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Ch. 1: Apes in the Family

#49: May - June 2008 (Non-Fiction)
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Robert Tulip

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Chris OConnor wrote:
Christian ideas such as love, mercy, forgiveness, justice and grace are precisely the impulses that draw us to others and make us care.
How are these Christian ideas? Weren't they around long before Christianity arrived on the scene? These concepts don't owe their origins to Christianity. Seeing as chimps and bonobos display all of the above tendencies or behaviors, AND few chimps or bonobos regularly attend any sort of Christian religious service I'd be hesitant to say these are "Christian ideas." If you want to give Christianity credit for love, mercy, forgiveness, justice and grace you also must link it with hate, cruelty, condemnation, unfairness, and good old evil. And you probably would rather seperate Christianity from it's dark and disgusting history.
Hi Chris, the New Testament proposed a shift from the Mosaic Law of 'eye for an eye' to a more forgiving and merciful approach, and introduced the concept of a loving God as a central theme. Earlier approaches had focussed more on God as a wrathful judge than a creative source of love. As well, the idea of salvation by grace was a distinctively Christian invention, introduced by Christ and explained by Paul. In anthropology, it is interesting to see how the injunction from Christ to love your enemies has led to cultural change in countries, such as Papua New Guinea, where traditional religion taught people to love friends and hate enemies. Yes, it is essential to separate Christianity (the teachings of Jesus) from its history (the behaviour of the church). Robert
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Chris OConnor wrote:I'd be happy to call or email Dawkins for a response. Let's get further into this discussion period and see if we're understanding Frans de Waal. It could be our misunderstanding.
Okay, since I gave my copy of the book to my grandfather I'm working off Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved until I pick up a copy at the library.

In the introduction, it gives this summary re Veneer Theory:
De Waal's aim is to argue against a set of answers to his "whence morality?" question that he describes as "Veneer Theory" - the argument that morality is only a thin veneer overlaid on amoral or immoral core.".... His main target is Thomas Huxley.... De Waal's other targets include some social contract theorists (notably Thomas Hobbes)...and some evolutionary biologists who, in his view, tend to overgeneralize from the established role of selfishness in the natural selection process.
I can't remember whether De Waal specifically mentions Veneer Theory in Our Inner Ape but the book clearly forms part of his long-running attempt to show that apes (and thereby humans) are innately moral creatures.
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The key sentence in the first chapter for me is on page 36 of the hardcover edition (look up Panzee in the index if your copy doesn't match):

"... caretakers generally have a higher opinion of apes' mental abilities than the philosophers and psychologists who write on the topic, few of whom have interacted with these animals on a daily basis."

The same could be said for many other animals too!
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My copy has arrived earlier than I thought, and this is just the sort of book I like.

Yes, De Waal mentions selfish genes, and this seems to be rather complex- perhaps we'd need to start reading a third book now to understand the first two... in the mean time, here are extracts from the beginning of the article about Dawkins's book at Wikipedia.



[quote]The Selfish Gene is a book on evolution by Richard Dawkins, published in 1976. It builds upon the principal theory of George C. Williams's first book Adaptation and Natural Selection. Dawkins coined the term selfish gene as a way of expressing the gene-centered view of evolution, which holds that evolution is best viewed as acting on genes, and that selection at the level of organisms or populations almost never overrides selection based on genes. An organism is expected to evolve to maximize its inclusive fitness
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Saffron wrote:
Just started to read the book and was struck by the paragraph at the bottom of page 1. It starts and ends:


Quote:
This opinion is still very much with us.....We are born with impulses that draw us to others and that later in life make us care about them.


I can't agree more with the opening ideas in this book. I think that when people think about and write about human nature the focus tends to be on the negative, i.e. the selfish genes and aggression. Rarely is there any real weight given to the qualities that pull us together and keep us interdependent. I believe these are the stronger more important behaviors/qualities of human beings.
This is a good point to make, especially at the start of the discussion.
We're so used to thinking in terms of all the reasons why people make choices that have a negative impact on others -whether it's "selfish genes", psychology or culture, that it may become difficult to see those positive forces you mention. Perhaps observation, or books you read, lead to feeling reserved, if not pessimistic, about the good in the human race.
Another thing is that a lot of people write to explain human bad behaviour, and indeed there are volumes to write in many fields, but it is more difficult perhaps to give positive explanations for positive behaviour-- unless you refer to religious beliefs and explanations.
I have no simple explanation for positive forces. Somehow it may become difficult to dare to believe that good things just are.
Explaining it away by hypocrisy and veneer theory certainly sounds too simple -- I imagine these explanations are only valid in some cases.

De Waal writes, page 20:
"This veneer theory, as I call it, became a dominent theme in post-war discussion. deep-down, we humans are violent and amoral."

p 21:
Taken to its extreme, the everything-is-selfish position leads to a nightmarish world. Having an excellent nose for shock value these authors
haul us to a Hobesian arena in which it's every man for himself, where people show generosity only to trick others. Love is unheard of, sympathy is absent, and goodness a mere illusion. The best-known quote of those days, from biologist Michael Ghiselin, says it all " Scratch an altruist, and watch a hypocrite bleed."
altruism: Etymology:
French altruisme, from autrui other people, from Old French,
1853
1 : unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others
2 : behavior by an animal that is not beneficial to or may be harmful to itself but that benefits others of its species .
Merriam Webster's Dictionary.
Last edited by Ophelia on Wed May 28, 2008 9:29 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Chris wrote:
On page 2 the author asks, "But if all that people care about is their own good, why does a day-old baby cry when it hears another baby cry?"

As much as I'd like to reject Richard Dawkins gene-centered view of biological evolution I'm more inclined to say that Frans de Waal might be taking the "selfish gene" concept out of context.

So why do they cry? How about "they just do." Babies do what nature has selected them to do.
I think different people could come up with many explanations here.
The author thinks the baby cries out of empathy for the sorrows (or hunger, discomfort ) of the other baby. This may be, if we think of a very simple form of empathy.

empathy
2: the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner; also : the capacity for this.
Merriam-Webster's dictionary.

But then the baby would also cry if he heard another loud noise that he found stressful.
I can imagine that the cries of baby 2 remind baby 1 of times when he himself felt upset. Baby 2 may not really share the suffering of baby 1, but feel distressed that this might happen to him again.

I wouldn't put it like Chris, that nature has selected babies to cry when they hear another baby cry, it would be hard to imagine that this much has been programmed, I imagine the reaction is partly automatic and partly a sign of the emotional development of the baby.
If there was a loud noise, or a baby two was crying, and baby 1 was not deaf and yet did not respond in any way, there would be something wrong with him.
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I've come to this book late. It's certainly much different in approach and tone from the similarly titled book some of us are also reading. We can marvel at our physical relationship to fish, but have a hard time developing much fellow-feeling with them! Not so with apes, as De Waal shows us skillfully.

De Waal's and Shubin's intents are similar, though, in their locating the origins in other animals of traits we might otherwise assume to be ours alone.

What I cannot explain about the empathy topic others have commented on, is how empathy would develop, how it could come about that an "empathic variant" of a primate appeared in the first place. Can anyone help me out with this? It seems we're talking about something far different from the bones in a fish's fin. Empathy, after all, is just what we call the trait we observe in people (the phenotype). What is it genetically, and how did it appear on the scene? Maybe it appeared in phases somehow as the complex eye did, or maybe it was at first a side-effect of some other variant. It doesn't seem sufficient as explanation just to point out that we can see caring behavior increasing in animals as we move forward in evolution, and that eventually this caring behavior becomes that ability to know what a fellow creature is feeling. This is a description but not an explanation. Of course empathy can be assumed to increase the rate of survival, but the question is still going begging, as far as I see. Have we reached the limits of our current knowledge with this kind of question, or is there something I'm missing?
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DWill wrote:
What I cannot explain about the empathy topic others have commented on, is how empathy would develop, how it could come about that an "empathic variant" of a primate appeared in the first place.
Look on page 6, second paragraph for at least a partial answer to how empathy would develop.

De Waal:
In mammals, parental care cannot be separated from lactation. During the 180 million years of mammalian evolution, females who responded to their offspring's needs outreproduced those who were cold and distant.
I can see how mammals that better tolerate their offspring would be more successful and therefore tolerance would be selected. Over time higher and higher levels of tolerance would become outright attentiveness and eventually develop into being able to anticipate need. Now it's just a short hop to empathy. I'm not sure humans could have evolved without the trait of empathy already in place. The human infant is so vulnerable and completely dependent for such an extended period of time. The mother must be able to feel empathy toward her infant. Think about nursing a baby; it is not always easy to get started, it can be confusing for mother and baby, painful, and tiring. Gaining weight in the first few weeks of an infant's life is critical to survival. This is true even today in our modern, protected and sanitized world. If a mother was not able to understand and feel the baby's distress when hungry, she might not be all the keen on feeding it in the middle of the night when her nipples are cracked and sore. Many, if not most other mammals have some mobility and can get to the mother's nipple. Human infants are totally dependent on the mother or other adult to bring them to the nipple.

I'm not sure about the second part of your question.
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Apes are not Monkeys

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The media, including some documentaries, constantly refer to chimps as monkeys. Since this is a mission of mine, I thought I'd point out how well De Waal explains the difference between apes and monkeys. The bottom of p 13 does a good job! Yay!
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[quote="Saffron]
I can see how mammals that better tolerate their offspring would be more successful and therefore tolerance would be selected. Over time higher and higher levels of tolerance would become outright attentiveness and eventually develop into being able to anticipate need. Now it's just a short hop to empathy. [/quote]

Well, maybe in evolutionary time, the "hop" to empathy took a few thousand generations, but I see what you mean. Right now, I'm puzzling over something that has never occurred to me to question, and that I suppose is this matter of the randomness of variants that may appear. Having a variant of greater empathy appear at random is hard for me to grasp, and I don't see any scientific explanation offered for it, if by scientific we might mean an explanation of the regularities of a process. To call the appearance of variations random is to say that science doesn't have a handle on the deeper workings that might show order underlying an apparent randomness. Or, it might be to say that science, as practiced at least, cannot reach into this phenomenon because it may have an inherently unpredictable element of spontaneity.
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