Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved by Frans de Waal. Edited by Stephen Macedo and Josiah Ober. Princeton University Press, 2006 ($22.95)
Frans de Waal believes that humans are, by nature, good and social. A primatologist who has devoted his life to studying chimpanzee behavior, de Waal says we have evolution to thank for our moral behavior, the essential antecedents of which can be found among lower animals.
Primates and Philosopherscontains the text of lectures de Waal delivered in 2004, together with responses from four philosophers who agree with some of his ideas and reject others. De Waal is reacting to the idea of selfishness, in both evolutionary and philosophical thought. Although we may have “selfish genes,” he believes we have evolved as social creatures to care and share. And although Western philosophy emphasizes individual autonomy and rationality, he stresses social bonds and our emotions–and he sees evidence for both in other animals. Mice will forgo food if pushing a lever to get it also delivers a painful shock to another mouse; the same reaction is stronger and longer lasting for monkeys and even more so for apes. In fact, de Waal says, “the building blocks of morality are evolutionarily ancient,” and a clear continuum links animal and human moral behavior.
The book is fascinating, as well as challenging. Its contributors struggle with the very language used to discuss moral behavior in animals—sympathy, feelings, and so on—because these terms are unavoidably so human. The contributors also assume readers will have some familiarity with the ideas espoused by David Hume, Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith and other philosophers who have written on the origins of human morality.
One of the crucial concepts discussed is psychological altruism: the idea that we can adjust our desires and intentions according to what we perceive to be needs of others. Philip Kitcher, a Columbia University philosopher, does not believe that de Waal’s examples from observing chimpanzees fully demonstrate psychological altruism in these apes, and he observes that “a lot more work needs to be done.” Much of the argument in Primates and Philosophers revolves around the crucial line dividing human from animal moral capacities. De Waal emphasizes what we share with animals; the others pick out the differences, especially when it comes to our motives and intentions—things that experiments are unlikely to divine from a chimpanzee brain. —Jonathan Beard
Dangers on a Train
Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong by Marc D. Hauser. HarperCollins, 2006 ($27.95)
You are driving a train when you see five hikers on the track ahead of you and a siding with a single hiker. Is it okay to flip a switch and send the train onto the siding, killing one hiker but saving five? Most people say yes. Would it be okay for a doctor to harvest organs from a healthy person to save five patients? Most people say no.
But they often do not have a clue why they think one of these choices is okay and the other is not. And that fact is a clue that we have an innate moral faculty. Like competent speakers who do not understand the grammatical underpinnings of language, people tend to have strong, gut-level opinions about what is moral but are unable to give coherent explanations.
Marc D. Hauser, a Harvard University psychologist, wants to do for morality what Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguist Noam Chomsky did for language—he wants to discover the universal “moral grammar.”
Chomsky suggested that humans are born with a “universal grammar,” a cognitive capacity that helps us acquire language and shapes the way we apply language rules. Hauser thinks our moral grammar works the same way, helping us isolate moral lessons from our culture and make judgments about right and wrong.
In Moral Minds, Hauser reviews what we already know about innate human faculties—for instance, that even infants seem to understand that people and animals have intentions, whereas inanimate objects do not. And he presents evidence that our universal morality is probably based on rules about fairness, proportionality and reciprocity, among other things.
The material is captivating and ranges from philosophy to anthropology to psychology, including some of Hauser’s own original work. Hauser’s main failing is that he sometimes loses the thread of his argument; he piles on the detail but fails to make it clear how his examples support his argument.
The upshot, though, is that we do not yet know exactly how our moral grammar works or even which cognitive capacities contribute to our moral faculty. Hauser’s achievement is to argue convincingly that such a faculty exists and to raise some of the many questions that have to be answered before we will fully understand it. —Kurt Kleiner
I’m OK, We’re OK
We all recognize a special capacity that humans have—some more so than others—to connect with others in a deep and direct way. We see this quality expressed by a performer revving a crowd, a doctor healing a patient or a mother putting a child to sleep. To orchestrate these tasks, a person must sense and stimulate the reactions and mood of another.
In 1995 Daniel Goleman, a Harvard University–trained psychologist and writer for the New York Times, published Emotional Intelligence, in which he discussed the human ability “to manage our own emotions and inner potential for positive relationships.” Now he goes a step further. In Social Intelligence, he enlarges his scope to encompass our human abilities to connect with one another.
“We are wired to connect,” Goleman says. “Neuroscience has discovered that our brain’s very design makes it sociable, inexorably drawn into an intimate brain-to-brain linkup whenever we engage with another person. That neural bridge lets us affect the brain—and so the body—of everyone we interact with, just as they do us.” Each encounter between people primes the emotions. This neurological pas de deux stimulates our nervous systems, affecting hormones, heart rate, circulation, breathing and the immune system.
Goleman peppers his discourse with anecdotes to illustrate the power of social intelligence. From the countertop of Rosie Garcia, a multitasking baker in New York’s Grand Central Terminal, to the tantrum-tainted class of a Texas teacher, he shows how social sensitivity and wisdom can profoundly reshape confl icts. In one encounter in Iraq, a quick-witted U.S. commander turned a Muslim mob’s threats into laughter when he ordered his soldiers to kneel, lower rifles and smile—averting a potentially fatal clash.
Goleman deftly discusses relevant neural pathways, including the thalamus and amygdala, which together regulate sensory and arousal stimuli. He speaks of spindle cells, which rapidly process social decisions; of mirror neurons, which sense another’s movements; of dopamine neurons, which react to pleasure-inducing neurotransmitters that flow freely while two lovers gaze.
The author’s introductory tour through this emerging research landscape helps readers grasp core concepts of social neuroscience, illustrating abstractions with poignant anecdotes, without excessive jargon. Goleman also explains how such research may influence our lives. Given our socially reactive brains, we must “be wise,” he says, and be aware of the ways that our moods infl uence the biology of each life we touch. —Rick Lipkin
Reading, Writing and Recess
Play = Learning: How Play Motivates and Enhances Children’s Cognitive and Social-Emotional Growth edited by Dorothy G. Singer, Roberta Michnick Golinkoff and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek Oxford University Press, 2006 ($45)
Play is under attack, argue the child development and learning experts behind this informative anthology. It is a victim of today’s trend to focus on a narrow set of cognitive skills, a downed bystander of the Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind Act. What has been neglected in this rush to reinvent education, these authors say, is the huge body of research buttressing the relation between types of play, a wide range of learning and school preparedness.
Editors Dorothy G. Singer, Roberta Michnick Golinkoff and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek lament a regression to 19th-century learning approaches, like memorization, in an era with “an emerging creative class that values conceptual knowledge and original thinking.” Children must know facts, but it is ironic that teachers now emphasize rote learning at a time when information constantly changes. “The power of knowledge,” they write, “comes from weaving those facts together in new and imaginative ways.”
The power of this volume is its descriptions of the varieties of play—make-believe, storytelling and story-acting, mathematical—and of more than 40 years of research linking play to increased attention spans, creativity, constructive peer interaction and mental health, to list only a few benefits. The authors present surprising and often dismaying reports about recent actions that ignore the literature. We learn of an unprecedented rise in expulsions from prekindergarten classes, perhaps arising from children’s frustration as they are taught skills once thought appropriate for youngsters several years older. Academic tutoring for test score gains has lasting negative consequences, according to one author, including poorer study habits and lower achievement.
The anthology grew out of a 2005 conference at Yale University funded by Fisher-Price, and editors and authors of the book have consulted for Fisher-Price and other toy manufacturers over the years. So it comes as no surprise that the book spends a little time examining what is known about the educational value of toys and videos. In a chapter on media, play, infants and toddlers, Fisher-Price manager of child research Deborah S. Weber cites studies of young children whose parents sing along and clap during, and talk to them about, age-appropriate television shows and videos. Teachers found that children who watch TV supported by this adult “scaffolding” were more ready to learn than children left to watch alone.
Though well written, the chapters of Play = Learning demand great concentration and challenge the educated lay reader. But it is hard to fault the authors for their thoroughness. They are serious about play and offer convincing evidence that rather than being a distraction from learning, play is the thing. —Karen A. Frenkel
