On his book The New Chimpanzee: A Twenty-First-Century Portrait of Our Closest Kin
Cover Interview of June 10, 2018
In a nutshell
This book is about the lives of chimpanzees living in the
tropical forests of Africa. Over the past two decades, scientists have made
dramatic discoveries about chimpanzees that will change the way we understand
both human nature and the apes themselves. Although there is a rich history of
chimpanzee field research that goes back nearly sixty years, almost all of the findings
discussed in The New Chimpanzee have been made just since the turn of
the millennium. From genomics to cultural traditions, I consider our close kin
in a new light and ask what this new information may mean for a new and improved
understanding of human nature.
Studying wild chimpanzees is the profession of a very small
number of people in the world. At any one time there are probably fewer than a
hundred scientists and their students actively engaged in chimpanzee field observation
and study. The number of full-time professors in American universities whose
careers are focused mainly on wild chimpanzee research is perhaps a dozen. Add
in the scholars and conservationists doing work in related areas, and the
global army of chimpanzee-watchers is a few hundred strong. The available
funding for the work they do is a miniscule fraction of that given to
scientists in other scientific endeavors. Yet the results of new studies are
front-page news and are rightly touted in the international media for the clues
they provide about human nature.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
In a nutshell
This book is about the lives of chimpanzees living in the tropical forests of Africa. Over the past two decades, scientists have made dramatic discoveries about chimpanzees that will change the way we understand both human nature and the apes themselves. Although there is a rich history of chimpanzee field research that goes back nearly sixty years, almost all of the findings discussed in The New Chimpanzee have been made just since the turn of the millennium. From genomics to cultural traditions, I consider our close kin in a new light and ask what this new information may mean for a new and improved understanding of human nature.
Studying wild chimpanzees is the profession of a very small number of people in the world. At any one time there are probably fewer than a hundred scientists and their students actively engaged in chimpanzee field observation and study. The number of full-time professors in American universities whose careers are focused mainly on wild chimpanzee research is perhaps a dozen. Add in the scholars and conservationists doing work in related areas, and the global army of chimpanzee-watchers is a few hundred strong. The available funding for the work they do is a miniscule fraction of that given to scientists in other scientific endeavors. Yet the results of new studies are front-page news and are rightly touted in the international media for the clues they provide about human nature.