Talk:Frans de Waal

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Professor de Waal once spoke to a group of Behaviorist psychologists about reconciliation among chimpanzees. They refused to accept this, insisting that reconciliation can only happen in Homo sapiens. De Waal invited them to witness the chimps reconciling. They declined, claiming that first-hand observation would destroy their "scientific objectivity." They were behaving just like the Aristotelian scholars who refused to look through the telescope of Galileo.

I don't see how this anecdote fits in an encyclopaedia but the last bit is blatantly NPOV as it aims to portray de Waal as a modern-day Galileo and his behaviorist contradictors as obscurantists. Also, no reference is provided as to how and when this incident took place. I suggest it to be rewritten or simply removed.

I agree. This anecdote will be removed. There remain to many questions. Which "group of Behaviorist psychologists"? Did they really use such an argument: "scientific objectivity"? Did they not formulate arguments about what "reconciliation" is in their eyes? This anecdote is not encyclopaedic material. Andy 13:54, 12 October 2006 (UTC)

Dorothy Munkenbeck Fragaszy, Elisabetta Vilsaberghi, and Linda Marie Fedigan, not Frans B. M. de Waal, wrote The complete capichin: The biology of the genus Cebus. ISBN 0521667682 Shaxshan 10:47, 17 July 2007 (UTC)