Books by Frans de Waal

“Frans de Waal is a primatologist who has worked amongst primates all his life, and knows a huge amount about their behaviour. He takes us through all the behaviours which we humans tend to obsess over in children—are boys being forced to hold guns? Are girls being forced into pretty pink dresses?—and also the whole business about finding a mate, how young females and young males behave, sex for enjoyment, sex for reproduction. All of these things are happening in this ape community. It’s incredibly interesting. The argument running through it is that it’s almost arrogant of human beings to think that they have their own special social construct…de Waal explains that the behaviour associated with gender is essentially a primate phenomenon, not a human one.” Read more...

The Best Popular Science Books of 2022: The Royal Society Book Prize

Maria Fitzgerald,

“Peacemaking Among Primates says that fighting and reconciliation are not incomprehensible pathologies of modern society. This book reminds us that we do have evolved talents for fighting and for making up after we have fought. Given how often we fight, it would be astonishing if natural selection hadn’t given us some talent for dealing with that. In De Waal’s picture, the cycle of fighting and reconciliation should be understood as the exercise of evolved talents rather than just an inexplicable breakdown of something that ought to be operating more harmoniously.” Read more...

The best books on Evolution and Human Cooperation

Paul Seabright, Economist

“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