Empathy, intuitive understanding of another’s feelings, is not an ability unique to humans.

Adherents of the ‘Intelligent Design’ movement assume that morality was granted to man by God’s grace and that Christian believers were at the front of the distribution queue. This idea was expressed by Intelligent Design adherent Henk Jochemsen in a 2005 book: “For sociobiology and evolutionary ethics, it is irrefutable that altruistic behaviour is biologically perverse and pathological, because it goes against human nature. But in most cultures and major religions, true altruistic behaviour is presented as the higher ideal.”

Anyone familiar with the work of Darwin and biologist Frans de Waal knows that this is nonsense. A dead-end idea. Lees verder »