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“Frans de Waal is one of my favourite scientists. He is such a good writer. If all scientists wrote as well as Frans de Waal, writers like me would be out of business! Once when I talked to him about this aspect of his life he said something that has always struck me as really interesting. He said he does some of his best scientific thinking when he is writing for the public because when he is writing for other scientists he has to think about the basic zeitgeist of the scientific argument. He has to think about which scientists are going to criticise his work and so on, whereas when he is writing for the general public he can concentrate on the pure idea. Good Natured essentially looks at the ongoing debate over what separates us from other animals. As a species we love to try to work out the characteristics that separate us from all other species – the traits that some argue make us “better”. So in this book De Waal takes on one of the most fundamental questions in this argument – are we the only moral species? He does this through looking at different instances of what you might call moral behaviour in other species.” Read more...
The best books on Science in Society
Deborah Blum, Science Writer
