It was not until a year and a half after his voyage on board the Beagle that Charles Darwin first came face to face with an ape. He was standing by the giraffe house at the London Zoo on a warm day in late March of 1838. The zoo had just acquired an orangutan named Jenny. One of the keepers was teasing her–showing her an apple, refusing to hand it over. Poor Jenny “threw herself on her back, kicked & cried, precisely like a naughty child,” Darwin wrote in a letter to his sister.
In reality, de Waal reminds us, dogs are social, wolves are social, chimps and macaques are social, and we ourselves are “social to the core.” Goodness, generosity and genuine kindness come just as naturally to us as meaner feelings. We didn’t have to invent compassion. When our ancestors began writing down the first codes of conduct, precepts, laws and commandments, they were elaborating on feelings that evolved thousands or even millions of years before they were born. “Instead of empathy being an endpoint,” de Waal writes, “it may have been the starting point.”
