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Do primates practice religion? [View all]
http://www.salon.com/2013/06/04/do_primates_have_religion_partner/singleton/TUESDAY, JUN 4, 2013 09:43 AM MDT
Do primates practice religion?
"The Bonobo and the Atheist" argues that the roots of religious life are deeply embedded in our biology
BY BEATRICE MAROVICH
(Credit: Shutterstock)
This article originally appeared on Religion Dispatches.
For centuries, a dominant majority of Western philosophers and intellectuals have asserted that humans are the rational animal. Our ability to reason, so the logic goes, is the one thing separating us from the plethora of other animals on the planet. Instinct, passion, and emotion, traditionally assigned to the animal side of life, often meant that being goodbeing the sort of human who behaves morallyrequired a removal of the animal or beastly nature that resides somewhere deep within our fleshy bodies.
In recent decades, however, this fragile logic has been falling apart. Its become increasingly clear that while our digital technologies behave quite rationally, they are often deeply cruel. And on the other side of the ledger, the accumulation of data on animal behavior makes it more and more difficult to support the claim that goodness is something that only humans exhibit.
Primatologists, who study our evolutionary kin, have been in the vanguard of researchers and thinkers to upset the territorial boundaries that demarcate a spotlessly pure sort of human life. Jane Goodalls fieldwork in chimpanzee communities allowed her to witness things like a young male chimp doing a rhythmic dance in front of a waterfall. It appeared, to Goodall, reverent and seemingly purposeless. Shes speculated that this might be evidence of something like ritualistic religion in the lives of other primates.
Public debates about religion in the contemporary U.S. are still rooted in debates about belief. Prominent public atheists like Richard Dawkins speak about religion as though its something we need to understand rationally. How would these public debates change if we were to start thinking about the animal edges of religious lifethe ways in which religious life has more to do with so-called animal instinct than weve often imagined? This is, precisely, where primatologist Frans de Waals new book The Bonobo and the Atheist (W.W. Norton, 2013) appears to be intervening into these hot-button conflicts.
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OK, the title may miss the point, but the book and the review are not about humans.
cbayer
Jun 2013
#6
Evidently we don't share a common definition of the term "biological evolution"
Fumesucker
Jun 2013
#49
Purpose implies intelligence, evolution certainly has effects but it is not intelligent
Fumesucker
Jun 2013
#28
Purposeful trial and error has a lot higher success rate than does evolution
Fumesucker
Jun 2013
#34
I don't think you can identify an 'optimal state of information' for a species
muriel_volestrangler
Jun 2013
#60
What I'm refering to is units of cultural information acting as genes.
napoleon_in_rags
Jun 2013
#62
Hope you are able to find it. I am on a road trip and would like to find it on audio.
cbayer
Jun 2013
#13
Thinking about religion rationally, and religiousity being innate are not mutually exclusive.
Warren Stupidity
Jun 2013
#10