Word: primatologist
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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While Witvliet labors to show the physiological benefits of forgiveness, Emory University primatologist Frans De Waal is busy extending its evolutionary pedigree. A study at his Living Links Center suggests that the Christian church's teaching on reconciliation may be viewed as the refinement of mechanisms reaching back not some 2,000 years but 25 million. "Instead of looking at conflict resolution as uniquely ours," he says, "we are showing that it exists in many cooperative species," particularly chimpanzees. De Waal's work focuses on the "social memories" of primates, and he says, "We have full confidence that they have...
That is the way Russell Mittermeier would like to keep this forest, and all the other forested areas of the world. The president of Conservation International, who is also a first-rate primatologist (A.B. Dartmouth, summa; Ph.D. Harvard), is part scientist, part activist, part barker and part kid. The kid, recently turned 49, is the same one who grew up in the Bronx and Brooklyn, N.Y., under the joint tutelage of a mother interested in the natural world, and Tarzan; Mittermeier continues to collect Tarzan novels and memorabilia. He and Peter A. Seligmann, CI's founder and chief executive, have...
Joining Heaney as winners this year are heart transplant pioneer Michael E. DeBakey, primatologist Jane Goodall, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee and Netscape co-founder James H. Clark...
...primatologists the bonobo did not exist at all until 1928, when researchers first noticed that the chimpanzee-like animal they had long been calling a pygmy chimp was in fact an entirely separate species. In the decades that followed, the physical differences between the newly recognized bonobo and its larger cousin were thought to be all that distinguished them. Then, in the 1970s, Japanese primatologist Takayoshi Kano began observing bonobos in the wild and noticed a key difference: in the bonobo culture, unlike the chimp or human culture, males were not the dominant gender...
...answer may be politics, which is hardly confined to human society. Scottish psychologists Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten believe chimps are positively "Machiavellian" in their efforts to acquire power within a group. In the Mahale Mountains in Tanzania, for instance, Japanese primatologist Toshisada Nishida observed one male chimp shift his support between two more dominant males who needed his allegiance to maintain power. The bigger males curried favor with this artful manipulator by allowing him access to fertile females. When a ruler began to take him for granted, the canny old chimp would shift allegiance to the pretender, thus ensuring...