Will I love Chimpanzee Politics?

If you want to understand the seemingly infinite complexity of our closest relatives, as well as get a glimpse of the deep evolutionary roots of politics, this is the book to read.

I felt transported into a world of political maneuvering and machinations that was eerily like our own and yet wonderfully different from it.

This is a highly readable and fun book published back in 1982 by one of the leading primatologists of our era. A close student of ape behavior, Frans de Waal shows how smart apes are and what we can learn about ourselves by studying their behavior. He demonstrates that, contrary to common belief, it is not by physical strength alone that an alpha ape hangs onto its power at the top of the social pyramid. More important than their muscles is their ability to form coalitions with others.  

If your mental image of an alpha ape is… show more.

Ever wonder why so many people are just so unpleasant? It’s because we are apes. As such, mendacity, deception, trickery, and a thirst for power are simply part of what we are. That’s how we got to be so (allegedly) smart. Frans de Waal has written many excellent books since this, his first – an observation and interpretation of the behavior of chimpanzees in the Arnhem Zoo in the Netherlands. However, as a young man, far from home, and taking my first steps in the often poisonous world of career and responsibility, the scales well and truly fell… show more.

This book started it all for me. I didn’t know about the social rivalry among animals, but when I read this, the world made sense. This long-term study of zoo chimps shows how hard our closest relatives work to raise their status in the troop. The reasons why they do it are explained in any textbook on Evolutionary Biology, but this book reads more like a soap opera. I also liked DeWaal’s next book, Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are. It compares chimps to bonobos, a recently discovered ape with different lifestyle choices.… show more.