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Stewart Myrent
Just returned another new release, "Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves", by Frans de Waal, a biologist & primatologist. Mama was the matriarch of a chimpanzee colony at Burger Zoo in Arnhem, the Netherlands & her last hug was w/Jan van Hooff, a Dutch biologist & primatologist, who visited her before she died, just shy of age 59, & who had known her for over 40 yrs. You can actually see footage of this, taken by a cellphone, if you look up van Hooff. I thought I had heard decades ago, that we share 97% of our DNA w/chimpanzees: I looked it up - they said we share 99% of our DNA w/chimps, & also with bonobos, who are physically, the closest to humans. Some notable excerpts from the book: from Chapter 2: "Window to the Soul: When Primates Laugh and Smile", "The loud volume of our species's laughter gets me every time: apes laugh much more softly, and monkeys can hardly be heard at all. My guess is that the loudness is inversely proportional to predation risk. If the laughter of the young of other primates were as earsplitting as the laughter of our children in schoolyards, predators would have no trouble locating them and pouncing at the right moment. Humans can afford to be noisy, although we obviously also do a lot of soft chuckling and snickering." From Chapter 3: "Body to Body: Empathy and Sympathy", "That the emotional glue of society emerges so early in life reveals its biological nature. It is a capacity we share with all mammals. In real life, a wild female orangutan will be skillfully swinging from one tall tree to the next. Her young offspring, trying to follow her through the tree canopy, comes to a stop: the gap between the next two trees is too wide for him. He whimpers and desperately calls for her help. Hearing him, she may whimper herself and hurries back to make a bridge for the juvenile. She grabs a branch from one tree with one hand and a branch from another tree with her other hand or her foot, then pulls the two trees closer to each other while draping herself between them, enabling her offspring to cross over by using her body as a live bridge. This everyday sequence is driven by emotional contagion - the mother being distressed by her offspring's whimpers - combined with intelligence, which allows the mother to understand the problem and come up with a solution." From Chapter 5, "Will to Power: Politics, Murder, Warfare", talking about when Aristotle labeled our species a 'political animal', "...the Greek philosopher may have overlooked the intensely emotional side of human politics. Rationality is often hard to find, and facts matter far less than we think. Politics is all about fears and hopes, the character of leaders, and the feelings they evoke. Fear-mongering is a great way to distract from the issues at hand. Even the most momentous democratic decisions often follow an emotional path rather than a careful weighing of data, such as when the British people in 2016 voted to leave the European Union. Despite warnings from economists, who explained that this decision might ruin the economy, anti-immigrant sentiment and national pride won out. The next day the British pound had its worst drop on record." This all relates back to the animal world, of course. The major point of this book is to explain that many animals experience feelings of sympathy & empathy, which were considered exclusively human emotions, & other sentiments that humans thought were exclusively ours alone, such as disgust, guilt, shame & embarassment, are found in ALL mammals, including elephants & mice, & birds & many other species. Because of all this current research , it turns out we're not so special, after all.
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