Frans de Waal, Who Found the Origins of Morality in Apes, Dies at 75
Frans de Waal, who used his study of the inner lives of animals to build a powerful case that apes think, feel, strategize, pass down culture and act on moral sentiments — and that humans are not quite as special as many of us like to think — died on Thursday at his home in Stone Mountain, Ga. He was 75.
The cause was stomach cancer, his wife, Catherine Marin, said.
A psychologist at Emory University in Atlanta and a research scientist at the school’s Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Professor de Waal objected to the common usage of the word “instinct.” He saw the behavior of all sentient creatures, from crows to persons, existing on the same broad continuum of evolutionary adaptation.
“Uniquely human emotions don’t exist,” he argued in a 2019 New York Times guest essay. “Like organs, the emotions evolved over millions of years to serve essential functions.”
The ambition and clarity of his thought, his skills as a storyteller and his prolific output made him an exceptionally popular figure for a primatologist — or a serious scientist of any kind. Two of his books, “Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?” (2016) and “Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves” (2019), were best sellers. In the mid-1990s, when he was speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich put Professor de Waal’s first book, “Chimpanzee Politics” (1982), on a reading list for Republican House freshmen.
The novelists Claire Messud and Sigrid Nunez both told The New York Times that they liked his writing. The actress Isabella Rossellini hosted a talk with him in Brooklyn last year. Major philosophers like Christine Korsgaard and Peter Singer wrote long, considered responses to his ideas.
Professor de Waal’s influence was such that The Times credited his work with unleashing “a torrent of discussion about animal sexuality” and helping to popularize the term “alpha male,” though neither of those accomplishments had much to do with the core of his thought.
His interest in what is shared across species, emotionally and morally, was kick-started in the mid-1970s, at the beginning of his career, when he saw one male chimpanzee raucously confront another, then calm down and extend his hand, palm up, in a peace offering, after which the apes embraced and groomed each other. After further research, he concluded that the episode showed a desire and ability to reconcile after fights.
He found further striking evidence that animals other than humans have empathy and a sense of fair play in the early 2000s, while working with the psychologist Sarah Brosnan. The scholars designed an experiment in which two monkeys were awarded cucumbers for completing a task. Then one monkey was given a grape and the other was given a less tasty cucumber. The one that got the cucumber began refusing to cooperate, even hurling the vegetable back at the researcher. Some animals that got the better end of the deal declined their grape.
Many of Professor de Waal’s animal anecdotes were moving. He wrote about a bonobo named Kuni who once picked up an injured starling, climbed a tree, spread the bird’s wings and then released it, enabling it to fly. “She tailored her assistance to the specific situation of an animal totally different from herself,” Professor de Waal wrote in his 2005 book, “Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are.”
These sorts of episodes indicated that primates had cognition, Professor de Waal said. Other ape behaviors — young females getting maternal training, for example — indicated something even more impressive: that apes were capable of learning, remembering and passing down new skills across generations, meaning that different communities had their own cultures.
Moskowitz said he wanted “to show the American people that they’re never going to impeach Joe Biden. It’s never going to happen because they don’t have the evidence. Okay, this is a show. It’s all fake. They just want to do these hearings.
Search for birth control on TikTok or Instagram and a cascade of misleading videos vilifying hormonal contraception appear: Young women blaming their weight gain on the pill. Right-wing commentators claiming that some birth control can lead to infertility. Testimonials complaining of depression and anxiety.
Instead, many social media influencers recommend “natural” alternatives, such as timing sex to menstrual cycles — a less effective birth-control method that doctors warn could result in unwanted pregnancies in a country where abortion is now banned or restricted in nearly half the states.
Physicians say they’re seeing an explosion of birth-control misinformation online targeting a vulnerable demographic: people in their teens and early 20s who are more likely to believe what they see on their phones because of algorithms that feed them a stream of videos reinforcing messages often divorced from scientific evidence. While doctors say hormonal contraception — which includes birth-control pills and intrauterine devices (IUDs) — is safe and effective, they worry the profession’s long-standing lack of transparency about some of the serious but rare side effects has left many patients seeking information from unqualified online communities.
The backlash to birth control comes at a time of rampant misinformation about basic health tenets amid poor digital literacy and a wider political debate over reproductive rights, in which far-right conservatives argue that broad acceptance of birth control has altered traditional gender roles and weakened the family.
Physicians and researchers say little data is available about the scale of this new phenomenon, but anecdotally, more patients are coming in with misconceptions about birth control fueled by influencers and conservative commentators.
“People are putting themselves out there as experts on birth control and speaking to things that the science does not bear out,” said Michael Belmonte, an OB/GYN in D.C. and a family planning expert with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG). “I am seeing those direct failures of this misinformation.”
He says women frequently come in for abortions after believing what they see on social media about the dangers of hormonal birth control and the effectiveness of tracking periods to prevent pregnancy. Many of these patients have traveled from states that have completely or partly banned abortions, he said, including Texas, Idaho, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina.
Doctors stand a better chance of dispelling misinformation when they listen to patients’ concerns, said Belmonte, noting that some are more worried about the side effects of birth control than the effectiveness doctors have long been trained to emphasize. He has adopted ACOG’s recommendation that physicians candidly discuss common side effects such as nausea, headaches, breast tenderness and bleeding between periods; many of these resolve on their own or can be mitigated by switching forms of birth control.
Women of color whose communities have historically been exploited by the medical establishment may be particularly vulnerable to misinformation, given the long history of mistrust around birth control in this country, said Kimberly Baker, an assistant professor at UTHealth Houston School of Public Health. Forced sterilizations of tens of thousands of primarily Black, Latina and Indigenous women happened under U.S. government programs in the 20th century.
“That’s another huge reason why these negative videos around birth control get a lot of fanfare, because there’s already the stigma attached to it, and that’s steeped in our history,” she said.
For influencers of all political stripes seeking fame and fortune on the internet, negative content draws more clicks, allowing them to reach a wider audience to sell their products and services.
Nicole Bendayan, who has amassed more than 1 million combined followers on Instagram and TikTok for her holistic-health coaching business, shared on social media that she stopped using hormonal birth control because she was concerned about weight gain, low libido and intermittent bleeding, which she had assumed were side effects.
Bendayan’s TikTok about getting off birth control and becoming a “cycle-syncing nutritionist” who teaches women how to live “in tune” with their menstrual cycles has drawn 10.5 million views.
The 29-year-old is not a licensed medical specialist.
“I had a lot of really bad symptoms [and] went to see a bunch of different doctors. Every one of them dismissed me. Even when I asked if it had anything to do with birth control, they all said no,” Bendayan said in an interview with The Washington Post. She had used a vaginal ring for eight years and an IUD for two; she said that when she went off birth control, her symptoms went away.
“I believe that the access to birth control is important,” she said. “I don’t think that we’re given informed consent.”
Bendayan has told her followers that birth control may deplete magnesium, vitamins B, C and E, and zinc levels. She charges hundreds of dollars for a three-month virtual program that includes analyses of blood panels for what she calls hormonal imbalances.
When asked about the science behind why her symptoms resolved after getting off birth control, Bendayan said she did her own research and found studies that backed up what she was feeling. She doesn’t claim to be a doctor, but says she wants to help others.
“I always make it clear in a disclaimer that I’m not a medical professional and that I would happily work with their health-care team,” said Bendayan, who lives in Valencia, Spain. “I’m an educator.”
In recent years, an entire industry has popped up around regulating hormones that experts say is often a cash grab; there is no proven science that the hormone-balancing regimes pushed by some social media influencers such as Bendayan work.
Social media companies struggle to combat misinformation as they balance free-speech protections. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, says it works hard to protect online communities.
“Our policies are designed to give people a voice, while at the same time keeping people safe on our apps,” said Ryan Daniels, a spokesman for Meta.
TikTok recently removed at least five videos linking birth control to mental health issues and other health problems after The Post asked how the company prevents the spread of misinformation. One of the videos removed was of Bendayan saying certain forms of birth control could make users more susceptible to sexually transmitted infections, which experts say the evidence does not support. A TikTok spokeswoman said the videos violated company policies prohibiting “inaccurate, misleading or false content that may cause significant harm to individuals or society.”
Bendayan told The Post she “fully” supports “the removal of any content that may inadvertently perpetuate misinformation.” She added, “As I often remind my audience, it’s essential for individuals to conduct their own research and seek comprehensive understanding, especially considering the limitations of short-form content.”
An underlying conservative push
Prominent conservative commentators have seized upon mistrust of medical professionals, sowing misinformation as a way to discourage the use of birth control. Some commentators inaccurately depict hormonal contraception as causing abortions. Others say they’re just looking out for women’s health.
Brett Cooper, a media commentator for the conservative Daily Wire, argued in a viral TikTok clip that birth control can impact fertility, cause women to gain weight and even alter whom they are attracted to. It racked up over 219,000 “likes” before TikTok removed it following The Post’s inquiry.
In a Daily Wire video, Cooper and political commentator Candace Owens denounce birth-control pills and IUDs as “unnatural,” with Owens saying she’s a “big advocate of getting women to realize this stuff is not normal,” and claiming that viewers of her content told her copper IUDs can harm women’s fertility. Medical experts say there is no evidence birth control impacts fertility long term.
On his show, Ben Shapiro, another right-wing pundit, called discussing birth-control side effects a “political third rail,” while interviewing a guest who proclaimed that women on birth-control pills are attracted to men who are “less traditionally masculine.”
Shapiro, Cooper and Owens did not respond to requests for comment.
The online magazine Evie, described by Rolling Stone as the conservative Gen Z’s version of Cosmo, urges readers to ditch hormonal birth control with headlines such as “Why Are So Many Feminists Silent About The Very Real Dangers Of Birth Control?”
Brittany Martinez, founder of Evie Magazine, said in an email that the outlet’s work has made questioning birth control mainstream. “Women have been silenced and shamed by legacy media, the pharmaceutical industry, and, in many cases, by their own doctors who have gaslit them about their experiences with hormonal birth control,” she wrote.
Martinez co-founded a menstrual cycle tracking app called 28 that is backed by conservative billionaire and tech mogul Peter Thiel. The company, 28 Wellness, told The Post it does not disclose its investors, but Evie announced Thiel Capital’s support when the product launched. A spokesman for Thiel did not respond to requests for comment. The app’s website declares: “Hormonal birth control promised freedom but tricked our bodies into dysfunction and pain.” The “feminine fitness” app told The Post it has “never been marketed as an alternative to hormonal birth control.”
The influencers’ messaging helps drive potential legislation limiting access to hormonal birth control, said Amanda Stevenson, a sociologist, demographer and assistant professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder who is studying how antiabortion activists and lawmakers are trying to restrict birth control. Already Republican legislators in Missouri have tried, unsuccessfully, to stop the state’s Medicaid program from covering IUDs and emergency contraceptives. A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit this month upheld a Texas law requiring minors to obtain parental permission before accessing birth control.
Stevenson pointed to pronouncements by Lila Rose, an antiabortion activist with hundreds of thousands of followers on social media who has urged women to get off birth control, in what Stevenson called an effort to stigmatize it.
“To be anti-fertility is to be anti-woman, and the proliferation of hormonal birth control is just another way of trying to force women to be more like men, with significant consequences for our emotional and physical health,” Rose said in an email.
In a 2017-2019 federal survey, the latest available, 14 percent of women 15 to 49 years old said they were currently using oral contraceptive pills, and 10 percent said they were using long-acting reversible contraceptives such as an IUD. In a federal survey of women ages 15 to 44 who had had sex, the percentage who reported ever having used the pill dropped from 82 percent to 79 percent between 2002 and 2015, while the percentage for those ever having used an IUD more than doubled to 15 percent.
Side effects of birth control
All forms of medication, including hormonal birth control, can have side effects. Some are rare, but serious: Birth-control pills that contain estrogen can lead to blood clots and strokes. IUDs can perforate the uterine wall.
When Sabrina Grimaldi went to urgent care for chest pain last spring, the medical staff told her she had pulled a muscle and sent her home. Weeks later, when her left leg started to swell and turn purple, the 24-year-old from Arizona realized it was more than a pulled muscle. Medical providers discovered blood clots in her leg and in both of her lungs, which she said they told her were caused by her birth-control pills. Grimaldi wrote about her experience in the Zillennial Zine, an online magazine where she is editor in chief, and also shared it on TikTok.
“There’s all of those crazy things on the package that say you might have a blood clot or a heart attack or death, and you’re just like whatever. You don’t actually think that that’s going to happen,” Grimaldi said in an interview, noting that her doctor never discussed potential side effects with her.
The Food and Drug Administration points out that the risk of developing blood clots from using birth-control pills — 3 to 9 women out of 10,000 who are on the pill — remains lower than the risk of developing blood clots in pregnancy and in the postpartum period. Doctors note that Opill, the over-the-counter pill that will soon be available in stores and online, contains only progestin — meaning it does not have the blood clot risk of estrogen-containing pills.
The algorithms behind TikTok, YouTube and Instagram are designed to surface content similar to what viewers have already watched, which experts say leads viewers to believe that more people suffer complications than in reality.
Jenny Wu, an OB/GYN resident at Duke University, noticed that her Gen Z patients were turning away from IUDs at higher rates than her millennial patients — and were referencing TikToks about the pain of IUD insertion. So she analyzed the 100 most popular TikTok videos about IUDs and found that a surprisingly high proportion — almost 40 percent — were negative.
“It’s changed how I practice,” she said. She now routinely offers patients a variety of pain management options including anti-inflammatory drugs, a lidocaine injection into the cervix, or anti-anxiety medication.
Catherine Miller, a junior at the University of Wisconsin at Stout, had never wanted to be on hormonal birth control after going down a rabbit hole of TikTok videos that listed negative side effects without context.
“It created this sense of fear that if I ever needed to be put on birth control, I would become a completely different person, I would gain a bunch of weight, and my life would be over,” the 20-year-old said. “I was like, well, obviously, this is true. This applies to everybody, because it’s the only thing I’m seeing.”
But in the fall, Miller took a human sexual biology class taught by a family physician who had spent decades counseling women on how to choose the right birth control. The professor walked the class through scientific research to dispel some of the misconceptions they had encountered.
After learning that her understanding of the risks was skewed by social media, Miller said she worries about her generation of women facing a lack of accurate information — and choices. Abortion is banned in Wisconsin after 22 weeks of pregnancy.
“It’s terrifying to think about our options being taken away, and misinformation about the things that we still have access to,” she said. “That’s a combination for disaster.”
The Dems on this committee are really doing a great job exposing this nonsense. Unfortunately there's a big chunk of the electorate who aren't going to see the fraud being perpetrated on them.
Engoron also ordered the Trump Organization to supply detailed information to the monitor about its efforts to obtain bonds to cover judgments.
“The Trump Organization shall inform the monitor, in advance, of any efforts to secure surety bonds, including any financial disclosures requested or required, any information provided in response to such requests, any representations made by Trump Organization in connection with securing such bonds any personal guarantees made by any of the defendants, and any obligations of the Trump Organization required by the surety,” the judge ordered.
WASHINGTON — A new budget by a large and influential group of House Republicans calls for raising the Social Security retirement age for future retirees and restructuring Medicare.
The proposals, which are unlikely to become law this year, reflect how many Republicans will seek to govern if they win the 2024 elections. And they play into a fight President Joe Biden is seeking to have with former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party as he runs for re-election.
The budget was released Wednesday by the Republican Study Committee, a group of more than 170 House GOP lawmakers, including many allies of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump...
Elon Musk@elonmusk
6h
This is a battle to the death with the anti-civilizational woke mind virus.
The Intellectualist@highbrow_nobrow
5h
Ted Cruz: “I don’t think Senate Democrats, if you had video of Joe Biden murdering children dressed as the devil under a full moon while singing Pat Benatar, they still wouldn’t vote to convict.”
And, come to think of it, I can recall other instances where "the Democrats do it too!" was a handy stock rejoinder, widely adopted, going back as far as Watergate and even back into the '50s.
emptywheel@emptywheel
4h
It's only right that all down-ballot Republicans have to wait in line behind Trump's civil and criminal defense lawyers to get $$.
For 7 years, they've serially agreed to turn the GOP into a criminal protection racket, and this is the inevitable result of that.
Quote:The Intellectualist@highbrow_nobrow
5h
Ted Cruz: “I don’t think Senate Democrats, if you had video of Joe Biden murdering children dressed as the devil under a full moon while singing Pat Benatar, they still wouldn’t vote to convict.”
I've been writing about this behavior for a quarter of a century. To see this as merely projection is to make a category error. Of course, projection (assuming others are motivated just as you are) is a common element in the mix but there is something else going on here that is central.
Cruz is engaging in a purposeful disinformation strategy just as Trump is when he uses phrases like "the Biden crime family" or the "Clinton crime family".
In the past few weeks, Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo has deepened our understanding of the right-wing attempt to impose Christian nationalism on the United States through support for Trump and the MAGA movement. On March 9, Kovensky explored the secret, men-only, right-wing society called the Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR), whose well-positioned, wealthy, white leaders call for instituting white male domination and their version of Christianity in the U.S. after a “regime” change.
On March 19, Kovensky explained how that power was reaching into lawmaking when he reported on a September 2023 speech by Russ Vought, a key architect of the plans for Trump’s second term, including Project 2025. In the speech, which took place in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Vought explained the right wing’s extreme border policies by explicitly marrying Christian nationalism and an aversion to the pluralism that is a hallmark of American democracy. Vought argued that the U.S. should model immigration on the Bible’s Old Testament, welcoming migrants only “so long as they accepted Israel’s God, laws, and understanding of history.”
These religious appeals against the equality of women and minorities seem an odd juxtaposition to a statement by United Auto Workers (UAW) union president Shawn Fain in response to the claim of the Trump campaign that Trump’s “bloodbath” statement of last Saturday was about the auto industry. Fain is also a self-described Christian, but he rejects the right-wing movement.
“Donald Trump can’t run from the facts,” Fain said in a statement to CBS News. “He can do all the name-calling he wants, but the truth is he is a con man who has been directly part of the problem we have seen over the past 40 years—where working class people have gone backward and billionaires like Donald Trump reap all the benefits….
“Trump has been a player in the class war against the working class for decades, whether screwing workers and small businesses in his dealings, exploiting workers at his Mar a Lago estate and properties, blaming workers for the Great Recession, or giving tax breaks to the rich. The bottom line is Trump only represents the billionaire class and he doesn’t give a damn about the plight of working class people, union or not.”
In the 1850s the United States saw a similar juxtaposition, with elite southern enslavers heightening their insistence that enslavement was sanctioned by God and their warnings that the freedom of Black Americans posed an existential threat to the United States just as white workers were beginning to turn against the system that had concentrated great wealth among a very few men. While white southern leaders were upset by the extraordinary popularity of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the 1852 novel that urged middle-class women to stand up against slavery, it was Hinton Rowan Helper’s 1857 The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It that made them apoplectic.
Hinton Helper was a white southerner himself and showed no abolitionist sympathies in his deeply racist book. What that book did was to show, using the statistics that had recently been made available from the 1850 census, that the American South was falling rapidly behind the North economically. Helper blamed the system of slavery for that economic backwardness, and he urged ordinary white men to overthrow the system of enslavement that served only a few wealthy white men. The cotton boom of the 1850s had created enormous fortunes for a few lucky planters, as well as a market for Helper’s book among poorer white men who had been forced off their land.
White southern elites considered Helper’s book so incendiary that state legislatures made it illegal to possess a copy, people were imprisoned and three allegedly hanged for being found with the book, and a fight over it consumed Congress for two months from December 1859 through January 1860. The determination of southern elites to preserve their power made them redouble their efforts to appeal to voters through religion and racism.
In today’s America, the right wing seems to be echoing its antebellum predecessors. It is attacking women’s rights; diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; immigration; LGBTQ+ rights and so on. At the same time, it continues to push an economic system that has moved as much as $50 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 10% since 1981 while exploding the annual budget deficit and the national debt.
Yesterday the far-right Republican Study Committee (RSC), which includes about two thirds of all House Republicans, released a 2025 budget plan to stand against Biden’s 2025 budget wish list. The RSC plan calls for dramatic cuts to business regulation, Social Security, Medicaid, and so on, and dismisses Biden’s plan for higher taxes on the wealthy, calling instead for more than $5 trillion in tax cuts. It calls the provision of the Inflation Reduction Act that permits the government to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies over prices “socialist price controls.”
Biden responded to the RSC budget, saying: “My budget represents a different future. One where the days of trickle-down economics are over and the wealthy and biggest corporations no longer get all the breaks. A future where we restore the right to choose and protect other freedoms, not take them away. A future where the middle class finally has a fair shot, and we protect Social Security so the working people who built this country can retire with dignity. I see a future for all Americans and I will never stop fighting for that future.”
Biden’s version of America has built a strong economy in the last two years, with extremely low unemployment, extraordinary growth, and real wage increases for all but the top 20%. Inequality has decreased. Today the White House announced the cancellation of nearly $6 billion in federal student loan debt for thousands of teachers, firefighters, and nurses. Simply by enforcing laws already on the books that allow debt forgiveness for borrowers who go into public service, the administration has erased nearly $144 billion of debt for about 4 million borrowers.
At the same time, the administration has reined in corporations. Today the Department of Justice, along with 15 states and the District of Columbia, sued Apple, Inc., for violating the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act. They charge that the company, which in 2023 had net revenues of $383 billion and a net income of $97 billion, has illegally established a monopoly over the smartphone market to extract as much revenue as possible from consumers. The company’s behavior also hurts developers, the Department of Justice says, because they cannot compete under the rules that Apple has set.
At the end of February, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued to block the merger of Kroger and Albertsons, a $24.6 billion takeover affecting 5,000 supermarkets and 700,000 workers across 48 states. The merger would raise grocery prices, narrow consumer choice, and hurt workers’ bargaining power, the FTC said. The attorneys general of Arizona, California, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon and Wyoming joined the FTC’s lawsuit.
The benefits of the administration’s reworking of the government for ordinary Americans have not gotten traction in the past few years, as right-wing media have continued to insist that Biden’s policies will destroy the economy. But as Shawn Fain’s position suggests, ordinary white men, who fueled the Reagan Revolution in 1980 when they turned against the Democrats and who have made up a key part of the Republican base, might be paying attention.
In June 2023 the AFL-CIO, a union with more than 12.5 million members, endorsed Biden for president in 2024 in its earliest endorsement ever. In January the UAW also endorsed Biden. Yesterday the United Steelworkers Union, which represents 850,000 workers in metals, mining, rubber, and other industries, added their endorsement.
Just as it was in the 1850s, the right-wing emphasis on religion and opposition to a modern multicultural America today is deeply entwined with preserving an economic power structure that has benefited a small minority. That emphasis is growing stronger in the face of the administration’s effort to restore a level economic playing field. In the 1850s, those who opposed the domination of elite enslavers could only promise voters a better future. But in 2024, the success of Biden’s policies may be changing the game.
Republicans against Trump@RpsAgainstTrump
21h
Donald Trump on Marjorie Taylor Greene:
“She’s a fantastic person. She’s a very smart person and very respected in Congress. A lot of people don't know how respected she is.” 🤡
