Human ethical capacity
"It is the differences between animal and man, not the similarities, which concern us..."
"It was not only Darwin among the natural scientists who failed to pass Chain's religious scrutiny. Another was Konrad Lorenz, of whom he spoke in a speech-day address to Jews' College in London in 1972. `It is easy to draw analogies between the behaviour of apes and man, and draw conclusions from the behaviour of birds and fishes on human ethical behaviour but all these analogies are superficial and have no general significance. Of course there are similarities between all living matter, but this fact does not allow the development of ethical guidelines for human behaviour. All attempts to do this, such as Lorenz' studies on aggression in animals suffer from the failure to take into account the all-important fact of man's capability to think and to be able to control his passions, and are therefore doomed to failure right from the beginning. It is the differences between animal and man, not the similarities, which concern us...the various speculations on cosmogony which are advanced from time to time, are nothing more than an amusing pastime for those proposing them.'" (Clark R.W., "The Life of Ernst Chain [Nobel Prize for Physiology & Medicine, 1945]: Penicillin and Beyond," Weidenfeld & Nicolson: London, 1985, p.148). [top]
But what about goals and the drive for a better existance? this is not really found in the animal world is it?