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Primates and Philosophers_ How Morality Evolved - Frans de Waal, Stephen Macedo, Josiah Ober (2009) epub

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  "It's the animal in us," we often
hear when we've been bad. But why not when we're good? Primates and Philosophers tackles this question by exploring the
biological foundations of one of humanity's most valued traits: morality.
  
  In this provocative book,
primatologist Frans de Waal argues that modern-day evolutionary biology takes far too dim a view of the natural world,
emphasizing our "selfish" genes. Science has thus exacerbated our reciprocal habits of blaming nature when we act badly
and labeling the good things we do as "humane." Seeking the origin of human morality not in evolution but in human
culture, science insists that we are moral by choice, not by nature.
  
  Citing remarkable evidence based on
his extensive research of primate behavior, de Waal attacks "Veneer Theory," which posits morality as a thin overlay on
an otherwise nasty nature. He explains how we evolved from a long line of animals that care for the weak and build
cooperation with reciprocal transactions. Drawing on both Darwin and recent scientific advances, de Waal demonstrates a
strong continuity between human and animal behavior. In the process, he also probes issues such as anthropomorphism and
human responsibilities toward animals.
  
  Based on the Tanner Lectures de Waal delivered at Princeton
University's Center for Human Values in 2004, Primates and Philosophers includes responses by the philosophers Peter
Singer, Christine M. Korsgaard, and Philip Kitcher and the science writer Robert Wright. They press de Waal to clarify
the differences between humans and other animals, yielding a lively debate that will fascinate all those who wonder
about the origins and reach of human goodness.
  
  From Publishers Weekly
  Celebrated primatologist de
Waal expands on his earlier work in Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals to argue
that human traits of fairness, reciprocity and altruism develop through natural selection. Based on his 2004 Tanner
Lectures at Princeton, this book argues that our morality grows out of the social instincts we share with bonobos,
chimpanzees and apes. De Waal criticizes what he calls the "veneer theory," which holds that human ethics is simply an
overlay masking our "selfish and brutish nature." De Waal draws on his own work with primates to illustrate the
evolution of morality. For example, chimpanzees are more favorably disposed to others who have performed a service for
them (such as grooming) and more likely to share their food with these individuals. In three appendixes, de Waal ranges
briefly over anthropomorphism, apes and a theory of mind, and animal rights. The volume also includes responses to de
Waal by Robert Wright, Christine M. Korsgaard, Philip Kitcher and Peter Singer. Although E.O. Wilson and Robert Wright
have long contended that altruism is a product of evolution, de Waal demonstrates through his empirical work with
primates the evolutionary basis for ethics. (Oct.)
  Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed
Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
 
From Scientific American
  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 the secret notebooks that he kept after the voyage, Darwin was
speculating about evolution from every angle, including the emotional, and he was fascinated by Jenny’s tantrum.
What is it like to be an ape? Does an orangutan’s frustration feel a lot like ours? Might she cherish some sense
of right and wrong? Will an ape despair because her keeper is breaking the rules—because he is just not playing
fair? Our own species has been talking, volubly and passionately, for at least 50,000 years, and it’s a fair
guess that arguments about right and wrong were prominent in our conversation pretty much from the beginning. We started
writing things down 5,000 years ago, and some of our first texts were codes of ethics. Our innumerable volumes of
scripture and law, our Departments of Justice, High Courts, Low Courts, and Courts of Common Pleas are unique in the
living world. But did we human beings invent our feeling for justice, or is it part of the package of primal emotions
that we inherited from our ancestors? In other words: Did morality evolve? Dutch-born psychologist, ethologist and
primatologist Frans de Waal has spent his career watching the behavior of apes and monkeys, mostly captive troupes in
zoos. As a young student, he sat on a wooden stool day after day for six years, observing a colony of chimpanzees at the
Arnhem Zoo. Today he watches chimpanzees from an observation post at Emory University’s Yerkes National Primate
Research Center in Atlanta and at other zoos and primate centers. His work, along with primatologist Jane
Goodall’s, has helped lift Darwin’s conjectures about the evolution of morality to a new level. He has
documented tens of thousands of instances of chimpanzee behavior that among ourselves we would call Machiavellian and
about as many moments that we would call altruistic, even noble. In his scientific papers and popular books (including
Chimpanzee Politics, Our Inner Ape and Good Natured), he argues that Darwin was correct from that first glimpse of Jenny
at the zoo. Sympathy, empathy, right and wrong are feelings that we share with other animals; even the best part of
human nature, the part that cares about ethics and justice, is also part of nature. De Waal’s latest book,
Primates and Philosophers, is based on the Tanner Lectures that he delivered at Princeton University’s Center for
Human Values in 2004. In this book he tries—as he has many times before—to refute a popular caricature of
Darwinism. Many people assume that to be good, be nice, behave, play well with others, we have to rise above our animal
nature. It’s a dog-eat dog world out there—or, as the Romans put it, homo homini lupus, man is wolf to man
(a curious proverb for a people whose founding myth was the suckling by a wolf of the infant twins Romulus and Remus).
Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin’s self-appointed bulldog, promoted this dark, cold view of life in a famous lecture,
Evolution and Ethics. "The ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in
running away from it, but in combating it," he declared. In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan
puts it another way: if there is no God, then we are lost in a moral chaos. "Everything is permitted." De Waal calls
this "Veneer Theory." In this view, human morality is a thin crust on a churning urn of boiling funk. 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." Back in the 1950s and 1960s, when
animal psychologists talked about "sympathy" and "empathy," they always put those words between quotation marks, de Waal
notes. Now he wants to take away the quotation marks. He describes one of his best-known demonstrations that animals
care about fairness. In the experiment, he had pairs of capuchin monkeys perform simple tasks in their cages. For
successfully completing each task they would get a reward, sometimes a slice of cucumber, sometimes a grape. All the
monkeys would work for and eat the cucumber slices, but they preferred grapes. If one monkey kept getting paid in
cucumber and it could see that its partner in the next cage was getting grapes, it would get mad, like Darwin’s
Jenny. After a while the monkey would refuse to eat or throw the cucumber right out of the cage. Is de Waal right about
all this? In the second half of Primates and Philosophers, his arguments are critiqued by a series of commentators, all
of whom have written important studies of evolutionary ethics. They cite Freud, Kant, Hume, Nietzsche and Adam Smith.
They circle and circle around those pairs of capuchin monkeys: "A capuchin rejects a cucumber when her partner is
offered a grape—is she protesting the unfairness, or is she just holding out for a grape?" writes Christine M.
Korsgaard, Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. "Of course, if the lucky capuchin were
to throw down the grape until his comrade had a similar reward, that would be very interesting!" writes Philip Kitcher,
John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. They disagree, they discuss, they bicker a little, like all
primates and philosophers. They illuminate not only ageless questions of ethics but also current concerns such as the
Geneva convention and "why universal empathy is such a fragile proposal," as de Waal writes in his response to his
critics. By the end of the book it seems clear that we can no longer look at morality as a sort of civilized veneer on a
cold and selfish animal, even though that view goes back long before Darwin went to the zoo. Its origin lies in the
Western concept of original sin—when Adam and Eve ate their first apple.
  
  Jonathan Weiner won a
Pulitzer Prize in 1995 for The Beak of the Finch. He teaches science writing in Columbia University’s Graduate
School of Journalism. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.  						

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