CHAPTER 1: EARTHLY DELIGHTS
1 Friedrich Nietzsche (1889), p. 5.
2 Also known as s’Hertogenbosch, the city is a twelfth-century provincial capital in the south of the Netherlands. At the time of Bosch’s life (from circa 1450 until 1516), it was the second-largest city of the country, after Utrecht.
3 In 2007, Al Sharpton and Christopher Hitchens debated religion at the New York Public Library. See www.fora.tv.
4 The blog was posted on “The Stone,” on 17 October 2010, available at http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/morals-without-god/.
5 Marc Kaufman, “Dalai Lama gives talk on science,” Washington Post, 13 November 2005.
6 Advocating attention to chimpanzees rather than to bonobos, Melvin Konner (2002), p. 199, wrote, “And in any case, chimps have done far better than bonobos, which are very close to extinction.”
7 “Hominin” is the new label for humans and their bipedal ancestors; previously it was “hominid.”
8 Jürgen Habermas (2001) in his acceptance speech as recipient of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. The German text uses the word “Schuld,” which means both blameworthy and being guilty: “Als sich Sünde in Schuld verwandelte, ging etwas verloren.” Translated at www.csudh.edu/dearhabermas/habermas11.htm.
9 John Gray (2011), p. 235.
10 Allain de Botton (2012), p. 11.
11 Karl Pearson (1914), p. 91.
12 Sam Harris (2010) gave his book the subtitle How Science Can Determine Human Values.
13 PLoS Medicine Editors (2011).
CHAPTER 2: GOODNESS EXPLAINED
1 Charles Darwin (1871), p. 72.
2 Catherine Crockford et al. (2012).
3 J. B. S. Haldane, quoted in Oren Harman (2009), p. 158.
4 John Maynard Smith, quoted in Harman (2009), p. 167.
5 On Ronald Fisher and John von Neumann, see Harman (2009), p. 110.
6 From Frans de Waal (1996), p. 25.
7 George Price in a 1971 letter to Henry Morris, the father of modern creationism, quoted in Harman (2009), p. 248.
8 Robert Trivers in an interview with Carole Jahme in the Guardian, 7 October 2011.
9 Ernst Mayr (1997), p. 250, wrote, “Huxley, who believed in final causes, rejected natural selection and did not represent genuine Darwinian thought in any way. . . . It is unfortunate, considering how confused Huxley was, that his essay [on ethics] is often referred to even today as if it were authoritative.”
10 For the statement by Joseph Hooker and other details of the Wilberforce-Huxley debate, see Ronald Numbers (2009), p. 155.
11 Letter of T. H. Huxley to Charles Darwin, 23 November 1859, in Leonard Huxley (1901), p. 189.
12 Letter of T. H. Huxley to Frederick Dyster, 10 October 1854, in Leonard Huxley (1901), p. 122.
13 From Leonard Huxley (1916), p. 322.
14 From T. H. Huxley (1894), p. 81.
15 Adrian Desmond (1994), p. 599.
16 Michael Ghiselin (1974), p. 247.
17 Robert Wright (1994), p. 344.
18 Defending his evaluation, George Williams (1988), p. 180, wrote, “I would concede that moral indifference might aptly characterize the physical universe. For the biological world a stronger term is needed.”
19 An interview by Frans Roes (1997), p. 3, quotes Richard Dawkins: “What I am saying, along with many other people, among them T. H. Huxley, is that in our political and social life we are entitled to throw out Darwinism, to say we don’t want to live in a Darwinian world.”
20 Francis Collins (2006), p. 218.
21 Richard Dawkins on Real Time with Bill Maher, 11 April 2008.
22 From a letter by Charles Darwin to T. H. Huxley, 27 March 1882, in Desmond (1994), p. 519.
23 Charles Darwin (1871), p. 98.
24 Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson (2005) call this the “big mistake hypothesis.”
25 Jessica Flack et al. (2005). De Waal (1992) provides data on impartial arbitration.
26 Roger Fouts and Stephen Mills (1997).
27 Jill Pruetz (2011).
28 Christophe Boesch et al. (2010).
29 Friedrich Nietzsche (1887), p. 51.
30 Marcus Aurelius (2002): “No one tires of being helped, and acts that are consistent with nature, like helping others, are their own reward. How then can you grow tired of helping others when by doing so you help yourself?”
31 Lara Aknin et al. (2012).
CHAPTER 3: BONOBOS IN THE FAMILY TREE
1 Common paraphrasing of a remark Abraham Lincoln made after he had spoken sympathetically of Southern rebels. A woman complained that it would be better for him to destroy than befriend his enemies, to which Lincoln replied (Ury, 1993, p. 146), “Why, madam, do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”
2 Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1809), p. 170.
3 Georges Cuvier’s “Elegy of Lamarck” was read to the French Académie des Sciences, in Paris, on 26 November 1832.
4 The Colbert Report, 30 January 2008.
5 Frans de Waal (1997a), p. 84.
6 Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson (1996), p. 204.
7 Frans de Waal (1989), p. 215.
8 Frans de Waal (1997a), p. 81.
9 Watch Isabel Behncke Izquierdo at www.ted.com/talks/.
10 Robert Ardrey (1961) wrote, “We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides.”
11 Gottfried Hohmann, quoted in Parker (2007).
12 Susan Block, “Bonobo Bashing in the New Yorker,” Counterpunch, 25 July 2007, available at http://www.counterpunch.org/2007/07/25/bonobo-bashing-in-the-new-yorker/.
13 Takeshi Furuichi in Parker (2007).
14 Glenn Shepard (2011).
15 Laurinda Dixon (1981).
16 Hieronymus is the Latin form of Jerome. The Dutch commonly use “Jeroen” as the first name of the painter, whereas he himself signed his work with “Jheronimus Bosch.”
17 Desiderius Erasmus (1519), p. 66.
18 Takeshi Furuichi (2011), p. 136.
19 Gottfried Hohmann and Barbara Fruth (2011), p. 72.
20 Robert Yerkes (1925), p. 246: “If I were to tell of his [the bonobo’s] altruistic and obviously sympathetic behavior towards Panzee [a sick chimpanzee] I should be suspected of idealizing an ape.”
21 Spindle cells are also known as Von Economo Neurons, or VEN cells. See John Allman et al. ( 2002).
22 James Rilling et al. (2011), p. 369.
23 Kay Prüfer et al. (2012). For more on “bipolar apes,” see de Waal (2005).
24 Harold Coolidge (1933), p. 56.
CHAPTER 4: IS GOD DEAD OR JUST IN A COMA?
1 Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) quoted in Maturin Murray Ballou (1872), p. 433.
2 The label “new atheists,” whom I shall call neo-atheists, applies mostly to four best-selling critics of religion and their followers: Sam Harris, Dan Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens.
3 A. C. Grayling in an interview in the Guardian, 3 April 2011.
4 Born in 1525 in the same region, Pieter Brueghel the Elder was greatly influenced by Bosch. He was less moralizing, however, and more interested in daily life. He lived and worked mostly in Antwerp and Brussels.
5 The O’Reilly Factor, 4 January 2011, at www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BCipg71LbI.
6 Christopher Hitchens (2007) prided himself, before his atheist turn, on having been Anglican, educated as a Methodist, married into Greek Orthodoxy, a follower of Sai Baba, and married by a rabbi.
7 Christopher Hitchens (2007).
8 Sam Harris (2010), p. 74: “the especially low-hanging fruit of conservative Islam.”
9 John Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew White’s A History of Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896).
10 Olaf Blanke and Shahar Arzy (2005), p. 17.
11 Frans de Waal et al. (1996).
12 Observing that neo-atheists are “sure that the world would be a better place if religion were hastened to extinction,” Dan Dennett (2006) adds, “I am still agnostic about that. I don’t know what could be put in religion’s place—or what would arise unbidden—so I am still eager to explore the prospect of reforming religion.”
13 Joseph Smith (1938).
14 Bernard Barber (1961), p. 596.
15 Jerry A. Coyne, “Science and religion aren’t friends,” USA Today, 11 October 2010.
16 Michael Gazzaniga interviewed in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (The Year in Cognitive Neuroscience) 1224 (2011), p. 8.
17 Albert Einstein: “What I dislike in this kind of argumentation [by Niels Bohr and others] is the basic positivistic attitude, which from my point of view is untenable. . . . ‘Being’ is always something which is mentally constructed by us, that is something which we freely posit.” Cited in Michael Dickson (1999), an article on the entanglement of theory and observation.
18 Matt Ridley (2001) describes the first display of apes at the London Zoo.
19 In a Gallup poll in the United States in May 2011, 30 percent responded that the Bible is the actual word of God, 49 percent that it is an inspired text, and 17 percent that it is a book of fables and legends.
20 I reviewed this book about rape in the New York Times Book Review, 2 April 2000.
21 In 2009, the Pew Research Center asked Americans whether they agreed “that evolution is the best explanation for the origin of human life on earth.” Buddhists (81 percent) and Hindus (80 percent) agreed the most, medium were Catholics (58 percent) and mainline Protestants (51 percent), and lowest were evangelical Protestants (24 percent) and Mormons (22 percent).
22 From a discussion between Matthieu Ricard and his father, Jean-François Revel, a prominent French philosopher, in which Ricard says that science makes “une contribution majeure à des besoins mineurs” (Revel and Ricard, 1997). Ricard recently added that he now feels differently, that science has greatly improved the human condition.
23 Leo Tolstoy (1882) sought answers to questions such as “What is the meaning of my life?” “What will come of my life?” “Why does everything exist that exists, and why do I exist?”
24 Albert Einstein wrote in a letter of 25 October 1929 (Jammer, 1999, p. 51), “We followers of Spinoza see our God in the wonderful order and lawfulness of all that exists and in its soul as it reveals itself in man and animal. It is a different question whether belief in a personal God should be contested. . . . I myself would never engage in such a task. For such a belief seems to me preferable to the lack of any transcendental outlook of life, and I wonder whether one can ever successfully render to the majority of mankind a more sublime means in order to satisfy its metaphysical needs.”
25 Interview in 2011 with Paul Kurtz: www.superscholar.org/interviews/paul-kurtz/.
26 Charles Renouvier (1859), p. 390: “à proprement parler, il n’y a pas de certitude; il y a seulement des hommes certains.”
27 Ursula Goodenough (1999).
28 John Steinbeck (1951), p. 178.
CHAPTER 5: THE PARABLE OF THE GOOD SIMIAN
1 Michel de Montaigne (1877), vol. 1, p. 94.
2 Keith Jensen et al. (2006), p. 1013: “Chimpanzees make their choices based solely on personal gain, with no regard for the outcomes of a conspecific.”
3 Ernst Fehr and Urs Fischbacher (2003).
4 Joan Silk et al. (2005), p. 1359: “The absence of other-regarding preferences in chimpanzees may indicate that such preferences are a derived property of the human species tied to [other] sophisticated capacities.”
5 Victoria Horner et al. (2011a).
6 John Skoyles (2011); see reply by Victoria Horner et al. (2011b).
7 Revenge tactics were statistically confirmed by Frans de Waal (1992).
8 David Freedberg and Vittorio Gallese (2007), p. 197.
9 The first neurophysiological demonstration of human mirror neurons by Roy Mukamel et al. (2010).
10 B. F. Skinner (1953), p. 160.
11 Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson (2004), p. 11.
12 Ivan Norscia and Elisabetta Palagi (2011).
13 Frans de Waal (2009), p. 61.
14 In a letter to Joshua Speed of 24 August 1855, Lincoln wrote, “[It is] a thing which has, and continually exercises, the power of making me miserable.” Available at http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/speed.htm.
15 Grit Hein et al. (2010).
16 Dale Langford et al. (2006).
17 Tony Buchanan et al. (2011).
18 Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal et al. (2011), p. 1429.
19 John Darley and Daniel Batson (1973).
20 Teresa Romero et al. (2010).
21 Shinya Yamamoto et al. (2012).
22 Jill Pruetz and Stacy Lindshield (2011).
CHAPTER 6: TEN COMMANDMENTS TOO MANY
1 Immanuel Kant (1788), Critique of Practical Reason, available at www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5683/pg5683.html.
2 Edward Westermarck (1912), p. 19.
3 According to French media, Tristane Banon compared DSK to a “chimpanzé en rut.”
4 Philip Kitcher (2006), p. 136, borrowed the term “wanton” from Harry Frankfurt (1971), who discussed it in the context of free will.
5 Christophe Boesch (2010).
6 Klaus Scherer (1994), p. 127.
7 For relative cortex size, see Katerina Semendeferi et al. (2002) and Suzana Herculano-Houzel (2009).
8 For delayed gratification in apes, see Theodore Evans and Michael Beran (2007).
9 Jesse Prinz (2006), p. 37.
10 Konrad Lorenz (1960).
11 Chris Coe and Leonard Rosenblum (1984) describe the experiment in which subordinate males reacted “in a manner that acknowledges a perceived violation of the social code.”
12 From Frans de Waal (1982), p. 92.
13 Jessica Flack et al. (2004).
14 See Kevin Langergraber et al. (2007), Joan Silk et al. (2009), and Carl Zimmer, “Friends with benefits,” Time, 20 February 2012.
15 David Hume (1739) notes how often authors move from descriptions of how things are to statements of how things ought to be, adding, p. 335, “This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.”
16 Patricia Churchland (2011).
17 Eric de Bruyn (2010).
18 Wilhelm Fränger (1951).
19 Henry Miller (1957), p. 29.
20 Philip Kitcher (2011), p. 207.
21 Favorable parole board rulings by Israeli judges were close to 0 percent before their lunch break, but about 65 percent thereafter (Danziger et al., 2011).
22 Blaise Pascal (1669): “Le cœur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point,” from Pascal’s Pensées, Gutenberg ebook, www.gutenberg.org.
23 Claudia von Rohr et al. (2012).
24 Francys Subiaul et al. (2008).
25 Victoria Horner et al. (2010).
26 Edward Westermarck (1917), p. 238.
27 Edward Westermarck (1912), p. 38.
28 Christopher Boehm (2012).
29 Richard Lee (1969).
30 Michael Alvard (2004) and Joseph Henrich et al. (2001).
31 Shortened from Milton Diamond (1990), p. 423.
32 On human sexual variety, including comparisons with bonobos, see Sarah Hrdy (2009), Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá (2010), Robert Walker et al. (2010), and Frans de Waal (2005).
33 Georgia representative Lynn Westmoreland on The Colbert Report, 14 June 2006.
34 Christopher Hitchens (2007), p. 99.
35 Sam Harris (2010).
36 The British philosopher Simon Blackburn made this “fools paradise” argument in a public rebuttal of Harris, in 2010: www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8vYq6Xm2To&feature=related.
37 Recognition of kinship by plants by Susan Dudley and Amanda File (2007).
38 Debate during the Tanner Lectures at Princeton University, in 2004. See Stephen Macedo and Josiah Ober (2006).
39 Michael Specter, “The dangerous philosopher,” The New Yorker, 6 September 1999.
40 The American philosopher Mark Johnson (1993), p. 5, wrote, “It is morally irresponsible to think and act as though we possess a universal, disembodied reason that generates absolute rules, decision-making procedures, and universal or categorical laws by which we can tell right from wrong in any situation we encounter.”
41 This debate is too complex to be covered in detail by a nonphilosopher, such as myself. Apart from the books mentioned by Kitcher and Churchland, I recommend Martha Nussbaum (2001) and Richard Joyce (2005).
42 Bonobo stories from the Milwaukee County Zoo, told by the ape caretaker Barbara Bell to Jo Sandin (2007) and myself.
CHAPTER 7: THE GOD GAP
1 Voltaire (1768), p. 402: “Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer.”
2 Following chronic infection, Makali’s finger had to be amputated by a veterinarian.
3 Geza Teleki (1973).
4 James Anderson et al. (2010), p. R351.
5 Nahoko Tokuyama et al. (2012).
6 Bert Haanstra’s 1984 film documentary, The Family of Chimps.
7 Jeffrey Levin (1994) and William Strawbridge et al. (1997).
8 Jane Goodall (2005), p. 1304.
9 Victoria Horner and Andrew Whiten (2005).
10 Philip Dray (2005).
11 Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson (1996) and Richard Byrne (1995).
12 Mathias Osvath (2009).
13 Mathias and Helena Osvath (2008).
14 Natacha Mendes et al. (2007).
15 Tetsuro Matsuzawa (2011), p. 304.
16 Ara Norenzayan and Ian Hansen (2006).
17 Carl Linfert (1972).
18 BBC, The Forum, 10 October 2010.
19 Roberta Smith, “Just when you thought it was safe,” New York Times, 16 October 2007.
20 Daniel Everett (2005), p. 30. Andrew Nevins et al. (2009) express doubt about the absence of myths and beliefs in the Pirahã.
21 Richard Sosis and Eric Bressler (2003).
22 Emma Cohen et al. (2010).
23 David Sloan Wilson (2002), p. 159.
24 Pascal Boyer (2010), p. 85.
25 Michael Fitzgerald, “Why science is more fragile than faith,” Boston Globe, 8 January 2012. See also Robert McCauley (2011).
26 William Arsenio and Melanie Killen (1996).
27 Sigmund Freud (1928), p. 89.
28 Sam Harris said, “There would be a religion of reason,” in answer to the question what a world without God might look like. Gary Wolf, “The church of the non-believers,” Wired, November 2006.
29 Philip Kitcher (2009).
30 Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff (2008), and Shariff and Norenzayan (2007).
31 Deepak Malhotra (2010) and Benjamin Edelman (2009).
32 Laura Saslow et al. (2012).
CHAPTER 8: BOTTOM-UP MORALITY
1 Michel de Montaigne (1877), vol. 3, p. 499.
2 A fifteenth-century Dutch expression about life is “Tis al hoy en stof” (It’s all hay and dust).
3 Erwin Panofsky (1966), p. 357.
4 The expression “Mama Grizzly” was made popular in 2008 by the vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
5 Hans Kummer (1995).
6 Frans de Waal (2000).
7 Marc Bekoff (2001), p. 85.
8 Joe Henrich et al. (2001) and Alan Sanfey et al. (2003).
9 Thomas Hobbes (1651), p. 36.
10 The monkey-fairness video concludes my 2012 TED talk, available at www.ted.com/talks.
11 Panbanisha’s incident is related in Frans de Waal (1997a) by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, who believes that her bonobos are happiest when everyone receives the same.
12 Megan van Wolkenten et al. (2007).
13 Sarah Brosnan et al. (2010).
14 Friederike Range et al. (2008).
15 Christopher Boehm (2012).
16 Peter Derkx (2011).
17 Candace Calloway Whiting, “Humpback whales intervene in orca attack on gray whale calf,” Digital Journal, 8 May 2012, available at http://digitaljournal.com/article/324348.
18 Jonathan Gallagher, “Evolution? No: A conversation with Dr. Ben Carson,” Adventist Review, 26 February 2004.