Leviticus states this unambiguously: “and anyone who touches her will be impure until nightfall (…) and everything on which she sits is impure (…) and anyone who touches her bed will be impure until nightfall (…) If a man lies with her (…) he will be impure for 7 days.”

Benificial for reproduction

According to the holy book, a woman has to make an offering and “purify” herself through a ritual bath, a mikvah, after every menstruation. I don’t understand this rule from a hygienic aspect, but it is beneficial for reproduction. Once a woman has menstruated, which usually lasts 5 days, she has to wait another 7 days to “purify” herself on the 8th day. Then she is in the 13th day of her cycle, and thus in the most fertile period. After this time of sexual abstinence, the chance of conception around ovulation is optimal. This is a rule with a clear advantage for maintaining the group. Could that be the clever idea behind this misogynistic rule?

In any case, the idea that people had to be wary of menstrual blood has remained powerful since Leviticus. Vincent de Beauvais (1478) felt that menstrual blood would prevent grain from sprouting, make grapes turn sour, wilt plants, make trees drop their fruit, rust iron, tarnish bronze, and cause rabies. This is not an outmoded, medieval idea. My mother-in-law was not allowed in the kitchen of her non-religious grandmother when she was menstruating if fruit from the garden was being processed. Women from Suriname are still not allowed into the kitchen when they are menstruating. According to popular belief, even today, bread and meat can spoil or plants die if touched or glanced at by a menstruating woman.

Severe neurological symptoms

Other rules have a better basis. Not only the Jewish dietary rules make shellfish like mussels “impure”, the North American Indians also forbid the eating of mussels. There appears to be a good reason for this. In 1987 within one day of eating mussels from the estuary of the Cardigan River on Prince Edward Island in eastern Canada, about 100 people suddenly fell severely ill. They not only suffered from nausea and vomiting, there were also severe neurological symptoms like confusion, headache and paralysis.

Seven patients ended up in a coma, and even after a year had passed, some victims still had serious problems with memory loss. They could not remember events that people just don’t forget, like their daughter’s wedding. A brain autopsy was performed on four people who died from the mussel poisoning, which revealed that the hippocampus and the amygdala, two structures essential for memory, were severely damaged.

Unusual weather conditions that summer in Canada had encouraged extreme algae blooms. The algae (the diatom Nitzschia pungens) were sieved and collected by the mussels from the water. The algae contained a substance that was poisonous for the central nervous system, domoic acid. This substance destroys brain cells by stimulating them strongly.

Pay attention

This effect is not limited to humans. In 1961 the puffin population in Rio del Mar, California, began to display strange behaviour. The birds flew at full speed against windows and lampposts. They pecked at people and regurgitated over them. Alfred Hitchcock requested articles about this strange bird behaviour from the local newspapers. Two years later he made the film “The Birds”, probably inspired by this story and naturally by Daphne de Maurier’s novel. In a similar epidemic in Santa Cruz, California, in 1991, when cormorants and pelicans suddenly began acting strangely, a high concentration of domoic acid was found in their bodies after death.

So we should pay attention to some of the rules in the Bible, but unfortunately we don’t know which ones are important. However, following all the regulations in Leviticus, just to be sure is not an option these days. Read the criminal code (Leviticus 20: 1-27) and shudder!

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This is the final column by Dick Swaab on this website.

The gender team of the Vrije Universiteit Medical Centre in Amsterdam has been a pioneer in this field for many years, initially under the leadership of professor Louis Gooren and now of professor Peggy Cohen-Kettenis. This is unusual because the Bible, on which the VU is founded, states in Deuteronomy 22:5-6: “A woman must not wear men’s clothing, nor a man wear women’s clothing, for the Lord your God detests anyone who does this.”

In the womb

Male-to-female (M2F) transsexuality occurs in 1 in 10,000 men, and female-to-male (F2M) transsexuality in 1 in 30,000 women. Gender problems are often expressed early in development. Mothers describe how from the moment their son could talk, he would wear his mother’s clothes and shoes, he was exclusively interested in girls’ toys and mostly played with girls. But not all children with gender problems want to change gender later. If necessary, puberty can be delayed for a while with a hormone inhibitor to gain additional time to make a decision about whether to undergo treatment or not.

All of the data indicate that gender problems develop in the womb. Small changes have been found in genes involved in the effect of hormones on brain development, which increase the chance of transsexuality developing. Abnormal hormone levels in the fetus in the womb and medicines that the mother takes during pregnancy that disturb the breakdown of sex hormones can increase the chance of transsexuality developing.

Sexual differentiation of our genitalia occurs in the first few months of pregnancy while sexual differentiation of the brain takes place in the second half of pregnancy. As these two processes occur at different times, it is theorised that in transsexuality these processes are influenced independently of each other. If that hypothesis is true, then we would expect female structures in the male brains of M2F transsexuals and vice versa in F2M transsexuals.

Brain and hormones

In 1995 such a reversal of the gender difference was published by us in Nature. It involved the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BSTc), a brain structure implicated in sexual behaviour. The BSTc was found to be  twice as large in men and contained double the number of neurons than in women. In M2F transsexuals we found a female BSTc. The only F2M transsexual we  could study did indeed have a male BSTc.

We could exclude the possibility that the reversal of the gender difference in transsexuals was caused by changed hormone levels in adulthood. Reversal must therefore have taken place during development. When a researcher finally does publish something interesting, the nicest comment that colleagues can come up with is: “This must first be confirmed by an independent group.” That can take a while, as it took me 20 years to collect the brain material for this study.

Thus, I was delighted to hear that Ivanka Savic’s research group the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm published a study last year of functional brain scanning of living M2F transsexuals. They had not yet been surgically altered nor had they started taking hormones. They were stimulated with male and female pheromones, scents that you pick up unconsciously. These scents produce different stimulation patterns in the hypothalamus and other brain regions in control men and women. The stimulation pattern in M2F transsexuals lay between that of men and women.

Last year Ramachandran, a psychologist and  neurologist in the United States presented an interesting hypothesis and preliminary results on transsexuality. His idea is that in M2F transsexuals the representation of the penis is lacking in the cerebral cortex and in F2M transsexuals the region for breasts during development is not mapped onto the cerebral cortex, which is why the brain does not consider the organs as its “own” and wants to get rid of them.

Everything indicates that during the early stages of development, the sexual differentiation of the brain occurs atypically in transsexuals, and not that they are “simply” psychotic, as a psychiatrist from Limburg recently dared to assert.

Every day large quantities of blood pass through the kidney for cleaning purposes. During the cleaning process, the kidney recycles about 15 liters of fluid per day from the waste water. The kidney receives help with this from a brain hormone that inhibits the excretion of water, hence its name: “anti-diuretic hormone” (ADH). The same hormone is also known as “vasopressin” because it acts to raise the blood pressure. It is a small protein produced by the brain cells. These cells are located in the hypothalamus and transport the hormone to the rearmost part of the pituitary gland, where it enters the bloodstream.

Revolutionary

The idea that brain cells could produce hormones was first suggested in the 1940s by Ernst and Berta Scharrer. Under the microscope they saw grains in large brain cells in the hypothalamus, and proposed that they were packaged hormones ready for release into the bloodstream. This revolutionary concept aroused strong emotional reactions among their colleagues. “Practically everybody rejected the idea vigorously or even viciously” Berta wrote me, still angry as an elderly woman.

Opponents claimed the grains were just part of a disease process, or changes that occurred after death or produced by the staining process. The Scharrers showed that they were wrong by finding similar nerve cells with grains throughout the animal kingdom, from worm to human. Their hypothesis that these cells had something to do with the body’s water management system was visionary. The function of ADH immediately became clear when a hereditary defect in the DNA for this hormone was found. Such a patient urinates 15 liters per day.

In Amsterdam we have followed such a family for five generations. It was during my internship in 1968 in the Central Hospital in Prof. Borst’s department that I first met them. The life of this family was determined to a great extent by continuous urinating and drinking.

Excessive drinking and urinating

One patient said her mother, who also had diabetes insipidus, got fed up with all the urinating and drinking of the children sleeping with her in the same room. The children were strictly forbidden to get out of bed at night to drink something. But the mother always kept a kettle under the bed to slake her own thirst.

The children could not stand being without water, however. While the mother slept, they secretly crept under the bed to suck on the kettle’s spout. If they woke their mother, they were slapped. When one patient was admitted to a sanatorium as a child, the nursing staff found the excessive drinking and urinating so annoying that they refused to give her more water for a long time. To get enough fluid, the patient would drink the flower vases dry at night.

At a certain point she became so dehydrated that it was thought she would die. The parents arrived just in time to restore her with a large bottle of water. If she went bicycling with her sister, they always took bottles of water along. At petrol stations, each one would drink a bottle and then refill it for the road, leaving the station attendant open-mouthed.

In 1992 we found the tiny defect in the DNA of this Amsterdam diabetes insipidus family in collaboration with a research group from Hamburg. One building block of the DNA on chromosome 20 was responsible for the 15 liters of urine per day. Now the patients can administer long-acting ADH by nasal spray, which has reduced the quantities to be drunk and urinated to almost normal proportions. Some patients refuse to take the medicine, though. They don’t consider this condition a disease, but rather a special family trait.

There was amazement all round when it was clinically proven that the effect of the most commonly used antidepressant was not significantly better than that of a placebo. But strangely enough, no one admires the effectiveness of the placebo. A placebo effect is any and all effects of a pill not caused by its specific chemical composition. For example, a red, yellow or orange pill is associated with a stimulating effect, while blue and green pills are thought to be calming.

A placebo can also have adverse effects. It can make a person nauseous or give them stomachache. People even get addicted to it, and develop withdrawal symptoms when the placebo treatment is terminated. There is thus sufficient reason to be interested in the effectiveness and the neurobiological mechanism of action of placebos.

Placebo effects are due to unconscious changes in brain functions, which ameliorate the disease symptoms. This is caused by the patient’s expectations of the treatment. The substances in a placebo are indeed pharmacologically inert, but the effect of the information about it given to the patient and the patient’s own expectations can make the placebo effect very specific. This is true not only for pills, it also applies to conversational therapies and surgical interventions.

Parkinson’s

In Parkinson’s disease, which is caused by a shortage of the chemical messenger dopamine, a placebo can stimulate the release of more dopamine in the brain and thus amelioration of the symptoms. Parkinsonian symptoms can also be lessened by electrically inhibiting a deep region of the brain through an electrode inserted into it. If the doctor tells the patient that he is turning the stimulator of this deep electrode on or off, but actually does nothing, an improvement or worsening of the Parkinsonian symptoms immediately becomes evident.

In a test of Parkinson patients who have a deep electrode inserted in their brain while conscious, an inactive substance claimed to be a new anti-Parkinson product was injected during the operation. The electrical activity in the same brain region was reduced and the symptoms improved in about half of the patients. Apparently, the brain of a patients who responds to the placebo “knows” in which area of the brain the activity must be altered to lessen the symptoms. And this works better if the patient expects the “new product” to have an effect.

Self-healing brain

Depressed patients treated with a placebo had improved after six weeks to the same level as the patients who were given real antidepressants. Brain scans showed that the changes in activity of various brain regions were very similar between the group that was given the placebo and the group that was given the real antidepressant. The brain induces exactly the right changes in function that will lead to a reduction in the symptoms of depression because of the placebo.

If a patient in pain is given a placebo, then the brain “knows” that an augmented release of morphine-like substances and a displacement of activity in several brain regions and the spinal cord are required to suppress the pain. In contrast, the patient’s expectation that a painkiller will help is absent in Alzheimer patients. Thus, pain relief in these patients is less effective, and they require higher doses of painkiller to achieve the same result.

The placebo effect shows the unconscious capacity of the brain to heal itself. That mechanism can contribute little or nothing to the treatment of cancer, but seems to be effective in several brain disorders. Research into the mechanism of placebo effects and the question of why some of us are more susceptible to placebo effects than others could have important clinical consequences. In addition, we must definitely not underestimate the effect of the old-fashioned, imposing and confidence-inspiring doctor as a “walking placebo”.

Alzheimer’s disease follows a fixed route through the brain. When the typical signs of the disease, the ‘tangles’, develop in the entorhinal cortex and then a few appear in the hippocampus, those can be seen only under a microscope. No external symptoms are visible. But as the disease strongly takes hold in those areas of the brain, problems become evident in the short-term memory. One no longer remembers what happened just recently, but can recall minute details of a birthday party in primary school. When finally the Alzheimer’s disease reaches the other cerebral cortex regions, the patient becomes demented.

Some demented painters with Alzheimer’s disease retain their creative artistic skills amazingly intact. One painter could make excellent portraits, but was no longer able to ask an adequate price for her work, and certainly not negotiate about it. This artist is utilising the rearmost portion of the cerebral cortex (with which we see) up to the last moment, as it is the last area affected by the disease.

Disease process

Just as the microscopic changes, the loss of functions during the disease process also follows a set pattern, in which the skills disappear in exactly the reverse order in which they were learned during our development.

Dr. Barry Reisberg in New York numbered the stages that the Alzheimer’s disease process passes through. In Stage 1 nothing appears to be wrong. In Stage 2 you can no longer find your possessions, and you notice that you have difficulty with your work but it is easy to keep the changes hidden. In Stage 3 other people begin to notice that you cannot do your work properly. In Stage 4 you have difficulty with more complex tasks, like organising your finances. Subsequently (5), you need help choosing clothing. Then (6a) you need help getting dressed, (6b) washing yourself, (6c) you have problems flushing the toilet and wiping your bottom, then urinary incontinence (6d) and faecal incontinence (6e) develop. In stage 7a you only speak one to five words a day and then nothing comprehensible (7b), you can no longer walk (7c), and then no longer sit down by yourself (7d). Subsequently (7e), your smile disappears, which everyone so enjoyed when you were a baby, and then (7f) you can no longer hold your head up. Patients ultimately lie in a fetal position in bed, and a sucking reflex is triggered when one sticks a finger in their mouth. Regression all the way back to the stage of a newborn baby.

Music skills

Language and music are stored in a part of the memory that is affected late in the disease. Speech doesn’t disappear until Stage 7. Musical skills can persist for a long time in Alzheimer patients. A demented professional pianist could not recall any spoken or written text or music notation. But she was still able to remember new, unfamiliar music that she had just heard and to reproduce it with an excellent musical feeling. In a later stage she still played her favourite melodies with great pleasure.

Lasting musical talent was also described in a violinist with Alzheimer’s disease. And as expected with a function that remains intact for so long, the effects of music on the brain functions are noted very early in development. Premature babies are calmer, have better oxygen levels and leave the incubator sooner if music is played. Newborn babies pay much more attention to their mother’s singing than when she speaks, and they are sensitive to musical rhythms. Alzheimer’s disease follows the reorganisation rule that those who were recruited last in the company are the first to go, and the employees who have been there the longest remain. But this is not reorganisation of the brain, it is destruction.

There are only a few things in this world that everyone seems to agree on, but people everywhere believe that it is bad to exercise little, and that we can only stay healthy by doing sports. The result is that, nowadays you cannot go for a peaceful walk in the woods without being overtaken by panting, sweating and clearly suffering joggers. Every self-respecting company sponsors athletes; marathons are run for cancer patients. The Amsterdam Medical Centre, which should know better, organises an endurance run each year. The Netherlands is dragged into the fitness race by the television broadcastor Max at quarter to seven in the morning, when elderly people are encouraged to exercise rhythmically in flashy tracksuits.

Sports injuries

How did the misunderstanding develop that sport is healthy? Certainly not by working in a hospital accident and emergency department on Sundays, as I did. At the beginning of January this year, a typical example occurred. The temperature plunged below zero, half of the Netherlands spent two weeks ice skating on the frozen canals, and the emergency rooms of every hospital had to work overtime because of the 10,000 additional patients with broken bones, hypothermia and other problems. Would you call that healthy?

The annual surge in plane flights back from the skiing resorts filled with patients in plaster casts also does not support the idea either that exercise is healthy. Each year there are 2.7 million sport injuries in the Netherlands alone, of which half require medical treatment. If sports were forbidden, we could eliminate the waiting lists for medical procedures in one fell swoop. We all know that boxers give each other permanent brain damage. Kickboxers are apparently 10 times worse off. Many head butts and an occasional elbow punch while playing football reduce the players’ brain cells. Since the very first marathon in Greece, people have dropped dead in this long-distance event.

No one seems worried about the increased risk of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis due to playing sports, or that in the Netherlands about 100 people die suddenly each year while exercising. In gyms people inject themselves with anabolic steroids or use growth hormone preparations that are sometimes infected with the Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease vector. It really does seem, as stated in the Dutch magazine Vrij Nederland once, as if half of the population plays sports and the other half drives them to the hospital.

Metabolism and brain size

One could object that these are just the minor inconveniences of a lifestyle that gives the Dutch people a long and healthy life. But that opinion has no evident foundation either. The American researcher Pearl concluded as early as 1924 that heavy physical exertion shortens the lifespan. And this rule applies to the entire animal kingdom. Comparative studies by Michel Hofman in the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience revealed that two factors determine our lifespan: the body’s metabolism and the size of the brain. The higher the metabolic rate, the shorter the lifespan. This agrees with the observation made at Harvard that top athletes do not live long. The enormous physical exertion required to play sports apparently shortens the human lifespan.

The American researcher Rajindar Sohal found that the more flying movements a fly makes, the sooner it drops down dead. If you prevent a fly wasting energy by imprisoning it between two plastic plates without enough room to fly, then it lives three times longer.

One organ, the brain, affects our lifespan in the opposite direction. The larger and more active the brain, the longer the lifespan. Stimulation of the brain seems to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, and once the disease has developed, its symptoms can be ameliorated. Vice versa, in disorders involving a relatively small brain like microcephaly and Down’s syndrome, the life expectancy is shorter. In addition, eminent scientists have a larger brain and live longer. You can increase your brain size by constantly stimulating it with new information, as done experimentally in an enriched environment. It seems therefore to be definitely healthier, if you enjoy doing so, to watch professional sports rather than play them. And if you must practise a sport, then how about chess?

This imitation behaviour largely functions automatically. Newborn human babies less than one hour old can already copy the movements of an adult’s mouth. Mirror neurons also work with emotions. They enable you to experience the emotions another person is feeling, and thus form the basis for empathy. Mirror neurons have been found in the prefrontal cortex, the foremost part of the brain, and in other parts of the cerebral cortex.

Changes in behaviour

Our large prefrontal cortex contains important components of our moral network. The  prefrontal cortex ensures that the perceived emotions are linked to moral concepts. It responds to social signals and inhibits impulsive, selfish reactions. The feeling of making an honest ‘deal’ also requires the  prefrontal cortex. The importance of the  prefrontal cortex for our moral understanding is evident from studies of the sequelae of damage by tumours, gunshot wounds and other injuries in that region, which can lead to asocial, psychopathic and immoral behaviour. The prefrontal cortex of a judge in the US was damaged by grenade fragments. He found he could no longer sympathise with the defendant at all and resigned from his post. Damage to the prefrontal cortex at a young age leads to aberrations in moral concepts and behaviour that we recognise from psychopaths. Men accused of murder often demonstrate disturbances in the function of their prefrontal cortex. Patients with frontotemporal dementia, a brain disorder that starts in the prefrontal cortex, can display antisocial, criminal behaviour, like unwanted sexual advances, driving away after committing traffic violations, physical violence, theft, burglary and paedophilia. Only later does it become evident that these changes in behaviour were the initial stage of the disease process.

The prefrontal cortex is the primary area involved in decision-making to solve moral dilemmas, like tests in which the sacrifice of the life of one person is necessary to save several others. For most of us it is impossible to make these types of decisions, but people with a damaged  prefrontal cortex can make cold-blooded, very impersonal decisions. They do not feel empathy or sympathy when making such terrible decisions.

Along with the prefrontal cortex there are other cortical and subcortical brain areas involved in our moral acts, like the foremost part of the temporal lobe that contains an almond-shaped core (the amygdala), the septum separating the ventricles, the reward circuitry (the ventral tegmental area) and the hypothalamus, which lies at the base of the brain. All of these regions are essential for the motivation and emotions of our moral behaviour. The amygdala is also involved in analysing the social meaning of facial expressions and how we respond to them. Murderers and psychopaths have an aberrantly functioning amygdala, which also explains why psychopaths respond less to facial expressions like sadness and fear. Men accused of murder have been found to have deficiencies in their temporal cerebral cortex.

Moral dilemmas

The moral network is thus not localised only in the part of the cerebral cortex that has evolved recently, the neocortex. Evolutionarily older areas are also crucial for our moral functions. Typical moral emotions like guilt, sympathy and empathy, shame, pride, disdain, and gratitude, as well as revulsion, respect, indignation and rage depend on the interactions between these brain regions. Functional brain scans, produced during the testing of terrible moral dilemmas, like suffocating a crying baby to save other lives, reveal changes in activity in brain regions known to lead to moral problems when damaged or invaded by a tumour.

But we must not forget with all these wonderful moral impulses that while empathy allows us to understand other people and sympathise with them, it also enables us to imagine what other people are going through when we deliberately hurt or torture them, and we can follow also those impulses with enthusiasm.

Hundreds of clinics and therapists work in this field, and it is claimed, without proof, that 30 percent of those who underwent therapy were ‘healed’. In the clinics people can be treated for two weeks for 2,500 US dollars and for six weeks for 6,000 dollars. The therapists are mostly ‘former homosexuals’, who say that after a course of therapy they became real family men. A counter-movement ‘It is OK to be Gay’ points out that the therapies are based on a conditioning of the shame, stigmatisation and discrimination of homosexuals. Suicides are the result.

All indications suggest that our sexual orientation is programmed early in the womb, and thus set for the rest of our lives. Our environment after birth does not affect this. Even the English boarding schools did not lead to an increased frequency of homosexuality in adulthood. I thought that the ‘curing’ of homosexuals was a typical American-Christian delusion, so I was surprised to learn that it happens here in the Netherlands, too. In the Pentecostal Church ‘healings’ are held during which, through prayer, you can be ‘healed’ of your homosexuality and at the same time of your HIV infection, and then married off to a woman from the church membership. It is not only misleading, it is life-threatening if seropositive men believe that they are cured in this way and no longer have to take their medication.

Concentration camps

The outmoded idea that we are free to choose our sexual orientation and that homosexuality is thus just a wrong choice is still causing great suffering. The stories I heard when giving a lecture for Contrario (a Christian gay organisation) showed me that for Dutch homosexuals from a Dutch Reformed Church background, their sexual orientation can still lead to a terrible struggle. Until just recently, medical science also considered homosexuality to be a disease. Only in 1992 was homosexuality removed from the ICD-10 (International Classification of Diseases). Until then, doctors tried to ‘cure’ men of their homosexuality.

The idea that your social environment influences the development of your sexual orientation resulted in widespread persecution. Nazi Germany’s view, expressed by Hitler himself, that homosexuality is as contagious as the plague, led to unimaginable consequences: first voluntary castration, then mandatory castration and then the systematic murdering of homosexuals in the concentration camps.

Ideas tried

One important argument against the idea that homosexuality is a ‘lifestyle’ choice or can be influenced by the environment is the evident impossibility of ‘curing’ people of homosexuality. The strangest ideas have already been tried: hormonal treatments like administering testosterone or oestrogen, castrations, treatments that affect the libido but not the sexual orientation. Electroshocks have been given and epileptic insults induced. Prison sentences don’t work either, with the sad example of the humiliation of Oscar Wilde. Testicle transplants were done, with a ‘success story’ of a homosexual man who pinched the nurse’s bum after surgery. Naturally, psychoanalysis was tried, and the emetic apomorphine was given in combination with homo-erotic pictures to condition men away from their homo-erotic feelings. Apparently, the only effect was that the men began to vomit when the therapist entered the room, but their homo-erotic feelings remained unaffected. Brain surgery has also been performed on homosexual men, whose prison sentence was reduced if the treatment had an effect. Of course, the men always said that it had had an effect.

As none of these interventions has ever produced a well-documented change in sexual orientation, there can be no doubt that our sexual orientation is fixed in adulthood and cannot be influenced. Once the churches in the Netherlands finally accept that fact openly, the life of many of their young members would look much rosier. And isn’t that what churches should all be about?

Darwin’s moral psychology (1859), consequently, was not based on an egotistical competition between individuals but on social involvement within the group. During the course of evolution, the benefit of helping each other developed from the loving care exhibited by parents towards their offspring. This was then expanded to apply to others of their kind according to the principle: do unto others, as you would have others do unto you. At a certain moment sympathising with the other became a goal in itself. Finally, this product of millions of years of evolution turned into a cornerstone of human morality that was recently, a couple of thousand years ago, incorporated in religions. It is thus rather cynical to ascertain that having a common enemy is the strongest stimulus for community spirit, a mechanism that many world leaders have exploited.

Preferential treatment

Inherent in the biological aim of morality – promoting cooperation – is the notion that members of your own group receive preferential treatment. First of all, there is the loyalty to one’s own family, the blood relatives and the community, as a moral duty. Once the survival and health of the nearest and dearest are assured, then the circle of loyalty can be expanded: “First food, then morality,” as playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote. Nowadays, we are doing so well that the circle of loyalty has expanded to include the EU, the West, the Third World and animal welfare, and even our enemies since the Geneva Convention of 1949. The necessity for doing so was, however, already noted much earlier. In the third century BC the Chinese philosopher Mozi sighed when he saw all the destruction caused by war: “What is the path to universal love and mutual benefit? When no one covets other countries as his own.”

Although tests show no significant difference in the moral choices made by atheists or believers, the Intelligent Design (ID) movement claims that moral behaviour is something unique to man and derives from religion, especially Christianity. In professor Cees Dekker’s book about Intelligent Design (2005) the ID-adherent and editor of books on theology and science, professor Jitse van der Meer says, “(…) humans are the only primate which can think about moral standards”. Biologist Frans de Waal, an expert in this field, has shown that people don’t usually think at all about moral acts. Action is taken quickly and instinctively from a strong biological basis. Then humans think up a reason for what they unconsciously did in a flash.

Biology

Our moral values evolved over the course of millions of years, based on unconscious universal values. Moral behaviour is evident already early in development, which together with the moral behaviour of animals forms an argument for the biological basis of this behaviour. Young children comfort family members in pain before they have developed the ability to talk or to think about moral standards, just like primates comfort each other. When adults pretend to be sad, a child of 1-2 years old will comfort them. And not only children; pets also displayed comforting behaviour during the same experiment.

Chimpanzees can display altruistic behaviour, just like children 18 months old, without being rewarded in the short or long term. They can pass another chimpanzee a stick or give a child a pencil, simply because the other can’t reach it. They will also repeat this action, without receiving any reward. So the roots of our altruistic behaviour extend a long way back.

There is thus no basis for what the ID-adherent Van der Meer says (in Dekker et al., 2005): “Good behaviour has no biological basis, but has to be learned because it is not inborn and thus things can go wrong.” It is incomprehensible that the wonderful primate studies conducted by De Waal and others on the biological basis of social behaviour fall under what ID-adherent and molecular biologist professor Henk Jochemsen in Dekker’s boek (2005) describes as “the reduction of the life sciences and social sciences into specialties of biology”. Putting your viewpoints a little more into perspective wouldn’t hurt, ID-adherents!

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. Darwin described in detail how our moral understanding derives from social instincts that contribute significantly to the survival of the group. This is evident in many species that have to rely on collaboration, like primates, elephants and wolves.

Empathy

Experiencing empathy, knowing how someone else feels, is the basis for all moral acts. I have watched in amazement as our dog empathised with his friend, our daughter’s dog, after it had undergone an operation on his paw. Normally, they rushed around, provoking each other to wild games without end. But after the operation, our dog sniffed the other dog and remained quietly standing, staring with a concentrated look, while making peeping sounds now and again to show that he was empathising with the other’s fate. Then he very carefully began to lick the other dog’s operated paw.

If an elephant is hit by a bullet or an anaesthetic dart, the others trumpet loudly and try to help the victim up again with their trunks or by pushing against him, sometimes for hours. Help is also offered by other elephants when one is wounded accidentally, even if they are not from the same herd. Rooks seek comfort from their lifelong mates after a conflict in the colony. They act affectionate, share some food, smooth each other’s feathers and lovingly hold the other’s beak, as if they are kissing.

There are many marvellous examples of animals exhibiting true moral behaviour. In a zoo, an old, sick ape was added to a group. Because he did not understand what the keepers wanted him to do, the bonobos led him by the hand to the correct place. And when he got lost and started crying in distress, the others came to him, calmed him down and brought him back to the group. Just try to see that on the street in Amsterdam!

Moral sense

That primates have a moral sense is apparent in chimpanzees from the existence of companionship and the urge to care for a wounded fellow. Pure empathy must also have been the basis for a bonobo caring for a wounded bird. In 1966 the female gorilla Binti Jua rescued a 3-year-old boy who had fallen 6 meters into the primate enclosure in Chicago. Other species can also sacrifice themselves for humans. For example, a labrador dog in California sprang in front of his best friend and was thus bitten by a rattlesnake. Dolphins are known not only to free trapped fellows from nets, but also to save drowning humans. Empathy and altruism are aspects that form the key to human morality, but they have a long evolutionary history that is certainly not unique to man.

These few examples clearly show that the nanotechnologist, orthodox-Christian and prophet of the Dutch branch of the intelligent design movement, professor Cees Dekker, is wide of the mark when he claims morality as the exclusive domain of Christianity. He said in a 2006 interview: “Jesus said: love God above all others and your brother like yourself. That is a moral task, a law that is difficult to understand or to examine with natural science methods. And yet we can distinguish good from evil”. Intelligent design adherents apparently do not read the writings of the people they criticise. Thus, they do not have to conclude that religion did not invent the rules of morality, but simply adopted them after they had developed in the course of evolution in social animals, including man.