Different Quotes

“Money borrowed this grammatical label, saying that for him gender refers to “all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman, respectively.” He set gender apart from biological sex, aware of the occasional disparity between those two. He also founded the world’s first Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins University in 1965.”
― Frans de Waal, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

“homosexual, most humans may be at the heterosexual end, but every bonobo is totally bi, or a perfect Kinsey”
― Frans de Waal, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

“Recognition of the existence of a sex drive in female birds set the stage for Darwinian feminism, as the American biologist Patricia Gowaty dubbed it in 1997. This label may sound like an oxymoron because many feminists consider humans to be far removed from the birds and the bees. They don’t see evolutionary science and its emphasis on genetics as particularly friendly to their cause. But for biological scientists, including the feminists among us, feminism can’t escape a connection with biology. After all, there wouldn’t be any need for feminism if we didn’t have two sexes to begin with. And why do we have two sexes? Because sexual reproduction works better than its alternative, which is cloning.”
― Frans de Waal, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

“Priority of access to food is an important function of dominance. Since most dominance interactions and virtually all agonistic episodes [conflicts] between adult females and males occur in feeding contexts, I find much less meaning in dominance occurring in the non-feeding context. Moreover, there is no difference.”26”
― Frans de Waal, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

“The Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz told us that we lack control over our aggressive instincts. Not long afterward the British biologist Richard Dawkins stated that our chief purpose on earth is to obey our “selfish genes.”
― Frans de Waal, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

“defined self-socialization: “The process whereby children influence the direction and outcomes of their development through selective attention, imitation, and participation in particular activities and modalities of interaction that function as key contexts of socialization.”
― Frans de Waal, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

“Mead stresses the universality of male competition, stating that “in every known human society, the male’s need for achievement can be recognized.” Men, to feel fulfilled and successful, need to excel at something—to be better at it than other men and better than women.13”
― Frans de Waal, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

“THE MOTIVATION BEHIND behavior rarely includes the goals for which it evolved. These goals stay behind the veil of evolution. We evolved nurturant tendencies, for example, to raise our own biological children, but a cute puppy triggers these tendencies just as well. Whereas reproduction is the evolutionary goal of nurturance, it isn’t part of its motivation. After a mother dies, other adult primates often take care of her weaned juvenile. Humans, too, adopt on a large scale, often going through hellish bureaucratic procedures to add children to their families. Stranger yet is cross-species adoption, such as by Pea, a rescued ostrich at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Kenya. Pea was beloved by all orphaned elephant calves at the trust and took special care of a baby named Jotto, who’d stay by her side and sleep with his head on her soft feathered body. The maternal instinct is remarkably generous.38 Some biological purists call such behavior a “mistake.” If adaptive goals are the measure, Pea was making a colossal error. As soon as we move from biology to psychology, however, the perspective changes. Our impulse to take care of vulnerable young is real and overwhelming even outside the family. Similarly, when human volunteers push a stranded whale back into the ocean, they employ empathic impulses that, I can assure you, didn’t evolve to take care of marine mammals. Human empathy arose for the sake of family and friends. But once a capacity exists, it takes on a life of its own. Rather than calling the saving of a whale a mistake, we should be glad that empathy isn’t tied down by what evolution intended it for. This is what makes our behavior as rich as it is. This line of thought can also be applied to sex.”
― Frans de Waal, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

“To wonder how homosexual behavior could have evolved is the wrong approach. It buys into a doubtful dichotomy unsupported by what we know about genetics as well as actual human behavior. To my mind, the better question is whether we should be surprised that humans and other animals regularly engage in sexual activities that can’t possibly lead to reproduction. Does evolutionary theory allow for such an opening up of sexual possibilities? Of course it does. The animal kingdom is chock full of traits that evolved for one reason but are also used for others. The hooves of ungulates are adapted to run on hard surfaces, but they also deliver a mean kick to pursuers. The primate hand evolved to grasp branches, but it also allows infants to cling to their mothers, which is a smart thing to do high up in the trees. The mouths of fish are for feeding, but they also serve as holding pens for the fry of mouth-breeding cichlids. Color vision is thought to have come about because our fruit-picking primate ancestors needed to judge the ripeness of their food. But once we perceived color, this capacity became available for reading maps, noticing someone’s blushing, or finding shoes that match our blouse.”
― Frans de Waal, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

“It took almost two decades before Ivanka Savic and Per Lindström resolved this conundrum at the Stockholm Brain Institute in Sweden. Instead of inspecting the same brain area as LeVay, they focused on much more general neural traits, such as brain asymmetry, that have no direct relation to particular behavior. These brain features are fixed at birth and don’t change with experience. Nevertheless, they reflect gender and sexual orientation. Brains of gay men are structurally similar to those of heterosexual women, whereas those of lesbian women resemble those of heterosexual men. Savic concluded that “these differences are likely to have been forged in the womb or in early infancy.”25”
― Frans de Waal, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

“This came to a head in 2005, when the Bremerhaven Zoo in Germany sought to breed endangered Humboldt penguins. They decided to separate their male pairs and repair them with females brought in for this purpose. The zoo declared that the male-male ties were “too strong” for its breeding program, since they kept the males away from the females. Some gay organizations disputed the move as an attempt to change the birds’ sexual orientation by means of “the organized and forced harassment through female seductresses.”3”
― Frans de Waal, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

“Recently, we have learned that some matriarchal, long-lived whales, such as orcas and belugas, also experience menopause. Grandmother whales increase the survival of their grand-offspring by passing on freshly caught salmon to young calves and guarding them on the ocean surface while their mother takes off for a deep dive.43”
― Frans de Waal, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

“Male bonobos can be highly protective. A striking example occurred at the San Diego Zoo at a time when its enclosure still had a wet moat. The keepers had drained the moat for scrubbing, then went to the kitchen to turn on the water valve to fill it up. Before they could do so, however, they were rudely interrupted by Kakowet, the alpha male. He appeared in front of their kitchen window, screaming and waving his arms. As it turned out, several young bonobos had jumped into the dry moat to play but were unable to get out. If the water flow had not been halted, they would have drowned. Kakowet’s anxious intervention demonstrated his ability to take another’s perspective and recognize their circumstances. But more practically, it also showed that he knew who controlled the water supply. After his alarm, the keepers descended into the moat with a ladder. They got all the bonobos out except for the smallest one, who was pulled up by Kakowet himself.”
― Frans de Waal, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

“Young female primates are as infant-obsessed as girls, whereas male interest in infants reflects an almost technical curiosity rather than a nurturing tendency. Young male chimpanzees often carry babies in an awkward manner without letting them cling to their bodies as ape babies love to do. I have watched in horror as young males inspect a small infant by stretching its limbs to the limit, sticking their big fingers down its throat, or making it the object of a tussle with a male peer.”
― Frans de Waal, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

“The curious reality is that while our civilization values intellect, education, and experience, we still fall for crude body parameters that have no bearing on these qualities. We look down on the brute force that we believe underpins the natural order, proud to have left “might is right” behind, yet we remain stubbornly sensitive to our species’s sexual dimorphism in height, muscularity, and voice. Turning this situation around will require more than a GenderTimer and a few new debate rules. A good start would be to appreciate the evolutionary roots of these biases. But while our fellow primates offer ample clues, we should also consider our species’s potential for behavioral modification.”
― Frans de Waal, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

“We are sensitive to the odors of others and actively try to catch a whiff. By surreptitiously filming people after a handshake, scientists discovered that the hand that has done the shaking often finds its way to the owner’s nose. They measured how many seconds the hand spent there and even assessed the nasal airflow of some subjects. They found that after interactions within their gender, people take a moment to sniff their hand. Men and women do so equally: men with men and women with women. Handshakes between the genders don’t prompt the same inspection. Automatic-looking gestures (arranging one’s hair, scratching one’s chin) bring the hand close to the face, offering traces of the other’s aroma. Olfactory sampling allows people to assess the level of self-confidence or hostility of potential rivals. Even though humans use the opportunity to smell each other as predictably as rats and dogs, they do so largely unconsciously.4”
― Frans de Waal, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

“A curious case that warmed this old ethologist’s heart was that of a mathematics professor at a California university who was accused of peeing against a colleague’s office door. The two male professors were said to have had a dispute that escalated to a “pissing contest.” After someone had found puddles in the hallway, school officials set up a camera and captured the urinating professor on video.”
― Frans de Waal, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

“There is in fact no data demonstrating that men are more hierarchical than women. The only difference one study reported is that when people are put together in same-gender groups, men settle on a rank order more quickly than women. Women do eventually always form one, however.”
― Frans de Waal, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

“THE CONNECTION BETWEEN social status and reproduction has been lost in modern society, thanks to our prosperity and our access to effective birth control. Human psychology, however, can’t shake the effects of this age-old connection. Since our inborn tendencies derive from ancestors who spread their genes, their means of social success are engraved into our psychology. Both male and female primates, and both men and women, are eager to ascend the social ladder. This has always been the winning ticket. Our primate heritage is still visible in the way we evaluate male and female leaders. We pay attention to the physical size of men, for example, but not of women. You’d think that we’d pay at least as much attention to a man’s intellect, experience, and expertise, but we remain stubbornly sensitive to his height. Our biases echo a time when physical prowess mattered more.”
― Frans de Waal, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

“Females worry about where they rank relative to other females, and males do the same relative to other males. Competition occurs primarily within each sex, and hierarchies help regulate and contain it. Males compete with each other over status and who will mate with females. For females, in contrast, sex is less important than food. In evolutionary terms, a female’s key to success is nutrition. She needs access to prime feeding spots to grow a fetus, nurse her infant, and feed her young. Since a female ape’s offspring stays with her for a minimum of ten years, she faces much higher food demands than a male. There is little reason for competition between the sexes.”
― Frans de Waal, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

“TROPHY HUNTERS, by eliminating the most magnificent specimens of a species, enact reverse selection. It’s the opposite of natural selection. The hunters remove the healthiest and fittest males from the gene pool by targeting the largest bears or the lions with the darkest manes. The same sort of reverse selection has had disastrous consequences for elephants, in which it combines with ivory poaching. In many populations, bulls with large tusks have gone virtually extinct. One of the devastating side-effects has been that young bulls have become unruly and dangerous. In Pilanesberg National Park in South Africa, marauding gangs of juvenile elephant bulls went berserk. Like a blood sport, they began to chase down white rhinoceroses, stomping them with their feet and goring them to death with their tusks. They harassed other animals as well. The park resolved this problem by setting up a Big Brother program. Park staff flew in six full-grown bull elephants from Kruger National Park. Bulls keep growing larger throughout their lives, and the oldest ones often roam with younger bulls in tow. Like warriors in training, the latter follow and watch their mentors. The hyperaggressive state of musth—when testosterone levels increase fifty-fold—is curbed when young bulls are exposed to dominant males. A young bull may lose the physical signs of musth within minutes of being put in his place by a bigger one. At Pilanesberg, hormonal suppression and reduced risk-taking in the presence of intimidating adults made all the difference. After the Big Brother program, signs of random violence disappeared. In previous years, elephants had killed over forty endangered white rhinos. The civilizing influence of older bulls stopped the carnage.”
― Frans de Waal, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

“Amos’s position defies the stream of modern business books, such as the Alpha Male Bible (2021), intended to instruct men how to become an alpha male. These books teach body language tricks and urge men to think like a winner with the goal of securing the corner office and charming women. They forget to mention the skills that set a good chimpanzee alpha male apart, such as generosity and impartiality. We’re presented with a cardboard version of the alpha concept, which I find all the more galling given how much my book Chimpanzee Politics contributed to its popularity.17”
― Frans de Waal, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

“We learned postmortem that in addition to a massively enlarged liver, Amos had several cancerous growths. Even though his condition must have been building for years, he had acted normally until his body couldn’t hold out any longer. Any hint of vulnerability might have meant loss of status, which is why males tend to hide weaknesses and act stoic around their rivals.”
― Frans de Waal, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

“One of the senior females is usually the alpha despite the presence of females in their prime, who would have no trouble winning a physical fight. We know about female physical strength from handgrip tests that we conducted with our chimpanzees. In contrast to women, whose handgrip strength begins to weaken only in their sixties, in female chimpanzees it drops off already after their mid-thirties.11 At that age, females become increasingly frail, yet they have no trouble holding on to their place on the social ladder. On the contrary, they often gain in status. Mama, for example, remained alpha until the day she died, at fifty-nine. She was nearly blind and walked unsteadily, yet she still enjoyed plenty of respect. Had Mama been a male, she’d have lost her position years before. In the wild, too, female chimpanzees achieve high status with age. They wait their turn for this moment in the sun, a process that has been described as “queuing.”
― Frans de Waal, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

“The killing of women doesn’t come nearly as easily to us as the killing of men. In one experiment, American and British subjects preferred to sacrifice or punish a man over a woman. Asked whom they would hypothetically push in front of an oncoming train to save others’ lives, nine out of ten participants of both genders preferred to throw a man rather than a woman onto the tracks. They offered reasons varying from “women are fragile, and it would be morally wrong” to “I value women and children over men.”
― Frans de Waal, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

“On the care side, we have the example of human societies in which children have multiple fathers. For example, children of the Barí in the Maracaibo Basin in South America often have one primary and several secondary fathers. The semen of all the men the mother has sex with is thought to contribute to the fetus’s growth, a phenomenon known as “partible paternity.” A pregnant woman will routinely take one or more lovers. On the day she delivers, she will utter the names of all these men. A woman who attended the birth will rush to the longhouse to congratulate each one of them, telling them, “You have a child.” Secondary fathers have an obligation to help the mother and her infant. Survival into adulthood is higher for children with extra fathers than it is for those without.35”
― Frans de Waal, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

“For researchers who seek to get around society’s prejudices, the biggest obstacle is the social sciences’ reliance on questionnaires. Especially regarding a sensitive topic such as sex, self-reports are hard to take seriously. No one wants to come across as a pervert or a jerk, so certain kinds of behavior are automatically underreported. Other kinds are overreported. Sometimes the data are plainly implausible. Thus, it is well known that men have more sex partners than women. And not just a few more, but more by a wide margin. One American study, for example, put the average number of lifetime partners of men at 12.3 and that of women at 3.3. Other countries report similar numbers. How is this even possible? Within a closed population that has a 1:1 sex ratio, there is no way. Where do men find all those partners? Many scientists have broken their heads trying to solve this riddle, but the most innovative approach tackled the likely source of the problem: lack of candor.20 At a midwestern university, Michele Alexander and Terri Fisher connected students to the tubes of a bogus lie-detector apparatus and asked them about their sex lives. Under the illusion that the truth would come out, the students gave very different answers than they had given before. All of a sudden, the women remembered more masturbation and more sex partners. On the first measure, they still scored below the men, but not on the second. Now we understand why the number of reported sex partners differs between the sexes. Men don’t mind talking about them, whereas women keep the information to themselves.”
― Frans de Waal, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

“Diego, a giant tortoise, single-handedly saved his species from extinction. As one of the few surviving representatives of his kind, he was moved from an American zoo to a breeding program on the Galápagos Islands, in Ecuador. Diego’s unrelenting mating efforts helped raise the number of these tortoises from just fifteen to two thousand. One hundred years old, Diego keeps going.”
― Frans de Waal, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

“The second reason we have underestimated the role of female choice is cultural. Both in biological science and in society at large, the female sex, whether animal or human, was depicted as passive and coy by nature. More than that: females were expected to be passive and coy. Exceptions were minimized or overlooked. Who got to mate and who didn’t was seen as a male decision. Females might play hard to get, allowing them to select the best male from among several suitors, but female sexual initiative wasn’t part of the era’s biological theories.”
― Frans de Waal, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist

“Position in the male hierarchy is only one factor in the mating game. The other one is female preference.”
― Frans de Waal, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist