thoughts about animal rights

The first post about the animal rights resolution has sparked a lot of great questions. Rather than try to answer them in the comments, I'll tackle them here, all at once, and see what other thoughts I can add.

First, a reader writes,

[If] we were to affirm, would major corporations such as McDonalds and Burger King be in violation of these rights, and if they were, would they be shut down by the government, costing thousands of people their jobs and adding to the country's unemployment rate?

This is one of the most critical points in this resolution: it doesn't define the nature or scope of animal rights. For all we know, animals could only have negative rights of a fairly limited extent, such as the right not to suffer cruel and unusual treatment. (It may seem morally strange to allow a person to kill and eat something, provided it doesn't suffer while alive, but that's just one of the morally strange things about trying to blend carnivorous and animal rights.)

So, unless animal rights include a "right not to be killed," we simply can't answer the question.

Next, reader nesh asks, "Didn't we as humans create this system of justice that the resolution speaks of?"

That's a great question that won't find an easy answer. In this view, rights are socially constructed. They're invented by humans, for humans--but this also makes rights a matter of human whim, changing with times and cultures. This gets tricky quickly, leading to cultural / moral relativism, and slippery grounds for disapproving of moral horrors like murder or rape.

Even if rights are human constructs, does it follow that animals are excluded from rights-talk? Not necessarily. There may be a good reason--a utilitarian or pragmatic reason--to extend rights to animals so that all humans benefit. More on this later.

A less constructivist approach is to argue that rights exist independent of human thought, but are discovered by rational actors, much as mathematical concepts exist on their own plane, waiting to be plucked out by mathematicians. Humans might disagree on the nature of rights, but they can't merely construct them. Animal rights could exist in a like manner, waiting for the first John Locke of the dolphins to squeak out a treatise. Even if such an event never occurs, however, a creature that can articulate animal rights--a human being--already exists, and can potentially assign those rights to animals.

An anonymous reader writes,

I do not like anything on the aff side... people will say that there are animals with "near human intelligence" and like arguments. This is not a good argument on several levels... First, that only occurs in certain cases. Not a true reason to affirm, and secondly if they were so smart they would protect their own rights

Giving animals rights for inherent reasons--they're intelligent, they can suffer, they're cute and fuzzy--is only one approach. Another is utilitarian, as I mentioned above: when we assign rights to animals, we protect their welfare, which not only improves their lives (and the environment), but may make us more moral as human beings. To wit, a person who treats animals with respect is more likely to treat humans with respect. (The opposite may be true as well; stereotypically, it's the psychopathic serial killer who's cruel to animals at a young age.)

Furthermore, an ethicist like Peter Singer will argue that the same reasons we defend the rights of defenseless, pre-rational human babies can be extended to the defense of non-rational animals.

As a different anonymous reader writes later on,

As for the justice approach, you're gonna have to be specific about the definition of justice, or what justice really is and what it applies to. Is justice a human-only concept? If we talk about justice and its benefits, is it utility for humans only? and if it is or isn't, why?

Amen and amen.

I'm running out of time at the moment, so I'll stop there for now. More questions, and concomitant answers, coming soon.

Resolved: Justice requires the recognition of animal rights.

The September / October 2011 Lincoln-Douglas debate topic has been released:

Resolved: Justice requires the recognition of animal rights.

It's a fairly straightforward sentence with a lot of deep philosophical implications, and is a great way to start the season.

To get started, here's a thought-experiment.

An alien spaceship descends on your hometown, bug-eyed spindly-legged creatures emerging from its bowels. "Great," you think. "This is gonna be great." You've always wondered whether there was intelligent life elsewhere in the universe--and here it is, practically knocking down your door.

Actually, it is knocking down your door, and vaporizing your furniture, and corralling you and your family into cages, until you're whisked off to some distant galaxy, ostensibly to serve as entertainment for Emperor Garthron of Planet X.

You try to reason with your captors. Their eyes are blank with apathy, however; they cannot hear, nor can they understand your rudimentary bleating. They ignore your gestures and are unfazed by your scribblings. Your actions are meaningless to them, beyond the detached interest of idle alien curiosity.

How would you convince one of these aliens that their behavior is unjust, and that they've violated your rights?

Or would you even bother to try?

Clearly, your rights exist regardless of your ability to articulate them to an outsider. But what if the situation were reversed, a la District 9? Would intelligent aliens have rights?

Or, more to the point, what if animals find themselves in the same position regarding their human neighbors?

How wide is the circuit of our moral concern? Should it include organisms of different species?

Why do we care about animals?
Suppose you feel anger or sadness about recent reports about whales' susceptibility to industrial toxins. Your sentiments could arise from many sources: appreciation of the whales' beauty and power and intelligence; pity for their helplessness; respect for their unique place in nature, or for divine mandates for environmental stewardship. You could also take a different tack, highlighting their instrumental value--for instance, their essential role in the oceanic ecosystem, or their utility as a food source.

The last makes the problem particularly acute. It's tough to concede rights to something you might grill on the barbecue. Here the culturally arbitrary nature of our attachments becomes evident: some folks dress up their dogs in funny clothes, while other folks eat them. (And if dogs have a right not to suffer, why not whales?)

How do we define "animal?"
Dictionary.com (based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary) gives us at least three workable definitions.

1.any member of the kingdom Animalia, comprising multicellular organisms that have a well-defined shape and usually limited growth, can move voluntarily, actively acquire food and digest it internally, and have sensory and nervous systems that allow them to respond rapidly to stimuli: some classification schemes also include protozoa and certain other single-celled eukaryotes that have motility and animallike nutritional modes.

This scientific definition would set up an interesting affirmative:

All humans have rights.
All humans are animals.
Therefore, some animals have rights.
Thus, we affirm the resolution.

The second and third definition are much narrower:

2. any such living thing other than a human being.
3. a mammal, as opposed to a fish, bird, etc.

The former sets up a distinction between human rights and animal rights, which is the traditional manner of thinking about such things. The latter is even more restrictive, making it so the affirmative would have to defend rights for whales and grizzlies and gibbons, but not for lobsters, snakes, or chickens. (Serious efforts to grant rights to apes and to cetaceans already exist.)

Which animals would have rights?
The definition chosen points to a potential answer; other arguments might revolve around distinctions based on sentience or intelligence.

Which rights would these animals have?
Hard to say. In Spain, for instance, non-human apes have rights of life and freedom from suffering.

Where do rights come from?
If they come from God, we may have to turn to some kind of scripture to answer the question.
If they're inherent, we have to figure out whether they're inherent in animals.
If they're social constructions, we have to decide whether our society admits nonhumans.
If they're contractual, we have to wonder whether non-signatories are covered by the contract.
If they're legal constructs, we have to determine whether the law assigning rights to animals is wise.
If they're a matter of utility, we need to know whether a life with animal rights increases utility.

Recommended Reading
The SEP's entry on the moral status of animals.
Lawrence Hinman's list of relevant links and resources.

As always, your ideas and questions are critical. Fire away in the comments.

Note: this is a slightly modified repost of the topic preview from last year, since, following custom, the Sept/Oct topic is the least popular top choice from the 2010-2011 list.

animal rights for people, too

NOTE: This topic was chosen for Sept. / Oct. 2011. Current comments and thoughts are posted here.


First in a series of previews of potential 2010-2011 LD topics.

An alien spaceship descends on your hometown, bug-eyed spindly-legged creatures emerging from its bowels. "Great," you think. "This is gonna be great." You've always wondered whether there was intelligent life elsewhere in the universe--and here it is, practically knocking down your door.

Actually, it is knocking down your door, and vaporizing your furniture, and corralling you and your family into cages, until you're whisked off to some distant galaxy, ostensibly to serve as entertainment for Emperor Garthron of Planet X.

You try to reason with your captors. Their eyes are blank with apathy, however; they cannot hear, nor can they understand your rudimentary bleating. They ignore your gestures and are unfazed by your scribblings. Your actions are meaningless to them, beyond the detached interest of idle alien curiosity.

How would you convince one of these aliens that their behavior is unjust, and that they've violated your rights?

Or would you even bother to try?

Clearly, your rights exist regardless of your ability to articulate them to an outsider. But what if the situation were reversed, a la District 9? Would intelligent aliens have rights?

Or, more to the point, what if animals find themselves in the same position regarding their human neighbors?

These, and other challenging moral questions, are raised by one of the potential LD topics for the 2010-11 season.

Resolved: Justice requires the recognition of animal rights.

How wide is the circuit of our moral concern? Should it include organisms of different species?

Why do we care about animals?
Suppose you feel anger or sadness about recent reports about whales' susceptibility to industrial toxins. Your sentiments could arise from many sources: appreciation of the whales' beauty and power and intelligence; pity for their helplessness; respect for their unique place in nature, or for divine mandates for environmental stewardship. You could also take a different tack, highlighting their instrumental value--for instance, their essential role in the oceanic ecosystem, or their utility as a food source.

The last makes the problem particularly acute. It's tough to concede rights to something you might grill on the barbecue. Here the culturally arbitrary nature of our attachments becomes evident: some folks dress up their dogs in funny clothes, while other folks eat them. (And if dogs have a right not to suffer, why not whales?)

How do we define "animal?"
Dictionary.com (based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary) gives us at least three workable definitions.

1.any member of the kingdom Animalia, comprising multicellular organisms that have a well-defined shape and usually limited growth, can move voluntarily, actively acquire food and digest it internally, and have sensory and nervous systems that allow them to respond rapidly to stimuli: some classification schemes also include protozoa and certain other single-celled eukaryotes that have motility and animallike nutritional modes.

This scientific definition would set up an interesting affirmative:

All humans have rights.
All humans are animals.
Therefore, some animals have rights.
Thus, we affirm the resolution.

The second and third definition are much narrower:

2. any such living thing other than a human being.
3. a mammal, as opposed to a fish, bird, etc.

The former sets up a distinction between human rights and animal rights, which is the traditional manner of thinking about such things. The latter is even more restrictive, making it so the affirmative would have to defend rights for whales and grizzlies and gibbons, but not for lobsters, snakes, or chickens. (Serious efforts to grant rights to apes and to cetaceans already exist.)

Which animals would have rights?
The definition chosen points to a potential answer; other arguments might revolve around distinctions based on sentience or intelligence.

Which rights would these animals have?
Hard to say. In Spain, for instance, non-human apes have rights of life and freedom from suffering.

Where do rights come from?
If they come from God, we may have to turn to some kind of scripture to answer the question.
If they're inherent, we have to figure out whether they're inherent in animals.
If they're social constructions, we have to decide whether our society admits nonhumans.
If they're contractual, we have to wonder whether non-signatories are covered by the contract.
If they're legal constructs, we have to determine whether the law assigning rights to animals is wise.
If they're a matter of utility, we need to know whether a life with animal rights increases utility.

Recommended Reading
The SEP's entry on the moral status of animals.
Lawrence Hinman's list of relevant links and resources.

the rook of fable

More intelligent behavior from birds: this time, rooks using stones to raise the water level in a jar, so they can reach a tasty worm.

I never forget a face

Add one more faculty to the crow repertoire: the ability to recognize and remember human faces. As the video shows, though, the face is all that matters; crows in the experiment couldn't distinguish body shapes.

Thankfully.

[via BoingBoing's McLaren and Torchinsky]

the brains of an amoeba

Amoeba memory? Maybe.

Di Ventra's team thinks there is an intrinsic memory storage device within the amoeba. As with the human brain, that device can strengthen and store memories for some time. But if the memory isn't used, it gradually fades away.

Now they have identified a potential storage device. The amoeba's interior contains a watery sol – a solid suspended in liquid – within a thick viscous gel. The sol flows through the gel like water through a sponge, creating a network of low-viscosity channels. Those channels are strengthened as long as the amoeba continues to respond to a static environment, but if that environment changes the channels gradually break down and a new network appears as the amoeba adapts. For a short while, though, the amoeba retains a “memory” of those earlier conditions.

Di Ventra's team took advantage of the development this year of memristors – electrical resistors that retain a memory of earlier voltages or currents applied and vary their resistance accordingly – to design a simple circuit that models the amoeba's gel-sol system. Their circuit contained just four basic elements: a resistor, capacitor, inductor and memristor. By changing the external voltage in a regular way they could model the changing temperature conditions studied by Nakagaki's team. When they did this, they found that their circuit could “learn” and predict future voltage fluctuations.

Earlier this year, I linked to the very same article in the blockquote, citing this passage:

Chua, now close to retirement, is thrilled at the finding.... "We can now expect many new unconventional applications, including super-dense memories and brain-like computing chips."

I wonder if Chua expected an amoeba to take the lead.

eight-legged geeks

Carl Zimmer:

So, is the octopus really all that smart? It depends on how you define intelligence. And if you've got a good definition, there are quite a few scientists who would love to hear it. Octopuses can learn, they can process complex information in their heads, and they can behave in equally complex ways. But it would be a mistake to try to give octopuses an IQ score. They are not intelligent in the way we are—not because they're dumb but because their behavior is the product of hundreds of millions of years of evolution under radically different conditions than the ones under which our own brains evolved.

Well, most of our brains, anyway.

the teacher of crows

Another one I missed in the turbulent finish to the 07-08 school year: the man who taught crows how to use a vending machine. Crows have the intelligence trifecta: causal reasoning, curiosity, and persistence. Watch and be amazed.

Added: Funny he should mention The Birds...

Experts are telling Chicago residents to beware of the birds.

The fiercely territorial behavior of red-winged blackbirds is being blamed on several recent dive-bomb attacks. The birds peck at unsuspecting bicyclists and pedestrians and swipe their hair.

humans still perched on their cognitive pedestal

Even as the birds try, in vain, to topple it:

As everyone knows, parrots are remarkably good at mimicking human speech, but they tend to repeat randomly picked-up phrases: obscenities, election slogans, “Hey, sailor.” Many parrots kept as pets also imitate familiar sounds, like the family dog barking or an alarm clock beeping. But Pepperberg taught Alex referential speech—labels for objects, and phrases like “Wanna go back.” By the end, he knew about fifty words for objects. Pepperberg was never particularly interested in teaching Alex language for its own sake; rather, she was interested in what language could reveal about the workings of his mind. In learning to speak, Alex showed Pepperberg that he understood categories like same and different, bigger and smaller. He could count and recognize Arabic numerals up to six. He could identify objects by their color, shape (“three-corner,” “four-corner,” and so on, up to “six-corner”), and material: when Pepperberg held up, say, a pompom or a wooden block, he could answer “Wool” or “Wood,” correctly, about eighty per cent of the time. Holding up a yellow key and a green key of the same size, Pepperberg might ask Alex to identify a difference between them, and he’d say, “Color.” When she held up two keys and asked, “Which is bigger?,” he could identify the larger one by naming its color. Looking at a collection of objects that he hadn’t seen before, Alex could reliably answer a two-tiered question like “How many blue blocks?”—a tricky task for toddlers. He even seemed to develop an understanding of absence, something akin to the concept of zero. If asked what the difference was between two identical blue keys, Alex learned to reply, “None.” (He pronounced it “nuh.”)

It's difficult to know exactly what level of awareness Alex the parrot would have of his own abilities--though, to be fair, two-year-old humans, with rare exceptions, aren't terribly reflective. Regardless, that Alex could endure the training of ethologists like Pepperberg shows either a remarkable patience or a stultifying lack of drive, seen usually in nearly-graduated seniors.

I should also add that I don't really think of admitting animal intelligence as knocking humans off a pedestal; as I've written time and again, it's more a matter of raising others closer to our humble perch.

For examples of other non-human leaps toward human heights, see this NewScientist summary.

chimps with "photographic memory"

Watch out! Not only can these chimps count, but they can beat a college student at a memory test. Of course, there's the obligatory knock-the-humans-off-their-perch component:

The finding challenges human assumptions about our uniqueness, and should make us think harder about ourselves in relation to other animals, says anthropologist Jill Pruetz of Iowa State University, Ames, US.

“Observing that other species can outperform us on tasks that we assume we excel at is a bit humbling,” she says. “Rather than taking such findings as a rare example or a fluke, we should incorporate this knowledge into a mindset that acknowledges that chimpanzees – and probably other species – share aspects of what we think of as uniquely human intelligence.”

I think it does more to expose the underestimation of animal intelligence than the proper estimation of human worth. As I've argued before, bumping into someone as smart as I doesn't reduce my dignity. To quote myself, "Moral worth isn't zero-sum."

it's a Hobbesian, Hobbesian, Hobbesian, Hobbesian world

Buffalo versus lions, lions versus crocs, lions versus buffalo again. Buffalo win. The end.

Be sure to watch it all.

[Thanks to Josh and the AV Club.]

crows using meta-tools

Crows get smarter the more we study them. From a primitive theory of mind to relatively sophisticated tool use, crows continually surprise. Now, crows have been observed using meta-tools in a laboratory setting.

Working with captured wild crows, Russell Gray and his team from the University of Auckland in New Zealand hid a treat in a box so that a crow could only extract it with the help of a long stick. This kind of task is easy for the tool-using crows.

But then the researchers added a twist by placing the long stick in a cage, out of the crows' reach. No problem: the birds used a second, shorter stick, to get the first one, then took it back to the box to get the food.

"Six out of seven crows tried straight away to use the short stick to get to the long tool. There was no trial and error," says Gray.

The seventh crow has been held back a year, despite his parents' wishes.

Update: Chris of Mixing Memory notes,

Recognizing that the long stick is sufficient, but the short one isn't, when looking at the placement of the food, and then understanding that the short stick is sufficient to retrieve the long stick is pretty impressive. I'm not sure it requires analogical reasoning -- association might be sufficient -- but I suspect that future studies will sort all of that out. However they're doing it, it's clear that crows are pretty damn smart.

animal intelligence: the heights and the limits

I've been reading Lewis Wolpert's Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, an examination of the evolution of belief. Along the way, Wolpert discusses the limitations of animal reason, making the book a perfect complement to my other reading selection, Jonathan Balcombe's Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good, which details the richness of many animals' emotional experiences, and (rather convincingly) makes the case that other animals experience pleasure much as we do.

After reading both books, what impresses me most is just how much we and our fellow animals are alike, and yet how tiny cognitive gaps open up a huge gulf in reasoning ability.

spite makes the man

Score one for human exceptionalism:

Spite is a common human reaction, says Jensen. "Imagine you're a kid at a birthday party. The mother gives you cake, then takes it away and gives it to another kid. It's not his fault, but you'll still be annoyed with him because of his good fortune. But chimps don't care who's got the cake, just who took it from them," he explains. In other words, chimps fail to see things from another's point of view.

And if a chimp's lack of empathy leaves it unable to feel spite, it may also fail to behave altruistically, says behavioural ecologist Rufus Johnstone of the University of Cambridge in the UK. "There have been experiments that gave chimps the chance to be nice to another at no cost to themselves, but they weren't interested. They didn't have a human propensity to be nice," he says.

"This is where things get tricky," admits Jensen. "Other papers coming out of our research group show chimps are altruistic. One interpretation is that one set of researchers isn't doing their job properly, but we don't like that one! Maybe altruistic tendencies operate in a narrow range in chimps, and a broader range in humans."

Well, maybe score .75. We haven't exactly tested for spite in dolphins. At least, as far as I know.

chimpanzees: the next next menace

Another in the "animals are smarter than you think" category:

Andrew Whiten at the University of St Andrews, UK, and colleagues taught individual chimpanzees one of two ways to solve complex foraging tasks, and observed how the different techniques spread across two sets of three groups. The chimps had to manipulate a combination of buttons, levers or discs to extract treats from cubes....

The cubes were then moved into the view of a second set of chimp groups, so they could observe their respective neighbours solving the tasks. The new groups learned the same techniques as demonstrated in the adjacent enclosure, and then passed their set of tricks on to a third group in another round of experiments.

Not to go all Charlton Heston here, but shouldn't we be a leeeetle bit worried about researchers who can influence chimps--for evil?

spider monkeys make perfume from crushed leaves

In another installment of Animals Are Smarter Than You Think, researchers are mighty suspicious that black-handed spider monkey males daub themselves with homemade cologne.

Laska’s team found, in ac­cord with a past study, that the spi­der mon­keys swiped the fra­grant mix on­ly on their arm­pits and breast­bone ar­eas, and that this oc­curred in­de­pen­d­ent­ly of time of day, sea­son, tem­per­a­ture or hu­mid­i­ty. The previous study—published in 2000—also found, con­sis­tent with the new one, that males do it more often than females.

All these con­sid­er­a­tions, ac­cord­ing to the auth­ors of both stu­dies, clash with the idea that the lo­tions func­tion as bug re­pel­lents or skin med­i­ca­tions.

No word on whether the spider monkeys have perfected the art of the pick-up line.

those happy, happy crows

Do animals have "higher" emotions? Dr. Jonathan Balcombe thinks they might.

Five years ago behaviorist and animal-rights activist Dr. Jonathan Balcombe stood on a Virginia hotel balcony watching two crows intimately groom each other in the comfort of an abandoned billboard. He felt that the birds liked what they were doing, even if engaged in a natural, beneficial act, such as picking parasites off the other's feathers. That moment changed the way he would view animals forever.

"I watched the crows enraptured and had an epiphany," Balcombe says. "I thought, 'Aha! Pleasure,' then started recording observations through pleasure contexts." That led to a book, "Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good" (MacMillan, 2006; $24.95), which is filled with hundreds of examples of animals living it up, thanks to developed senses of touch, taste, sight, sound and smell.

Balcombe recounts a favorite example of Kenyan hippos receiving the hippopotamus equivalent of a high-end spa treatment in a freshwater spring. They splay their toes, open their mouths wide and wait for a school of cleaner fish to remove parasites and slough off dead skin, he recalls. Balcombe knows that the hippos and the fish both benefit from this arrangement. "My interpretation is that it is also enjoyable for them," he says.

The first to admit his premise is hardly unique, Balcombe thinks his work merits a broader look. "Science has neglected this issue," he said. Identifying positive affect has been a part of animal-behavior studies since the 1930s, when Donald Griffin, the noted biologist who discovered that some bats use echolocation to see in the dark, founded the field of animal thinking called cognitive ethology. Balcombe, who believes nature rewards behaviors that promote evolution, wants to take it a step further.

There's reason for skepticism; UW researcher Jim Ha warns of the ever-present danger of anthropomorphism. But the simplistic notion that animals are instinct-driven idiots is more and more untenable by the day.

ravenous ravens, a menace to your driving safety

Long-time reader blogmastergeneral points me to this article about a new wildlife menace, the wiper-destroying raven.

It seems that at least two ravens have spent the hiking season ripping out the rubber windshield wiper blades from their housings on various vehicles, including some at the employee parking lot, at the Goodell Creek Campground and near the visitor center.

Curious raven behavior began in May, however, when a raven continually attacked the center's rear windows....

Employees wrapped butcher paper around the first few feet of all of the windows, but it was torn down by the next day.

Theories included reflection anxiety, trying to attack the two large murals of ravens that were inside (they covered the murals) and wanting to get in because it heard the raven calls that were played inside.

By June, the raven had given up windows and started on windshield wipers.

Think they're isolated to the wilds of Washington? Think again. The birds--or, I should say, The Birds--just like their anarchoterrorist raccoon compatriots, are striking back at humanity all over North America.

Last July, rangers reported that ravens were ripping off windshield wipers (and a few antennas) in a Yosemite National Park parking lot. Those ravens had a bartering gene, however. Sometimes they left dead rodents on top of the vehicles, the one-pair-wipers-for-one-dead-vole system.

CBC radio once reported that a principal from a New Brunswick, Canada, school had removed more than 40 windshield wipers from vehicles in the parking lot. One teaching assistant lost nine wipers, gained a lot of scratches on her car, and had the car's soft top damaged by a raven apparently trying to rip it off.

Yours truly witnessed ravens attacking the fender of his parents' Grand Marquis while at a scenic stopping point in Banff National Park, pictured above. Ravens are smart, aggressive, and potentially deadly. Don't underestimate their wiles.

Update: Someday, someone is going to catalogue all these kinds of incidents. The results will be truly terrifying.

school starts tomorrow

Which puts this recent demonstration in perspective:

At one day old, none of the infants showed any imitation. By day three, however, infants started to copy the researchers’ expressions, including tongue protrusions, mouth opening and lip smacking – all typical macaque expressions....

By two weeks, all imitative behaviour had ceased, showing the imitation period in the monkeys is far shorter than for great apes. However, the researchers note that macaques may copy other macaques for longer.

By the time macaques reach high school, they group into cliques like the majaques and mageeques, proving beyond a scientific doubt that their imitative powers have completely revived.

these chimps are no chumps: part III

In parts I and II, we learned that chimps can teach each other about tool use and problem solving. What, though, can they teach us about ourselves? Enter Frans de Waal, one of the world's leading primatologists, with over three decades' experience observing the behavior of our closest relatives.

In this Spiegel online interview, the author of Our Inner Ape, which I breezed through last week, summarizes his book's themes better than I ever could.

SPIEGEL: Family and language are traits that you recognize as being unique to human beings. There is also another major difference: We have religion and ethics. Apes can't compete in that respect, can they?

De Waal: I'll admit that. But I do believe that religion and ethics are based on psychological building blocks that we share with related species. We have added a system of social pressure, with which we justify and emphasize rules. One of those rules is "Thou shalt not kill." It may be expressed by religious leaders or philosophers, but it merely signifies something that is deeply engrained in our consciousness.

SPIEGEL: When the Pope appeals to us to love our brothers, is he appealing to the apes in all of us?

De Waal: Essentially. I'm not saying that chimpanzees and bonobos are moral beings.

SPIEGEL: They're unlikely to be familiar with the categorical imperative.

De Waal: But they are. They're very familiar with the motto "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." It's precisely the principle of reciprocity that I see, in addition to empathy, as the fundamental element in the psychology of all primates. We did an experiment in which we gave chimpanzees watermelons and then documented how they divided up the fruit among themselves. In the hours leading up to the experiment, we recorded which animals groomed which other animals' fur. The results were clear. The ape that divided up the watermelon gave significantly more to those apes that had groomed him earlier on.

SPIEGEL: You also mentioned empathy...

De Waal: Oh yes. For example, chimpanzees are quite good at comforting one another. If a friend is suffering, they hug him and attend to him. It's only our arrogance that makes us doubt that this is even possible. When someone brutally kills someone else, we call him "animalistic." But we consider ourselves "human" when we give to the poor.

SPIEGEL: On the other hand, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes said: "Homo homini lupus," or "man is a wolf to man."

De Waal: The evolutionary struggle for survival is really a self-serving series of blows and stabs, and yet it can lead to extremely social animals like dolphins, wolves or, for that matter, primates. I call the notion that we are nothing but killer apes the Beethoven fallacy. Beethoven was disorganized and messy, and yet his music is the epitome of order.

You can disagree with the political conclusions he draws (socialism out, capitalism out, democracy out, non-despotic hierarchies in) or with points of his analysis, but you've got to study our chimp and bonobo relatives with as much care and empathy as de Waal before you can say his claims are groundless.