One of the greatest students of life, peace, culture, and interspecies relations has left us, a scholar of astonishing insight, kindness, and humility.
de Waal's powerful writings about Orientalist bias and the kneejerk Western defense of human exceptionalism by anthropologists and biologists are, I think, essential reading - e.g., https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-003-0197-4
“One thing that I’ve seen often in my career is claims of human uniqueness that fall away and are never heard from again,” he said in 2014. “We always end up overestimating the complexity of what we do … I’ve brought apes a little closer to humans but I’ve also brought humans down a bit.”
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