Friday lecture connects human behavior to primates

Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal's lecture filled nearly every seat in the Indiana Memorial Union's Whittenberger Auditorium Friday afternoon.\nHis lecture, "Our Inner Ape", presented a variety of primate studies to illustrate how the behavior of primates can be connected to human behavior. He said he was impressed with interest shown on campus.\n"I'm very pleased to be here, in a place where animal behavior is so well-studied," de Waal said.\nHis findings applied to several educational fields. For example, de Waal's said his study of chimpanzees was culturally important because it noted regional differences among the species. And his international studies of reconciliation after fighting among schoolchildren provided educational insight. Reconciliation was highest in Japan, where teachers interfered with fights the least. The opposite was true of the United States.\n"I think he's done work in the neurological and biological sciences that have really important implications in social science fields," said political science graduate student Derek Reiners, who attended the lecture. De Waal said his inequality aversion studies of capuchin monkeys and chimpanzees were used by economists. Both species went on strike when their work was not rewarded equally, which goes against the commonly accepted economic principle of rational optimization. The principle states humans will work for rewards.\nHe showed the importance of body language among chimpanzees through swaggering and said human politics were equally physical. De Waal showed pictures of a South Korean man hurling a podium at a political event, and the distances British politicians were required to sit apart from each other to show this.\n"It informed some of the things I do as a political science graduate student," said Brent Hierman, who attended the lecture.\nThe lecture was not without its share of humor, however. De Waal used a picture of President Bush flanked by his father and Dick Cheney to illustrate the tendencies of humans and chimpanzees to form power coalitions, specifically when disempowered older males latch onto stronger, younger males. \nThe lecture took a philosophical standpoint when he said moral behavior was not exclusively human.\nTo debunk this theory, he used examples of primates helping each other at no personal benefit.\nDe Waal's study of matriarchal bonobos -- a type of ape -- that found they use food and sex to relieve tension, gain political power and barter has proved important to nonscientists.\n"You can see why bonobos became popular with the feminist community, the gay community," he said. \nRieners said de Waal's studies were thought-provoking.\n"It makes us question what it is to be human," he said.