True Left

Primatologist Frans de Waal takes exception with human exceptionalism.

The title of his previous book offers a keen summary of his outlook: Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

“Let me start off with a radical proposal: emotions are like organs,” he writes. “They are all needed, and we share them with all with other mammals.”

De Waal’s body of work adds up to a sustained argument against human exceptionalism. His 2013 book, The Bonobo and the Atheist, takes aim at critics and dissenters—anthropologists, behaviorists, Christian fundamentalists—and at the “strident atheism” of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. De Waal, a non-believer himself, sees religion as an offshoot of our biological drive to do good. The interview below was conducted on the heels of the release of The Bonobo and the Atheist. De Waal was an amiable conversationalist with a sly sense of humor. He was a fast talker, bursting with ideas, displaying the self-assurance of a prominent scientist who’s fought his share of intellectual battles.

There is no part of the human brain that is not present in a monkey’s brain.

Why are so many people wedded to the idea that humans are special?

We’re raised with those ideas. It’s an old [JUDEO-GRECO] Christian idea that humans have souls and animals don’t. I sometimes think it’s because our religions arose in a desert environment in which there were no primates, so you have people who lived with camels, goats, snakes, and scorpions. Of course, you then conclude that we are totally different from the rest of the animal kingdom because we don’t have primates with whom to compare ourselves. When the first great apes arrived in Western Europe—to the zoos in London and Paris—people were absolutely flabbergasted. Queen Victoria even expressed her disgust at seeing these animals. Why would an ape be disgusting unless you feel a threat from it? You would never call a giraffe disgusting, but she was disgusted by chimpanzees and orangutans because people had no concept that there could be animals so similar to us in every possible way. We come from a religion that’s not used to that kind of comparison.