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Do physicians or artificial intelligence (AI) offer better treatment recommendations for patients examined through a virtual urgent care setting? A new study shows physicians and AI models have distinct strengths. The study compared initial AI treatment recommendations to final recommendations of physicians who had access to the AI recommendations but may or may not have reviewed them.

The US anti-vaccine movement is now firmly embedded in the highest levels of government, where those overseeing public health agencies are making drastic cuts both wide and deep

It’s been years since I read any Ayn Rand, and her philosophy never fetched me. However, a reader called my attention to the article below on a Rand-ian site that dilates on the “KerFFRFLE”: what I call the fracas about the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s censorship of my critique of their fellow Kat Grant’s piece, “What is a woman?”. I won’t reprise all that; you can see the summary in the collection of posts here.

The  new article, which you can access by clicking on the screenshot below, comes from the New Ideal site, whose motto is “Reason/Individualism/Capitalism”. And it seems a site thoroughly devoted to osculating the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Its own summary:

At New Ideal, we explore pressing cultural issues from the perspective of Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism.

Here you will not find the categories that define today’s intellectual world. We are neither of the right nor the left, but we reject “the center.” We are atheists, but we are for reason, not merely against religion. We champion science, but also free will. We are staunch individualists, but also moralists—embracing a new kind of morality, in which selfishness is a virtue and none of us is bound to be our brother’s keeper. We don’t just oppose “big government,” we eagerly support the right kind of government—one limited to protecting individual rights.

Right off the bat I find a bug: “We champion science, but also free will.”  I disagree heartily with that, for libertarian free will is incompatible with what we know of science. But let’s move on.

Short take of the piece: the author, Ben Bayer, (a Fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute) agreed with my critique of the FFRF’s self-definition of sex, a critique that ultimately led to the FFRF’s censorship and my resignation from the organization, along with Steve Pinker and Richard Dawkins.  But Bayer also argues that scientists should be “proud” rather than “humble,” an approach that the person who sent me the article said was “very Ayn Randian.”  I presume some readers will tell me what that means, but it seems to comport with New Ideal’s dictum that selfishness is a virtue. I presume, then, that Bayer equates “pride” with “selfishness” and “humility” with “being a weenie.”

But read below:

As I said, Bayer sides with Pinker, Dawkins, and me on the sex binary, but does take issue with some of the statistics I cited (the stats were supposedly the reason the FFRF found my piece “harmful”).  An excerpt from Bayer:

While Coyne’s arguments about the biological sex binary sound plausible to me, as a non-biologist I’m not fully qualified to evaluate the debate. But I find little to no assistance from his critics. After deciding to unpublish Coyne’s piece, the FFRF offered no specific criticism apart from the claim that the piece did not align with the organization’s values.4 Subsequent defenders of the FFRF’s decision for the most part ignored Coyne’s arguments for the sex binary.5 (One tried to challenge the binary by sharing an article that admits that sex is a biological binary but which attacks its utility for failing to explain everything about the behavior of sexed individuals — a straw man if ever there was one.6)

Instead of offering an argument to show why Coyne is wrong on a matter of his expertise, his critics instead focused on his remarks at the end of the piece addressing Grant’s claim that “Transgender people are no more likely to be sexual predators than other individuals.” They’ve made sensible criticisms of Coyne’s use of statistics in claiming that trans women are more likely to be sex predators.7 (Notably, the study he cites draws on a very small sample size and probably classifies non-predatory behavior like consensual prostitution as a “sex offense.”) So far as I can tell, neither Coyne nor his defenders have responded to these criticisms. They should.

So I’ll respond first to the “statistics” argument. The site I used, and the only one to have any decent statistics, is from Fair Play for Women, and I summarized the data in my vanished FFRF piece this way:

Under the biological concept of sex, then, it is impossible for humans to change sex — to be truly “transsexual” — for mammals cannot change their means of producing gametes. A more appropriate term is “transgender,” or, for transwomen, “men who identify as women.”

But even here Grant misleads the reader. They argue, for example, that “Transgender people are no more likely to be sexual predators than other individuals.” Yet the facts support the opposite of this claim, at least for transgender women. A cross-comparison of statistics from the U.K. Ministry of Justice and the U.K. Census shows that while almost 20 percent of male prisoners and a maximum of 3 percent of female prisoners have committed sex offenses, at least 41 percent of trans-identifying prisoners were convicted of these crimes. Transgender [-identifying prisoners], then, appear to be twice as likely as natal males and at least 14 times as likely as natal females to be sex offenders. While these data are imperfect because they’re based only on those who are caught, or on some who declare their female gender only after conviction, they suggest that transgender women are far more sexually predatory than biological women and somewhat more predatory than biological men. There are suggestions of similar trends in Scotland, New Zealand, and Australia.

Note that I am emphasizing transgender women here, that is, biological men who identify as women. And my main conclusion is this: transgender women are far more sexually predatory than biological women.  That is to be expected simply because transgender women are men who retain some of the biological propensities of men as well as their strength, and thus are expected to commit sex offenses more often than do natal women. In this sense, at least, you can’t say “trans women are women”, for the data show the expected biological differences that result in imprisonment,

Yes, the statistics are based on a small sample size, and there are problems with them–problems that I noted. But I will say two things.

First, Kat Grant gives NO data, saying only that “Transgender people are no more likely to be sexual predators than other individuals. . . “.  Well, that’s not true, at least for transgender women compared to natal women, which was my point. Note that I was not saying that trans people are, in general, more likely to be sexual predators than cis people. My point was about trans women versus natal women. And that leads to my second point:

I predict that when more data are collected in the future, this pattern vis-à-vis women will hold up. While trans men (biological women) may not be sexual predators more often than are natal women, I will bet that, based on behavioral differences between the sexes, trans women will be more violent—and more guilty of sex crimes—than are natal women.

I hope that clarifies what I was trying to say. But of course we do need better statistics, for data on trans prisoners are hard to get.

However, the statistics were a small part of my argument, which was mainly about how self-identification is a lousy way to define sex (“a woman is whoever she says she is”, as Grant asserts), but also about how one defines sex has very little bearing on the rights of groups. As I said, “The first [point] is to insist that it is not ‘transphobic’ to accept the biological reality of binary sex and to reject concepts based on ideology.” Except in a very few cases, like where one goes to prison or in what sports group one competes, trans people should have all the rights and dignity as everyone else. It is simply dumb to accuse me of trying to “erase” them.

On to Bayer’s accusation that both atheists and those who share my views on biological sex affect an attitude of humility but really should be proud.  Bayer doesn’t define humility right off the bat, but eventually gives us a definition before showing us why we shouldn’t even emphasize “humility” as a scientific virtue:

. . .  “humility,” which in an ordinary definition means “a modest or low view of one’s own importance.” No one who appreciates the power of scientific reason to discover progressively more truth can see it as modest or lowly.

On this basis Bayer excoriates atheists and scientists for affecting an attitude of humility, when in reality we are evincing fierce pride. Thus we should simply drop the “humility” bit:

In recent years, atheists including Dawkins and Pinker have followed a trend in the broader rationalist community of paying homage to the value of intellectual or epistemic humility. Dawkins claims that science by its nature is “humble” insofar as it doesn’t pretend to know everything.  Just a few years back, the house journal of one of Dawkins’s allied organizations, Skeptical Inquirer, published a piece calling on the skeptical movement to embrace the value of humility as its “guiding credo,” as against a consistent “take-no-prisoners” approach that invites the charge of arrogance or elitism.

Yet when atheists fight back against transgender ideology, they are clearly not practicing anything like the now-fashionable intellectual humility. Not only are they asserting with strident certainty the biological reality of the sex binary, they’re doing so knowing that other very intelligent atheists disagree with them. They’re also intransigent about this biological reality even though they know a whole subpopulation of vulnerable people find their assertion not only offensive but threatening to their identities.

That’s not an exercise in humility, but in pride. It’s precisely this pride that Coyne’s critics are condemning; it’s precisely humility that they’re demanding.

Unfortunately, any atheists who otherwise advocate epistemic humility but take the strident approach against transgender ideology are, frankly, hypocrites. Fortunately, there’s a rational way to escape this contradiction and reclaim the moral high ground: they should give up the humility fad.

But when scientists say they are being “humble,” they do not mean “being modest or lowly”.  No, what we mean is that we should never assert that we have the absolute truth about the universe. All scientific “facts” and “knowledge” are tentative, subject to revision in light of new observation.  Now some observations (e.g., the Earth goes around the Sun and a molecule of regular water has two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atoms) are about as certain as you can get, and I’d bet all my possessions on their objective truth. But certainty has been overturned so often in science that the proper attitude is to adhere to this well-known and eloquent passage written by Stephen Jay Gould in 1994 (my bolding)

Moreover, “fact” does not mean “absolute certainty.” The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science, “fact” can only mean “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.” I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

THAT attitude is what we mean by “humility”: the idea that one considers something “true’ when it’s supported by so much evidence that you’d be crazy to withhold assent. But even Gould would agree that we never have 100% certainty about anything.

I guess there’s an Ayn-Rand-ian reason for what Bayer does next, which is to argue that having pride in adhering to science and being rational helps us form a set of objective moral values:

The following proposal itself has to be weighed carefully against the balance of the evidence. Recognizing that the very practice of science involves commitment to these real virtues reveals not just a guideline for scientific practice, but the possibility of a rational code of morality. The rational commitment to truth is not just the source of our knowledge, it also helps to create the values that help us survive. Respecting the power of truth to give life means respecting the needs of the minds that pursue it, both one’s own needs and those of others. Though it goes far beyond the scope of this article, there’s an argument here that unlocks a code of moral virtues and values we need to live on earth.

Atheists need to do the work to defend a rational moral code now more than ever. It was a major scandal for the atheist movement that its long-celebrated heroine Ayaan Hirsi Ali converted to Christianity. In her statement explaining her conversion, she argued that the West needs guidance to fight off the triple threats of resurgent authoritarianism, Islamist militancy, and “woke” ideology. “Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?” She argued that only religion can offer such guidance. Someone needs to show anyone who sympathizes with her concern that the values of the Western Enlightenment can form the basis of a powerful moral code — and that religion, by contrast, is at the root of the irrational rivals of the West.

To do that, atheists need the courage of their convictions. The latest row over transgender ideology dramatizes this for all to see. When religious-style dogmatism infiltrates atheism itself, it’s a sign of religion’s pervasive influence on our culture, and thus of the need for the courage to challenge widespread conventional assumptions like the alleged virtue of humility.

But atheists have defended a “rational moral code”: the code of humanism.  Such codes have been set forth by atheists for centuries, including by people like Spinoza, Rawls, Kant, Singer, Mill and Grayling.  The specifics of how one derives morality differ (Rawls, for instance, offered a “veil of ignorance”, Kant offered deontology, and Singer and Mill were utilitarians). And I assert that, in the end, however you derive a moral code, in the end it is subjective, leading to a structure of society that you prefer but cannot justify as “the right structure.”

So what is the sweating Professor Bayer trying to say?  I guess I could review Ayn Rand’s philosophy, but I don’t have the stomach for it.

Yes – it is well-documented that in many industries the design of products incorporates a plan for when the product will need to be replaced. A blatant example was in 1924 when an international meeting of lightbulb manufacturers decided to limit the lifespan of lightbulbs to 1,000 hours, so that consumers would have to constantly replace them. This artificial limitation did not end until CFLs and then LED lightbulbs largely replaced incandescent bulbs.

But – it’s more complicated than you might think (it always is). Planned obsolescence is not always about gimping products so they break faster. It often is – products are made so they are difficult to repair or upgrade and arbitrary fashions change specifically to create demand for new versions. But often there is a rational decision to limit product quality. Some products, like kid’s clothes, have a short use timeline, so consumers prefer cheap to durable. There is also a very good (for the consumer) example of true obsolescence – sometimes the technology simply advances, offering better products. Durability is not the only nor the primary attribute determining the quality of a product, and it makes no sense to build in expensive durability for a product that consumers will want to replace. So there is a complex dynamic among various product features, with durability being only one feature.

We can also ask the question, for any product or class of products, is durability actually decreasing over time? Consumers are now on the alert for planned obsolescence, and this may produce the confirmation bias of seeing it everywhere, even when it’s not true. A recent study looking at big-ticket appliances shows how complex this question can be. This is a Norwegian study looking at the lifespan of large appliances over decades, starting in the 1950s.

First, they found that for most large appliances, there was no decrease in lifespan over this time period. So the phenomenon simply did not exist for the items that homeowning consumers care the most about, their expensive appliances. There were two exceptions, however – ovens and washing machines. Each has its own explanations.

For washing machines, the researchers found another plausible explanation for the decrease in lifespan from 19.2 to 10. 6 years (a decrease of 45%). The researchers found that over the same time, the average number of loads a household of four did increased from 2 per week in 1960 to 8 per week by 2000. So if you count lifespan not in years but in number of loads, washing machines had become more durable over this time. I suspect that washing habits were formed in the years when many people did not have washing machines, and doing laundry was brutal work. Once the convenience of doing laundry in the modern era settled in (and perhaps also once it became more than woman’s work), people did laundry more often. How many times do you wear an article of clothing before you wash it? Lots of variables there, but at some point it’s a judgement call, and this likely also changed culturally over time.

For ovens there appears to be a few answers. One is that ovens have become more complex over the decades. For many technologies there is a trade-off between simple but durable, and complex but fragile. Again – there is a tradeoff, not a simple decision to gimp a product to exploit consumers. But there are two other factors the researchers found. Over this time the design of homes have also changed. Kitchens are increasingly connected to living spaces with a more open design. In the past kitchens were closed off and hidden away. Now they are where people live and entertain. This means that the fashion of kitchen appliances are more important. People might buy new appliances to make their kitchen look more modern, rather than because the old ones are broken.

If this were true, however, then we would expect the lifespan of all large kitchen appliances to converge. As people renovate their kitchens, they are likely to buy all new appliances that match and have an updated look. This is exactly what the researchers found – the lifespan of large kitchen appliances have tended to converge over the years.

They did not find evidence that the manufacturers of large appliances were deliberately reducing the durability of their products to force consumers to replace them at regular intervals. But this is the narrative that most people have.

There is also a bigger issue of waste and the environment. Even when the tradeoffs for the consumer favor cheaper, more stylish and fashionable, or more complex products with lower durability, is this a good thing for the world? Landfilled are overflowing with discarded consumer products. This is a valid point, and should be considered in the calculus when making purchasing decisions and also for regulation.  Designing products to be recyclable, repairable, and replaceable is also an important consideration. I generally replace my smartphone when the battery life gets too short, because the battery is not replaceable. (This is another discussion unto itself.)

But replacing old technology with new is not always bad for the environment. Newer dishwashers, for example, are much more energy and water efficient than older ones. Refrigerators are notorious energy hogs, and newer models are substantially more energy efficient than older models. This is another rabbit hole, exactly when do you replace rather than repair an old appliance, but generally if a newer model is significantly more efficient, replacing may be best for the environment. Refrigerators, for example, probably should be upgraded every 10 years with newer and more efficient models – so then why build them to last 20 or more?

I like this new research and this story primarily because it’s a good reminder that everything is more complex than you think, and not to fall for simplistic narratives.

The post Is Planned Obsolescence Real first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Any advanced civilisation needs power. Don’t know about you but I’ve been camping lots, even wild camping but the experience is a whole lot easier if you have power! It’s the same for a long-term presence on the Moon (not that I’m likening my camping to a trip to the Moon!) but instead of launching a bunch of solar panels, a new paper suggests we can get power from the lunar regolith! Researchers suggest that the fine dusty material on the surface of the Moon could be melted to provide a type of crystals that can produce solar electricity! This would allow solar panels to be built on the Moon with only 1% of components sent from Earth!

"Just where is that extensive 5000 word longform apology from Adam Cifu over at Sensible Medicine, begging forgiveness for legitimizing Robert F. Kennedy, Jr?"

The post Doctors Who Fluffed RFK Jr.: Here’s What You Own So Far first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

A research team is developing a 3D-printed skin imitation equipped with living cells in order to test nanoparticles from cosmetics without animal testing.

Engineers have created new technology that can move cells without touching them, enabling critical tasks that currently require large pieces of lab equipment to be carried out on a benchtop device.

Physicists have made a novel discovery regarding the interaction of electronic excitations via spin waves. The finding could open the door to future technologies and advanced applications such as optical modulators, all-optical logic gates, and quantum transducers.

Physicists have made a novel discovery regarding the interaction of electronic excitations via spin waves. The finding could open the door to future technologies and advanced applications such as optical modulators, all-optical logic gates, and quantum transducers.

Frans de Waal was one of the world’s leading primatologists. He has been named one of TIME magazine’s 100 Most Influential People. The author of Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, as well as many other works, he was the C.H. Candler Professor in Emory University’s Psychology Department and director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center.

Skeptic: How can we know what another mind is thinking or feeling?

Frans de Waal: My work is on animals that cannot talk, which is both a disadvantage and advantage. It’s a disadvantage because I cannot ask them how they feel and what their experiences are, but it is an advantage because I think humans lie a lot. I don’t trust humans. I’m a biologist but I work in a psychology department, and all my colleagues are psychologists. Most psychologists nowadays use questionnaires, and they trust what people tell them, but I don’t. So, I’d much rather work with animals where instead of asking how often they have sex, I just count how often. That’s more reliable.

I cannot ask them how they feel and what their experiences are, but it is an advantage because I think humans lie a lot. I don’t trust humans.

That said, I distinguish between emotions and feelings because you cannot know the feelings of any animals. But I can deduce them, guess at them. Personally, I feel it’s very similar with humans. Humans can tell me their feelings, but even if you tell me that you are sad, I don’t know if that’s the same sadness that I would feel under the same circumstances, so I can only guess what you feel. You might even be experiencing mixed feelings, or there may be feelings you’re not even aware of, and so you’re not able to communicate them. We have the same problem in non-human species as we do in humans, because feelings are less accessible and require guesswork.

That said, sometimes I’m perfectly comfortable guessing at the feelings of animals, even though you must distinguish them from the things you can measure. I can measure facial expressions. I can measure blood pressure. I can measure their behavior, but I can never really measure what they feel. But then, psychologists can’t do that with people either.

Skeptic: Suppose I’m feeling sad and I’m crying at some sort of loss. And then I see you’ve experienced a loss and that you’re crying … Isn’t it reasonable to infer that you feel sad?

FdW: Yes. And so that same principle of being reasonable can be applied to other species. And the closer that species is to you, the easier it is. Chimpanzees and bonobos cry and laugh. They have facial expressions— the same sort of expressions we do. So it’s fairly easy to infer the feelings behind those expressions and infer they may be very similar to our own. If you move to, say, an elephant, which is still a mammal, or to a fish, which is not, it becomes successively more difficult. Fish don’t even have facial expressions. That doesn’t mean that fish don’t feel anything. It would be a very biased view to assume that an animal needs to show facial expressions as evidence that it feels something.

At the same time, research on humans has argued that we have six basic emotions based on the observation that we have six basic facial expressions. So, there the tie between emotions and expressions has been made very explicit.

In my work, I tend to focus on the expressive behavior. But behind it, of course, there must be similar feelings. At least that’s what Darwin thought.

Chimpanzees and bonobos cry and laugh. They have facial expressions—the same sort of expressions we do.

Skeptic: That’s not widely known, is it? Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872, but it took almost a century before the taboo against it started to lift.

FdW: It’s the only book of Darwin’s that disappeared from view for a century. All the other books were celebrated, but that book was placed under some sort of taboo. Partly because of the influence of the behaviorist school of B.F. Skinner, Richard Herrnstein, and others, it was considered silly to think that animals would have the same sort of emotions as we do.

Biologists, including my own biology professors, however, found a way out. They didn’t need to talk about emotions because they would talk about the function of behavior. For example, they would not say “the animal is afraid” but rather that “the animal escapes from danger.” They phrased everything in functional terms—a semantic trick that researchers still often use.

If you were to say that two animals “love each other” or that “they’re very attached to each other,” you’re likely to receive significant criticism, if not ridicule. So why even describe it that way? Instead, you objectively report that the animals bonded and they benefited from doing so. Phrasing it functionally has, well, functioned as a sort of preferred safe procedure. But I have decided not to employ it anymore.

Skeptic: In most of your books you talk about the social and political context of science. Why do you think the conversation about animal emotions was held back for almost a century?

FdW: World War II had an effect on the study of aggression, which became a very popular topic in the 1960s and 70s. Then we got the era of “the selfish gene” and so on. In fact, the silencing of the study of mental processes and emotions in animals started before the war. It actually started in the 1920s and 30s. And I think it’s because scientists such as Skinner wanted the behavioral sciences to be like the physical sciences. They operated under the belief that it provided a certain protection against criticism to get away from anything that could be seen as speculation. And there was a lot of speculation going on in the so-called “depth psychologies,” some of it rather wild.

However, there are a lot of invisible things in science that we assume to be true, for example, evolutionary theory. Evolution is not necessarily visible, at least most of the time it isn’t, yet still, we believe very strongly that evolution happened. Continental drift is unobservable, but we now accept that it happened. The same principle can be applied to animal feelings and animal consciousness. You assume it as a sort of theory and see if things fit. And, research has demonstrated that things fit quite well.

Skeptic: Taking a different angle, can Artificial Intelligence (AI) experience emotions? Was IBM’s Watson “thrilled” when it beat Ken Jennings, the all-time champion of Jeopardy!? Well, of course not. So what do you think about programming such internal states into an artificial intelligence?

FdW: I think researchers developing AI models are interested in affective programs because of the way we biologists look at emotions. Emotions trigger actions that are adaptive. Fear is an adaptive emotion because it may trigger certain behaviors such as hiding, escaping, etc., so we look at emotions as being the stimulus that elicits certain specific types of behavior. Emotions organize behavior, and I think that’s what the AI people are interested in. Emotions are actually a very smart system, compared to instincts. Someone might argue that instincts also trigger behavior. However, while instincts are inflexible, emotions are different.

Let’s say you are afraid of something. The emotion of fear doesn’t trigger your behavior. An emotion just prepares the body for certain behaviors, but you still need to make a decision. Do I want to escape? Do I want to fight? Do I want to hide? What is the best behavior under these circumstances? And so, your emotion triggers the need for a response, and then your cognition takes over and searches for the best solution. It’s a very, very nice system and creators of AI models are interested in such an organizational system of behavior. I’m not sure they will ever construct the feelings behind the emotions—it’s not an easy thing to do—but certainly organizing behavior according to emotions is possible.

Skeptic: Are emotions created from the bottom-up? How do you scale from something very simple up to much higher levels of complexity?

FdW: Humans have a complex emotional system—we mix a lot of emotions, sort them, regulate them. Well, sometimes we don’t actually regulate them and that is something that really interests me in my work with animals. What kind of regulation do they have over their emotions? People often say that we have emotions and we can suppress them, whereas animals have emotions that they have to follow. However, experiments have demonstrated that’s not really the case. For example, we give apes the marshmallow test. Briefly, that’s where you put a child in a situation in which he or she can either eat a marshmallow immediately, or wait and get a second one later. Well, kids are willing to wait for 15 minutes. If you do that same experiment with apes, they’re also willing to wait for 15 minutes. So they can control their emotions. And like children, apes seek distractions from the situation because they’re aware that they’re dealing with certain specific emotions. Therefore, we know that apes have a certain awareness of their emotions, and they have a certain level of control over them. This whole idea that regulation of emotions is specifically human, while animals can only follow them, is wrong.

The emotional farewell between the chimpanzee Mama and her caretaker, Jan van Hooff (Source)

That’s actually the reason I wrote Mama’s Last Hug. The starting point of the book was when Prof. Jan Van Hoff came on TV and showed a little clip that everyone has seen by now, where he and a chimpanzee called Mama hug each other. Both he and I were shocked when the clip went viral and generated such a response. Many people cried and wrote to us to say they were very influenced by what they saw. The truth is Mama was simply showing perfectly normal chimpanzee behavior. It was a very touching moment, obviously, but for those familiar with chimps, there was nothing surprising about the behavior. And so, I wrote this book partly because I noticed that people did not know how human-like the expressions of the apes are. Embracing, and hugging, and calming someone down, and having a big smile on your face are all common behaviors seen in primates and are not unique to humans.

Skeptic: Your famous experiment with capuchin monkeys, where you offer them a grape or a piece of cucumber, is along similar lines. When the monkey got the cucumber instead of the grape, he got really angry. He threw the cucumber back, then proceeded to pound on the table and the walls … He was clearly ticked off at the injustice he felt had been done him, just as a person would be.

A still from the famous capuchin monkey fairness experiment (Source: Frans de Waal’s TED Talk)

FdW: The funny thing is that primates, including those monkeys, have all the same expressions and behaviors as we do. And so, they shake their cage and throw the cucumber at you. The behavior is just so extremely similar, and the circumstances are so similar … I always say that if related species behave in a similar way under similar circumstances, you have to assume a shared psychology lies behind it. It is just not acceptable in this day and age of Darwinian philosophy, so to speak, to assume anything else. If people want to make the point that it’s maybe not similar, that maybe the monkey was actually very happy while he was throwing the stuff … they’ll have a lot of work to do to convince me of that.

Skeptic: What’s the date of the last common ancestor humans shared with chimps and bonobos?

FdW: It’s about 6 million years ago.

Skeptic: So, these are indeed pretty ancient emotions.

FdW: Oh, they go back much further than that! Like the bonding mechanism based on oxytocin—the neuropeptides in bonding go back to rodents, and probably even back to fish at some point. These neuropeptide circuits involved in attachment and bonding are very ancient. They’re even older than mammals themselves.

Skeptic: One emotion that seems very uniquely human is disgust. If a chimp or Bonobo comes across a pile of feces or vomit, what do they do?

FdW: When we do experiments and put interesting food on top of feces and see if the chimp is willing to take it, they don’t. They refuse to. The facial expression of the chimps is the same as we have for disgust—with the wrinkly nose and all that. Chimps also show it, for example, when it rains. They don’t like rain. And they show it, sometimes, in circumstances where they encounter a rat. So, some of these emotions have been proposed as being uniquely human, but I disagree. Disgust, I think, is a very old emotion.

If related species behave in a similar way under similar circumstances, you have to assume a shared psychology lies behind it.

Disgust is an interesting case because we know that both in chimps and humans a specific part of the brain called the insula is involved. If you stimulate the insula in a monkey who’s chewing on good fruit, he’ll spit it out. If you put humans in a brain scanner and show them piles of feces or things they don’t want to see, the insula is likewise activated. So here we have an emotion that is triggered under the same circumstances, that is shown in the face in the same way, and that is associated with the same specific area in the brain. So we have to assume it’s the same emotion across the board. That’s why I disagree with those scientists who have declared disgust uniquely human.

Skeptic: In one of your lectures, you show photos of a horse wrinkling up its nose and baring its teeth. Is that a smile or something else?

FdW: The baring of the teeth is very complex because in many primates it is a fearful signal shown when they’re afraid or when they’re intimidated by dominance and showing submission. So, we think it became a signal of appeasement and non-hostility. Basically saying, “I’m not hostile. Don’t expect any trouble from me.” And then over time, especially in apes and then in humans, it became more and more of a friendly signal. So it’s not necessarily a fear signal. Although we still say that if someone smiles too much, they’re probably nervous.

Skeptic: Is it true that you can determine whether someone’s giving you a fake smile or a real smile depending on whether the corners of their eyes are pulled down?

FdW: Yes, this is called the Duchenne smile. Duchenne was a 19th century French neurologist. He studied people who had facial paralysis, meaning they had the muscles, but they could not feel anything in their face. This allowed him to put electrodes on their faces and stimulate them. He methodically contracted different muscles and noticed he could produce a smile on his subjects. Yet he was never quite happy with the smile—it just didn’t look real. Then one day he told a subject a joke. A very good joke, I suppose, and all of a sudden, he got a real full-blown smile. That’s when Duchenne decided that there needs to be a contraction and a narrowing of the eyes for a smile to be a real smile. So, we now distinguish between the fake smile and the Duchenne smile.

Skeptic: So, smiling involves a whole complex suite of muscles. Is the number of muscles in the face of humans higher than other species?

FdW: Do we have far more muscles in the face than a chimpanzee? I’ve heard that all my life. Until people who analyze faces of chimpanzees found exactly the same number of muscles in there as in a human face. So that whole story doesn’t hold up. I think the confusion originated because when we look at the human face, we can interpret so many little details of it—and I think chimps do that with each other too—but when we look at a chimp, we only see the bold, more flamboyant expressions.

Skeptic: Have we evolved in the way we treat other animals?

FdW: The Planet of the Apes movies provide a good example of that. I’m so happy that Hollywood has found a way of featuring apes in movies without the involvement of real animals. There was a time when Hollywood had trainers who described what they do as affective training. Not effective, but affective. They used cattle prods, and stuff like that. People used to think that seeing apes dressed up or producing silly grins was hilarious. No longer. We’ve come a long way from that.

Skeptic: The Planet of the Apes films show apes that are quite violent, maybe even brutal. You actually studied the darker side of emotion in apes. Can you describe it?

FdW: Most of the books on emotions in animals dwell on the positive: they show how animals love each other, how they hug each other, how they help each other, how they grieve … and I do think that’s all very impressive. However, the emotional life of animals—just like that of humans— includes a lot of nasty emotions.

We do not treat animals very well, certainly not in the agricultural industry.

I have seen so much of chimpanzee politics that I witnessed those very dark emotions. They can kill each other. One of the killings I’ve witnessed was in captivity. So, when it happened, I thought maybe it was a product of captivity. Some colleagues said to me, “What do you expect if you lock them up?” But now we know that wild chimpanzees do the exact same thing. Sometimes, if a male leader loses his position or other chimps are not happy with him, they will brutally kill him. At the same time, chimpanzees can also be good friends, help each other, and defend their territory together—just like people who on occasion hate each other or even kill each other, but otherwise coexist peacefully.

The more important point is that we do not treat animals very well, certainly not in the agricultural industry. And we need to do something about that.

Skeptic: Are you a vegetarian or vegan?

FdW: No. Well, I do try to avoid eating meat. For me, however, the issue is not so much the eating, it’s the treatment of animals. As a biologist, I see the cycle of life as a natural thing. But it bothers me how we treat animals.

Skeptic: What’s next for you?

FdW: I’m going to retire! In fact, I’ve already stopped my research. I’m going to travel with my wife, and write.

Dr. Frans de Waal passed away on March 14, 2024, aged 75. In Loving Memory.

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