The scientist Frans de Waal has some entertaining stories about chimps but he is too tolerant of religion
A bonobo chimpanzee; there are no sharp differences between human and primate emotions, says Frans de Waal © Cyril Ruos/JH Editorial/Minden Pictures/Corbis
It was once regarded as a cardinal sin to anthropomorphise in discussing non-human animal emotion. The danger of “reading in” empathy, sympathy, concern and (perish the thought!) altruism was so great, and the conservative impulse to regard all behaviour as explicable solely in terms of food-finding and gene-bequeathing so compelling, as to make generations of ethologists shut their eyes to anything else. The person who, almost single-handedly, has effected a revolution in this regard is the primatologist Frans de Waal, whose new book, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates, has just been published.
For de Waal there are no sharp differences between the great apes and their human cousins in respect of emotions and intentions. Indeed he sees no difference, only a
NBeale
I can’t see why the %age of regular (monthly) attendees of CofE services should have much to do with the number of Bishops in the House of Lords? But as it happens the 26 Bishops are about 3% of the number of peers so on Grayling’s “argument” this would be about right. How many people come to British Humanist Association meetings on a monthly basis? However it is a sobering thought that 71% of peers are formally affiliated to political parties and less than 0.1% of the population regularly attends party meetings.
But maybe we shouldn’t expect too much from a “philosopher” who, inter alia, can’t distinguish between believing that the earth is flat and a geo-centric view of the universe or decide whether religion is “false” or “contentless”. And does he really think that Hitler dreamed up the Prussian Motto?
Neil H
Precisely a century before the publication of On the Origin of Species, Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments hypothesised that human moral values stem from sympathy. I promptly seized on the discovery of mirror neurons as neurological evidence for this view of human behaviour. Of course, ‘sympathy with’ is but one factor in cultural evolution, albeit a major one, I think.
David Hume and others during the Enlightenment noted its importance. I haven’t looked up the origin of ‘empathy’ but suspect that today we would substitute it for eighteenth century ‘sympathy’.