are easy to see, de Waal suggests that the conciliatory bonobo is just as legitimate a model to study when we explore our primate heritage. He even connects humanity’s desire for fairness and its morality with primate behavior, offering a view of society that contrasts markedly with the caricature people have of Darwinian evolution. It’s plain that our finest qualities run deeper in our DNA than experts have previously thought.
Frans de Waal has spent the last two decades studying our closest primate relations, and his observations of each species in Our Inner Ape encompass the spectrum of human behavior. This is an audacious book, an engrossing discourse that proposes thought-provoking and sometimes shocking connections among chimps, bonobos, and those most paradoxical of apes, human beings.
- Sales Rank: #210924 in Books
- Published on: 2006-08-01
- Released on: 2006-08-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.30" h x .80" w x 5.50" l, .63 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 320 pages
Amazon.com Review
Power, sex, violence and kindness: these four broad-spectrum categories encompass much of human behavior, so it's only fitting that they're also the primary subject material for Frans de Waal's (The Ape and The Sushi Master) book Our Inner Ape. The few (but deeply detailed) chapters are a mesmerizing read that spans biology, child psychology, postmodern theorists and fundamental morality, using tales of stern chimps, and sexy bonobos to examine humans' place between them. In the process, he examines why we need to know our place in the world, how our body language communicates feelings, and where the roots of empathy lie in mammalian life.
De Waal's respect for both his readers and his research subjects come shining through in the simple clarity he uses when describing both the endless sex of bonobo apes and the heartrending violence occasionally present in chimp hierarchal structure. By illustrating his points with a mixture of straight-from-research experiences and jokes at the expense of modern politicians, he keeps his ideas compelling for anyone with a basic understanding of evolutionary science without drifting towards the academic drone that could be expected of by a researcher of his experience.
You won't find specific conclusions concerning human nature, but instead a gentle, almost rambling look at two primate species with vastly different social networks and how, perhaps, humanity can learn from each to our benefit. A few of de Waal's lovely duotone photos (My Family Album: 30 Years of Primate Photography grace the end of the book, featuring close-up shots of the folks he's been writing about--chimps like Yeroen, Nikkie and Mama, and bonobo Kuif and adopted daughter Roosje are downright thrilling to see after reading such interesting stories about their lives. Jill Lightner
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Noted primatologist de Waal (Chimpanzee Politics) thinks human behavior cannot be fully explained by selfish genes and Darwinian competition. Drawing on his own primate research on chimpanzees and bonobos—our closest animal relatives—he shows how much we can learn from them about ourselves: our qualities of "fellow feeling and empathy" as well as our power-obsessed, violent side. We are "bipolar apes," de Waal says, as much like bonobos as like chimps. The latter are known for their viciousness and "red in tooth and claw" social politics, but bonobos offer a radically different social model, one of peace and hedonistic orgies; de Waal offers vivid, often delightful stories of politics, sex, violence and kindness in the ape communities he has studied to illustrate such questions as why we are irreverent toward the powerful and whether men or women are better at conflict resolution. Readers might be surprised at how much these apes and their stories resonate with their own lives, and may well be left with an urge to spend a few hours watching primates themselves at the local zoo.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Scientific American
No man is an island. In fact, people are less happy and healthy alone than when they are in a group--of kin, of countrymen or indeed of anybody with whom they can identify, however fleetingly. But tribes are tricky, at once so solid and yet so evanescent--je suis Marxiste, runs the apocryphal French graffito, tendance Groucho. We switch allegiance from one Thousand-Year Reich to another at the drop of the hat. At the dictates of some distant demagogue, your good neighbor can become a deadly foe. On July 7, 2005, suicide bombers blew themselves up on three London subway trains and a bus, killing themselves and more than 50 other people in the cause of radical Islam. The abiding horror is that the bombers were not foreign insurgents--Them--but were British, born and raised; in Margaret Thatcher's defining phrase, One of Us. The crisis of tribal identity that the horror unleashed will, eventually, change the characteristics of what we mean by "Britishness," qualifying the laissez-faire multicultural consensus that has held for the past half a century. Such is the mutability of tribes, entities forever changing with reference to one another, and the protean subject of David Berreby's brave book. Berreby's quest is to understand what he sees as a fundamental human urge to classify and identify with "human kinds." We project this urge onto what we see. Are races and human kinds real? The fact that they change all the time, and we can switch from one to another so easily, suggests not. Instead, Berreby says, our ideas of the "human-kind code" are based "on facts about how we relate to [other] people at the moment we categorize them--what we want, or expect, or fear from them." Having an inbuilt facility to distinguish between Us and Them was a valuable resource, related to that essential ability to create artificial groupings from what, to a robot, would be entirely distinct objects. We take this talent for granted, but what would life be like if we lacked it: if we were like Funes, the cripple created by Jorge Luis Borges in his story Funes the Memorious--a man with mental recall so powerful that he could not stand back and objectify what he saw? Funes saw each dog, each leaf, each cloud as sui generis: his inability to form categories left him utterly unable to make sense of the world. This vital trick serves us well. But when applied to people, it can cause problems, especially when different kinds of people are all mixed up together, as they are in London, one of the most polyglot cities on the planet. The current crisis swirling around Islam and Britishness, what some see as a symptom of the imminent failure of the multicultural consensus, could have been predicted by the fate of the "contact" hypothesis, in which prejudice is meant to be weakened by familiarity. That foreign-looking man in the hooded jacket will be less threatening if you know he's just Bernie from next door. Most scholars now think, Berreby says, that the contact hypothesis is a muddle: "Actual contact sometimes makes people more prejudiced. On many American college campuses ... the emphasis on di?versity has led students to join one of these diverse human kinds and shun much contact with the others." Bernie could be your friend for life--or your worst enemy. Do we remain forever prey to our irrepressible urges to classify, to create outcasts, Untermenschen, untouchables? Because "human kinds" are epiphenomena, results of unspoken contracts between fickle human minds and changeful reality, we can rise above them. "Human kinds exist because of human minds," Berreby concludes. "But how you choose to live with them is up to you." We can actively choose the kinds we want, for evil or for good. Since the bombings, London mayor Ken Livingstone has had posters put up all over the city promoting our unity. "Seven Million Londoners," it reads, "Only One London." Livingstone, like Margaret Thatcher at the opposite end of the political spectrum, is a consummate politician who knows how to play on our instincts. In times of universal crisis and brouhaha, what we really need is a sense of perspective. Our Inner Ape, written by a scientist with a lifetime's experience around apes, is perhaps the most humane treatment of the human condition you can read, for all that it is mostly about chimpanzees. So-called common (but extremely rare) chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) live in male-dominated societies characterized by shifting allegiances and extreme violence. So far, so Berreby. Their close cousins, the even less frequent pygmy chimps, or bonobos (P. paniscus), live in matriarchal societies where the stress is on reconciliation, all anxieties smoothed over by liberal applications of sex, in all possible combinations. If chimps are from Mars, bonobos are from Venus. Really? It's tempting to see these creatures as cartoon characters, caricatures of ourselves, done up as clowns or, more seriously, as metaphors for the human condition. De Waal plays this up to engage our interest but is at pains not to overdo it. Chimps and bonobos are not Looney Tunes humans; neither are they human ancestors, but creatures with a long evolutionary history of their own, which has provoked its own adaptive responses, its own repertoire of behaviors. Chimps are many things, but they are not One of Us. The essential difference between humans and chimpanzees is that we form nuclear families, whereas chimps, so human in many ways, have no such institution. Although we stray from the path more often than we care to admit, human society is all about the age-old business of boy meets girl and sets up home under a roof, so much so that it explains such things as the size of our testicles, the manifest oddities of the female reproductive system, and why we prefer to have sex in private. At root, we define ourselves with reference to our families and closest kin and work outward from there. But we can learn a great deal more of our own humanity by comparing ourselves with something closely related but still Other. And this, in the final analysis, is the lesson of both books. Tribal allegiance means nothing unless there are other tribes out there against which we can get our measure.
Henry Gee, who lives in London, is a senior editor of Nature and former Regents' Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is author of The Science of Middle-earth (Cold Spring Press, 2004) and Jacob's Ladder: The History of the Human Genome (W. W. Norton, 2004).
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Three Species of Ape
By Jim E. Murphy
I read this book while doing research for a work of fiction about Chimpanzees. This was just one of several scientific and popular books that I read, but it was the most engaging and enlightening because it did not just discuss chimpanzee behavior or bonobo behavior, but compared and contrasted three distinctly different species of ape, including humans as the third species. The new thing that this book brings to the reader is not just how alike humans are to other apes. I think many people are beginning to understand that other apes also lie, cheat, steal, wage war, and go on organized hunting expeditions. But where the book breaks really new ground is in its discussion of sex, child-rearing and politics in the three ape worlds. Reading this, one realizes that bonobos are not chimpanzees, and neither are we, but it raises very valid questions about who and what we really are. This book demonstrates the effects of culture on basic patterns of behavior and asks what is actual normal behavior for any of us from a genetic and evolutionary perspective.
This book caused me to discard the extensive work I had already done on a new novel and totally rethink what I had to say.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Benign biologism
By Ashtar Command
"Our Inner Ape" is a popular science book by leading primatologist Frans de Waal. It attempts to uncover human nature by taking a closer look at chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest living relatives. The book contains chapters on power, sex, violence and kindness.
De Waal's book is interesting and well worth reading. Sometimes, it's even entertaining. The author often mentions his own encounters with apes...and with humans who were perhaps acting out their inner ape just a little bit too much!
Many popularized books on human evolution portray us as "killer apes". They emphasize our violent, manipulative and hierarchical streaks. Naturally, they then connect this behaviour to that of apes and monkeys, usually the chimpanzee. Indeed, chimpanzees can be extremely violent. In the wild, they have been observed to attack, kill and even eat members of their own species. The conclusion: we are descended from murderous, aggressive beasts and cannot be counted on to ever mend our ways. Some literature of this type is anti-feminist and regards male dominance over females as a good thing.
De Waal doesn't deny the darker sides of humans, but his book is nevertheless unusual in its emphasis on the positive traits of our nature. He points out that these, too, have parallels among the apes.
Chimpanzees may be fiercely hierarchic, but their hierarchies are nevertheless unstable. Coalitions of subordinates can overthrow the alpha male if he gets to overbearing. Is this the origin of our democracy? And while chimpanzees can be aggressive, they have also evolved methods of peace-keeping and reconciliation. De Waal describes how one old female played the role of arbiter in disputes among dominant males in a flock at the Arnhem zoo in the Netherlands. As for male dominance, chimpanzees are "patriarchal" in the wild, but flocks kept in captivity have a more even balance of power between the sexes, since the females can build more effective coalitions among themselves.
De Waal also believes that aggression among primates is to a large extent a learned behaviour. He reports an intriguing experiment with rhesus monkeys, which are usually aggressive. After spending months in the same cage with the larger but less aggressive stumptail macaques, the rhesus monkeys developed more reconciliation skills and became less aggressive themselves. This continued even after the two species had been separated again. De Waal also reports a curious case in Africa, where a flock of olive baboons became more peaceful and even "matriarchal" after the aggressive and dominant males had all died of poisoned food. A decade later, the flock was still relatively peaceful. Somehow, the females had managed to "indoctrinate" new males who had joined the flock into accepting the new norms.
The author further believes that human morality also comes from our primate ancestors. Apes have developed empathic skills, even towards members of other species. De Waal's favourite example is a bonobo in a zoo, which tried to help a wounded bird, and even defended it against other bonobos in the flock. Monkeys don't have empathy, but they can show tolerance towards handicapped members of their flocks. Human morality is a kind of highly evolved ape empathy or monkey tolerance. Or at least that's De Waal's take on it.
Another obvious difference between "Our Inner Ape" and most other books on this subject, is the author's emphasis on the bonobo. The bonobo is as closely related to humans as the chimpanzee, yet it's often left out of discussions about human evolution. Why? Obviously because it doesn't fit the picture of patriarchal, aggressive "killer apes". Bonobos are much less aggressive than common chimpanzees, they live in flocks dominated by females, and they frequently resolve disputes by having sex! When two flocks of chimpanzees meet in the jungle, violent confrontation is the rule. When two flock of bonobos meet, they socialize with each other at the boundaries of their respective territories, and then depart in peace. But what really bugs most people is the "matriarchy" of the bonobos. For instance, bonobo males must beg for food from the females, and they lack effective coalitions among themselves. De Waal tells a funny anecdote about a man at a lecture who essentially snapped when De Waal told him about bonobos, shouting: "What on earth is wrong with these males?!". Since bonobos are promiscuous and have casual sex all day long, one cannot help wondering whether the males of this "hippie ape" aren't actually better off than most...
Despite all these positives, I nevertheless found myself in frequent disagreement with De Waal. There is still too much emphasis on violence, power and hierarchy among humans. Perhaps subliminally, the author still sees this as the "natural" state. Both anthropology and archaeology suggests otherwise. Egalitarian, peaceful and non-patriarchal societies have existed. At least one advanced high culture, the Indus Valley Civilization, had curious egalitarian traits. Another, the Minoan culture, was probably hierarchic but seems to have been peaceful and had a religion centred on goddesses. De Waal further believes that the nuclear family and monogamy are somehow "natural" to our species, at least as an "ideal". This is unconvincing, especially since De Waal himself references studies of polyandrous cultures which lack our concept of "fathers". Of course, he mentions polygyny as well.
The cross-cultural (and individual) variation among humans makes all comparisons between humans and apes problematic, especially since chimpanzees and bonobos are so vastly different from each other. Which human is being compared to which ape? In an unguarded moment, De Waal admits that our ancestors may have been very different from the great apes (surely a trivial observation outside the ivory tower of biology), but his entire book is based on the idea that you can get real insights by comparing us with chimps, although we have evolved along different lines for at least six million years. It seems you cannot take the ape out of the biologist!
If there is any insight to be gained by comparing humans to other primates, it's that the flexibility and intelligence typical of humans exist in some form already among apes and monkeys. This is why I found De Waal's experiments with rhesus monkeys so fascinating, not to mention his observations on "girl power" among usually "patriarchal" chimpanzees and olive baboons. The real lesson from our primate relatives is that a certain evolutionary lineage developed more and more intelligence, flexibility and empathy. A larger part of their behaviour became acquired through learning than through instinct. Finally, this lead to the emergence of Homo sapiens, the only species that can socially construct its reality, leading to the immense cultural variation within our species.
Perhaps De Waal would agree with this, as far as it goes. However, I still think he's too "biologist", although it's a more good natured biologism than orthodox sociobiology, since it takes into account the "flower power" bonobos alongside common chimpanzees.
That being said, I nevertheless recommend this and other books by Frans de Waal. They are interesting, relatively well written, and give much food for thought.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
The Inner Human of Apes
By Arnold
This is a wonderful synopsis of Frans de Waal's decades of research on chimpanzee and bonobo societies and what it tells us about human evolution. Like Jared Diamond's The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (P.S.), Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are attempts to answer some of the big questions about humanity and human evolution. Like Diamond's books, this one will change your conception of human evolution and what it means to be human.
In some ways, this book should really be called "The Inner Human of Apes," since the book focuses on the apes more than on humans. Since most readers know about human emotions, this focus makes sense. What makes the book so interesting is that de Waal knows chimps and bonobos so well that he can go beyond the stereotypical images of both species and provide some intimate anecdotes to illustrate his points. In particular, de Waal goes to great lengths to illustrate the entire spectrum of ape emotions and society, including regret, political alliances, jealousy, foresight, reconciliation, and empathy. These emotions, which many once believed to distinguish humans from animals, can clearly be seen in our next of kin.
Some of the anecdotes are so amazing as to make the book worth the purchase price alone. De Waal frequently invokes the political alliance of two male chimpanzees, Nikkie and Yoern. This pair resembled the relationship between a political master and upstart (think John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson). At one point, Nikkie and Yoern got into a fight (as political allies occasionally do), and Nikkie bit Yoern on his leg. In order to make his younger colleague jealous, Yoern would subsequently pretend to limp whenever Nikkie was watching. Talk about seeking a sympathy vote!
By the end of the book, you'll realize that the real issue isn't whether apes feel emotions or engage in society, but whether we can understand their lives. De Waal describes the methodology of some of his experiments, but acknowledges that too often human experiments are designed by a human mind as if for human subjects. For example, one researcher who sought to assess whether chimps could tell faces apart, showed chimps pictures of different humans. When the chimps did not appear to recognize the differences, the researcher assumed they lacked that aspect of intelligence. However, when later researchers showed the chimps the faces of different chimps, the chimps could recognize the differences. Just as we have difficulty telling chimps apart from each other, they find it easier to recognize differences in chimp features than human faces. Thus, as de Waal notes, there are no stupid apes, just stupid experiments.
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