I was being interviewed this morning when the interviewer asked how the work we were talking about related to “Frans de Waal who just passed away.” I had not heard. I immediately choked up and remain teary, twenty minutes since receiving the news. Frans’s death is an enormous loss to me and for the world. Emory University, Frans’s academic home for more than 30 years, most recently as the Charles Howard Candler Professor Emeritus of Psychology, published an outstanding obituary which I encourage you to read. Here is why Frans mattered so much to me:

Frans picked up where Darwin left off, building the case for biological continuity between non-human animals and humans. He railed against human exceptionalism. He saw us in bonobos and chimps and saw bonobos and chimps in us.

Frans was the consummate communicator. His first book Chimpanzee Politics (1982) caught the attention of Newt Gingrich, later the GOP Speaker of the House of Representatives. Gingrich attributed a large part of the credit for his legislative successes in the House to lessons that he learned from Frans’s books on. That caught my attention. Here was someone able to communicate the relevance of biology to a politician and a Republican one to boot. Wow!

Frans’s second book, Peacemaking Among Primates (1988), was about reconciliation. As with Darwin, so with Frans, everything starts with observations. Frans watched chimps fight. He noticed that in the immediate aftermath of a fight, the two chimps who had just been in conflict came together in what looked to be something very, very different. They kissed, held out a hand, embraced, and touched while grunting “submissively.” To make this into science-speak acceptable at the time prior to the animal-emotion-revolution he made, Frans wrote that the two chimps came “into non-violent contact.” But he pushed the envelope, an opening salvo in his revolution by titling his paper, Reconciliation and consolation among chimpanzees. Reconciliation! Consolation! Oh my! At the time, applying what were viewed as human specialties even to our all-but-1.5%-DNA-shared ape cousins, was heresy.

Some years later, Frans slam-dunked his finding of peacemaking in chimps with exactly the right analysis. A beautiful piece of science. In work with several students, he compared the proportion of times that two chimps were together just after a conflict with the proportion of times that the same two chimps were together at exactly that same time of day, 24 hours later. The point being that if, say, Gwennie and Natasha fought at 2:00 in the afternoon on Wednesday, they were more likely to be together between 2:00 and 2:15 on Wednesday than during the same time period on Thursday (when they didn’t fight). In fact, on average, they were more than 3x more likely to come into contact after a conflict than without a preceding conflict. Simple, elegant, compelling. I still remember with a smile that analysis roughly 25 years after I first heard it presented (by Felippo Aureli, one of the authors on the paper).

The first time, my hula hoop of an orbit touched Frans’s galactic sphere of influence was shortly after Jeff Mogil published a paper on empathy in mice. For reasons that are as mysterious to me as they have been influential on my life, Science called me for a comment. At the time, I knew the pain field but knew basically nothing about empathy. Flying my hubris flag, I pontificated:

“Emotional contagion means one baby starts crying and all the babies start crying,” explains Peggy Mason, a neurobiologist at the University of Chicago who studies pain. Unlike higher forms of empathy, it doesn’t require understanding what others are experiencing. “The second baby doesn’t have to realize that the first baby is upset because it has a dirty diaper,” notes Mason.

– Greg Miller, Signs of Empathy, Science 312: 1860-1861

That 15 minute conversation then begot an invitation from Scientific American Mind to comment on a blog about the Mogil paper. Not to blog, mind you, but to comment on a blog. Hubris flying freely and not yet blogging myself, I snarkily responded that the only person that I would write a comment on for a blog would be Frans de Waal. Otherwise, I would settle for nothing less than the blog itself. The editor wrote back that indeed Frans would be writing the blog. Eye rolling embarrassment. Of course, I agreed.

My comment on Frans’s blog now makes me cringe as I went on and on about mirror neurons which I now believe are the biggest PR coup of the modern era. But it was the stepping stone to changing my life because some months later, Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal, now on the faculty at Tel Aviv University, saw the comment and approached me with her idea to study empathy in rats. Lucky break! With my hubris intact enough to think I could contribute despite still knowing nothing about empathy, I said Yes. Inbal, her advisor Jean Decety (Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago), and I went to work.

Inbal found that a rat would open the door to an acrylic tube containing his trapped cagemate, thereby liberating the cagemate. After adding an experiment that pitted freeing a rat against accessing chocolate – which ended in a draw – our findings were published in a featured article in Science. The news went public on the same day that Inbal gave birth to her oldest child. Helping rats received a lot of coverage in NPR, Science Friday, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, and more. I still have a lovely binder that Inbal’s husband made for Inbal and me of the dozens of popular press articles written about our study.

Science published a news item on our paper. In there, Frans commented:

“The study … is truly groundbreaking,” ethologist Frans de Waal of Emory University in Atlanta, writes in an e-mail. It “shows for the first time that rodents are not just affected by the emotions of others, but that empathy motivates altruism.”

I was over the moon.

Then came an email directly from Frans: “Congratulations on the rat-empathy paper in Science. Such a lovely study.” Our blossoming correspondence elated me as I wrote, “It is surreal for me to be e-talking with you.”

Frans invited me to Emory to give a talk. I remember he was surprised at my very short introduction. My standard-operating-procedure is to get in and out of an introduction in under 5 mins. Get on to the data! After the talk, we went to his laboratory at the Emory National Primate Research Center. That was heaven. Chimps and students. In other words, interesting, fun primates. We left the non-human ones behind and decamped to Frans’s house in Stone Mountain. Beautiful home.

When we arrived, Frans saw that he had received a shipment of fish. Putting everything else on hold, Frans excitedly unpacked the fish into a very large tank, one of several. This was the first I learned of his aquarist hobby that he has practiced since childhood. Dinner with students, Frans, and his beloved wife was spirited, tasty and memorable.

Over the years, Frans and I wrote back and forth. I would see him when he gave talks in Chicago at the Humanities Festival (2013) and at our Law School (2018). He chaired a FENS (Federation of European Neuroscience Societies) meeting on The Social Brain in Copenhagen (2014) and invited me. Great meeting!

Last summer, I listened¹ to Frans’s book Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist which is a masterpiece. Frans writes of the two sexes:

“In most mammals, males strive for status or territory whereas females vigorously defend their young. Whether we approve or disapprove of such behavior, it’s not hard to see how it evolved. For both sexes, it has always been the ticket to a genetic legacy. 

“Ideology has little to do with it.”

Frans goes on to say what differences between the behavior of male and female mammals do not mean:

“I can say that I’ve devoted my entire career to the study of animal intelligence and never noticed a difference between the sexes. We have brilliant individuals and not-so-brilliant ones on both sides, but hundreds of studies by myself and others have revealed no cognitive gaps. While there is no shortage of behavioral contrasts between primate males and females, their mental capacities must have evolved in tandem. In our species, too, even the cognitive domains traditionally associated with one gender and not the other, such as mathematical ability, prove indistinguishable by gender if tested on a large enough sample. The whole idea of one gender being mentally superior receives no backing from modern science.” [My emphasis.]

Clear as clear can be.

Frans discussed psychologists who:

“are right in the thick of what they study which makes it difficult not to judge behavior by cultural, moral, or political standards. This explains why psychology textbooks read almost like ideological tracts. Between the lines, we gather that racism is deplorable, sexism is wrong, aggression is to be eliminated, and hierarchies are archaic. For me this was a shock. Not necessarily because I believe the opposite, but because such opinions interfere with science. I may want to know how the races see each other or how sexes interact, but whether their behavior is desirable is a separate issue. The task of science is not to judge behavior but to understand it. [my emphasis]

“Every time I received a psychology textbook from a publisher, I made a point of checking the index for entries on power and dominance. Most of the time, these terms were not even listed. As if they didn’t apply to the social behavior of Homo sapiens. If they were included as topics about which students needed to learn, it was usually about the abuse of power or the drawbacks of hierarchical structures. Power was treated as a dirty word that deserved scorn rather than attention.

“The egalitarian delusion of the social sciences is all the more astounding since we all work at a university which is one huge power structure… At a critical meeting, one senior professor who acted like a silverback of our department was undermined by a coalition of junior faculty members… After the vote that marked his defeat, I never heard this professor’s booming voice again. He roamed the hallways like a zombie, deflated. He retired within a year. I had seen it all before, only in another species.”

So much of what Frans wrote was as much about academic freedom as it was about primatology. Frans was reminding people that science has to discover the truths, whether those truths feel welcome, scary, or unwanted. Frans talked of how feminists wanted Frans to promote bonobos as humans’ closest relatives while corporate sharks favored modeling humans on the ever competitive and often aggressive chimps.

I am a devotee of the Chicago Principles of Free Expression and a member of Faculty Advisory Board for the University of Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression. I worry that free expression in science has been swept under the rug with seriously deleterious effects. After consulting with the Forum’s leadership, I invited Frans to come give a talk for the Forum. I wrote:

“I absolutely loved Different. Thanks for taking that on. I see it as a public service. I hope it can make headway against the tide of human exceptionalism and constructionist thinking with no biology in sight that seems to be sweeping the US these days.”

Frans agreed. We settled on April 4. He planned a Chicago weekend with his wife. My mother and nephew hoped to fly in, having joined me in reading Different and several other of Frans’s books.

Frans and I chatted about the focus of the talk. I told Frans that I hoped he could expand on his point that the desirability of a behavior is not the purview of science, that the task of science is to understand behavior. It is critical that people understand the necessity of freely following questions wherever they take you, whatever comfortable or uncomfortable truths are unearthed. Frans was game although he worried, “I am not sure the general public is ready for a gender approach that is more biological in a time when all sorts of stories are made up about gender.”

Frans obviously never had the chance to talk to us.

Our world has lost a luminary, arguably the most important thinker in organismal biology since Darwin. EO Wilson, Tinbergen, and Lorenz can all be mentioned in the same breath. But I vote for Frans. I am indebted to his contributions to science, to science communication and to our world.

¹This is relevant because my transcriptions have my punctuation, not Frans’s.