Our Inner Ape

More Editorial Reviews
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.
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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).

From Booklist
*Starred Review* In Chimpanzee Politics (1982) and five succeeding books, de Waal has called attention to how close to human Homo sapiens ' closest relatives really are; indeed, the domestic entity referenced by the title of de Waal's photo collection My Family Album (2003) isn't his particular menage; it's that of the chimps and bonobos he has studied and grown to love. As his books have become more complete and general about human-ape resemblances, his prose has become ever clearer and more artful. This book is arguably an even better read than The Ape and the Sushi Master (2001). After a bringing-up-to-speed chapter on such matters as chimp-bonobo distinctions and human-ape shared ancestry, de Waal devotes long chapters to power, sex, violence, and kindness among the apes, and among humans, too. Comparing the three upper primate species, and occasionally certain monkey species, as well, yields illuminating and provocative results because they are all highly social, and the apes share cultural capability with humans. Overall, chimps are more concerned with power and more violent but much less sexy than bonobos, and both apes demonstrate kindness socially to a greater extent than humans do, at least verbally. In conclusion, de Waal turns directly to "The Bipolar Ape"--that is, the human being--and urges learning from the apes how to improve humanity's longtime balancing act between savagery and good fellowship. Ray Olson
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Review
De Waal is perhaps the most literate, entertaining, and soulful of the cognitive ethologists. -- Los Angeles Times

De Waal's most hopeful message is that peaceful behavior can be learned.... [An] important and illuminating book... -- New York Times Book Review, October 9, 2005

Review
De Waal is perhaps the most literate, entertaining, and soulful of the cognitive ethologists. (Los Angeles Times)

Product Description
From "one of the world's greatest experts on primate behavior" (Desmond Morris) comes a look at the most provocative aspects of human nature--power, sex, violence, kindness, and morality--through our closest cousins. For nearly twenty years, Frans De Waal has studied both the famously aggressive chimpanzee and the egalitarian, matriarchal bonobo, two species whose DNA is nearly identical to ours. The result is an engrossing narrative that reveals what their behavior can teach us about ourselves.

About the Author
Frans de Waal, Ph.D., is a biologist and ethologist, world-renowned for his work on the social intelligence of primates such as chimpanzees, bonobos, capuchins, and macaques. He is credited with the discovery of reconciliation in chimpanzees, and is the founder of the field of conflict resolution research in animals. He was the first scientist to show that apes resolve conflicts, cooperate, and console one another. He is the author of five previous books, which have been translated into fourteen languages, including The Ape and the Sushi Master, a New York Times Notable Book, and Peacemaking Among Primates, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award. De Waal is currently C. H. Candler Professor in the Psychology Department of Emory University and Director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes Primate Center in Atlanta, Georgia.