There is a popular belief about Nature that we live in a dog-eat-world of brutish survival of the fittest. If such a pessimistic world view ever makes you depressed, primate psychologist Frans de Waal offers an optimistic counterpoint. He found striking evidence that animals other than humans have empathy and a sense of fair play, as well as cognition. Dr. Michael
Sullivan will discuss de Waal’s counterintuitive findings from the uplifting The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society. These include the ways that empathy has evolved in animals as a widespread adaptive trait, underscoring the intelligence of animals which is often dismissed.
On Being Spiritual
The development of spiritual virtues – loving all of life, even the hard parts; equanimity, compassion – may be entirely a matter of getting our neurons wired a certain way, but the circuitry of spirituality differs from the circuitry of cognition and emotion, though it draws on both.