So I think everything started much earlier and that's why I'm interested in other primates because they share many of the same tendencies. They do punish aberrant behavior, or deviant behavior, and they have social rules that they follow and so many of these tendencies can be observed in other species.
I'm not saying that religion is irrelevant, but it's not the source of human morality.
R.K.: Now, you refer to our current religions being two, or three thousand years old and I know you're a primatologist, not an anthropologist. How far back do religions go?
F.W.: I don't think we know that. We know about burial grave-site analysis indicating that for example, the Neanderthals, they buried their dead so they probably also had some sort of afterlife understanding and some sort of religion going. So, who knows? They may be very old, but we really don't know that.
R.K.: Okay. Now, in your writings you also refer not just to primates. You talked about morals, or the kinds of tendencies, or behaviors that are associated with morals going back to birds and mice and rats. Could you talk about that?
F.W.: Yeah. I'm very interested in the origins of empathy. Empathy is defined as that you are sensitive to the emotions of the situation of somebody else and, if that's your definition of empathy, then of course your average dog has empathy and every one who has a dog will tell you that, that they are sensitive to your emotions and they react to them, sometimes negatively, but sometimes also positively. So the thinking in the field of empathy, which is a growing field, it's also a human studies, is that it is a mammalian characteristic.
Mammals, they go back two hundred million years and whether you are a female mouse, or a female elephant you need to react to your young and so the thinking is that maternal care is actually the original of empathic responses because you needs to be sensitive to the emotions of others if you want to raise them. And so there are now, I think, a dozen studies of rodent empathy where literally they put the word empathy in the title, so they're very convinced of what they're finding where they study how rats, or mice respond to the emotions of others and how they sometimes help others who are in a predicament, and so on.
Certainly in species like, let's say elephants, or dogs, or other primates, or dolphins you find lots of that sensitivity and so the thinking is that all of that can be found in the mammals and so I don't really focus exclusively on the primates even though I'm a primatologist. We also do work with elephants which I think is a very interesting species.
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