Monkeys too have noble feelings
times of india 14.04.2019
Is man the only animal capable of noble feelings like empathy and morality? Social scientists think so, but primatologist Frans de Waal, who wrote the book ‘Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are?’ disagrees.
He says we aren’t fundamentally different from other animals “because there is no part of the human brain that is not present in a monkey’s brain.” So, how did the idea of human exceptionalism arise?
De Waal says it’s a result of the Christian belief that humans have souls but animals don’t. And Christianity probably got that idea because it arose in a desert environment where humans lived with camels, goats, snakes and scorpions, but no primates. “Of course, you then conclude that we are totally different from the rest of the animal kingdom because we don’t have primates with whom to compare ourselves.”
As to why social scientists also cling to this belief, de Waal says the social sciences are strongly influenced by religion. “But the average biologist believes that everything is continuous. We know that plants have DNA and humans have DNA, so we see that all of us are totally connected.”
The belief that only humans have a sense of the past and the future is also a myth, says de Waal. In a Swiss zoo, orangutans showed the ability to plan for the future. Their cage had a skylight, which they slyly dismantled. “That way they could spend summer nights on the roof of their building. Then in the morning, before the caretakers came back, they would go back in the cage and put the skylight precisely back together.”
Chimps also care for others, it seems. In one experiment, they picked tokens that brought a reward to them as well as their partner, rather than a token that only rewarded them. In another case, younger chimps used to bring water to an arthritic female chimpanzee, and helped her up a climbing frame.
For more: Nautilus
APING THE APES: The human brain has more processing power, but it is basically the same as a primate brain
times of india 14.04.2019
Is man the only animal capable of noble feelings like empathy and morality? Social scientists think so, but primatologist Frans de Waal, who wrote the book ‘Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are?’ disagrees.
He says we aren’t fundamentally different from other animals “because there is no part of the human brain that is not present in a monkey’s brain.” So, how did the idea of human exceptionalism arise?
De Waal says it’s a result of the Christian belief that humans have souls but animals don’t. And Christianity probably got that idea because it arose in a desert environment where humans lived with camels, goats, snakes and scorpions, but no primates. “Of course, you then conclude that we are totally different from the rest of the animal kingdom because we don’t have primates with whom to compare ourselves.”
As to why social scientists also cling to this belief, de Waal says the social sciences are strongly influenced by religion. “But the average biologist believes that everything is continuous. We know that plants have DNA and humans have DNA, so we see that all of us are totally connected.”
The belief that only humans have a sense of the past and the future is also a myth, says de Waal. In a Swiss zoo, orangutans showed the ability to plan for the future. Their cage had a skylight, which they slyly dismantled. “That way they could spend summer nights on the roof of their building. Then in the morning, before the caretakers came back, they would go back in the cage and put the skylight precisely back together.”
Chimps also care for others, it seems. In one experiment, they picked tokens that brought a reward to them as well as their partner, rather than a token that only rewarded them. In another case, younger chimps used to bring water to an arthritic female chimpanzee, and helped her up a climbing frame.
For more: Nautilus
APING THE APES: The human brain has more processing power, but it is basically the same as a primate brain
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