TED Talk on the Morality of Animals

Glow

I thought this was interesting:

person

I really like the emphasis of psychological and social studies on the cooperative emotions going on today.

30-40 years ago the trend was very much about competition and aggression and I feel that that contributed to some of the behavior in society by justifying it.

So I wonder what effects these studies getting out into the collective conscious will have on society.

Glow

I agree. I've seen people justify a sort of social Darwinism by citing animal studies, but it's apparent to anyone who actually has spent time watching animals that their behavior is much more complex and nuanced than the more mechanistic explanations many people give them. It's great to see the newer research expanding the picture a bit.

Vastmind

This was fasanating to watch.
I also liked the point that they addressed that
there were monkeys that refused the grape until
the other one got that instead of the cucumber.
Were those monkeys trying to be a hero....???
Hmmmm?

zenff

Back in the seventies I liked this idea of (the anarchist) Peter Kropotkin.

In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense – not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the species. The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.
— Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), Conclusion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Kropotkin