The Ape and the Sushi Master Quotes

“These findings are especially damaging to Freud, because if Westermarck is right then Oedipal theory is wrong. Freud's thinking was premised on a supposed sexual attraction between members of the same family that needs to be suppressed and sublimated. His theory would predict that unrelated boys and girls who have grown up together will marry in absolute bliss, as there is no taboo standing in the way of their primal sexual desires. In reality, however, the signs are that such marriages often end in misery. Co-reared boys and girls resist being wed, arguing that they are too much like brother and sister. The father of the bride sometimes needs to stand with a stick by the door during the wedding night to prevent the two from escaping the situation. In these marriages, sexual indifference seems to be the rule, and adultery a common outlet. As Wolf exclaimed at the conference, Westermarck may have been less flamboyant, less self-assured, and less famous than any of his mighty opponents; the fundamental difference was that he was the only one who was right!”
― Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist

“If one biologist's apples are another's oranges, this obviously creates a communication problem. We usually resolve the difficulty by asking whether someone is talking at the "proximate" (direct causation) or "ultimate" (adaptive value) level, but this distinction has never caught on outside of biology. The tension between the two is forever there, however. The mother dog who raises tiger cubs is at once extraordinarily generous and doing what her genes, based on millions of years of self-service, nudge her to do. By following her natural impulses, she illustrates the contradictions that lend so much richness to evolutionary accounts that we will never be done mining their meaning.”
― Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist

“Rescue dogs are trained to perform such responses on command, often in repulsive situations, such as fires, that they would normally avoid unless the entrapped individuals are familiar. Training is accomplished with the usual carrot-and stick method. One might think, therefore, that the dogs perform like Skinnerian rats, doing what has been reinforced in the past, partly out of instinct, partly out of a desire for tidbits. If they save human lives, one could argue, they do so for purely selfish reasons.
The image of the rescue dog as a well-behaved robot is hard to maintain, however, in the face of their attitude under trying circumstances with few survivors, such as in the aftermath of the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. When rescue dogs encounter too many dead people, they lose interest in their job regardless of how much praise and goodies they get.
This was discovered by Caroline Hebard, the U.S. pioneer of canine search and rescue, during the Mexico City earthquake of 1985. Hebard recounts how her German shepherd, Aly, reacted to finding corpse after corpse and few survivors. Aly would be all excited and joyful if he detected human life in the rubble, but became depressed by all the death. In Hebard's words, Aly regarded humans as his friends, and he could not stand to be surrounded by so many dead friends: "Aly fervently wanted his stick reward, and equally wanted to please Caroline, but as long as he was uncertain about whether he had found someone alive, he would not even reward himself. Here in this gray area, rules of logic no longer applied."
The logic referred to is that a reward is just a reward: there is no reason for a trained dog to care about the victim's condition. Yet, all dogs on the team became depressed. They required longer and longer resting periods, and their eagerness for the job dropped off dramatically. After a couple of days, Aly clearly had had enough. His big brown eyes were mournful, and he hid behind the bed when Hehard wanted to take him out again. He also refused to eat. All other dogs on the team had lost their appetites as well.
The solution to this motivational problem says a lot about what the dogs wanted. A Mexican veterinarian was invited to act as stand-in survivor. The rescuers hid the volunteer somewhere in a wreckage and let the dogs find him. One after another the dogs were sent in, picked up the man's scent, and happily alerted, thus "saving" his life. Refreshed by this exercise, the dogs were ready to work again.
What this means is that trained dogs rescue people only partly for approval and food rewards. Instead of performing a cheap circus trick, they are emotionally invested. They relish the opportunity to find and save a live person. Doing so also constitutes some sort of reward, but one more in line with what Adam Smith, the Scottish philosopher and father of economics, thought to underlie human sympathy: all that we derive from sympathy, he said, is the pleasure of seeing someone else's fortune. Perhaps this doesn't seem like much, but it means a lot to many people, and apparently also to some bighearted canines.”
― Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist

“The animal literature is filled with examples of normal behavior under unusual circumstances. Followed by a single file of goslings, Konrad Lorenz demonstrated the tendency of these birds to imprint on the first moving object they lay their eyes on. He thus permanently confused their sense of speciesbelonging. Niko Tinbergen saw stickleback fish in a row of tanks in front of his laboratory window, in Leiden, make furious territorial displays at the mail delivery van in the street below. At the time, Dutch mail vans were bright red, the same color as the male stickleback's underbelly during the breeding season, and the fish mistook the van for an intruder of their own species.
Artificial situations sometimes help us see more clearly how behavior is regulated. When goslings do the normal thing, following their mom around all day, one might think that they share our exalted view of motherhood. We are quickly disabused of this notion, however, when they follow a bearded zoologist with equal devotion. And when sticklebacks defend their territory, we might think that they want to keep competitors out, whereas in reality they are only reacting to a speciestypical red flag. What animals really are after is not always evident, and tinkering with conditions is a way to find out.”
― Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist

“But even though apes may be special in this regard, we cannot exclude similar capacities in other animals. A well-documented instance of possible altruism concerns a very different species: Rodrigues fruit bats in a breeding colony in Florida, studied by Thomas Kunz, a biologist at the University of Boston. By chance, Kunz witnessed an exceptionally difficult birthing process in which a mother bat failed to adopt the required feet-down position. Instead, she continued to hang upside-down. Taking on a midwife role, another female spent no less than two and a half hours assisting the inexperienced mother. She licked and groomed her behind, and wrapped her wings around her, perhaps so as to prevent the emerging pup from falling. She also repeatedly fanned the exhausted mother with her wings. But what amazed the biologist most was that the helper seemed to be instructing the mother: the mother adopted the correct feet-down position only after the helper had done so right in front of her. On four separate occasions the helper adopted the correct position in full view of the mother-a position normally used only for urination or defecation, which the helper didn't engage in-and each time the mother followed the helper's example.”
― Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist

“People are animists by nature, always interpreting reality in their own image. It starts early when children freely ascribe inner lives to clouds, trees, dolls, and other objects. This tendency is commercially exploited with pet rocks, chia pets, and Tamagotchi, which show remarkably little resemblance to the usual recipients of human love. The phenomenon is not even limited to our species; chimpanzees, too, care for imaginary young. Richard Wrangham observed a six-year-old juvenile, Kakama, carry and cradle a small wooden log as if it were a newborn. Kakama did so for hours on end, one time even building a nest in a tree and putting the log into it on its own. Kakama's mother was pregnant at the time. The field-worker notes: "My intuition suggested a possibility that I was reluctant, as a professional skeptical scientist, to accept on the basis of a single observation: that I had just watched a young male chimpanzee invent and then play with a doll in possible anticipation of his mother giving birth.”
― Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist

“And then there is the mounting evidence for self-medication. Some of it is widespread in all sort of animals, such as the eating of clay, which contains absorbent components resembling Kaopectate, a commercial drug against diarrhea and stomach upsets. But apes are also known to chew the bitter pith of certain plants and to swallow whole leaves of others, both of which are assumed to have health benefits. Michael Huffman saw chimpanzees remove the outer bark and leaves of young shoots of Vemonia amygdalina to extract extremely bitter juice. Nearly all these chimpanzees showed diarrhea, listlessness, and worm infections. Fecal analysis revealed a striking drop in one chimpanzee's nematode infection following bitter pith chewing, a drop not seen in chimpanzees not taking this medicine. The same plants' bark and leaves contain toxins that can kill laboratory mice, but the chimpanzees must have learned to avoid these parts and extract only the beneficial compounds. For many African ethnic groups Vernonia is an essential ingredient in concoctions to treat malaria, dysentery, and a number of intestinal parasites.”
― Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist

“Language-trained apes often give the impression that they regard themselves as almost human, such as when, while sorting pictures of humans from those of other animals, they put their own portrait on the human pile. They obviously sympathize with the people that surround them: they want to fit in, and to be like them.”
― Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist

“Within a decade, both individual identification and food provisioning were adopted at Western field sites, from Gombe Stream to Cayo Santiago. And even though the second part of the method has fallen out of favor, the first remains firmly embedded. The concept of the individual in its society amounts to a momentous theoretical contribution by Japanese primatology to the study of social animals. The ideas that individuals matter, that their identities are linked to their place in the whole, that they need to be followed over time, and that human empathy helps us understand them, are so obviously correct that armies of scientists now apply this perspective, often without knowing where it came from.”
― Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist

“It is unclear whether the behavioral sciences will ever reach the point when logically derived predictions drive progress. Behavior is more variable than the dance of photons, and its explanation involves multiple layers, from the physiological to the mental. We cannot afford to look through a single pair of glasses; we need lots of different glasses to see reality. Theories do assist in this effort, by guiding our attention and making large amounts of data graspable, but they also induce selective blindness.”
― Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist

“People accused Morris of trying to ridicule modern art, but that was never his goal. If people get over their giggles and consider the issue at hand, they will see that there is a serious question behind it. Why do the members of our species all over the world produce art? What is it that drives them? Why waste time and energy on this sort of activity? Is it a form of play, a form of exploration, a mental game, a way of impressing others? Morris simply wanted to show that we are not the only species to take pleasure in self-created visual effects, hence that the aesthetic sense probably has older roots than is often assumed.”
― Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist

“A telling experience is that of Lucien Tessarolo, a French painter, who used to work side by side with a female chimpanzee, Kunda, on a canvas that both of them would sign at the end-Tessarolo with a signature, Kunda with a handprint. Tessarolo was impressed by Kunda's precision and harmonious choice of colors. The figurative elements that he added to their work were not always appreciated by the ape, however. Sometimes she reacted enthusiastically, but on occasion she rubbed Tessarolo's contributions out and waited to continue painting until he had come up with something else.”
― Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist

“Another indication that apes do not just make disruptive marks comes from the fact that they have a sense of completion of a painting. This is in contrast to what some early observers claimed. They argued that ape paintings are actually a human product: apes happily paint away until the product starts to look like a piece of abstract art to the people around it, who then take it away from the ape and hang it in a gallery. That would mean that the art is all in the human eye, that an ape has no conception of making a finished product.”
― Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist

“In addition, ape painters don't seem to follow the rules that human artists do. Instead of worrying about the cumulative impact of an entire series of brush strokes and dabs, apes give the impression of taking a kinesthetic and visual pleasure in each separate action. We don't know the aesthetic secrets of the chimpanzee that Rainer tried to imitate, but the fact is that the human painter failed miserably in his attempt to achieve the same directness and sovereignty of expression. When Lenain examined fifteen works simultaneously produced by ape and human, he concluded that "[t]he chimpanzee's compositions are straightforward and clear. The imitations, on the other hand, are fuzzy, tangled webs of lines, completely illegible, almost to the point of hysteria.”
― Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist

“Conversely, animals can be quite sensitive to human music. There are stories of dogs who hide under the couch for piano works by atonal composers but not for those by, say, Mozart. One music teacher told me that her dog would heave an audible sigh of relief if she stopped playing complex, fast-moving pieces by Franz Liszt and proceeded to something calmer. And there are reports of cows that produce more milk listening to Beethoven (although, if this is true, shouldn't one hear more classical music on farms?).
Birds listen as carefully to sounds as any musician. They have to, because they learn from each other. Many birds are not born with the song they sing: the symphonies they offer us for free in forests and meadows are cultural. White-crowned sparrows, for example, develop their normal song only when they have been exposed early in life to the sounds of an adult of their species. Many songbirds have dialects-differences in song structure from one population to another. One theory about this is that if a female can tell from a male's song that he is a local boy, she may prefer him as a mate, as he may be genetically adapted to regional conditions. Given the variability in song from location to location it is hard to maintain that birdsong is instinctive in the usual sense. There is room for creativity and modification. Some individuals act as star performers, setting new trends in their region.”
― Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist

“Yet biologists feel that animals are no strangers to aesthetic expression. The New Guinean bowerbird's nest decorations are as good an example as any. The thatched nests can be so large and well-constructed that they once were mistaken for the huts of timid people, who never showed up. The nests often have a doorway with carefully arranged colorful objects, such as berries, flowers, or iridescent beetle wings. The male who built the bower keeps flying in new ornaments, shifting everything around with a critical eye, fussing over the arrangement, moving back to look at the whole from a distant anglelike a human painter with his painting-and then continuing the rearrangement. He is very sensitive to the fading of his flowers, replacing them with fresh ones as soon as necessary. Young males build crude "practice" bowers, tearing them down, then starting over again, until the construction holds up as it should. They also frequently visit the completed bowers of adult males in the neighborhood and see how the ornaments are laid out. There are ample learning opportunities here, and it has been noted that bower decorations differ in color and arrangement from region to region, which suggests culturally transmitted styles.
Is this art? One could counter that it isn't: howerbird males are genetically programmed to engage in this activity just to attract females. Yet, while it is true that females select mates on nest quality and their equivalent of a stamp collection, the argument is not nearly as good as it sounds. To contrast these birds with our species requires that one demonstrates that human art does not rest on an inborn aesthetic sense and is produced purely for its own sake, not to impress anyone else. Both are unlikely. In fact, Geoffrey Miller argues in a recent book that impressing others, especially members of the opposite sex, may be the whole point of human art!
What if our artistic impulse is ancient, antedating modern humanity, and perhaps even our species? What if it rests on a delight in self-created visual effects and a penchant for certain color combinations, shapes, and visual equilibriums that we share with other animals? Would admission in any of these areas diminish the significance of and pleasure derived from human art? Isn't it possible that our basic distinctions in art, our musical scales, and our preference for symmetrical compositions, go deeper than culture, and relate to basic features of our perceptual systems?”
― Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist

“As soon as camera crews are able to enter the Congo again, and have the guts to film bonobos the way they are, people will understand that everything being said about these apes is no exaggeration. They are not the product of some overactive sexual imagination, or of wishful thinking. That they delight feminists, the gay community, and pacifists should not be held against them. If one of our closest relatives fails to fit the prevailing views about aggressive males and passive females, one possibility to consider is that the prevailing views are mistaken.
Either that, or there is something wrong with those males.”
― Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist

“A sabbatical in Europe allowed me to devote my time to writing. I alternated my hours behind the computer with train trips around Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands to test my message on all sorts of audiences. The high point of my European lecture tour-or perhaps it was the low point-occurred when an older, highly respected German professor stood up after my lecture and barked in an almost accusatory tone: "What's wrong with those males?!" He was shocked by the dominance of females. Given that bonobos thrived for thousands of years in the African rain forest until human activity began to threaten their existence, there really seems nothing wrong with them at all. And in view of their frequent sexual activity and low aggression, I find it hard to imagine that males of the species have a particularly stressful time. My response to the professor-that bonobo males seemed to be doing fine-did not appear to satisfy him. The incident, though, shows how profoundly the bonobo is challenging assumptions about our lineage.”
― Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist

“Given that the English language dominates the information flow in the modern world, this has not been to the advantage of the bonobo. When the Make Love Not War hippies of the animal kingdom knocked at our door, they were left standing outside by a mortified family. The author of the same Time article about the female body, Barbara Ehrenreich, felt that the bonobo's peculiarities were better left alone. Similarly, a British camera crew traveled all the way to the remote jungles of Africa to film bonobos only to stop their cameras each time an embarrassing scene came into view.”
― Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist

“Animalcentric anthropomorphism must be sharply distinguished from anthropocentric anthropomorphism (see diagram). The first takes the animal's perspective, the second takes ours. It is a bit like people we all know, who buy us presents that they think we like versus people who buy us presents that they like. The latter have not yet reached a mature form of empathy, and perhaps never will."
The Catholic Church, on the other hand, saw the universe as vertically arranged between heaven and earth. From this perspective, it made sense to speak of "higher" and "lower" forms of life, with humans being closest to the deity. Via philosophy, this way of thinking permeated all of the social sciences and humanities, where it still lingers even though biology has made it absolutely clear that the idea of a linear progression among life forms is mistaken. Every organism fits on the phylogenetic tree without being above or below anything else. Biologists make distinctions between organisms that do well or are extinct, that are specialized or generalized, or that multiply slowly or rapidly, but they never look at one organism as a model that others strive for or that is inherently superior.”
― Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist

“Aninialcentric anthropomorphism must be sharply distinguished from anthropocentric anthropomorphism (see diagram). The first takes the animal's perspective, the second takes ours. It is a bit like people we all know, who buy us presents that they think we like versus people who buy us presents that they like. The latter have not yet reached a mature form of empathy, and perhaps never will."
The Catholic Church, on the other hand, saw the universe as vertically arranged between heaven and earth. From this perspective, it made sense to speak of "higher" and "lower" forms of life, with humans being closest to the deity. Via philosophy, this way of thinking permeated all of the social sciences and humanities, where it still lingers even though biology has made it absolutely clear that the idea of a linear progression among life forms is mistaken. Every organism fits on the phylogenetic tree without being above or below anything else. Biologists make distinctions between organisms that do well or are extinct, that are specialized or generalized, or that multiply slowly or rapidly, but they never look at one organism as a model that others strive for or that is inherently superior.”
― Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist

“The animalcentric approach is not easy to apply to every animal: some are more like us than others. The problem of sharing the experiences of organisms that rely on different senses was expressed most famously by the philosopher Thomas Nagel when he asked, "What is it like to be a bat?" A bat perceives its world in pulses of reflected sound, something that we creatures of vision have a hard time imagining. Still, Nagel's answer to his own question-that we will never know-may have been overly pessimistic. Some blind persons manage to avoid collisions with objects by means of a crude form of echolocation.
Perhaps even more alien would be the experience of an animal such as the star-nosed mole. With its twenty-two pink, writhing tentacles around its nostrils, it is able to feel microscopic textures on small objects in the mud with the keenest sense of touch of any animal on earth. Humans can barely imagine this creature's Umwelt. Ohviously, the closer a species is to us, the easier it is to do so. This is why anthropomorphism is not only tempting in the case of apes, but also hard to reject on the grounds that we cannot know how they perceive the world. Their sensory systems are essentially the same as ours.”
― Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist

“While the goal of understanding animals from the inside out may be considered naive, it certainly is not anthropocentric. Ideally, we understand animals based on what we know about their Umwelt-a German term introduced in 1909 by Jacob von Uexkull for the environment as perceived by the animal. In the same way that parents learn to see through their children's eyes, the empathic observer learns what is important to his or her animals, what frightens them, under which circumstances they feel at ease, and so on.”
― Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist

“This is clearly not so. Pigeons, for example, do better than humans at mentally rotating visual images, and some birds have an amazing memory for the location of hidden objects. Clark's nutcrackers store up to 33,000 seeds in caches distributed over many square kilometers and find most of the caches again months later.28As someone who occasionally forgets where he has parked an item as large and significant as his car, I am impressed by these peanut-brained birds.”
― Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist

“For the biologist, the way habits are transmitted is secondary. All we care about is whether the process is "visible" to natural selection. That is, does learning from others contribute to survival? As illustrated by the examples of alarm calling, food aversion, and snake fear, there is every reason to believe that, yes, information gained from others plays a major role in the struggle for existence. Rehabilitation programs, in which home-reared apes have been released into the wild, have taught us how critical it is for these animals to know what to eat, where to go, and what to avoid. Having grown up in the absence of adult models of their species, young apes are rarely successful in the forest, often starving to death. In this sense, apes are as culturally reliant as we are.”
― Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist

“Social learning is widespread in animals and may continue well beyond the point at which it started. For example, as a student I worked in a laboratory in Utrecht where one scientist regularly caught monkeys out of a large group with a net. At first, the monkeys gave warning calls whenever they saw him approach with his dreadful net, but later they also did so when he only walked by. Still later, years after his research had ceased, I noticed that monkeys too young to have known the threat he once posed alarm-called for this man, and for no one else. They must have deduced from the reaction of their elders that he was not to be trusted. I recently heard that the group kept this alarm-call tradition up for decades, still always aimed at the same person!”
― Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist

“Culture is an environment that we create ourselves. For this reason, and quite contrary to the accepted view in some circles, culture does not deserve equal footing with nature. An entire generation of anthropologists has given this false impression by asking whether it is culture or nature that makes us act in a certain way. Natural selection, however, has produced our species, including our cultural abilities. Culture is part of human nature. To say that "man is made by culture," as many textbooks still do, is at the same level of accuracy as saying that "the river follows its bed." While true, the river also shapes its bed: the current river's flow is the product of the past river's action. In the same way, culture cannot exist apart from human nature, and there is profound circularity in saying that we are the product of culture if culture is the product of us.”
― Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist

“The other major domain of cultural learning is food. Animals learn from each other what to eat, and what not. Parent crows that fly daily with their offspring to the local garbage dump to look for tasty morsels instill in them a life-long preference for such sites, whereas the crow family that survives on natural foods will have offspring that carry on the same tradition when they get older. Food aversion is similarly transmitted. This was first noticed by a German rodent-control officer who set out poisoned bait, killing wild rats in large numbers. After a while, however, the remaining rats began to avoid the bait, and their offspring would do the same. Without any direct experience with the bait, young rats would eat only safe foods.
An experimental psychologist, Bennett Galef, tested this in his laboratory by feeding rats two diets of different texture, taste, and smell. He then laced one of the diets with lithium chloride, which makes rats sick. This procedure led the animals to avoid the contaminated diet. The question now was how the rats' offspring would react after removal of the contamination. Both diets were again perfectly okay to eat, but adults fed exclusively on only one diet due to their bad experience with the other. It turned out that the pups acted like their parents. Of 240 pups given a choice of both diets, only one ate any of the food that adults in its colony had learned to avoid.”
― Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Reflections of a Primatologist