Download Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are AudioBook Free
Visit the author's Site at www.ourinnerape.comIt’s no secret that humans and apes share a bunch of traits, from the tribal communities we form to our irrepressible curiosity. We have the ancestor, scientists tell us, so it’s natural that we act alike. However, not all of these parallels are so appealing: the chimpanzee, for example, can be as vicious and manipulative as any human.Yet there’s more to our shared primate heritage than just our violent streak. In Our Inner Ape, Frans de Waal, one of the world’s great primatologists and a renowned expert on social behavior in apes, presents the provocative proven fact that our noblest qualities—generosity, kindness, altruism—are the maximum amount of an integral part of our nature as are our baser instincts. After all, we share them with another primate: the lesser-known bonobo. As genetically similar to man as the chimpanzee, the bonobo has a temperament and a lifestyle vastly different from those of its genetic cousin. Where chimps are aggressive, territorial, and hierarchical, bonobos are gentle, loving, and erotic (sex for bonobos is as much about pleasure and social bonding as it is about reproduction).While the parallels between chimp brutality and human brutality are easy to understand, de Waal suggests that the conciliatory bonobo is just as legitimate a model to review whenever we explore our primate heritage. He even connects humanity’s desire for fairness and its morality with primate behavior, offering a view of society that contrasts markedly with the caricature folks have of Darwinian evolution. It’s plain that our finest qualities run deeper inside our DNA than experts have previously thought.Frans de Waal has spent the last 2 decades studying our closest primate relations, and his observations of each species in Our Inner Ape encompass the spectral range of human behavior. That is an audacious book, an engrossing discourse that proposes thought-provoking and sometimes shocking connections among chimps, bonobos, and those most paradoxical of apes, humans.
