Up Your Family Tree with Frans de Waal

Frans de Waal Introduces Our Oldest Family Values

Primatologist and popular writer, Frans de Waal wants us to understand that human nature isn't something that has only to do with us but is rich with features embedded in nature, nature we share with our great ape cousins and other primates.

His research, reflected in his exceptionally readable and bestselling books, shows how clearly we are part of the expanding tree of evolution and how much we have in common with our primate cousins.

"The enemy of science is not religion," he writes in The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates.

"The true enemy is the substitution of thought, reflection, and curiosity with dogma."

But don't get the idea he takes the side of science over other sources of understanding.

He sees scientists, especially prominent, vocal atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, as susceptible to blinding dogmatism as religious advocates.

He even has a fun time describing a debate between the two camps and describes the participants as "the usual suspects."

What he sees as a hopeless crusade by militant atheists to persuade people away from their religious beliefs amounts to "trying to save fish from drowning," as humorously observed by novelist Amy Tan.

But before he took on the conflict between reason and faith, his mission was to understand how humans got to be moral animals and the role religion and nature have in moral development.

De Waal's latest book takes his research findings farther into the discovery of our place in nature. A question he has long been interested in - Where does morality come from? - is convincingly answered.

For centuries, the unchallenged answer was "religion" or, at least moral and philosophical teachings.

But as his book shows, morality predates homo sapiens - modern humans.

Empathy, rules, regulations and fairness permeate primate culture, no religion necessary. A community's need to work together in harmony trumps the selfish impulse animals are often tagged with.

Just yesterday in a news story, a vicious criminal was described as not being human but "an animal."

According to the evidence, this seems unfair to the animals, assuming we believe, contrary to reason, that we are not animals ourselves.

Barbara Tuchman's book A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century was a revelation for me. Tuchman held the Twentieth Century up next to the Fourteenth and asked us how much the centuries changed us.

De Waal takes the question deeper.

In his books, de Waal goes back millennia to find what we have in common with our great ape ancestors and what we can learn from that.

What he finds should make anyone feel a sense of relief.

Morality evolved, just as brains did and our preference for walking upright. Living in groups helped communities survive and taught us the benefits of compassion and cooperation.

We really just need to get used to the idea that morality, kindness and empathy are not exclusive to humans.

We got all that from our oldest ancestors and built on it.

Are humans just another ape or something very different?

Frans de Waal on moral animals of all species.