David Brooks asks "Do animals have morals?"

David Brooks asks Do Animals Have Morals? No, he wasn’t discussing Congress. He was moderating a panel discussion titled Darwin 200: Evolution and the Ethical Brain, sponsored by the Templeton Foundation earlier this month.

I won’t spoil the fun by providing the definitive answer here. Video of the discussion featuring Michael Gazzaniga (UC-Santa Barbara), Jonathan Haidt (University of Virginia), and Steven Quartz (Caltech), is on the Templeton Foundation’s website.

The discussion is supposed to shed light on the question of whether evolution can account for traits like altruism, cooperation, conscience, and a sense of justice. Can a richer view of our evolved nature help us to understand modern society?

I wish Brooks et al had taken up the case of Santino the Chimp. Chimpanzee's Plan to Attack Zoo Visitors Shows Evidence of Premeditated Thought.

When Santino the chimpanzee started pelting zoo visitors with stones, his keepers were mystified.

Not that they were surprised by his displays of aggression — the 31-year-old chimp is, after all, a dominant male. But there was no obvious source of stones in his enclosure; so where was he finding all the missiles?

All became clear when they carried out a search and found his stockpiles of rocks. Santino had been fishing stones from the moat surrounding his enclosure - and, even more impressively, he had been shaping odd pieces of concrete into aerodynamic disc-shaped missiles. Then he had been stashing them away for future use.

His behaviour has led scientists to conclude that premeditation is not a uniquely human trait.

Unfortunately, the Templeton Foundation tends to the high-minded sort of discussion rather than the really interesting stuff like Santino. Last week they awarded the £1 million 2009 Templeton Prize for progress in spiritual thought to Bernard d'Espagnat, an 87 year old French physicist whose main contribution to spiritual thought seems to have been to note that reality can’t be explained by science.

Bernard d'Espagnat, 87, was today announced as the winner of the £1 million Templeton Prize, founded by the late US multi-millionaire entrepreneur and philanthropist Sir John Templeton to honour scientists who contribute to progress in religion.Dr d'Espagnat, professor emeritus of theoretical physics at Paris-Sud university, believes that science cannot fully explain "the nature of being".

Dr d'Espagnat said in prepared remarks that, since science cannot reveal anything certain about the nature of being, it cannot tell us with certainty what it is not. "Mystery is not something negative that has to be eliminated," he said. "On the contrary, it is one of the constitutive elements of being."

His main contribution to the development of quantum mechanics was made from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s when he carried out experiments testing the "Bell's inequalities" theorem. His work centred on a concept described as "veiled reality", a reality that is hidden beneath what is perceived as time, space, matter, and energy, concepts challenged by quantum physics as possibly mere appearances.

Well, duh! For a million, I could have come to the same conclusion.