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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Time Magazine sticks to science when comparing humans to chimpanzees

I'm applauding the cover story of the October 9, 2006 edition of Time:  "What Makes Us Different?"   [The quick answer is that, out of 3 billion base pairs in the human genome, only 1.23% are different than those found in the chimpanzee genome]. The writers based this article solely on the expert…

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The books of Wal-Mart

This is a companion piece to “The Magazines of Wal-Mart.”  In that post (and now in this post) I put on my amateur anthropologist hat and explored the range of reading materials made available to consumers by America’s largest retailer. 

I traveled to a Wal-Mart superstore yesteday to check out the types of books for sale.  Why?  Because Wal-Mart serves as a culture filter to the many people who don’t take the extra effort to shop for books at bona fide book stores.  For those people who select their books from the limited offerings of Wal-Mart, here is the full range of written materials with which they are fertilizing their minds.  Here is how they prepare their minds to deal with important things such as parenthood, justice, the practices of other cultures, the meaning of life and how to vote. 

The book section of the St. Louis area Wal-Mart I visited consists of five large sections of shelves.  The three inside sections consist entirely of fiction; most of those titles are romance novels.  Here are some of the fiction titles you can buy at Wal-Mart:

romance novels.JPG

Such fiction works constitute 60% of the titles made available by Wal-Mart. 

If you are one of those people who wants to buy a “Best Seller,” you would need to check out the first section of book shelves (the left-most). But don’t expect to see any of the following books, each of which is currently ranked within the top 15 books on the …

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Non-believers as targets of anger

Check out this post called "Turning Away Anger," by Ebonmuse at Daylight Atheism. This post is a good collection of the sorts of abuse one can expect whenever one publicly expresses doubt that supernatural beings exist.  He gives lots of examples. [T]here is a huge amount of anger seething and fuming among…

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Freethinker quotes of the day

I noticed this quote at Freedom from Religion Foundation: “The God of the Christians is a father who is a great deal more concerned about his apples than he is about his children.” -- Diderot, French writer, philosopher (1713-1784), Addition aux Pensees philosophiques, c. 1762 FFRF is a site that…

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