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The Bonobo and the Atheist
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
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Publisher's summary
In this lively and illuminating discussion of his landmark research, esteemed primatologist Frans de Waal argues that human morality is not imposed from above but instead comes from within. Moral behavior does not begin and end with religion but is in fact a product of evolution.
For many years, de Waal has observed chimpanzees soothe distressed neighbors and bonobos share their food. Now he delivers fascinating fresh evidence for the seeds of ethical behavior in primate societies that further cements the case for the biological origins of human fairness. Interweaving vivid tales from the animal kingdom with thoughtful philosophical analysis, de Waal seeks a bottom-up explanation of morality that emphasizes our connection with animals. In doing so, de Waal explores for the first time the implications of his work for our understanding of modern religion. Whatever the role of religious moral imperatives, he sees it as a "Johnny-come-lately" role that emerged only as an addition to our natural instincts for cooperation and empathy.
But unlike the dogmatic neo-atheist of his book’s title, de Waal does not scorn religion per se. Instead, he draws on the long tradition of humanism exemplified by the painter Hieronymus Bosch and asks reflective readers to consider these issues from a positive perspective: What role, if any, does religion play for a well-functioning society today? And where can believers and nonbelievers alike find the inspiration to lead a good life?
Rich with cultural references and anecdotes of primate behavior, The Bonobo and the Atheist engagingly builds a unique argument grounded in evolutionary biology and moral philosophy. Ever a pioneering thinker, de Waal delivers a heartening and inclusive new perspective on human nature and our struggle to find purpose in our lives.
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From the time she was a girl, Jane Goodall dreamed of a life spent working with animals. Finally she had her wish. When she was 26 years old, she ventured into the forests of Africa to observe chimpanzees in the wild. On her expeditions she braved the dangers with leopards and lions in the African bush. And she got to know an amazing group of wild chimpanzees - intelligent animals whose lives, in work and play and family relationships, bear a surprising resemblance to our own.
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Love Jane, message & superbly crafted soundscapes!
- By Deb Tyler on 06-25-20
By: Jane Goodall
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Bonobo Handshake
- A Memoir of Love and Adventure in the Congo
- By: Vanessa Woods
- Narrated by: Justine Eyre
- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2005, Vanessa Woods accepted a marriage proposal from a man she barely knew and agreed to join him on a research trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country reeling from a brutal decade-long war that had claimed the lives of millions. Settling in at a bonobo sanctuary in Congo's capital, Vanessa and her fiancee entered the world of a rare ape with whom we share 98.7 percent of our DNA.
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Interesting & Informative
- By Elizabeth on 06-21-10
By: Vanessa Woods
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Big Gods
- How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict
- By: Ara Norenzayan
- Narrated by: Paul Nixon
- Length: 8 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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How did human societies scale up from small, tight-knit groups of hunter-gatherers to the large, anonymous, cooperative societies of today - even though anonymity is the enemy of cooperation? How did organized religions with "Big Gods" - the great monotheistic and polytheistic faiths - spread to colonize most minds in the world? In Big Gods, Ara Norenzayan makes the surprising and provocative argument that these fundamental puzzles about the origins of civilization are one and the same, and answer each other.
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Great read
- By paro on 02-27-24
By: Ara Norenzayan
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The Moral Molecule
- The Source of Love and Prosperity
- By: Paul J. Zak
- Narrated by: Paul J. Zak
- Length: 7 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Human beings can be so compassionate - and yet they can also be shockingly cruel. What if there was a hidden master control for human behavior? Switch it on and people are loving and generous. Switch it off and they revert to violence and greed. Pioneering neuroeconomist Paul J. Zak has discovered just such a master switch, a molecule in the human brain. The Moral Molecule is a firsthand account of this discovery, revealing how evolution built the Golden Rule into our biology.
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A Codicil Is Necessary...
- By Douglas on 11-23-13
By: Paul J. Zak
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The Blank Slate
- The Modern Denial of Human Nature
- By: Steven Pinker
- Narrated by: Victor Bevine
- Length: 22 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading experts on language and the mind, explores the idea of human nature and its moral, emotional, and political colorings. With characteristic wit, lucidity, and insight, Pinker argues that the dogma that the mind has no innate traits, denies our common humanity and our individual preferences, replaces objective analyses of social problems with feel-good slogans, and distorts our understanding of politics, violence, parenting, and the arts.
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Don't bother. Outdated science & poor logic...
- By ejf211 on 03-31-10
By: Steven Pinker
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Other Minds
- The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
- By: Peter Godfrey-Smith
- Narrated by: Peter Noble
- Length: 7 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Peter Godfrey-Smith, a distinguished philosopher of science and a skilled scuba diver, tells a bold new story of how subjective experience crept into being—how nature became aware of itself. As Godfrey-Smith stresses, it is a story that largely occurs in the ocean, where animals first appeared. Tracking the mind’s fitful development, Godfrey-Smith shows how unruly clumps of seaborne cells began living together and became capable of sensing, acting, and signaling.
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Mischief and Craft
- By Darwin8u on 08-10-17
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Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me)
- Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions and Hurtful Acts
- By: Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson
- Narrated by: Marsha Mercant, Joe Barrett
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Why do people dodge responsibility when things fall apart? Why the parade of public figures unable to own up when they screw up? Why the endless marital quarrels over who is right? Why can we see hypocrisy in others but not in ourselves? Are we all liars? Or do we really believe the stories we tell? Backed by years of research and delivered in lively, energetic prose, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) offers a fascinating explanation of self-deception.
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Excellent insights, but a little too long
- By Anand on 11-11-12
By: Carol Tavris, and others
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The Song of the Cell
- An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human
- By: Siddhartha Mukherjee
- Narrated by: Dennis Boutsikaris
- Length: 16 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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From the author of The Emperor of All Maladies, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and The Gene, a #1 New York Times bestseller, comes his most spectacular book yet, an exploration of medicine and our radical new ability to manipulate cells. Rich with Mukherjee’s revelatory and exhilarating stories of scientists, doctors, and the patients whose lives may be saved by their work, The Song of the Cell is the third book in this extraordinary writer’s exploration of what it means to be human.
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Beyond Words Wonderful
- By Lynn on 11-27-22
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An Immense World
- How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
- By: Ed Yong
- Narrated by: Ed Yong
- Length: 14 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every kind of animal, including humans, is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of our immense world. In An Immense World, Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us.
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If you’ve never read about the wonder of animal sensory capabilities this is for you
- By MediaBaron on 06-27-22
By: Ed Yong
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How Emotions Are Made
- The Secret Life of the Brain
- By: Lisa Feldman Barrett
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 14 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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The science of emotion is in the midst of a revolution on par with the discovery of relativity in physics and natural selection in biology. Leading the charge is psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, whose research overturns the long-standing belief that emotions are automatic, universal, and hardwired in different brain regions. Instead, Barrett shows, we construct each instance of emotion through a unique interplay of brain, body, and culture.
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Emotions are not things!!!!!!
- By Gary on 03-14-17
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The Thirty Years War
- Europe's Tragedy
- By: Peter H. Wilson
- Narrated by: Matthew Waterson
- Length: 33 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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The Thirty Years War devastated seventeenth-century Europe, killing nearly a quarter of all Germans and laying waste to towns and countryside alike. Peter Wilson offers the first new history in a generation of a horrifying conflict that transformed the map of the modern world.
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Best Single-Volume History of the 30 Years' War
- By Amazon Customer on 10-09-23
By: Peter H. Wilson
What listeners say about The Bonobo and the Atheist
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Christian Bonnell
- 07-18-14
Great research on apes, bad research on humans
What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?
Frans de Waal is a brilliant researcher when it comes to the Bonobos and Chimpanzees that are his primary research subjects, and I absolutely loved the chapters talking about those subjects.
Unfortunately, he spends about half of the book ranting about various human authors and speakers (Notably, Hitchens, Harris, and D'Souza). On these sections it is clear that he has only a nominal familiarity with the subjects, and in some cases he even grossly mis-characterizes the views or arguments of the humans in question. There was even one case where the author points out in his book "people will probably accuse me of saying X, but that is not what I am saying at all..." and goes on to elaborate and explain the point in greater detail. Yet de Waal still accuses that author of saying X, and spends most of a chapter explaining why the author is ignorant and mistaken. de Waal also spends a good deal of time critiquing American culture, but in such a way that I seriously doubt he really understands what is going with any of the groups in question.
I would have loved a book on ethics than contained not only good science (which this book definitely does), but also something intelligent and cogent to add to the philosophical topics of Ethics. In this case, the book definitely does not deliver.
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31 people found this helpful
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- Gary
- 06-08-13
Masterful presentation of interesting topic
The book really should have been titled "The Bonobo and Human Empathy". The two pillars of all philosophy are empathy and reciprocity. He completely examines the first pillar, empathy, by illustrating empathetic behavior in Bonobos (and other animals) and linking it to our behavior.
He's such a good writer even when he wrote about things I completely disagreed with I would find the book thought provoking. I thought he trivialized the arguments of Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and John Stuart Mill. But, I'm not bothered. I believe what I believe and I appreciated the different perspective.
The narrator did a perfect job.
The book is much better than most pop science books I have listened to and I'm much richer for having listened to this highly entertaining book and can definitely say because of this book I'm much closer to my goal of understanding our place in the universe. He does talk about philosophy but I enjoyed those parts as much as I did about bonobos.
(P.S. Matt Ridley's book, "The Rational Optimist", fully covers the second pillar of human philosophy, reciprocity. Also, my personal take on the author he seemed like an apologetic atheist and he didn't want to offend anyone. But as I say, I wasn't bothered by this, but I disagreed with him regarding those sections. Also, he seemed to characterized the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill in a comic book fashion. Once again I wasn't bothered but I don't want to leave the impression that I agreed with him on those two points).
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21 people found this helpful
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- Ian
- 12-08-15
Three threads-1st 5 star - 2nd 3 star - 3rd 1 star
This is my first de Waal listen. The bits about primates are interesting, informative, amusing and thought provoking. The guy knows his stuff and I wish there had been more of it.
The bits about the art of Hieronymus Bosch are a bit here nor there for me. They probably serve to give some kind of framework to the observations on morality, empathy etc from the primate bits but to be honest the whole "etenal verity of art" vibe goes straight past me in a blur. I'm sure the paintings are fascinating to study but I felt that they added little to this work.
The atheism bit was depressing.
In a world where people are still in the thrall of imaginary beings to the extent that they are willing to kill each other over them, de Waal's characterisation and interpretation of the "neo-atheists" is at best disappointing and at worst dangerous. He cites primate examples showing where, how and why this mindset can be evolved and completely misses the point that the local and small scale sanctions imposed by a troop of chimps or bonobos loses its efficacy if the bad chimp is armed with an AK-47.
In a world where an evolved brain has discovered the chemical formula for cemtex it is depressing to meet an intelligent man who thinks that "why can't we all just get along together" is an appropriate response to the kind of mental backwater that produces religious fundamentalism.
Some of his characterisations of the work of the so called militant atheists are completely at odds with my own reading and interpretation of those works. I am perfectly willing to accept that mine may be the erroneous view but am left with a bad feeling that an intelligent man has, at some level, stepped back from a position just because he has faced an argument that he has no chance, at the moment, of winning in a society that is overly reverent of mythical thinking.
And most of the bits about primates are about Chimps rather than Bonobos.
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20 people found this helpful
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- Lisa
- 06-10-13
Less science and more meditative
I suspect I'm being a little generous with 4 stars. It isn't that I don't enjoy the writing of de Waal; I do. I read de Waal's Age of Empathy (2009), which is why I moved on to The Bonobo and the Atheist (2013). Age of Empathy contains a good many anecdotes from research about animal empathy, which are informative and entertaining. The Bonobo and the Atheist is more meditative. de Waal considers matters of atheism and religion intellectually, but with much less research. Jheronimus Bosch is his companion in these meditations time after time, using the paintings as a guide in his reflections. There are some research-based anecdotes, one of which was so surprising to me that I immediately sought out a companion with whom to share it. (Did you know a juvenile chimpanzee used a log for hours as a proxy baby chimp, cradling it and gently placing it in a night-time nest? Imagination is alive in other primates.) However, that doesn't alter the overall meditative tone on atheism and religion from the European secular perspective rather than harder science. I just happen to like the European secular perspective and de Waal's thoughts about those matters.
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17 people found this helpful
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- Sean
- 06-06-13
Meandering but thought provoking
I'm a big fan of the author and really enjoyed "Our Inner Ape." I enjoyed this book less. The writing is interesting but the book has an unstructured, unfinished feel to it.
He draws on his vast primatology experience to address the question "how can we have morality without God?" Using many insightful stories about chimps, bonobos and other monkeys he demonstrates that evolution has given us an innate moral sense that only recently (in anthropologic time) has been transplanted to the institution of religion.
He never clearly lays out this very delicate and complicated argument. His style is more throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. I never had a sense of what would be coming next and there was no systematic refutation of possible objections. As a student of philosophy I expect a clear premise and a well structured argument to back it up. I agree with most of what he says, but I honestly don't see how you could attack his argument if you didn't. There's no "If A, then B and if B then C. Now I'm going to prove A and B." Instead he gives us detailed analysis of several medieval paintings and anecdotes from his research.
I did appreciate his bristling at Hitchens and Dawkins' confrontational atheism. I like(d) them, but both frequently get a pass because of their divine status in the atheist pantheon.
In the end "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," and he hasn't brought that.
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10 people found this helpful
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- Diane
- 12-13-13
The parts about primates were great...
De Waal’s stories about apes, which were weaved throughout his book, were fascinating and enlightening. De Waal is, after all, an expert on the subject. Not as enlightening, however, were his insights about atheists and atheism. He was dismissive of great thinkers such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and the late Christopher Hitchens, often quoting them out of context in order to make a point. Yet, I often had trouble understanding what point he was trying to make as his arguments were contradictory: moral norms exist in primates and other mammals and are in inherent in humans, yet human society requires religion to enforce moral behavior; religion is a man-made concept, yet we should continue to pretend that it’s not because it brings comfort and thus is an essential and necessary part of human existence.
I don’t enjoy this narrator as he comes across as condescending.
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6 people found this helpful
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- FRAP38
- 02-10-15
Great info on primate behavior
Theme seemed force. A good read, as always, on primate behavior but the addition of the authors thoughts on atheism and "new atheism" just seem out of place. As if the author used the book as a platform to vent on his displeasure for outspoken atheists.
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5 people found this helpful
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- T. Prizer
- 02-01-19
The PERFECT narrator for a staggeringly brilliant work
This book goes further than anything I’ve read to complicate the relationship between religion and science. Should be read by absolutely everyone, regardless of faith or lack thereof. De Wall treats religion with the utmost respect despite being an atheist himself. In fact, he argues *for* its place in society, alongside science, rather than railing against it like so many of the “New Atheists” (he is damningly critical of Dawkins and Hitchens, showing that they too are dogmatists of the highest order).
A delightfully engaging book and a BRILLIANT narrator.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Csaba Turkosi
- 12-12-15
A fascinating glimpse into the origins of morality
The author clearly has a thorough understanding of primate behavior and offers a compelling argument for a natural, evolved origin of our innate, instinctive human morality.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Gerry
- 04-17-15
Amazingly Insightful View of Origins of Morality
Frans de Wall wrote one of the most sensible books imaginable that explores the roots of morality through his intimate and wide experience with our closest living relatives. The legacy of religion may well be rooted in our species' propensities to live socially as tribes. This is one of the most intellectually satisfying books that I have ever "read" (OK - listened to).
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3 people found this helpful