by Salman Hameed

If you have a chance you should read at least on of the books by primatologist, Frans de Waal. I was introduced to his work with The Ape and the Sushi Master and have been a fan ever since. He works on the origins of morality and is a fantastic writer. His latest book, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism among the Primates looks at the moral landscape today, including the debates between militant atheism and religion. From a review in Nature:

Frans de Waal's latest book, The Bonobo and the Atheist, is both an exceptionally good

read and a tour de force of scholarship. In it, de Waal states his argument for the evolution of human empathy with the sophistication of a well-grounded, risk-taking scientist who can venture into philosophy.
...
De Waal views extreme strains of atheism as getting “all worked up about the absence of something”, at one point using the fanciful device of a talking bonobo as his mouthpiece (hence the book's title). His view is that religion is undeniably in our bones — even though evidence of primate precursors seems less than substantial. This does not mean that he is pro-religion, however. The Bonobo and the Atheist is permeated with the ethos of secular humanism, using the Renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights — a vision of humanity freed from narrow moral constraints — as a touchstone for his arguments. 

In his discussion of empathy and morality, de Waal has little time for what he calls “veneer theories” that reduce altruism to 'natural' selfishness. As he shows, human altruism has analogues in a wide range of species, even though sterile ants' care for the offspring of their queen can hardly be labelled empathy. When dolphins assist humans struggling in the water, we may at least suggest some basic similarities. But when a chimpanzee, sharing more than 95% of our DNA, helps an unrelated member of its group to lick a wound it cannot reach, a type of empathy very near the human is surely coming into play. 

Many evolutionists favour chimpanzees as ancestral models. Whereas de Waal does look frequently to chimpanzees as exemplars of primate altruism, he champions the less violent bonobo — not least because its habitat, like that of our common primate ancestor, remains the tropical forest, whereas chimpanzees and humans have evolved into ecological generalists. 

De Waal looks to mothering and infant care by non-kin, a basic form of empathy discussed by primatologist Sarah Hrdy in Mothers and Others (Harvard University Press, 2011), as the foundation of human altruism and complex cooperation, and as his prime evolutionary building block for morality. He also emphasizes the importance of emotion in moral choices, citing the work of psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind (Allen Lane, 2012). Haidt's empirical investigations of subjects' disgusted reactions to incest demonstrate that when it comes to morality, raw emotions trump rationality.

Read the full review here.

Also, see Frans de Waal's TED talk, Moral Behavior in Animals:


And he recently got embroiled in a controversy when he criticized some of the New Atheists. Here is de Waal's response and this also nicely encapsulates his book:

Having heard the protests by prominent atheists against the excerpt published by salon.com (under the inflammatory banner "Has militant atheism become a religion?"), let me say that the role of religion and atheism covers only about 10% of my book. It is an important part, hence the book title, but needs to be weighed against the rest of my message. In order to discuss the biological origins of morality, which is its central theme, I need to get two groups out of the way. One is fundamentalist religion, for which morality comes from God. The other are the neo-atheists who, by labeling themselves rational and everyone else irrational, have closed the door to open and tolerant debate. Calling believers idiots can't possibly be a good discussion opener. This explains my stance against militant atheism (a label that is not mine, but Dawkins' by the way). 

My book is about how morality doesn't come from above but rather is an evolutionary product. I speak of bottom-up morality, in line with the ideas of some psychologists (Haidt), philosophers and neuroscientists (Kitcher, Churchland). The book is rooted in my research on monkeys, apes, elephants, and other animals, and my conviction that they show the beginnings of morality. I have written about this before, but now I am bringing religion into the mix. Even though I don't think religion is absolutely critical, it is also not irrelevant. The question how humans would fare without it is hard to answer for the simple reason that religion is universal. There are no societies that are not now and never were religious. 

Morality promotes cooperation. It asks us to put our personal interests on the back-burner and work for the common good. It is a complex system that religion and philosophy have tried to capture in simple rules (such as the golden rule or the ten commandments), but these rules provide only imperfect summaries. We like to think of morality as top-down, but this is merely a left-over of the story of God on the mountain top. There is no evidence that it started out as a top-down system. Science is rather coming around to the Humean view of morality guided by intuitions and passions. Looking at other primates, we recognize many of the same tendencies that underlie our morality, such as rules of reciprocity, empathy and sympathy, a sense of fairness, and the need to get along. Monkeys, for example, object to unfair distributions of resources (see the end of my TED talk), and chimpanzees do each other favors even if there is nothing in it for themselves. Bonobos are probably the most empathic animals of all, and the recent genome data places them extremely close to us.
...
Human morality goes beyond all of this, but ancient primate tendencies do play a crucial role. We have been indoctrinated that nature is "red in tooth and claw," and entirely selfish, but we are now learning about conflict resolution, cooperation, empathy, and the like, in our fellow primates. They are far more harmony-oriented than people realize. I don't necessarily call apes "moral beings," but we share with them an old psychology without which we'd never have become moral.

Atheism will need to be combined with something else, something more constructive than its opposition to religion, to be relevant to our lives. The only possibility is to embrace morality as natural to our species. Otherwise atheism will end up in the Big Black Hole that Thomas Henry Huxley created for himself in the 19th Century. He did not believe morality came from God, but also denied its possible evolution. He could not explain where it came from except for saying that we had to fight very hard against our own nature to become moral (which is of course an ancient Christian position related to original sin, and so on). In this, Huxley went against Darwin himself, who did see room for moral evolution, as explained in "The Descent of Man." To debate these important issues we all need to step back, stop shouting, and move beyond unanswerable questions about the existence of God. Atheists should be interested in this debate and I hope they will join in.

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by Salman Hameed

Jonathan Haidt is a smart guy and he's had interesting things to say in the past. I'm currently reading his new book, The Righteous Mind:Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion and Iike it so far (I'm still in the first part of the book). Here is his recent TED talk on the topic of origins of religious experiences. Below his talk I have also embedded a talk by David Sloan Wilson - again on the topic of group selection and the search for the origins of religion. That talk was one of the first talks of Hampshire College Lecture Series on Science and Religion.

But first, here is Jonathan Haidt on Religion, Evolution and the Ecstasy of Self-Transcendance (by the way, great visuals!):



And here is David Sloan Wilson on Evolution and Religion:

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by Salman Hameed

The issue of morality often gets entangled with religion. But the origins of certain behaviors that we term 'moral' can be traced in our evolutionary pasts. Of course, one can argue that those characteristics are part of the natural world because of the laws put in place by God. At the same time, the search for the origins of those laws (like any other scientific question) falls under the purview of science, and the following talk is about that. Here is primatologist Frans de Waal talking about Morality without Religion. By the way, if you haven't read his books, you should definitely check those out. He is an excellent writer. I was hooked on to his books after reading The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist.

Here is the Tedx talk by Frans de Waal. Also note the fascinating videos of chimps from the Yerkes Archive.

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These couple of talks are part of a workshop and a panel at ASU on Can science tell us right from wrong. The panel had both scientists and philosophers, and yet I was surprised at the way philosophy was denigrated by some on the panel (you have to see the panel discussion for that or the opening talk by Sam Harris). Nevertheless, there is some fascinating discussion on this very tricky topic. Here are two talks that especially stood out for me. The first one is by Simon Blackburn, where he brings up places where it is hard for science to provide adequate answers, unless one defines science in a very broad term that incorporates reason and rationality more broadly - and be inclusive of philosophy. The talks here are relatively short (about 10-12 minutes in length). So here is Blackburn (tip from Laura Sizer):



And here is the talk by Steven Pinker:



The discussion that followed runs up for about 45 minutes, and you can watch it in three parts (part 1, part 2, part 3). If you are interested in some good discussion of whether an ought can be derived from an is, tune in to 10 minutes into part 2, and keep watching into the first 5 minutes of part 3 (Blackburn's takedown of Krauss here is entertaining).

In any case, these are fascinating talks and you can watch them all here.

One other note: When you go to the link above, you will also find a lecture by Sean Carroll at the bottom (I could not embed it here, nor could I find a separate link to it). The lecture is titled, Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species, and is about the voyages of Wallace, Bates, and Darwin in the nineteenth century. The lecture is very good and provides some fascinating details of Wallace's trips to the Amazon and southeast Asia. Perhaps, more importantly, it captures the spirit of wonder in these three important figures of biology. I highly recommend this lecture (it is about 50 minutes long, but is entertaining)! So scroll down to the bottom to find Sean Carroll's lecture.
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May be Frans de Waal also attended Jon Stewart's rally to restore sanity. He is definitely urging to tone-down some of the rhetoric in science-religion debates. He is responding to the reaction generated by an article he wrote a few weeks ago, Morals without God?. Whatever one's position regarding God & religion, he is interested in engaging with questions that are intellectually interesting. In general, we hope we are doing the same on this blog. Here is de Waal:

To have a productive debate, religion needs to recognize the power of the scientific method and the truths it has revealed, but its opponents need to recognize that one cannot simply dismiss a social phenomenon found in every major society. If humans are inherently religious, or at least show rituals related to the supernatural, there is a big question to be answered. The issue is not whether or not God exists — which I find to be a monumentally uninteresting question defined, as it is, by the narrow parameters of monotheism — but why humans universally feel the need for supernatural entities. Is this just to stay socially connected or does it also underpin morality? And if so, what will happen to morality in its absence?

Just raising such an obvious issue has become controversial in an atmosphere in which public forums seem to consist of pro-science partisans or pro-religion partisans, and nothing in between. How did we arrive at this level of polarization, this small-mindedness, as if we are taking part in the Oxford Debating Society, where all that matters is winning or losing? It is unfortunate when, in discussing how to lead our lives and why to be good — very personal questions — we end up with a shouting match. There are in fact no answers to these questions, only approximations, and while science may be an excellent source of information it is simply not designed to offer any inspiration in this regard.

The last part is almost another way of saying Gould's Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA). Yes, this approach also runs into problem as groups may define boundaries in a different way. In fact, for many, de Waal's own work on the origins of morality may be overstepping the boundaries. But I think there can be a civil discussion about boundaries themselves - especially when it comes to the questions of origins (as we run into those frequently when dealing with science & religion). Perhaps in this context, NOMA can serve as a good initial point to start such conversations.

Here is de Waal again:

What I would love to see is a debate among moderates. Perhaps it is an illusion that this can be achieved on the Internet, given how it magnifies disagreements, but I do think that most people will be open to a debate that respects both the beliefs held by many and the triumphs of science. There is no obligation for non-religious people to hate religion, and many believers are open to interrogating their own convictions. If the radicals on both ends are unable to talk with each other, this should not keep the rest of us from doing so.

Yes we can (oh - sorry, this is from 2008). But yes, Frans, we are definitely with you on this.

Read the full article here.
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NPR is running an excellent series, How Evolution Gave Us the Human Edge (yay - we are #1!!). Its latest installment was on the sense of fairness in humans - and what capuchin monkeys can tell us about the origin of this trait in humans. Listen to the episode here (it is about 6 minutes long). This also provides me with an opportunity to announce our next Science & Religion lecture at Hampshire College on Wednesday, September 22nd at 5:30pm. Our speaker is anthropologist Barbara J King (see her blog here). The title of her talk is Gorillas and God: Evolutionary Roots of Religion. I will have another announcement as time gets closer, but if you are in the area and are interested in the lecture, please save the date.
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Here is another fascinating short episode (about 20 min) from Radiolab (from last year). The show is about how we think about what is right and wrong, and the difference between our emotional and the rational part of the brain. The program starts with a moral puzzle of asking if one would kill his or her baby, if this act would result in saving the lives of many (you have to listen to the podcast to get the proper scenario). The discussion here is fascinating and I like Jad's response that, of course, no father could ever think of doing that (the results actually suggest that 50% would choose to save many lives). However, this got me thinking about honor-killings - the despicable act of killing a son or a daughter (usually daughters) for the sake of saving the honor of the family. Here is a case where cultural issues perhaps short-circuit the rational part of the brain so much that one is willing to kill one's offspring simply over a disagreement (usually associated with marriage choices). While socially despicable, this may be an interesting premise to explore in testing the limits of such moral puzzles (and just to be clear, unlike the scenario presented above, there is absolutely no justification whatsoever regarding honor-killings!).

The most fascinating part of the program dealt with our increasing ability to deal with abstract thoughts - and how it is changing the way we use our brain. Josh Greene, here, is certainly hopeful that we can learn to think about long-scale problems, such as climate change and nuclear proliferation and is optimistic about about our the future of our species. Also, I totally loved the experiment where the task of remembering large numbers resulted in an overwhelming choice of eating a chocolate cake over fruit salad. Confused about how all of this related to saving the world? Well check out the full podcast.

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Here is a contentious Point of Inquiry interview with Chris Hedges. While Hedges goes a bit too far in labeling the New Atheists as "fundamentalists", his overall criticism is quite interesting (and perhaps valid) - especially on the caricatured depictions of Muslims by the New Atheists (mostly Sam Harris). In response to the question about the promotion of secularism in the Muslim world, it was good to see him bring up "which Muslim country" - Bosnia, Turkey, Morocco? Or Saudi Arabia, Sudan? The interviewer, DJ Grothe, is usually very good - but here he sounds a bit defensive and he kept on making huge generalizations (such as the attitude of the "left" towards Islamic fundamentalism or "Muslim" reaction to the West). On the other hand, the skepticism of Hedges towards reason to potentially improve our lives is also discomforting. Do check out the interview as it raises good questions and, at the same time, I'm sure you'll find things in here to vehemently disagree (or angry) with.

Here is Chris Hedges bio:

Chris Hedges is a journalist and author who focuses on American and Middle Eastern politics and society. He is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City and a Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University. He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than fifty countries, and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, where he spent fifteen years. He is the author of What Every Person Should Know About War and American Fascists. His newest book is I Don't Believe in Atheists.

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Here is an excellent interview with Marc Hauser at the Point of Inquiry podcast. The questions at the beginning and at the end of the interview center around the issues of science, religion, and morality. Yes - morality can be explained without the supernatural and Hauser does a good job of separating science from religion on these matters. But most of the interview is about morality research, in particular, Hauser's work in the area. Here is a summary of the topics discussed:

In this interview with D.J. Grothe, Marc Hauser expounds his theory that morality has biological origins while challenging the common view that morality comes from God. He compares the human capacity for morality with Noam Chomsky's notion of a universal grammar, arguing that there is a "morality module" in the brain. He explains how his theory accounts for differences in morality across cultures, and discusses how morality could have evolved and what genetic benefit it might have afforded. He also explores the implications of his theory for the legal system, and for cultural institutions like religion and the family.

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This is part of a conference Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0, which was held this past November. It is a fascinating conference (this is actually the second one in the series - the first was in 2006) and all of the lectures are available on line with high quality sound and good video (you can also buy a DVD of the event and support The Science Network). It is a good way to spend 20 hours of your life with some of the most prominent names in the field and to a second order, get an experience of actually being at the conference (minus the coffee and the food). I have gone through the lectures and in the coming weeks, I will be posting on the blog some of those directly related to science & religion.

Here is a TV interview with philosopher Daniel Dennett at the end of the conference. He is the author of, among other books, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon and Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. The most interesting part is about belief in belief (in God), but there is also a good discussion about consciousness, evolution of brain, and in the Q&A, about animal intelligence. Enjoy!

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Now this is entertainment!! I had never seen The View before, but now I know what I was missing. Actually, Whoopi Goldberg comes out pretty good (and why not - after all she was on Star Trek). The co-host illuminating us about evolution is Sherri Shepherd. Quite appropriately, this is on her website:

Now just keep praying, that every morning I don't put my foot in my mouth - but if you know me, it's bound to happen :O)

Alas - This seems to be another prayer test that has failed completely.

And here is the article from New York Times that prompted the conversation on The View about the origins of morality: Is Do Unto Others Written in Our Genes?

Enjoy! And please please if you have never ever thought about the shape of the Earth - close your eyes, take a deep breath, and think about it now.

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Here is part of an interview with primatologist, Frans de Waal, in The Believer dealing with the evolution of morality:

BLVR: Much of your work recently has been aimed at correcting another misconception—that morality is exclusively a human invention, something that evolved long after we split from other apes. Do you think apes and bonobos are moral species? Do they exhibit moral behavior?

FDW: Well, I usually don’t call it moral behavior. I tend to call it building blocks or prerequisites for morality. I don’t think that chimpanzees are moral beings in the human sense. But they do have empathy, sympathy, reciprocity. They share food, resolve conflicts. All of these elements are present in human morality. So what I argue is that the basic psychology of the great apes is an essential element of human morality. Humans add things to that, making our morality far more complex. And that’s why I don’t want to call chimpanzees moral beings exactly.

BLVR: Why do you want to hesitate if you believe that chimpanzees have gratitude and empathy, indignation, maybe, what we call the moral emotions?

FDW: They have the moral emotions, yes. You can see gratitude, outrage, a sense of fairness—you can see parallels and equivalences in all the great apes. But to get to morality you need more than just the emotions. So yes, empathy is a good thing to have. And I cannot imagine how humans could have morality without empathy, but what morality adds to that, for example, is what Adam Smith termed the “impartial spectator.” You need to be able to look at a situation, and make a judgment about that situation even though it doesn’t affect you yourself. So I can see an interaction between two humans and say this one is wrong and this one is right. I’m not convinced that chimpanzees have this kind of distance in their judgments. They certainly have judgments about what they do and how they interact with others. And how others treat them. I’m sure they have opinions about that, about how to react to that, but whether they have opinions about more abstract interactions around them and a concept about what kind of society they want to live in. Do they have a concept about fairness between others, or do they only care about fairness for themselves? That kind of distance that you see in human moral reasoning. I’m not sure you’ll find that in a chimpanzee.

BLVR: Correct me if I’m wrong but I thought I read something in Chimpanzee Politics and some other work indicating that chimps do react with a kind of indignation when they see one chimp mistreating another chimp. A third party will react, punishing the offender.

FDW: Yes, true. Yes.

BLVR: Wouldn’t that count?

FDW: Yes—I think you can probably find examples of this in chimpanzee life. But in a way even the interactions around them affect themselves: these are their friends, their relatives, their rivals. They are never impartial spectators. If chimpanzees have a morality, it likely is a self-centered morality.

BLVR: Can you give some examples of empathy in other species?

FDW: Well, yes. Today, you saw that old [chimpanzee] female Penny who can barely get up on the climb bars, right?

BLVR: Yes.

FDW: We often see young females push her up onto the climber. So that’s altruistic helping because it’s really hard to imagine that they’re doing it to get some favor back from this old lady. I give many examples in my books of sophisticated empathetic behavior in chimpanzees, including those that clearly require “theory of mind”—the ability to take the perspective of other chimps.

BLVR: So you think when a young chimp is helping Penny up the climb bars, she feels her frustration in some way, and she does this by taking her perspective, imagining what it must be like not to be able to climb on her own?

FDW: Well, the young chimp must understand Penny’s goal and also the trouble she has trying to reach her goal. That’s a very complex action right there. In humans there is a literature that says that perspective-taking requires a strong sense of self. A “self-other” distinction. Which is why in children, perspective-taking comes only at two years, when they are able to recognize themselves in the mirror. So we did the mirror-recognition experiments with chimps and also recently with elephants. Because elephants are very well known as highly altruistic animals. And they have large brains. So the thinking was that more complex empathy, based on perspective-taking, must correlate with mirror recognition.

Read the full interview here.
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I will write about the Science & Religion conference at Lancaster University in the next couple of days. In the mean time here is an interesting study that claims that altruism may be linked with religious themes - independent of actual beliefs. Introduction of civic concepts (like jury, contract, police) also has a similar impact that results in increased cooperation.

To investigate how belief in supernatural agents might influence cooperation, Shariff and his colleague Ara Norenzayan used a word game to stealthily introduce religious concepts to their subjects.

Participants had to unscramble five-word sentences, dropping an extraneous word from each to create a grammatical four-word sentence. For example, "felt she eradicate spirit the" would become "she felt the spirit," and "dessert divine was fork the" could become "the dessert was divine." A control group unscrambled sentences made up of non-spiritual words.

After this exercise, the participants played an economic decision-making game. Each player was given $10 to share with an anonymous recipient.

Participants primed with religious concepts gave their partner an average of $4.22, compared with only $1.84 in the control group. But those who declared themselves religious before the study were no more generous than non-believers.

"The effect of the religious prime was both large and surprising, especially considering that during exit interviews the participants were unaware of having been religiously primed," says Shariff.

A second study introduced a third group, primed with words associated with civic responsibility such as "jury", contract", and "police." This group behaved almost identically to that primed with religious concepts.

And on the reasons for this correlation:

But why such priming makes people more charitable is unclear. "The fact that primes to civic institutions also produced more charitable behaviour gives some clues," he says. "Perhaps religion and these civic institutions have certain functions or effects in common."

Whether religion and civic responsibilities are equally effective spurs to cooperation remains to be seen. "We can't compare the relative strengths of religion and civics, or draw tight analogies to real-world situations," says Shariff. "What we can do is identify that both concepts have substantial effects on prosocial behaviour."

The Nature story doesn't mention the number of participants in the study and followup studies will be interesting. Read the full story here.


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Whenever evolution is discussed in religious context, the issue of soul is brought up. Many are willing to accept evolution as long as there is room for "special" soul for humans. This way we can claim that we are different than any other creature on Earth and retain human uniqueness. But more and more it is becoming clear that human mind is simply a product of evolution without much room for the soul. Here is an article in New York Times, Science of the Soul?, that talks about this issue and presents three different interpretations:

no soul = no God (its all in the head):

The idea that human minds are the product of evolution is “unassailable fact,” the journal Nature said this month in an editorial on new findings on the physical basis of moral thought. A headline on the editorial drove the point home: “With all deference to the sensibilities of religious people, the idea that man was created in the image of God can surely be put aside.”

Or as V. S. Ramachandran, a brain scientist at the University of California, San Diego, put it in an interview, there may be soul in the sense of “the universal spirit of the cosmos,” but the soul as it is usually spoken of, “an immaterial spirit that occupies individual brains and that only evolved in humans — all that is complete nonsense.” Belief in that kind of soul “is basically superstition,” he said.

For people like the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, talk of the soul is of a piece with the rest of the palaver of religious faith, which he has likened to a disease. And among evolutionary psychologists, religious faith is nothing but an evolutionary artifact, a predilection that evolved because shared belief increased group solidarity and other traits that contribute to survival and reproduction.

soul = something else or still need a definition or everything has a soul:

For Dr. Murphy and Dr. Haught, though, people make a mistake when they assume that people can be “ensouled” only if other creatures are soulless.

“Evolutionary biology shows the transition from animal to human to be too gradual to make sense of the idea that we humans have souls while animals do not,” wrote Dr. Murphy, an ordained minister in the Church of the Brethren. “All the human capacities once attributed to the mind or soul are now being fruitfully studied as brain processes — or, more accurately, I should say, processes involving the brain, the rest of the nervous system and other bodily systems, all interacting with the socio-cultural world.”

Therefore, she writes, it is “faulty” reasoning to want to distinguish people from the rest of creation. She and Dr. Haught cite the ideas of Thomas Aquinas, the 13th-century philosopher and theologian who, Dr. Haught said, “spoke of a vegetative and animal soul along with the human soul.”

Dr. Haught, who testified for the American Civil Liberties Union when it successfully challenged the teaching of intelligent design, an ideological cousin of creationism, in the science classrooms of Dover, Pa., said, “The way I look at it, instead of eliminating the notion of a human soul in order to make us humans fit seamlessly into the rest of nature, it’s wiser to recognize that there is something analogous to soul in all living beings.”

soul = not a scientific question:

For scientists who are people of faith, like Kenneth R. Miller, a biologist at Brown University, asking about the science of the soul is pointless, in a way, because it is not a subject science can address. “It is not physical and investigateable in the world of science,” he said.

“Everything we know about the biological sciences says that life is a phenomenon of physics and chemistry, and therefore the notion of some sort of spirit to animate it and give the flesh a life really doesn’t fit with modern science,” said Dr. Miller, a Roman Catholic whose book, “Finding Darwin’s God” (Harper, 1999) explains his reconciliation of the theory of evolution with religious faith. “However, if you regard the soul as something else, as you might, say, the spiritual reflection of your individuality as a human being, then the theology of the soul it seems to me is on firm ground.”

Dr. Miller, who also testified in the Dover case, said he spoke often at college campuses and elsewhere and was regularly asked, “What do you say as a scientist about the soul?” His answer, he said, is always the same: “As a scientist, I have nothing to say about the soul. It’s not a scientific idea.”

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From New York Times (3/20):
Scientist finds the beginnings of morality in primate behavior

The scientist here is Frans de Waal. He is a fantastic writer and here the article is talking about his new book Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved in which he argues that morality in humans has evolved through natural selection and we can learn about its origins through the behavior of non-human primates.

Dr. de Waal, who is director of the Living Links Center at Emory University, argues that all social animals have had to constrain or alter their behavior in various ways for group living to be worthwhile. These constraints, evident in monkeys and even more so in chimpanzees, are part of human inheritance, too, and in his view form the set of behaviors from which human morality has been shaped.

Many philosophers find it hard to think of animals as moral beings, and indeed Dr. de Waal does not contend that even chimpanzees possess morality. But he argues that human morality would be impossible without certain emotional building blocks that are clearly at work in chimp and monkey societies.

Dr. de Waal’s views are based on years of observing nonhuman primates, starting with work on aggression in the 1960s. He noticed then that after fights between two combatants, other chimpanzees would console the loser. But he was waylaid in battles with psychologists over imputing emotional states to animals, and it took him 20 years to come back to the subject.

He found that consolation was universal among the great apes but generally absent from monkeys — among macaques, mothers will not even reassure an injured infant. To console another, Dr. de Waal argues, requires empathy and a level of self-awareness that only apes and humans seem to possess. And consideration of empathy quickly led him to explore the conditions for morality.

Though human morality may end in notions of rights and justice and fine ethical distinctions, it begins, Dr. de Waal says, in concern for others and the understanding of social rules as to how they should be treated. At this lower level, primatologists have shown, there is what they consider to be a sizable overlap between the behavior of people and other social primates.

Social living requires empathy, which is especially evident in chimpanzees, as well as ways of bringing internal hostilities to an end. Every species of ape and monkey has its own protocol for reconciliation after fights, Dr. de Waal has found. If two males fail to make up, female chimpanzees will often bring the rivals together, as if sensing that discord makes their community worse off and more vulnerable to attack by neighbors. Or they will head off a fight by taking stones out of the males’ hands.

Dr. de Waal believes that these actions are undertaken for the greater good of the community, as distinct from person-to-person relationships, and are a significant precursor of morality in human societies.

Of course, this automatically leads to the question of origin(s) of religion:

Dr. de Waal sees human morality as having grown out of primate sociality, but with two extra levels of sophistication. People enforce their society’s moral codes much more rigorously with rewards, punishments and reputation building. They also apply a degree of judgment and reason, for which there are no parallels in animals.

Religion can be seen as another special ingredient of human societies, though one that emerged thousands of years after morality, in Dr. de Waal’s view. There are clear precursors of morality in nonhuman primates, but no precursors of religion. So it seems reasonable to assume that as humans evolved away from chimps, morality emerged first, followed by religion. “I look at religions as recent additions,” he said. “Their function may have to do with social life, and enforcement of rules and giving a narrative to them, which is what religions really do.

Also check out Frans de Waal's Chimapanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes and The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural reflections of a Primatologist

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Several new books have come out on the topic of origin of religious beliefs in the past few months. The latest is by an anthropologist, Barbara King, and its called Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion. Her theory is based on the studies of social behaviour of apes and monkeys.

Here is a long Salon.com interview with Barbara King.

The Salon article does a good job of summarizing some major ideas on origin of religious beliefs in one paragraph:

Take Daniel Dannett, the philosopher who has proposed that religion is a meme -- an idea that evolved like a virus -- that infected our ancestors and continued to spread throughout cultures. By contrast, anthropologist Pascal Boyer argues that religious belief is a quirky byproduct of a brain that evolved to detect predators and other survival needs. In this view, the brain developed a hair-trigger detection system to believe the world is full of "agents" that affect our lives. And British biologist Lewis Wolpert, with yet another theory, posits that religion developed once hominids understood cause and effect, which allowed them to make complex tools. Once they started to make causal connections, they felt compelled to explain life's mysteries. Their brains, in essence, turned into "belief engines."

King's basic idea regarding religion is also summarized in the article (there is obviously more detail in the interview and in her book):

For the last two decades, King has studied ape and monkey behavior in Gabon and Kenya, and at the Smithsonian's National Zoo. In her new book, "Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion," King argues that religion is rooted in our social and emotional connections with each other. What's more, we can trace back the origins of our religious impulse not just to early cave paintings and burial sites 20,000 to 40,000 years ago, but much earlier -- back to our ancient ancestors millions of years ago. And today, King says, we can see the foundations of religious behavior in chimpanzees and gorillas; watching our distant cousins can do much to explain the foundations of our own beliefs.

But more relevant here is her response regarding science & religion compatibility:

I'm part of the camp of people who thinks it's perfectly possible to see religion and science as compatible areas of thought and inquiry. In my book, I lay out three choices. You can say you've got to choose one. You can believe in science or you can have faith in God -- the Richard Dawkins school of thought. Or you can say there are "non-overlapping magisteria" -- the famous Stephen Jay Gould answer that religion will help us with meaning, and science will tell us about other things. I'm actually in a third place. If you can avoid being a biblical literalist, and if you can avoid being an arrogant scientist who tells everyone else what to think, you can think on multiple levels at once. There's a lot of beauty in seeing that religion and science are really about the same things. They can be perfectly compatible.

She describes herself as spiritual - which is quite a vague category. Her view on the compatibility of science & religion is equally vague. Of course, they can be compatible if you consider the feeling of awe provided by science as a religious experience - and that is indeed a good way of thinking about religion and science. But I'm not sure if this is what she is saying. Otherwise, its quite hard to make science & religion compatible/tolerable without resorting to Gould's non-overlapping magestaria (which has its own problems).
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As my 'science & religion' co-teacher Laura Sizer can testify, I try my best to avoid any discussion about free will. Its totally fine if I don't have free-will - but please don't tell me that I don't have it. So to my horror, the lead story in Science Times today is about free-will:
Free Will: Now you Have it, Now you Don't (NYT 1/2/07)

Its actually a good summary of the debate and it quite rightly points out that if people are uncomfortable about evolution, wait till they hear questions about free will:

“Is it an illusion? That’s the question,” said Michael Silberstein, a science philosopher at Elizabethtown College in Maryland. Another question, he added, is whether talking about this in public will fan the culture wars.

“If people freak at evolution, etc.,” he wrote in an e-mail message, “how much more will they freak if scientists and philosophers tell them they are nothing more than sophisticated meat machines, and is that conclusion now clearly warranted or is it premature?”

Daniel C. Dennett, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Tufts University who has written extensively about free will, said that “when we consider whether free will is an illusion or reality, we are looking into an abyss. What seems to confront us is a plunge into nihilism and despair.”

Mark Hallett, a researcher with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said, “Free will does exist, but it’s a perception, not a power or a driving force. People experience free will. They have the sense they are free.

“The more you scrutinize it, the more you realize you don’t have it,” he said.

Follow your will and read the full article as it takes you through lab experiments, cosmology, and computational concepts about free will.
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