PDF Mama Last Hug Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves Audible Audio Edition Frans de Waal L J Ganser Recorded Books Books
Download As PDF : Mama Last Hug Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves Audible Audio Edition Frans de Waal L J Ganser Recorded Books Books
New York Times best-selling author and primatologist Frans de Waal explores the fascinating world of animal and human emotions.Â
Mama's Last Hug opens with the dramatic farewell between Mama, a dying 59-year-old chimpanzee matriarch, and biologist Jan Van Hooff. This heartfelt final meeting of two longtime friends, widely shared as a video, offers a window into how deep and instantly recognizable these bonds can be.Â
So begins Frans de Waal's whirlwind tour of new ideas and findings about animal emotions, based on his renowned studies of the social and emotional lives of chimpanzees, bonobos, and other primates. De Waal discusses facial expressions, animal sentience and consciousness, Mama's life and death, the emotional side of human politics, and the illusion of free will. He distinguishes between emotions and feelings, all the while emphasizing the continuity between our species and other species. And he makes the radical proposal that emotions are like organs We don't have a single organ that other animals don't have, and the same is true for our emotions.Â
PDF Mama Last Hug Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves Audible Audio Edition Frans de Waal L J Ganser Recorded Books Books
"Frans de Wall has outdone himself with this impossible to put down book on the similarities between ourselves and the Great Apes. heartwarming, a book i'll re-read just for the emotional warmth it brings."
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Mama Last Hug Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves Audible Audio Edition Frans de Waal L J Ganser Recorded Books Books Reviews :
Mama Last Hug Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves Audible Audio Edition Frans de Waal L J Ganser Recorded Books Books Reviews
- We humans like to think we are something special, that we have qualities no other animal possesses. Many people believe that our emotions are among the things that make us human. Primatologist Frans De Waal used to go along with this prevailing belief, but he has spent many years studying our closest relatives, and he says “More and more I believe that all the emotions we are familiar with can be found one way or another in all mammals, and that the variation is only in the details, elaborations, applications, and intensity.†In Mama’s Last Hug he makes his case for this position, and the result is both fascinating and convincing.
De Waal says that modern emotion research puts too much stress on language, and that is part of the problem. We humans don’t use language to recognize and respond to emotions of other humans in our daily lives; we observe; and DeWaal uses observation as his scientific tool to argue engagingly, but also convincingly, in favor of a rich emotional life for animals other than humans.
He won me over in Chapter 1 with a description of a moving reunion between Mama, a 59-year-old chimpanzee who was on her deathbed, and 80-year-old Jan van Hooff, who had been De Waal’s dissertation advisor and who had worked with Mama for many years. If you are skeptical of De Waal’s description, the reunion video is available on YouTube, and to me there is no doubt about Mama’s genuine joy at seeing her old friend.
If DeWaal’s wonderful anecdotes do not convince you, consider his credentials. How often do you read a book by an IgNobel Prize winner? For those of you not familiar with the Ig Nobel prizes, they have been awarded annually since 1991 (on the Harvard campus but not by Harvard) to "honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think." The paper that won the Ig Nobel for De Waal was called “Faces and Behindsâ€, and it was a study in which his team learned that apes have a “whole-body†image of familiar individuals and could even pick out individuals they knew from pictures of that ape’s derriere. My first reaction, of course, was to laugh, but then I had to recognize that this was clever work that tells me something rather impressive about apes.
I had more laughs, some more sad moments, and a lot of thoughtful moments throughout the book. Do read it; I am confident that you will come away with a greater feeling of kinship with all the creatures, great and small. - Frans de Waal has always offered insightful looks at animals and this most recent book is no exception. Some of this will be familiar to those who have read de Waal’s other books, but there is new information and insights here, as well.
Here’s a look at the contents, including the subheadings within chapters, to give a better idea of just what this book covers
Prologue
1 Mama’s Last Hug An Ape Matriarch’s Farewell – recognizing ourselves; Mama’s central role; alpha female; finality and grief
2 Window to the Soul When Primates Laugh and Smile – express yourself; from ear to ear; That was funny!; blended emotions
3 Body To Body Empathy and Sympathy – wisdom of ages; monkey see, monkey do; kissing the sore spot; the good and the bad; rat sympathy
4 Emotions that Make Us Human Disgust, Shame, Guilt, and Other Discomforts – a thirsty horse; an eye for an eye; pride and prejudice; guilty as a dog; the yuck! factor; emotions are like organs
5 Will To Power Politics, Murder, Warfare – like an alpha male; political tantrums; murder; drums of war; female power
6 Emotional Intelligence On Fairness and Free Will – celebrating the cerebral; cucumber and grape monkeys; the ultimatum game; free will and b.s.; stand by me
7 Sentience What Animals Feel – meat and sentience; Chrysippus’s dog; evolution minus miracles; no fish no cry; transparency
Conclusion
A very worthwhile read, but that’s JustMe. - From his 1982 Chimpanzee Politics on, animal ethologist de Waal has explored and commented on the parallels in human and animal (primarily simian) behavior. This book is only the latest –the twelfth- in a long going dialogue, the last of which was 2016’s Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? This book is thus about similarities between humans and animals, and the similarities are apparent and profuse. As De Waal notes repeatedly in this book, why should we be surprised that Nature repeats itself? It is simpler to build modifications on a common platform and in most respects, there is little difference structurally or functionally between ape and human. But the book is also about emotions and the role they play in intelligence. If you have read the work of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (whom De Waal cites), it won’t come as a surprise that emotions play a vital role in our decision making process. Block emotions and you can no longer decide anything. Emotions and intellect are a package in humans, not separated entities. And De Waal makes it clear that animals, not just humans, feel these motions. A good part of this book is an attack on the science-based bias that body is inferior to mind, and then, that animals are somehow distinct from humans in our essential functions-- they don’t feel the emotions we do and thus we cannot apply to them labels like affection, grief, shame, guilt and envy.(De Waal has interesting comments on the significance of deny in social animals.) For De Waal, it is fairly simple humans, simians, all the way down through colony fish, benefit more in the long run from cooperation than from out and our war, and thus we all have developed –evolved- ways to moderate our behavior in groups, and emotions are a key part of this they give us advance but flexible signals (unlike rigid Skinnerian responses) to guide our choices in potentially fraught situations.
As always, De Waal draws on hard and observational science both, and draws acute and sensible from what he observes. - This book is a true page turner and it is both fascinating and informative reading that re-connects us with the animal inside of ourselves. For the science junkies out there, this book is a must!
- Frans de Wall has outdone himself with this impossible to put down book on the similarities between ourselves and the Great Apes. heartwarming, a book i'll re-read just for the emotional warmth it brings.
