Looks at a lot of the research, and some anecdotal evidence, on the nature versus urture or instinct versus culture debate. He was preaching to the choir in my case, so its hard to gauge how compelling his arguments would have been to a skeptic. I am quite sure that man is an animal and shares many of his experiences and ways of reacting to them with his primate cousins and even some more distant relatives ( )

Highly informative, insightful and enlightening to anyone interested in human nature. A very humbling yet thought provoking account of how much of this intangible matter – morals – we share with primates. You will also learn that a tremendously big part of our individual and collective behavior apparently started in apes. It robs us of our perceived uniqueness, but simultaneously enriches us with a widened realization of a bigger and more complex picture. And this is just a tiny sliver of many other wonderful revelations that are kept for your in store in this treasure trove of a book! A must read. ( )

Frans de Waal believes in the possibility that animals have culture. In the beginning of his book he spends some time talking about how we, as humans, apply human emotion to animals. He uses the example of Binti Jua, the ape at the Chicago zoo who "saved" and protected the little boy back in 1996. He couldn't comment on the incident at the Cincinnati zoo when Harambe was shot dead for fear of purposefully drowning a child. What would he have said about that? As an aside, I admit I am guilty of applying emotion to animal behavior. When my cat went missing I swore her "brother" missed her. Do I know that for fact? No. But, he did act strangely for the duration of her absence so I would like to think he did.
But, back to the point. Do animals have cultural instinct that they follow? Do they learn by copying others? Is habit passed down from one generation to another? This is what DE Waal sets out to discover. ( )

The title refers to the training of a sushi chef - sheer observation, imitation and practice in private time over an extended period and with no official instruction at all. And that too is how apes acquire culture from each other.

I don't want to go into whether or not animals have culture, observation of my cats has shown me that of course they do. I've watched how the younger cat learned from the older one how to open doors and cupboards and how to nudge the shower tap to get water, not to mention all the learning of particular foibles of 'their' humans so they can manipulate them (me mostly) into doing what they want.

When I was much younger and interested in animal behaviour but had no appreciation of politics I read, enjoyed and learned from [a:Konrad Lorenz|8674|Konrad Lorenz|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1208422955p2/8674.jpg], particularly [b:King Solomon's Ring|13965|King Solomon's Ring (Routledge Classics)|Konrad Lorenz|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166575276s/13965.jpg|3334566] and [b:Here Am I--Where Are You?: The Behavior of the Greylag Goose|958531|Here Am I--Where Are You? The Behavior of the Greylag Goose|Konrad Lorenz|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/310ITCzuHML._SL75_.jpg|943441]. I didn't know at the time that Lorenz believed that if two populations of animals that could interbreed but didn't usually because of geographic distance should find themselves in the same locality, the 'interlopers' should be exterminated as interbreeding would weaken the original population. I didn't know that this was Hitler's scientific justification for his policy of extermination of the Jews, a policy which Lorenz was fully behind.

To be a bit more specific, in 1938 Lorenz joined the Nazi party, writing on his application, "I'm able to say that my whole scientific work is devoted to the ideas of the National Socialists." This earned him a University chair. Later, when Germany had lost the war, he muddled and fuddled and changed his tune and eventually, in 1973, had been so rehabilitated he got the Nobel Prize. (Part of me thinks he absolutely, as the father of the modern discipline of ethology, deserved it. Part of me is disgusted...)

And that part of me was also disgusted with the author of [b:The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist|354349|The Ape and the Sushi Master Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist|Frans de Waal|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1174022831s/354349.jpg|344541] whose hero is Lorenz. He goes to endless, tortuous lengths to excuse him whilst having to admit that he was behind a lot of pseudo-scientific Nazi genocidal shit, but he manages never to once mention the word Jews.

So once I'd read that chapter the book was spoiled for me. The author's credibility had gone, I couldn't trust him to present an unbiased, scientific truth, how would I know if he twisted things to fit in with his own political axes?

I did plod on through, and it wasn't a bad book, but there are many others better and by authors whom I can fully respect. ( )

This is a very serious book that has been given the day-time-chat-show-host-recommendation treatment by the editors of my Penguin Books edition. You know something is wrong when they quote reviews on the front cover as well as on the back. However, there is nothing wrong with this book except that it will be a hard slog for anyone who was deceived by the cover into thinking it will be a folksy amble in the intellectual woods; the kind of place you go to pick fruit to put on your dinner table to impress your friends. Frans de Waal is a primate specialist (Bonobos) and he lays out a persuasive argument that the only way to approach animal behaviour is to see it on a continuum with human behaviour. Which is to admit that the higher primates (and some surprising others) can be expected to have society and culture as well. He makes a very good defence of anthropomorphism, and distinguishes between the bad version (when we are wrong about animal behaviour and motives) and the good version (where we have reasonable grounds to believe we are right). There are some excellent insights into the development of thinking in these fields, and the characers who have pushed the concept of animal culture along (and those who have resisted it). The section on Conrad Lorenz is unmissable, particularly de Waal's observation that despite everything he couldn't but love the man for his love of birds. The bottom line is that this is an expert in the field writing about primate studies, and I'd recommend it highly. ( )