The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society

by Frans de Waal

If being sensitive to others were truly limited to our species, this would make it a young trait, something we evolved only recently. The problem with young traits, however, is that they tend to be experimental. Consider the human back. When our ancestors started walking on two legs, their backs straightened and assumed a vertical position. In doing so, backs became the bearers of extra weight. Since this is not what the vertebral column was originally designed for, chronic back pain became our species’ universal curse. If empathy were truly like a toupee put on our head yesterday, my greatest fear would be that it might blow off tomorrow. Linking empathy to our frontal lobes, which achieved their extraordinary size only in the last couple of million years, denies how much it is a part of who and what we are. Obviously, I believe the exact opposite, which is that empathy is part of a heritage as ancient as the mammalian line. Empathy engages brain areas that are more than a hundred million years old. The capacity arose long ago with motor mimicry and emotional contagion, after which evolution added layer after layer, until our ancestors not only felt what others felt, but understood what others might want or need.

prisao empatia. antiguidade