In what ways are the OTHER animals moral?

Primatologist Frans De Waal has spent much of his career pointing out how incredibly similar the emotional and moral behavior of human animals is to the behavior of many other animals (he focuses especially chimps and bonobos). In this post, I will comment on De Waal's 2005 work, Our Inner Ape, where De Waal substantiates his stunning conclusion (well, stunning to those who just can't bear to acknowledge that humans are animals - see here and here and here) that the precursors of morality are easily seen in animals other than human animals. More specifically, De Waal demonstrates that there is a well-substantiated continuity between the proto-moral behavior of chimpanzees and bonobos and the full-bloomed sense of morality that we see in human animals. De Waal is clearly frustrated that people consider only human aggression to be "animalistic," but not human empathy. De Waal describes studies clearly demonstrating empathy in many animals, ranging from rats to the great apes. Children as young as one year of age naturally reach out to comfort others. Household pets such as cats and dogs can become upset (just like children do) when family members feign distress. Empathy therefore develops even before language. This would seem to demonstrate that top-down rule-based (therefore language-based) versions of morality don't capture the essence of what it means to be moral. [More . . . ]

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Warning: having more choices can be detrimental to your happiness

I recently spoke with a friend who was having difficulty making a major decision in his life. I suggested to him that he might be struggling because he is a talented fellow who might therefore have too many options.

After we concluded our conversation, I recalled reading a well-written book called the Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (2004), by Barry Schwartz. This delightful book incorporates many findings of cognitive science and the psychology of decision-making.  His main point is, indeed, paradoxical:

As the number of available choices increases, as it has in our consumer culture, the autonomy, control and liberation this variety brings are powerful and positive.  But as the number of choices keeps growing, negative aspects of having a multitude of options begin to appear.  As the number of choices grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded.  At this point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitated.  It might even be said to tyrannize. 

When Schwartz speaks of tyranny, he reminds us that we live in a society in which you can find paralyzing members of choices even at the supermarket.  Why is it that we need 16 types of instant mashed potatoes, 75 types of instant gravies, 120 different types of pastas sauce 16 versions of Italian dressing, 275 types of serial and 64 formulas of barbecue sauce?  We face similar numbers of choices when we choose retirement plans, medical care, careers, where to live and who to be.

Modern society has done this to …

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Video Interview of Richard Dawkins discussing his new book: The God Delusion

In this lively 9-minute interview, Dawkins discusses his new book, The God Delusion. The interviewer, Jeremy Paxman, asked Dawkins what he intended to accomplish with his book.  Here’s Dawkins’ answer: I hope to persuade . . . a substantial number of middle of the road people that there’s nothing wrong…

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My limited vision.

A Young Earth Creationist with whom I often discourse pities me my small view of the universe. You see, I apparently cannot see the vast immensity and perfection of a 7,000 year old universe created and micromanaged by a spoiled-child-like deity. He is sure that I cannot conceive of how time might mean different things to God than to man. Or how mutually exclusive states of being (God and Man) might have existed simultaneously and yet separately in a single organism here on Earth about 2,000 years ago, and never anywhere else.

My tiny universe is about 15,000,000,000 years old, and I watch it unfurl from a curdled cloud of mesons and quarks to chill and congeal into lumpy proton soup in a quark broth. As it cools it further clumps into first generation stars that are huge, bright, and short-lived: On the order of 10 million years from ignition (when fusion begins) until explosion (when the Hydrogen-Helium cycle breaks down, and gravity collapses it into a mild nova that creates more Helium, and a few of the other light elements. Much of the residue clouds of these stars collect into clusters of smaller stars , galaxies. When they burn out and die, they form and expel the whole periodic table in the hotter, tighter crucibles of their bright supernovae. Then these clouds condense and we get third generation stars, like our sun. The remnants around it also cluster into smaller chunks that are not heavy enough to sustain fusion, …

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Will money make you happy? Beware the focusing effect!

Erika’s post regarding Psychology’s Top Blunders brought to mind another pitfall to those who do psychology. One aspect of Erika is post is that priming can corrupt the results of projection testing. This reminded me of an article I recently read regarding attempts to measure how “happy” people are. The article is “Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer? A Focusing Illusion.”  I found the article in the June 30, 2006 edition of Science (http://www.sciencemag.com/ -available only to subscribers online).

Experimenters have often tried to find how satisfied someone is with his or her life, but such questions elicit a global evaluation. People tend to exaggerate the importance of a single factor on their overall well-being. The authors refer to this as the “focusing illusion.” This illusion can be the source of error in personal decision-making. 

Here’s an example. First, assume the experimenter asks these two questions in this order: 1) “How happy are you with your life in general?” and 2) “How many dates did you have last month?” In this case, there is no statistical correlation between the two questions. When you reverse the order of this questioning, however, the correlation becomes highly significant. “The dating question evidently caused that aspect of life to become salient and its importance to be exaggerated when the respondents encountered the more general question about their happiness.” The authors indicate that these focusing effects have also been observed when the respondent’s attention is first directed to their marriage or health.…

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