Book Review: ‘Different’ by Frans de Waal


De Waal does not even give a footnote when he claims that male apes and males are judged by the width of their shoulders. After seeing that male chimpanzees exaggerate their size by sewing their hair, she turns to men’s fashion. “We also pay special attention to men’s shoulder width, so suits have shoulder pads,” says De Waal.

Professor de Waal, Joan Crawford is on line one waiting to talk to you. Joan Collins on line two.

And sometimes Waal’s proof of the connection between humans and other primates feels more like free association. When discussing male violence against women, she argues that unrelated women can protect each other just like female bonobos. “The #MeToo movement comes to mind. So is the Green Sari movement,” she writes.

“Different” could benefit from less free association and longer discussion. I wasn’t sure what to make of the fact that humans were in some ways like chimpanzees and in some ways like bonobos. After all, both are equally related to us and descended from a lineage that diverged from ours about six million years ago.

Things get even more confusing when De Waal travels further in the primate tree. In a section on parental care, cotton tamarins describe how fathers put a lot of effort into raising young. (They can burn 10 percent of their body weight by wrapping them around their children.) As we wait to find out what cotton tamarind dads can tell us about human dads, de Waal loses interest. “These apes are quite far away from us, which makes them less relevant to human evolution,” he says, turning to Gibbons. Will cotton tamarind take the midterm?

There’s a deeper problem with writing about cotton tamarind this way: They’re different from their own close relatives. The ancestors of cotton tamarinds started out as a species that the fathers had no interest in. And then, a mysterious combination of evolutionary factors pushed the cotton tamarind’s ancestors down a strange path.

We humans are weird too. We may not be as special as we’d like to think, but we’ve had some big changes since our lineage split from chimpanzees and bonobos. Our ancestors began to walk upright, lost most of their hair, developed large brains, and spoke a complete language. It’s hard to tell from “different” to what extent our sexes were shaped by history before and after we split from our other primates.



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