But you will find many people in this world who feel close to animals and don't have any trouble if you say your emotions are similar to your dog's emotions, or the other way around. They don't feel insulted at all. They think it's only logical that human feelings and emotions are very similar to those of other animals.
And then there's an entirely different category of people and you're wondering about their psychology, but I cannot really answer what their psychology is like. But there is an entirely different category of people who insist on that they are different. That is something that comes up at a certain age because you never find children who think like that. So you will never find, let's say, a five year, or six year old child who, if you ask them about animals, of course they think they're close to animals, that animals have feelings, and so on. But it's after a certain age, probably after adolescence, that one category of people becomes very stubborn about the idea that humans are totally different and totally special and I don't know what that is and why that happens.
It's not something that you are born with necessarily. So I suspect it's a product of indoctrination and it's probably indoctrination that comes from either religion, or some other areas. But it is of course an old religious position to say that humans are totally different. Humans have souls and animals don't have souls. So some people buy into that indoctrination and some people don't. That's basically the difference.
R.K.: Okay, this is the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show WNJC 1360 AM out of Washington Township reaching metro Philly and South Jersey sponsored by OpEdnews.com. If you're coming in to the middle of this interview, I am speaking with Frans de Waal. He is a biologist who has been named in Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People. He has been studying primates for almost forty years. He is the author of about ten books, the latest one is, The Bonobo and the Atheists; In Search of Humanism Among the Primates, and we have been talking about his bottom-up ideas about morality and ethics. Where I want to go with this is you have had some debates with both religious people and with atheists and you can disagree with both of them and you have got your own take on it. Can you talk about where this is all fits in? How you address people who believe in God and the top-down approach to morality versus atheists who don't believe in any of that?
F.W. informs Rob that he needs to step awy from the phone for a few minutes.
R.K.: Okay, so I am going to keep talking. The reason I got really interested in Dr. de Waal is because I have this theory that the bottom-up approach is changing the way our culture works and I also have beliefs that bottom-up is the way that indigenous tribal people have lived for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years, and what he brings to the table is this idea that... ideas about caring and cooperation and helping each other have been around, not for hundreds of thousands, not for one or two million years, but for even tens of millions of years even a hundred million or more years and it's built deeply into our DNA and our genetic structure. So that's where I am going to go with this conversation next and hopefully he will be back in just a moment and we will continue this conversation.
I am going to be including in the podcasts... if you can go to the podcasts at opednews.com/podcasts and you will find my interview there with Dr. de Waal. I will have a link to his TED Talk which has videos of his studies with the monkeys with the cucumbers and the grapes, links to his website and it's...this is fascinating stuff and I think, I am not sure that I agree with him in that there is nothing to learn from the primates. I think what we can learn from them is what we have forgotten and I will get back to him on that in just a moment. In terms of the billionaires, I love what he had to say about that because...
F.W.: Alright.
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