De Waal's Posthumous Book Argues Animals Have Inner Lives — SkimNews
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- Frans de Waal's posthumous book "Minds I've Met" (Granta in the UK; W. W. Norton in the US) blends memoir and science, tracing the primatologist's career alongside the field's shift toward recognizing animal emotions and cognition.
- De Waal died in 2024 before completing the manuscript; his wife Catherine Marin, psychologists Stephanie Preston and Sarah Brosnan, and anthropologist Peter Verbeek wrote the final two chapters and epilogue using his notes and audio files.
- The book documents behaviorist research practices, including keeping lab apes below 80% of their normal weight to drive performance — prompting B.F. Skinner to complain about "tender-hearted colleagues" who frustrated efforts to "reduce chimpanzees to a satisfactory state of deprivation."
- De Waal recounts being told to replace "ape laughter" with the term "vocalized panting" because the original phrase was deemed anthropomorphic — part of what he called an "arcane, castrated vocabulary for animal behaviour."
- Earlier de Waal works cited as foundation stones — "Chimpanzee Politics" (1982) and "Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape" — established now-mainstream ideas that animals engage in social maneuvering and that bonobos resolve conflict through sex rather than violence in female-dominated societies.
- Reviewer Michael Marshall calls the book's final chapter "scattered and unsatisfying" for rushing through animal culture, fairness and delayed gratification, while describing the rest as "readable, often funny, illuminating, occasionally shocking."
Why it matters: Completed by four collaborators from de Waal's notes, the book is structurally uneven but preserves his central argument that 20th-century behaviorism systematically denied animals rich inner lives — a position that cost de Waal credibility early in his career but now underpins mainstream animal cognition research. For readers, it doubles as a career retrospective and an accessible primer on the ethical stakes of treating animals as stimulus-response machines.
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