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The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society |  | Author: Frans de Waal
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
List Price: $32.99
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Seller: hwalsh_books_online
Rating:  19 reviews
Sales Rank: 5085402
Format: Import
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 304
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.3 x 1.1
ISBN: 0771027370
Dewey Decimal Number: 152.41
EAN: 9780771027376
ASIN: 0771027370
Publication Date: September 22, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
An engrossing, lucid exploration of the origins of human morality that challenges our most basic assumptions, from the worldâs leading primatologist
Is it really human nature to stab one another in the back in our climb up the corporate ladder? Competitive, selfish behaviour is often explained away as instinctive, thanks to evolution and âsurvival of the fittest,â but in fact humans are equally hard-wired for empathy. Using research from the fields of anthropology, psychology, animal behaviour, and neuroscience, de Waal brilliantly argues that humans are group animals â highly cooperative, sensitive to injustice, and mostly peace-loving â just like other primates, elephants, and dolphins. This revelation has profound implications for everything from politics to office culture.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 19
 A bridge-building, hopeful, and deeply inspiring book March 7, 2010
Michael Dowd (Freeland, WA USA)
I simply cannot recommend this book too highly. After having just read another wonderful book along similar (but by no means identical) lines: Jeremy Rifkin's The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, my wife and I downloaded the audiobook version of Frans de Waal's The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society. What a delightful complement these two are! One reviewer (who by her own admission did not finish de Wall's book) complained about it being repetitive. I didn't find it so at all, nor did my wife Connie Barlow, a former editor of science books at Columbia University Press and a science writer herself (author of Green Space, Green Time: The Way of Science; The Ghosts of Evolution: Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronisms; and From Gaia to Selfish Genes: Selected Writings in the Life Sciences. We both absolutely loved The Age of Empathy! But here's the thing: if you start reading this book, I recommend you finish it. It's a surprisingly quick read (or listen). Toward the end (at his discussion of "The Dark Side"), I was brought to tears more powerfully than by any book in recent memory. My wife and I both enthusiastically give this book a 5-star rating.
~ Michael Dowd, author of Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World, which has been endorsed by 6 Nobel Prize-winning scientists and other science luminaries, including noted skeptics, and by religious leaders across the spectrum.
 Overreach January 19, 2010
Charles S. Fisher (Woodacre, CA USA)
1 out of 6 found this review helpful
This is a somewhat jaundiced set of comments on the book. I am not sure how you should take them. I apologize.
I wish scientists would stick to what they know. There are great biologists and physicists out there who indeed have something to say about their physics and biology that the world needs to hear. Some of them are also talented writers, but they often delve into realms of society about which they are quite naïve and so the generalizations that they take from their science and turn into lessons for humans fall short. This book fit this category. I tend to fall into the same trap in my own writing, but I have found it is necessary to be both tentative and carefully define the circumstances under which one's generalization might apply.
Frans de Waal is a great biologist. I have my reservations about what can be told about nature from the behavior of captive animals and yet de Waals is as good as they come in describing the behavior of his apes and designing experiments to tease out aspects of behavior. Yes there is empathy in nature. Yes, psychology and evolution have focused on the negative. No, positive psychology and altruism are not new subjects despite how much scientists who are disciples of the Dalai Lama claim that they have started a revolution against those negative people who studied pathology and competition. I do not think de Waals is a disciple (though the Dalai Lama is some kind of pseudo faculty member and is idolized at Emory University where de Waal's Yerkes Lab resides), nonetheless he writes within the aura of the this movement.
Paragraphs like, "What we need is a complete overhaul of assumptions about human nature. Too many economists and politicians model human society on the perpetual struggle they believe exists in nature, but which is a mere projection [of their ideological prejudices].---Humans can't live by competition alone (p. 7)," really set me on edge. "We live in an age that celebrates the cerebral and looks down upon emotions as mushy and messy." Where have you been Frans? Certainly not in any working class bar with their sentimental drunks, or new age retreat, or welfare clinic, or movie theatre or AA meeting, or even watching daytime TV serials. Yes there is sharing in nature (at least among kin) but humans are not too different from brutes. Our minds just make things messier and less clear cut, and as Darwin pointed out a hundred or more years ago it all derives from our animal ancestors. Yes you are right empathetic behavior is rooted in caring for young but then that is pretty obvious despite the fact that I don't often come across the assertion in much of the natural history that I read. There are lots of different kinds of families in nature and we would expect that they would be sources of different kinds of shared understanding both while the family is together and after it breaks up.
A second sociological generalization with supposed natural roots de Waal's derives from some survey that purports that after 9/11 New Yorkers said they viewed race relations as generally good. (I assume that they would not have said it before 9/11 but he supplies no evidence.) He compares this to flocking behavior of fish and birds when threatened, i.e. in the presence of threat the various species stick together for safety. But how about in concentrations camps (lots of threat) which illicit all kinds selfishness or the streets of Port-au-Prince after the recent earthquake where a headline now reads, "Drunk looters, desperate survivors." de Waal accuses the people who think competition is human beings natural inheritance of being clichéd but he just does the same for the opposite conclusion. Or in criticizing people who characterize humans as intrinsically warlike he posits that hunter-gatherers were mostly peaceable only engaging in brief interludes of violence. This is a silly argument because our ancestors did both and you can't really tease out how much of which and when. The archeological evidence isn't there and modern hunter-gathers demonstrate both. It is the subject of intense anthropological debate which is hardly conclusive. Elizabeth Marshall finds the !kung peaceable but others say she is romanticizing, and Napoleon Chagnon finds that the Yaomamo love their children but are violent, and he is the center of much controversy.
Another sentence which is doubtful: "Social Darwinism sought to supply a scientific endorsement craved by a nation of immigrants who had quite naturally developed a strong sense of self-reliance and individualism. (p.29)" What to say: the Quakers, Mennonites, The Grange, Hull House, the union movement, even Teddy, the Rough Rider, was anti-monopoly and set up National Parks using the military to keep out rugged individualistic loggers and miners. History is not so simple. Liberal Woodrow Wilson smashed the Socialists.
But I really like de Waal's many examples of animal behavior. A book of that without his social generalizing would be more than welcome. I wouldn't get so irritated and then not be able to tease out the natural history from the often historically or psychologically inaccurate sociobiology. But de Waal wants biology to inform government and society and he thinks his version of biology is better than the Social Darwinists (and of course the Nazi's or Stalinist dialecticians and Lysenko-ites). Cooperation and empathy are cuddly. In the far north I once saw two juvenile black bear siblings hugging and dancing. So beautiful. A male bear eating cubs to bring the mother back into heat isn't.
Many animals are indeed intertwined with each other in ways that analogously express themselves non-cognitively and automatically among humans. Smiles, fear, yawns, emotive expressions happen and its is difficult to control them. Being a good naturalist De Waal doesn't much emphasize mirror neurons, the darling of the positive folk. He sees natural selection as favoring empathy among female nurturers. "Seeing another's emotions arouses our own emotion, and from there we go on constructing a more advanced understanding of the other's situation. Bodily connections come first--understanding follows." Yes! Empathy can be inhibited and is often limited to in-groups. And there is the emotion first theory but without faces it is hard to share.
Well that is as far as I got before the book was way overdue at the library. If I can overcome my objections to his social generalizations I may try to read the rest. If I had the discipline I would abstract his interesting observations about animals and see what they amounted to without his effort to influence society by means of them.
Charlie Fisher author of Dismantling Discontent: Buddha's Way Through Darwin's World
An Overdue Corrective December 31, 2009
Ruben Kleiman
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I full-heartedly recommend this passionate, entertaining, informative, and overdue corrective to a common interpretation of the Darwinian "struggle" of the species. I will simplify by saying that Mr. de Waal makes it clear that human behavior, considered in the geological time scale, is different only in degree from that of other species; particularly mammals, and more so primates--his specialization. More specifically, humans are not alone: as he notes, we are not limited to looking through telescopes for interesting life elsewhere in the universe.
The book is well-written. Yet the absence of footnotes makes the abundant bibliography less useful and the line of argument to sometimes appear looser than it might have been. I would have liked it if Mr. de Waal's apparent diplomacy had not prevented a more direct treatment of his discussions with Richard Dawkins viz. the "selfish" gene. The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society
Whoosh-BOOM!! December 30, 2009
M. Jones (Greenville, SC USA)
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
Don't worry your naturally empathic self about the loud noise you may have heard coming from my ankles. It's the happy sound of my socks being knocked off by The Age of Empathy. Enjoy this one!
Being called an "animal" isn't always an insult December 20, 2009
Sacramento Book Review (Sacramento, CA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
There has been a spike in popular books on human evolution, all trying to describe, from a natural selection perspective, the whys of human development, behavior, etc. Despite the ignorance of the public on the issue of evolution the theory has been adopted, and adapted, by elites of every strip. Sadly, the only part of the theory that has been grasped is the "red in tooth and claw" variety of natural selection, forgetting that natural selection can also select for empathetic and sympathetic traits. //The Age of Empathy// is Frans De Waal's attempt to correct this imbalance. De Waal's studies apes and monkeys, specifically, how emotionally "developed" they are, what "human" emotions they have, and how such things as empathy could evolve in a species. De Waal goes out of his way to show how human emotion is a bottom-up process and that our advanced ethical reasoning is built up from structures and behaviors that we use that are found throughout the animal kingdom. Frans clearly and lucidly show all the ways animals, and humans, are inheritors of a peaceful and cooperative genetic legacy that is the polar opposite of the "dog eat dog" mentality that misconceptions of human evolutionary biology have helped create in our culture.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 19
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