Reddit reviews Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton Science Library (Paperback))

You should read this book!

There's a great story in there about a bonobo that found a stunned bird in its enclosure. It took the bird to the top of the highest tree carefully spread its wings, and threw it like a paper airplane. While it was not a successful attempt at help, it showed a pretty impressive understanding of the difference between it and a bird.

Many people admit that although animals are not moral agents, they are our moral patients. I submit that they are indeed moral agents. Where do you think morality came from, God? Aliens?

A summary of Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved by the primatologist and ethologist, Frans De Waal;

"In these exquisitely written essays - the Tanner Lectures - de Waal shows how behaviour in various species, particularly our closest cousins the great apes, exhibits moral issues daily confronted and resolved. His research has led him to challenge one of Western society's most commonly held shibboleths - that morality is limited to human beings and that it lies as a thin layer over our animal instincts. Labelled by de Waal as the Veneer Theory, he attributes its source to Thomas Henry Huxley, also known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his defence of natural selection. Huxley, along with Alfred Russel Wallace, thought that human reasoning was to ?? mechanism lifting us above the remainder of the animals. The author notes the irony of Darwin's most vocal defender countering the naturalist's own stance that morality in humans is reflected in ape behaviour. De Waal forcibly contests Huxley's view, arguing that moral decisions result from our being a social species. Survival meant cooperation from our earliest evolutionary state, and was strengthened by selection pressures over time."

http://www.amazon.com/ss/customer-reviews/0691141290/ref=?_encoding=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0

You hit on a lot of good points, yes. But, it is indeed (thought not as our present level of technology) to create such a thing. The "me first" is the most primal, long before monkey, mammal, or vertebrate, programming or our DNA. As life on Earth evolved and became more complex, more layers of code were selected for and passed on. A lot of these systems play of of each other, modify each other, and sometimes play against each other. Cooperation, self-sacrifice, and charity CERTAINLY don't make sense for very primitive organism, but once you start scaling up and you start dealing with mammals it makes a lot of sense. You get new layers of genetic commands piled on top of the old ones, things like "defend kin. Sacrifice for kin. Have attachment to creatures with large heads and large eyes." That for the most part do their job, but also luckily spread outward and let us care about complete strangers and even other species and the planet. There are two really good books to help understand all this

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins goes into the broader category of why life behaves the way it does.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Selfish-Gene-Richard-Dawkins/dp/0192860925

And Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved by Frans de Waal goes into goes specifically into how altruism, morality, and the more noble aspects of humanity came to be in our simian ancestors and cousins. P,us, it's just sort of an uplifting read that will make you feel good.

http://www.amazon.com/Primates-Philosophers-Morality-Evolved-Princeton/dp/0691141290/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1419420928&sr=1-1&keywords=primates+and+philosophers

There is a reason for why we humans behave, for good and bad, the way that we do. For why we think the way that we do. But we have the advantage of being self-aware organisms that have the opportunity to look in the mirror and realize what we are doing and why we are doing it and choose a better, more moral course than what biology may demand of us. It is very difficult, many of us won't and of those that do none of us always will, but we can, and that is something fantastic. As far as we know a first for the history of life on this planet.

I tend to see things through the lens of biology, so I'd recommend the following biology based books not necessarily on religion but on related subjects that I think tend to favor atheism:

Dark Nature by Lyall Watson.

Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved by Frans de Waal

Also, in the field of psychology I strongly recommend the free online book The Authoritarians by Bob Altemeyer for an excellent book that explains much of the reasons why fundamentalist Christians are so hard to reason with (link is to free PDF published by Prof. Altemeyer, but you can also order a paper copy through lulu.com here ).