”…animals have social lives rich beyond our imagining, and that cooperation and caring have shaped the course of evolution every bit as much as competition and ruthlessness have.“

That comes from this excellent article
(thanks to Morgan for alerting me to it via her blog)
here:

”Moral in Tooth and Claw“
by Jessica Pierce and Marc Bekoff

http://chronicle.com/article/Moral-in-%20ToothClaw/48800/

The recently deceased Lyn Margulis might well have said that, around 20 or 30 years ago. Until she came along, biology was dominated by men who believed that the story of evolution was their story; a manly story of competition, a manly story of manly fighting and war and competition and conflict and did you spill my pint. The story of evolution, according to the people who chose to misunderstand and misinterpret Darwin, is the story of ‘nature red in tooth and claw’. The first person to challenge that notion was Margulis. Initially burnt at the stake by angry men, and thrown out of the boy’s science club for being a girl and wrong, she has, in recent times, been acknowledged as the brilliant scientist what she is/was.

That is a terrible paragraph, and I’m embarrassed, I’m being as vague as 4th former who left his biology textbook on the bus.

I’m just saying that the legacy of her work is clear in this article. Anyone in biology who studies cooperation owes a debt to her. I’m such a fanboy.

“…for many nonhuman primates, more than 90 percent of their social interactions are affiliative rather than competitive or divisive…”

And in this summers riots, more than 90 percent of our feral young people, didn’t.

Isn’t it time that we stood up to the right-wing idiots who tell us that our children are behaving like animals?

(oh, and thank you Barnardo’s – here’s that link: https://plexity.wordpress.com/2011/11/04/terence-blacker-alarmism-thats-no-help-to-children-terence-blacker-commentators-the-independent/)

And isn’t it time, to stretch a point, to point out that if we really meant that children were behaving like animals, then we would, like, actually be saying that “more than 90 percent of their social interactions are affiliative rather than competitive or divisive” and that “as animals they have social lives rich beyond our imagining, and that cooperation and caring have shaped the course of their evolution every bit as much as competition and ruthlessness have?

So to labour the point and sum up:

If you tell me I’m behaving like an animal, I’ll take it as compliment, and no I didn’t threw up behind the sofa, that was the cat.