The Biggest Mistake Human Beings Make

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People make assumptions about how psychology works that could easily be debunked by studying chimpanzees, bonobos and other kinds of species. For example, the chimpanzee is a dulce when they're 16. They learn a lot of things in their lifetime before they are adults. And we know that there's a lot of cultural habits that they have. So if you look at the other primates, you see also culture. If you look at humans, you see more culture than biology.

Frans de Waal is a Dutch-American primatologist and the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Primate Behavior in the Department of Psychology at Emory University. He is the author of, among other books, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes and Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Frans de Waal discuss how primate empathy forms the basis for human morality; the precedent for diversity in human gender and gender roles that exists in non-human primates; and why, despite attempts to separate human behavior from human biology, you can’t have one without the other.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

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