F.W.: Yeah, acting like Bonobos. ...and the middle panel is often interpreted as paradise, but paradise without any "Fall." So there was no original sin and people were not aware of good and evil so to speak, and that's what you see in the middle panel and that's not necessarily a bad situation.
The bad situation comes in the right hand panel where Hell is and the right hand panel punishes not the people from the middle panel, but as you said, gamblers and monks and greedy people, and so on, and so the view is that Bosch was sort of playing around with the idea of what would happen to humanity if we had never heard of good and evil and we had never had "The Fall" and never had original sin and so on.
So it's a very interesting speculation and Bosch is often of course presented as a moralizing painter, but in this case he was sort of speculating where morality came from and how important it is.
R.K.: What interests me is that I've been doing a series of interviews about psychopaths and sociopaths and then you're referring to Bosch's painting of gluttons and gamblers and warriors and drunks and I wonder if there is a primate analog to psychopaths and sociopaths.
F.W.: May I interrupt for a second? I need to...in five minutes I need to step out of my office because...
R.K.: Okay, we we're wrapping up, just near the end right now.
F.W.: So sociopaths and psychopaths- I always find them an interesting category because they have...as smart as anybody else, but they don't have the emotional components of empathy, so to speak. We've actually done research on that, but we don't have the numbers of primates that you would need. So in humans, one percent of the population is estimated to be a sociopath. So if you work with chimpanzees and you have twenty five chimps, as I do, what are the chances of you, even if chimps have the same frequency so to speak, what are chances that you find one of those? And so in humans of course, in human society, we have millions of people and so you can have a whole collection of sociopaths and study them, but that is not really possible for us.
R.K.: So what are your anecdotal observations about primate psychopaths and sociopaths?
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