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This is a topic that the soft-spoken 63-year old Dutch-born primatologist - who became a United States citizen in 2009 - seems to have been primed to undertake from birth. As the Western world has been shaken by unprecedented corruption and greed in the financial sector during the past few years, it is a message that has found a wide audience.
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Unlike most of de Waal's books, however, The Age of Empathy offers suggestions about how we can implement some of these moral lessons into our own society. She is cared for by other members of her troop as they dip their own mouths into the stream and bring it back for her so she can drink. In one moving example, an elderly chimpanzee female named Peony is incapacitated with arthritis and is unable to reach water. Many of the case studies he describes seem to defy the notion that nature is selfish or that humans alone are the only moral animal. The theme of his newest book, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society, is the culmination of his work to date and presents a synthesis of the factors that account for cooperative behavior in the natural world. From his pioneering research on alliance formation in Chimpanzee Politics, to reconciliation behavior in Peacemaking Among Primates and Good Natured, to the implications for human life and thought in Primates and Philosophers, de Waal has been seeking to understand the roots of moral behavior in the most political of animals.
![are bonobos happy in zoo s or sad are bonobos happy in zoo s or sad](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ttw9udDmRsw/maxresdefault.jpg)
But why not when we're good? This is the question that has driven Frans de Waal for the past 30 years. "It's the animal in us," we often hear when we've been bad.