On the left is Bill Maher while on the right is Frans de Waal.
Franciscus Bernardus Maria “Frans” de Waal, PhD was born 29th October 1948. He is a Dutch primatologist and ethologist. He is the Charles Howard Candler professor of Primate Behavior at 399 Psychology Building in the Emory University psychology department in Atlanta, Georgia. Dr. de Waal received his Ph.D. in Biology and Zoology from Utrecht University, the Netherlands, in 1977. He completed his postdoctoral study of chimpanzees while associated with Utrecht University, in 1981, and moved the same year to the USA. He has been a National Academy of Sciences member since 2004, and a Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences member since 1993. Time Magazine featured him in 2007 as one of the World’s One Hundred Most Influential People. Frans de Waal is the Ig Nobel Prize winner, in the Anatomy category. He is also the Director of Living Links at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center and was responsible for writing the book, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism among the Primates. He is author of numerous books including Chimpanzee Politics and Our Inner Ape. In 2012 was featured in a Youtube video showing Capuchin monkey fairness experiment (Two Monkeys Were Paid Unequally: Excerpt from Frans de Waal’s TED Talk) where two monkey where given two different types of food cucumbers and grapes and observed their reaction at seeing it. The video was a very funny viral video on the internet. His research centers on primate social behavior, including conflict resolution, cooperation, inequity aversion, and food-sharing. He is a Member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Frans de Waal was born in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, North Brabant, Netherlands. Frans de Waal studied at the Dutch universities of Radboud University Nijmegen, University of Groningen, and Utrecht. In 1977, De Waal received his doctorate in biology from Utrecht University after training as a zoologist and ethologist with Professor Jan van Hooff, a well-known expert of emotional facial expressions in primates. His dissertation research concerned aggressive behavior and alliance formation in macaques. In 1975, Frans de Waall began a six-year project on the world’s largest captive colony of chimpanzees at the Arnhem Zoo. The study resulted in many scientific papers, and resulted in publication of his first book, Chimpanzee Politics, in 1982. This book offered the first description of primate behavior explicitly in terms of planned social strategies. De Waal was first to introduce the thinking of Machiavelli to primatology, leading to the label “Machiavellian Intelligence” that later became associated with it. In his writings, De Waal has never shied away from attributing emotions and intentions to his primates, and as such his work inspired the field of primate cognition that, three decades later, flourishes around themes of cooperation, altruism, and fairness. His early work also drew attention to deception and conflict resolution, nowadays two major areas of research. Initially, all of this was highly controversial. Thus, the label of “reconciliation”, which De Waal introduced for reunions after fights, was questioned at first, but is now fully accepted with respect to animal behavior. Recently, De Waal‘s work has emphasized non-human animal empathy and even the origins of morality. His most widely cited paper, written with his former student Stephanie Preston, concerns the evolutionary origin and neuroscience of empathy, not just in primates, but in mammals in general. Frans de Waal‘s name is also associated with Bonobo, the “make love – not war” primate that he has made popular. But even his Bonobo studies are secondary to the larger goal of understanding what binds primate societies together rather than how competition structures them. Competition is not ignored in his work: the original focus of De Waal‘s research, before he was well known, was aggressive behavior and social dominance. Whereas his science focuses on the behavior of nonhuman primates (mostly chimpanzees, bonobos, macaques, and capuchin monkeys), his popular books have given De Waal worldwide visibility by relating the insights he has gained from monkey and ape behavior to human society. With his students, he has also worked on elephants, which are increasingly featured in his writings.
His research into the innate capacity for empathy among primates has led De Waal to the conclusion that non-human great apes and humans are simply different types of apes, and that empathic and cooperative tendencies are continuous between these species. His belief is illustrated in the following quote from The Age of Empathy:
“We start out postulating sharp boundaries, such as between humans and apes, or between apes and monkeys, but are in fact dealing with sand castles that lose much of their structure when the sea of knowledge washes over them. They turn into hills, leveled ever more, until we are back to where evolutionary theory always leads us: a gently sloping beach.”
This is quite opposite to the view of some economists and anthropologists, who love to postulate differences between humans and other animals. However, recent work on prosocial tendencies in apes and monkeys supports De Waal‘s position. See, for example, the research of Felix Warneken, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. In 2011, De Waal and his co-workers were the first to report that chimpanzees given a free choice between helping only themselves or helping themselves plus a partner, prefer the latter. In fact, De Waal does not believe these tendencies to be restricted to humans and apes, but views empathy and sympathy as universal mammalian characteristics, a view that over the past decade has gained support from studies on rodents and other mammals, such as dogs. He and his students have also extensively worked on fairness, leading to a video that went viral on inequity aversion among capuchin monkeys. The most recent work in this area was the first demonstration that given a chance to play the Ultimatum game, chimpanzees respond in the same way as children and human adults by preferring the equitable outcome. In 1981, Frans de Waal moved to the United States for a position at the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center, and in 1991 took a position at Emory University, in Atlanta, GA. He is currently C.H. Candler professor in the Psychology Department at Emory and director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. He became an American citizen in 2008. His 2013 book The Bonobo and the Atheist examines human behavior through the eyes of a primatologist, and explores how much God and religion are needed for human morality. The main conclusion is that morality comes from within, and is part of human nature. The role of religion is secondary. De Waal also writes a column for Psychologie, a popular Dutch monthly magazine. Since September 1st, 2013, Frans de Waall is a Distinguished Professor (Universiteitshoogleraar) at the University of Utrecht. This is a part-time appointment — he remains in his position at Emory University, in Atlanta.
Quotes
Wikiquote has quotations related to: Frans de Waal
“The possibility that empathy resides in parts of the brain so ancient that we share them with rats should give pause to anyone comparing politicians with those poor, underestimated creatures.”
“I’ve argued that many of what philosophers call moral sentiments can be seen in other species. In chimpanzees and other animals, you see examples of sympathy, empathy, reciprocity, a willingness to follow social rules. Dogs are a good example of a species that have and obey social rules; that’s why we like them so much, even though they’re large carnivores.”
“To endow animals with human emotions has long been a scientific taboo. But if we do not, we risk missing something fundamental, about both animals and us.”
“Atheism will need to be combined with something else, something more constructive than its opposition to religion, to be relevant to our lives. The only possibility is to embrace morality as natural to our species.” “The Bonobo and the Atheist,” 2013.
“Being both more systematically brutal than chimps and more empathic than bonobos, we are by far the most bipolar ape. Our societies are never completely peaceful, never completely competitive, never ruled by sheer selfishness, and never perfectly moral.”
“The enemy of science is not religion… . The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma.”The Bonobo and the Atheist”, 2013.
Bill Maher was born William Maher, Jr. on January 20th 1956 in New York City. He is an American stand-up comedian, television host, political commentator, satirist, author, and actor who is 5′ 8″ tall. Before his current role as the host of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, he hosted a similar late-night talk show called Politically Incorrect, originally on Comedy Central and later on ABC. Bill Maher is known for his sarcastic attitude, political satire and sociopolitical commentary, which targets a wide swath of topics including religion, politics, bureaucracies of many kinds, political correctness, the mass media, greed among people and persons in positions of high political and social power, and the lack of intellectual curiosity in the electorate. Bill Maher supports the legalization of marijuana and same-sex marriage. His critical views of religion were the basis for the 2008 documentary film Religulous. He serves on the board of PETA and is an advisory board member of Project Reason. In 2005, Bill Maher ranked at number 38 on Comedy Central’s 100 greatest stand-up comedians of all time. Bill Maher received a Hollywood Walk of Fame star on September 14, 2010. His father, William Maher, Sr., was a network news editor and radio announcer, and his mother, Julie Maher (née Berman), was a nurse. He was raised in his Irish American father’s Catholic religion, unaware that his Hungarian American mother was Jewish until his early teens. Owing to his disagreement with the Catholic Church’s doctrine about birth control, Maher’s father stopped taking him and his sister to Catholic church services when Bill Maher was thirteen. Bill Maher won an array of awards, including an Emmy Award for Outstanding Technical Direction, two CableACE awards for Best Talk Show Series, and a Genesis Award for Best Television Talk Show all for producing, writing and hosting of Politically Incorrect. Politically Incorrect was canceled on June 16, 2002, and the Sinclair Broadcast Group had dropped the show from its ABC-affiliated stations months prior. On June 22, 2002, just six days after the cancellation of Politically Incorrect, Bill Maher received the Los Angeles Press Club president’s award (for “championing free speech”). Bill Maher was on the board of judges for the 2002 PEN/Newman’s Own First Amendment Award. In 2003, Bill Maher became the host, co-producer and co-writer of Real Time with Bill Maher, a weekly hour-long political comedy talk show on the cable television network HBO. It is currently in its 12th season. During an interview, Maher told Terry Gross (on NPR’s Fresh Air) that he much prefers having serious and well-informed guests on his program, as opposed to the random celebrities that fleshed out his roundtable discussions on Politically Incorrect. As with his previous show, Politically Incorrect, Bill Maher begins Real Time with a comic opening monologue based upon current events and other topical issues. He proceeds to a one-on-one interview with a guest, either in-studio or via satellite. Following the interview, Maher sits with three panelists, usually consisting of pundits, authors, activists and journalists, for a discussion of the week’s events. In the segment “New Rules” at the end of each show, Maher delivers a humorous editorial on popular culture and American politics. Real Time has earned widespread praise. It has been nominated for more than ten Primetime Emmy Awards and six Writer’s Guild awards. In 2007, Maher and his co-producers were awarded the Television Producer of the Year Award in Variety Television by the Producers Guild of America. Maher holds the record for the most Emmy nominations without a win, having been nominated on 22 occasions and not winning once. Eleven of the nominations were for Politically Incorrect, while nine were for Real Time. The other two were nominations for two of his HBO comedy specials: Bill Maher: I’m Swiss and Bill Maher: The Decider. For the last eighteen years, Bill Maher has set the boundaries of where funny, political talk can go on American television. First on “Politically Incorrect” (Comedy Central, ABC, 1993-2002), and for the last nine years on HBO’s “Real Time,” Maher’s combination of unflinching honesty and big laughs have garnered him 24 Emmy nominations. In October of 2008, this same combination was on display in Maher’s uproarious and unprecedented swipe at organized religion, “Religulous,” directed by Larry Charles (“Borat”). The documentary has gone on to become the 7th Highest Grossing Documentary ever. He started his career as a stand-up comedian in 1979 and still performs over fifty dates a year in Las Vegas, and in sold-out theaters across the country. Two of his eight stand-up specials for HBO have been nominated for Emmy awards. Bill Maher attended Cornell University. He now resides in Los Angeles. He holds the record for most Emmy nominations without a win: 32 (as of 2013). He host of Real Time with Bill Maher (2003), live on Friday nights at 11:30pm on Home Box Office. [February 2003].
Franciscus Bernardus Maria “Frans” de Waal and Bill Maher or William Maher are famous people who look alike. They have a full head of white hair. They are intelligent white influential men.