Frans de Waal Changed How We Think About Animals, Ourselves Included

The great primatologist Frans de Waal died last week, of stomach cancer, to the great sadness of his many admirers, myself among them.  His radically different view of primate behavior, and his gift for writing about it gracefully in a series of popular books, have placed him among the leaders of a quiet revolution in our ideas about the animal world and about ourselves. Harvard University biologist E. O. Wilson credited de Waal with “moving the great apes closer to the human level than could have been imagined as recently as two decades ago.” Anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, once a skeptic, later came to regard herself as one of de Waal’s “biggest fans” and said his description of the tactics primate societies use to stay together “in spite of their dominance-seeking and even murderous tendencies was terribly important, most especially if we want to understand humans.” 

I spent a few days with de Waal in 2003, researching a profile of him for Smithsonian Magazine. (Parts of it later turned up in my book The Ape in the Corner Office.) The first day in the observation tower overlooking his study subjects, I was watching de Waal closely, as any reporter would do in the course of note-taking. “You’re not paying attention to the apes!” he remarked.  “I’m paying attention to the main ape,” I replied. He laughed and we got along well thereafter, and of course I did also pay attention to his study subjects. Here’s that profile. I hope it brings back your own memories of an inspired and inspiring observer of the natural world.

By Richard Conniff

As in a good soap opera, chimpanzee life is anything but gentle, and, his interest in peacemaking notwithstanding, that suits de Waal just fine. On this lazy spring afternoon, he sits watching his study animals from a boxy yellow tower beside an open-air compound, part of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta, where de Waal is a psychology professor. Below, one chimp strolls past another and deals out a slap that would send a football tackle to the emergency room. A second chimp casually sits on a subordinate. Others hurl debris, charge, bluff and displace one another. One chimp lets out an outraged waa! and others join in till the screaming swirls up into a cacophony, then dies away.

De Waal, now 55, going gray at the temples, in round, wire-rimmed glasses and a “Save the Congo” T-shirt, smiles down on the apparent chaos. “Growing up in a family of six boys, I never looked at aggression and conflict as particularly disturbing,” he says. “That’s maybe a difference I have with people who are always depicting aggression as nasty and negative and bad. I just shrug my shoulders and say, ‘Well, it’s a little fight. As long as they don’t kill each other.’” And killing members of their own troop is something chimpanzees rarely do. Their lives are more like one of those marriages where husband and wife are always squabbling, and always making up.

“Growing up in a family of six boys, I never looked at aggression
and conflict as particularly disturbing”

De Waal got his start in biology as a child wandering the polders, or flooded lowlands, in the Netherlands, and bringing home stickleback fish and dragonfly larvae to raise in jars and buckets. His mother indulged this interest, despite her own aversion to seeing animals in captivity. (She was the child of pet shop owner and joked that the gene had skipped a generation.) When her fourth son briefly considered studying physics in college, she nudged him toward biology. De Waal wound up studying jackdaws, members of the crow family,which lived around (and sometimes in) his residence. Jackdaws were among the main study animals for de Waal’s early hero, Konrad Lorenz, whose book On Aggression was one of the most influential biological works of the 1960s.

Like many students then, de Waal wore his hair long, and sported a disreputable-looking fur-fringed jacket, with the result that he flunked a crucial oral exam. The chairman of the panel said, “If you don’t have a tie on, what can you expect?” De Waal was furious, but during the next six months preparing for his makeup exam, he got his first chance to do behavioral work with chimpanzees. This time he passed the exam, then threw himself full-time into captive primate studies. Eventually he obtained three different degrees at three different universities in Holland, including a PhD in primatology. He continued his research with chimps at the Arnhem zoo, then spent ten years studying macaques as a staff member at a primate center in Madison, Wisconsin.

Since 1991, he has divided his time between research at Yerkes and teaching at Emory. At Yerkes, the chimpanzee compound for de Waal’s main study group, FS1, is an area of dirt and grass half again as large as a basketball court, enclosed by steel walls and fencing. The chimps lounge around on plastic drums, sections of culvert pipe and old tires. Dividing walls angle across the open space, giving the chimps a chance to get away from one another. (The walls, says de Waal, “let subordinates copulate without getting caught by the alpha.”) Toys include an old telephone book, which the chimpanzees like to shred as a form of amusement.

It is, de Waal acknowledges, a completely artificial environment. Unlike chimps in the wild, his charges don’t spend seven hours a day foraging across their home range, they face no competition from outside groups, there are no immigrants or emigrants, and because of a worldwide surplus of captive chimps, birth control is mandatory. Captivity also reduces the power difference between males and females; females who live together defend one other against male aggression. “But the basic psychology of the chimpanzee and the basic behavioral repertoire are still there,” he says.

Captive studies also offer one crucial advantage: “You have control and you can see more,” says de Waal. In wild studies, it’s often a matter of luck whether you find the animals in the first place, “and it’s tricky to see when they have a fight, because they tend to run into the underbrush. So to follow what happens after a fight is almost an impossibility.” Students of captives used to say that research in the wild was anecdotal and unscientific; the wild researchers in turn said captive work had nothing to do with how animals really live. But the two sides now often collaborate. “I look at it that we need both,” says de Waal.

Was Our Ancestral Homeland in Botswana–not East Africa?

by Richard Conniff/Scientific American

Anyone lucky enough to have visited the Okavango Delta in the southern African nation of Botswana will recall the comforting and oddly familiar sensation of looking out from the shelter of a stand of trees at the panorama of wildlife—from elephants and African wild dogs to lilac-breasted rollers—moving across the lush surrounding floodplains. That sense of familiarity may run deeper than we imagine, a new study suggests—back to a time when early modern humans also wandered there.

The study, appearing Monday in the journal Nature, uses genetic, archaeological, linguistic and climatic evidence to argue that the ancestral homeland of everyone alive today was in northern Botswana—not in East Africa, as previously thought. Based on mitochondrial DNA, passed down from mother to daughter, the paper’s co-authors argue that we are all descended from a small community of Khoisan hunter-gatherers who lived 200,000 years ago in vast wetlands encompassing Botswana’s Okavango Delta and the Makgadikgadi regions.

Much of that place is now a dry salt pan—and inhabited by modern Khoisan people, sometimes called Bushmen. But back then, it was a vast wetland covering an area the size of Switzerland. The community that lived there was

Cities Are For People, Not Cars

Yes, there are people in those cars. But not many for the space they occupy.

by Richard Conniff/The New York Times

In many of the major cities of the world, it has begun to dawn even on public officials that walking is a highly efficient means of transit, as well as one of the great underrated pleasures in life. A few major cities have even tentatively begun to take back their streets for pedestrians.

Denver, for instance, is proposing a plan to invest $1.2 billion in sidewalks, and, at far greater cost, bring frequent public transit within a quarter-mile of most of its residents. In Europe, where clean, safe, punctual public transit is already widely available, Oslo plans to ban all cars from its city center beginning next year. Madrid is banning cars owned by nonresidents, and is also redesigning 24 major downtown avenues to take them back for pedestrians. Paris has banned vehicles from a road along the Seine, and plans to rebuild it for bicycle and pedestrian use.

Yes, car owners are furious. That’s because they have mistaken their century-long domination over pedestrians for a right rather than a privilege. The truth is that cities are not doing nearly enough to restore streets for pedestrian use, and it’s the pedestrians who should be furious.

Many American cities still rely on “level of service” (LOS) design models developed in the 1960s that focus single-mindedly on keeping vehicle traffic moving, according to Elizabeth Macdonald, an urban design specialist at the University of California, Berkeley. “Hence improvements for other modes (walking, cycling, transit) that might increase vehicle delay are characterized as LOS. impediments,” she and her co-authors write in The Journal of Urban Design. The idea of pedestrians as “impediments” is of course perverse, especially given the word’s original meaning: An impediment was something that functioned as a shackle for the feet — unlimited vehicle traffic, say.

The emphasis on vehicle traffic flow is also a perversion of basic social equity, and the costs show up in ways large and small. Vehicles in cities contribute a major portion of small-particle pollution, the kind that penetrates deep into the lungs. (The percentage can reach as high as 49 percent in Phoenix and 55 percent in Los Angeles. It’s just 6 percent in Beijing, but that’s because there are so many other pollution sources.) People living close to busy roads, particularly infants and older people in lower-income households, pay most of the cost in respiratory, cardiovascular and other problems. A 2013 M.I.T. study estimated that vehicle emissions cause 53,000 early deaths a year in the United States, and a study just last month from Lancaster University in Britain found that children with intellectual disabilities are far more likely to live in areas with high levels of vehicle pollution.

Among the smaller costs: Most people in cities from Bangalore to Brooklyn cannot afford to keep a car, and yet our cities routinely turn over the majority of public thoroughfares to those who can. They allow parked cars to eat up 350 square feet apiece, often at no charge, in cities where private parking spaces rent for as much as $700 a month. And they devote most of what’s left of the street to the uninterrupted flow of motor vehicles.

But that’s not really such a small cost, after all: It means that

Hello, My Name is Denisova 11. And Mom Is S-O-O-O-O Weird. Or Is It Dad?

Artist’s conception of a Neanderthal: This would be Denny’s mom.  (Photo: Joe McNally/National Geographic)

by Richard Conniff/Scientific American

In a remarkable twist in the story line of early human evolution, scientists have announced the discovery of “Denisova 11”—a female who was at least 13 years old, lived more than 50,000 years ago, and was the child of an early mixed marriage.

That is, her parents were not just of different races, but two different and now-extinct early human types. Their exact taxonomic designations—whether they were separate species or subspecies—is still a matter of scientific debate. But the bottom line for Denisova 11 is that mom was a Neandertal and dad was a Denisovan.

The research, published Wednesday in Nature, is the work of a team led by pioneering paleogeneticist Svante Pääbo at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. He and his co-authors presented the first description of the Denisovans in 2010, based on genetic evidence from one of the 2,000 or so bone fragments found in Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains,

The Telltale Bone, in 360 degrees (Photo Thomas Higham/Oxford University)

where Siberia borders Mongolia and China. The new discovery is based on another bone fragment from that lot, a 2.5-centimeter-long fragment of what was a femur or humerus, from which the researchers extracted six DNA samples and then cloned them for detailed analysis.

Molecular dating indicates that Denisovans, who are so far known only from Denisova Cave, and Neanderthals, known mainly from sites in Europe, diverged from each other almost 400,000 years ago. They coexisted, probably in relatively small populations scattered across the vast Eurasian landmass, until both became extinct some 30,000 to 40,000 years ago.

But the genetic evidence from Denisova 11 and other recent studies suggests that, on the occasions when they met, Denisovans and Neandertals commonly

Acts of Gratitude: Remembering A Doctor’s Heroic Care

This morning I got word that Dr. Robert S. Modlinger, the endocrinologist who saved my life, has died at 72. Here is the obituary giving the considerable accomplishments of his career. But Bob Modlinger meant so much more than that to me and to so many other patients, despite his own disabling medical issues.

This is the column I wrote a few years ago to thank him.

BY RICHARD CONNIFF/The New York Times

JULY 5, 2007 6:53 PM

I’m too big a skeptic to put much faith in the circularity of life, with deeds done long ago coming round years later to haunt us or make us whole. But I began to think about the possibility recently, during a visit to Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. One of the lectures that day was about the art of listening to patients’ stories with an almost literary ear, as a way of treating them with greater insight and sensitivity.

The speaker was looking at things only from the doctor’s perspective. But it struck me that there are at least two sides to every medical story. And it got me thinking back 30 years, to when I was a young man dying of no apparent cause.

My symptoms then included listlessness, faint-headedness, an inability to climb stairs without resting and unquenchable thirst. Twice, I took home a jug for a 24-hour urine test, and both times I came back with an extra bottle on the side. It didn’t seem to signify much to my doctor. The heart was his specialty, and he kept doing electrocardiograms suggesting something wrong there, but no particular diagnosis. I wasn’t much interested, in any case. I was only 26 years old, but the idea of dying seemed perfectly fine.

Then one afternoon

Can Mixing Bots & Humans Make Business Meetings Less Annoying?

by Richard Conniff/Scientific American

When people work together on a project, they often come to think they’ve figured out the problems in their own particular sphere. If trouble persists, it’s somebody else—engineering, say, or the marketing department—that is screwing up. That local focus means finding the best way forward for the overall project is often a struggle. But what if adding artificial intelligence to the conversation, in the form of a computer program called a bot, could actually make people in groups more productive?

This is the tantalizing implication of a study published Wednesday in Nature. Hirokazu Shirado and Nicholas Christakis, researchers at Yale University’s Institute for Network Science, were wondering what would happen if they looked at artificial intelligence (AI) not in the usual way—as a potential replacement for people—but instead as a useful companion and helper, particularly for altering human social behavior

Donald Trump and Other Animals

(Art: Tim Enthoven)

by Richard Conniff/New York Times

I once interviewed Donald Trump for a magazine story. The topic was rivalries, which seemed like a natural for him. But he was so bombastically short on specifics, so braggadociously vague, that in the end there was nothing to quote. I left him out of the story.

So I was surprised recently to learn, by way of an article in The New Yorker, that Mr. Trump had, in fact, quoted me in a passage from his 2004 book “Trump: Think Like a Billionaire.” I would not have imagined

The Notorious Racist Who Inspired America’s National Parks

Madison Grant

by Richard Conniff/Mother Jones

I used to tune out when my father would go on about eminent domain: how his immigrant grandparents had built up a modest homestead with two houses, three grown children, and a flock of chickens on the banks of the Bronx River. And then, around 1913, how the government had seized the property to make way for the Bronx River Parkway. That the episode still rankled after almost a century just seemed like a manifestation of my father’s cranky late-life conservatism.

That was before I found out about Madison Grant.

It’s a name you should be hearing a lot this year because of the centennial of the National Park Service—in many ways a product of Grant’s pioneering work as the greatest conservationist who ever lived, according to one early Park Service director, and a creator of “the park concept,” in the words of another. But you probably won’t hear Grant’s name so much as whispered, because his peculiar line of thinking also helped lay the groundwork for the death camps of Nazi Germany.

Born in 1865, Grant enjoyed a blue-blood Manhattan childhood thanks to his mother’s family wealth and his father’s reputation as a doctor and Civil War hero. At 16, he went to Germany for four years of private tutoring before coming back for Yale and then Columbia Law School.

Grant was a handsome, urbane figure with a thick mustache and steady, deep-set eyes and a reputation as a ladies’ man. He set up a Manhattan law office but rarely practiced. Nor did he ever hold

Christmas 1940: My Father’s Poem

I found this poem by my father among his papers, after his death.  He had a seriously bad family life then, as a 20-year-old, and everybody also knew this might be the last peacetime Christmas before the U.S. entered World War II. Read it, be thankful for what peace we have, and have a Merry Christmas:

The beeswax lit and the holly hung,

And three kings on their knees;

The ancient hymns and the carols sung,

And snow in the branchy trees.

A whistling wind on the frozen ponds,

The moon on the mantled loam;

The canes on the scented balsam’s fronds:

The wise man turns him home.

                 –James C.G. Conniff, 12/18/40

 

For T-Day: Save Yourself from the Digital Zombie Apocalypse

(Photo: Visions of America/UIG via Getty Images)

My latest for Takepart:

The other day I was sitting on a porch on the coast of Maine watching as a red-throated loon hunted underwater. I couldn’t see the bird beneath the surface, but the trail of bubbles it left behind let me follow the action. It shot along for a while in one direction, circled, jinked out to one side, then sent the water boiling in a tight little spot. It surfaced momentarily to gobble down its prize, a small fish, then dove again to hunt some more.

I was lucky to be in that place at that time. And even more so not to have my attention monopolized at that moment by an electronic screen. Lucky, because most of the time I am as bad about this as everybody else. My work as a writer means I often spend eight or 10 hours a day at the keyboard of a laptop. I unwind after dinner with a Netflix show and a beer. When I can’t sleep at night, I browse Facebook or Feedly on a tablet. (Yes, I know, looking at a video screen is like firecrackers for sleep. But it doesn’t stop me.) And when I get up in the morning, the first thing I do is check the time and weather on my smartphone.

The Internet doesn’t just offer endless possibilities; it offers endlessly updating possibilities. It is addictive because of the fear that if we don’t look now, we could be missing something big, something important, something viral.

All the while what we are missing is life. We are missing wildlife and the natural world too.

Even worse,