Let’s start first with Marc Hauser. His academic disgrace was because he was found to have falsified data, not because of how he interpreted said data. A cursory look through Wikipedia could have made that clear for you.

If you had bothered to do more than a ‘cursory look’ at the Marc Hauser investigation as I have, you would find information like this in the NYT’s article on the investigation:

There is a wide spectrum of scientific sins, ranging from wrist-slap offenses like bad data storage at one end, to data fabrication at the other. It is still not clear where on this spectrum Dr. Hauser’s errors may fall. He has admitted only to unspecified “mistakes,” not to misconduct.

Many of his experiments involved inferring a monkey’s thoughts or expectations from its response to a sight or sound. But the technique required somewhat subjective assessments by the researcher as to whether the monkey stared longer than usual at a display or turned its head toward a loudspeaker broadcasting an unexpected sound.

At least some of Dr. Hauser’s students disagreed with his interpretation of one such experiment three years ago, and reported their reservations to the Harvard authorities in a letter that was obtained this week by The Chronicle of Higher Education. It was this letter that spurred a three-year investigation of Dr. Hauser’s work going back at least as far as 2002.

You should do more than read Wikipedia articles on the subject.

The notion that the monkey was reacting to fairness was the conclusion of the researchers, not just Jerry Coyne. That’s because the monkey was able to see that his friend was getting a treat, while he was not. More profound was the example given later in the talk of a chimp who refused to eat the sweets until his friend got a similar treat (based on this: http://scienceblogs.com/primatediaries/2010/04/22/chimpanzees-prefer-fair-play-o/)

Yes, this was noted in the quote I included. Again, anyone reading carefully before responding would have noted this.

Now, it’s worth noting that the moral capacity of primates is still the subject of much controversy. We’re not sure exactly to what extent they can abstract about things like “fairness”. In the study that you cite, chimps could not simply see their friend getting a better reward for the same task, but would have had to abstract about how their actions might affect another. Saying that a primate does not have a human-like capacity for cognitive abstractions is not the same thing as saying that analogs of human fairness exist in primates.

There is no way to know this of course unless we can actually communicate with primates about what they think of fairness – which we can’t because they don’t conceptualize fairness in any way that can be communicated. Which is why these sort of experiments are highly subjective, and prone to the sort of nonsense we see in the interpretations above. Which is the entire pioint of this post which you seem to have missed.

And that was De Waal’s point, if you’d bothered to watch the video. Nobody’s arguing that primates have a system of morals anything like that of humans. Yet they do appear to have a rudimentary sense of fairness, of cooperative pro-social behavior, and of empathy – all of which do not constitute human morality in themselves, but are integral to it. They are “analogs”, or “building blocks” without which human morality could not exist, indicating that human morality is part of an evolutionary continuum rather than the invention of human minds or bestowed upon humans by gods.

Well again, if you had read the actual post instead of reacting mindlessly, you would see where I said, “Now its possible monkeys have some idea of fairness. It’s possible other animals do … There is no reason why I as a Christian would deny the existence of such sensations in animals – but is such frustration really the basis for our moral notion of fairness? This is where I think comparisons start to break down.”

So basically you just repeated and affirmed what I have already wrote, because you don’t read before you reacted.

“Finally:

Theists tend to cherry pick such studies. Because they have an a priori commitment to the supernatural, they are forced to believe that human morality must have been the product of a creative intelligence. So any animal behavior that fails to resemble a human action motivated by a moral precept is interpreted as evidence for this notion.
See how easy it is to turn around your masturbatory drivel? The fact is, it is your position that is dogmatically committed to human exceptionalism, despite the mountains of evidence that it is a wholly unjustified belief.”

I know schools don’t teach logic in the lower levels, but a tu quoque is a cogent argument against a proposition. It’s like saying “You say smoking is unhealthy, but you smoke, therefore, smoking isn’t bad for your health”

Nonetheless, you are right, I am committed to human exceptionalism (all humans are of course, some just aren’t willing to admit it) but I would be glad to abandon this bias the second a non-human explains to me why I should.

Not to mention Jack that, as usual, you’re wrong about atheism. Atheism does not require, nor entail, a commitment to naturalism/materialism. It is the product of an evidence-based worldview – a result, not a thesis. But it’s not like I and many others haven’t bludgeoned you over the head with that fact innumerable times in the hope, clearly in vain, that a proper understanding of atheism might at least keep you from erecting one straw man after another.

I know atheists themselves are still trying to figure out what atheism means (see my last post), so feel free to bludgeon away once that’s settled. Until then, there are no atheists who don’t first accept some notion of naturalism or materialism as a condition upon which their atheism rests.

That critter just don’t exist.

Let’s start first with Marc Hauser. His academic disgrace was because he was found to have falsified data, not because of how he interpreted said data. A cursory look through Wikipedia could have made that clear for you.

The notion that the monkey was reacting to fairness was the conclusion of the researchers, not just Jerry Coyne. That’s because the monkey was able to see that his friend was getting a treat, while he was not. More profound was the example given later in the talk of a chimp who refused to eat the sweets until his friend got a similar treat (based on this: http://scienceblogs.com/primatediaries/2010/04/22/chimpanzees-prefer-fair-play-o/)

Now, it’s worth noting that the moral capacity of primates is still the subject of much controversy. We’re not sure exactly to what extent they can abstract about things like “fairness”. In the study that you cite, chimps could not simply see their friend getting a better reward for the same task, but would have had to abstract about how their actions might affect another. Saying that a primate does not have a human-like capacity for cognitive abstractions is not the same thing as saying that analogs of human fairness exist in primates.

And that was De Waal’s point, if you’d bothered to watch the video. Nobody’s arguing that primates have a system of morals anything like that of humans. Yet they do appear to have a rudimentary sense of fairness, of cooperative pro-social behavior, and of empathy – all of which do not constitute human morality in themselves, but are integral to it. They are “analogs”, or “building blocks” without which human morality could not exist, indicating that human morality is part of an evolutionary continuum rather than the invention of human minds or bestowed upon humans by gods.

Finally:

Theists tend to cherry pick such studies. Because they have an a priori commitment to the supernatural, they are forced to believe that human morality must have been the product of a creative intelligence. So any animal behavior that fails to resemble a human action motivated by a moral precept is interpreted as evidence for this notion.

See how easy it is to turn around your masturbatory drivel? The fact is, it is your position that is dogmatically committed to human exceptionalism, despite the mountains of evidence that it is a wholly unjustified belief.

Not to mention Jack that, as usual, you’re wrong about atheism. Atheism does not require, nor entail, a commitment to naturalism/materialism. It is the product of an evidence-based worldview – a result, not a thesis. But it’s not like I and many others haven’t bludgeoned you over the head with that fact innumerable times in the hope, clearly in vain, that a proper understanding of atheism might at least keep you from erecting one straw man after another.

But then again theism is never a product of evidence.