Primatologist Frans de Waal dies, aged 75 – 03/17/2024 – Science

Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal, one of the main people responsible for revolutionizing science’s view of the behavioral and cognitive complexity of chimpanzees and other great apes, died last Thursday (14), at the age of 75. Waal had stomach cancer and had lived for decades in Atlanta (southern USA), where he was a professor at Emory University.

Baptized as Franciscus Bernardus Maria de Waal, he was born into a Catholic family in the province of Brabant and had five brothers. Although he became an atheist, he maintained a certain affection for the tolerant and happy-go-lucky priests, lovers of beer and cigars, whom he met in his youth, as he says in his book “The Bonobo and the Atheist” (“The Bonobo and the Atheist” ).

Fascinated by the nature and behavior of animals since childhood, he began studying the chimpanzee colony at Arnhem Zoo, in his home country, in 1975, during his doctorate at Utrecht University.

At the time, field research carried out by scientists such as the British Jane Goodall had already shown that these “first cousins” of human beings were capable of using tools, hunting in a coordinated way and establishing long-term relationships with their packmates, Among other things.

Through careful observation of the social groups of apes in captivity, Waal and his European and American colleagues detailed and expanded these initial observations, showing how interactions between chimpanzees depended on the animals’ astute understanding of the animals’ personalities and intentions. species companions.

Waal, however, really earned his place in the sun among the world’s leading primatologists for his conceptual boldness and creativity when designing experiments. On the one hand, he refused to fear “anthropomorphism”, that is, the idea that it would be unscientific to attribute feelings and cognition similar to those of humans to other animals.

His justification for this was, from our point of view today, difficult to question: after all, if there is a great evolutionary proximity between the Homo sapiens and the great apes, and even other mammals, it would not make sense to imagine that there is no similarity between our minds and theirs.

Based on this principle, he was not afraid to say that chimpanzees sought “reconciliation” after a bad fight, rather than using some supposedly more neutral and scientific term to describe the calming interactions between the animals.

The same type of bold metaphor christened his first best-seller, “Chimpanzee Politics” (“The Politics of Chimpanzees”, from 1982), a book that would end up becoming popular reading even among American congressmen.

Above all, though, Waal was an expert at “interviewing animals in their own language,” as one of the mottos of his other favorite discipline, ethology, goes. Thus, in addition to using imaginative and bold terms to designate what he was seeing, he also had enough creativity to test these ideas using logic relevant to the species he studied.

This is what was behind one of his classic experiments, carried out in partnership with his then advisor Sarah Brosnan and published in 2003.

Realizing that capuchin monkeys liked both cucumbers and grapes, but preferred the fruit to the vegetable, they tested what happened if one capuchin monkey got a slice of cucumber instead of a grape after all of its groupmates got grapes.

Result: the animal tended to throw the cucumber into the keeper’s noses — which led the duo to conclude that the species had an incipient type of “sense of justice”.

Another important mark of the Dutch ethologist’s scientific legacy is his relative optimism. Our species’ link to chimpanzees has often been interpreted as something similar to the original sin of Christian tradition, given the high rates of violence (including “wars” and infanticide) and male tyranny against females.

Taking this into account, would we be doomed to reproduce the simian legacy, only on a much more destructive scale?

Not according to Waal. He always highlighted the empathetic and gentle aspects that were also present even in alpha males of chimpanzees.

And, most importantly, he used to remind us that we are equally close, genetically, to bonobos or pygmy chimpanzees. This species does not have wars and peaceful interactions between different groups prevail among them. Furthermore, females are socially dominant and most social tensions are resolved through sex.

“We are the only species that is prejudiced against individuals who deviate from the norm”, he declared in a recent interview with reporter Ana Bottallo, in this Sheet. “Primates compete for leadership and power in the social hierarchy, but if there are females who have sex with other females, they are not discriminated against.”

The researcher developed intense work as a scientific popularizer, with 16 books published, numerous live and online lectures and appearances on TV. His latest works became increasingly comprehensive, leaving aside the exclusive focus on great apes. This is the case of “The Last Embrace of the Matriarch”, about the emotions of animals, and “Different”, a biological vision of sex and gender.

In 2012, Waal (along with colleague Jennifer Pokorny) even won the IgNobel, the humorous parody of the Nobel Prize. The award came from a study that showed that chimpanzees were able to recognize bandmates just by looking at photographs of their butts.

Waal is survived by his wife, Frenchwoman Catherine Marin, with whom he had a union of more than 40 years. The couple had no children.