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Life

Review: The Age of Empathy by Frans de Waal

By Marc Bekoff

9 September 2009

New Scientist. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

(Image: Michael Nichols / National Geographic / Getty)

MANY people have argued that humans are naturally cooperative. Charles Darwin, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, the Dalai Lama, Russian zoologist and anarchist Peter Kropotkin, neurobiologist James Rilling and psychologist Dacher Keltner, among many others including myself, have all made the case that our animal nature is characterised as much by kindness and collaboration as it is by competition and carnage. Now, the prolific primatologist Frans de Waal joins the fray to convince people that we are not such nasty creatures after all.

“Our animal nature is characterised as much by cooperation as it is by carnage”…

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