Frans de Waal (RIP) and the Origins of War
Primatologist Frans de Waal, when I interviewed him in 2007, rejected the claim that we share an “instinct” for war with chimpanzees, our closest relatives. I found this photo of de Waal, who died on March 14, on Wikipedia. Doesn’t he look like a nice guy?
March 17, 2024. I was scrolling through Twitter last night when I came across an RIP for primatologist Frans de Waal. The news caught me off guard. How could de Waal be dead? He was just out there promoting Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist, the latest of his 16 popular books. But a release from Emory University, de Waal’s long-time academic home, confirmed that he succumbed to stomach cancer on March 14.
I interviewed de Waal in 2007 while researching my book The End of War. At the time, high-profile scientists were promoting the notion that humans are genetically predisposed to war. As evidence, they cited the violence of our closest genetic relatives, chimpanzees. In his influential 1996 book Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, anthropologist Richard Wrangham declared: “Chimpanzee-like violence preceded and paved the way for human war, making modern humans the dazed survivors of a continuous, five-million-year habit of lethal aggression.” This hypothesis, which I call the deep-roots theory of war, was embraced by public intellectuals like Steven Pinker and Francis Fukuyama.
I discussed the deep-roots theory with de Waal on June 12, 2007, at the Yerkes Primate Research Center in Georgia, which houses chimpanzees and monkeys. De Waal was tall with sandy-colored hair. He still spoke with a faint Dutch accent, although he left his native Holland in the 1980s. We chatted in a watchtower overlooking a yard where three male chimps and a dozen females lolled, lazily nitpicking and sniffing each other.
Against this backdrop, de Waal heatedly rejected the widespread belief in “some sort of blind aggressive drive that makes us go to war.” De Waal deplored the fact that this grim meme—promulgated a half century ago by the German biologist Konrad Lorenz and, before him, by Freud—was being touted once again by leading scientists.
The idea that primate violence stems from an “instinct” or “drive” reflects “an old way of thinking,” de Waal said, “that I don’t think fits the facts.” While not denying that chimpanzees can be violent—he has witnessed gruesome attacks himself—de Waal charged that anthropologist Richard Wrangham and others have promulgated a cartoonishly distorted picture of the species.
De Waal contended that chimpanzees fight not for its own sake, as some scientists proposed, but to achieve a goal: typically food, access to mates, or status. Chimpanzee aggression is especially contingent on the availability of food; the easiest way for researchers to provoke squabbles is to give one group of chimps in a compound more food than others.
Moreover, over decades of observing chimpanzees in the wild and captivity, de Waal had accumulated overwhelming evidence of chimpanzees’ generosity, empathy and peace-making. Chimps often hug and kiss each other and share food both to avoid fights and to make up after them. If one chimp has been injured, others will console it by licking its wounds.
Chimpanzees are capable of extraordinary altruism. They cannot swim, and hence they can easily panic and drown even in shallow water. Because chimps fear water, zoos often surround chimpanzee compounds with moats. Yet male and female chimpanzees have died after plunging into moats to rescue others who have fallen into the water. De Waal believed that humans share these innate traits with chimpanzees rather than an instinct for war.
Bonobos, de Waal said, also contradict the demonic-males thesis. Discovered in the forests of Zaire in the 1929, bonobos were initially viewed as a subspecies of the common chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes. They were then classified as a separate species, Pan paniscus, within the Pan genus. Bonobos, sometimes called pygmy chimps, are darker-skinned and more slender than Pan troglodytes, although otherwise about the same size. (The descriptors “Paniscus,” which means diminutive, and “pygmy” are misnomers.)
Only in the past few decades has the bonobos’ remarkable social behavior come to light. Male bonobos are much less aggressive and violent than chimpanzee males; researchers have not witnessed a single case of lethal fighting either within or between bonobo troops.
“The species is best characterized as female-centered and egalitarian and as one that substitutes sex for aggression,” de Waal once wrote. “Bonobos engage in sex in virtually every partner combination (although such contact among close family members may be suppressed).”
Bonobos engage in homosexual as well as heterosexual couplings of every kind, including mutual masturbation, oral sex and tongue kissing. Males and females often copulate face-to-face, missionary-style, which chimpanzees do only rarely. “The frontal orientation of the bonobo vulva and clitoris strongly suggest that the female genitalia are adapted for this position,” de Waal commented.
Sex smooths relations between as well as within troops. When bonobos from different troops meet, instead of reacting with hostility—as Pan troglodytes do--they engage in sex. This promiscuity reduces violence between bonobo troops just as intermarriage does between human tribes, de Waal speculated.
Bonobos display empathy and altruism even toward other species. In one case, an adult male rescued a duckling being harassed by two young bonobos and released it back into its moat. Environmental factors may also contribute to the bonobos’ benign behavior; food tends to be more abundant in their dense forest habitats than in the semi-open woodlands frequented by chimpanzees.
Some critics charge that the reputation of the “Hippy Chimps” for making love, not war, has been overblown. But de Waal and others have repeatedly confirmed bonobos’ benign behavior in captivity and the wild. Bonobos are just as closely related to us as their chimpanzee cousins, de Waal noted, and hence “exactly, equally relevant to this whole discussion” about the origins of warfare.”
De Waal has also demonstrated that shifts in environmental conditions can dramatically reduce primate aggression. Chimpanzees become much less aggressive if placed in situations in which cooperation will help them obtain more food. In another experiment, de Waal placed captive adolescent rhesus and stump-tailed macaques together to see how their behavior might change. Although the two species of monkey are genetically almost identical, their behavior is as different as that of chimps and bonobos.
Rhesuses normally dwell in rigid hierarchies, in which dominant males grab most of the food, enforce their rule viciously, and rarely reconcile after fights. Stump-tails, in contrast, are much less aggressive, more egalitarian, and more likely to make up after fighting with lip-smacking, grooming, and other behaviors. Within a few months after rhesus and stump-tails lived together, the rhesuses were behaving less aggressively and reconciling after fights as often as stump-tails.
My takeaway from De Waal’s work is that primate aggression, far from being hard-wired, is varied, flexible, and sensitive to environmental conditions. And human warfare is neither innate nor inevitable.
That, more or less, is what I wrote about de Waal in The End of War. This excerpt doesn’t convey de Waal’s personality. He was warm, witty and wise. I am glad that I met him, and sad that he is gone.
Further Reading:
Confessions of a Woke, Antiwar, Hockey-Playing Demonic Male
Free Will, War and the Tolstoy Paradox
Is Killing Children Ever Justified?
Thanksgiving and Scientists’ Slander of Native Americans
You’re Not Free If You’re Dead: The Case Against Giving Ukraine F-16s