It is hard to resist the implication that de Waal draws from this, that empathy is essential to the social character of social animals, and a more than sufficient evolutionary source of human morality. What else could underlie bonding, mutual awareness of needs, sharing and co-operation, and the readiness with which group harmony is restored after outbursts of conflict, than recognition of the emotional states of others? His early empirical work in primate ethology was on competition, deception and conflict resolution among chimpanzees (his first book Chimpanzee Politics, published in 1982, reported the outcome), and it led naturally to this view about the emotional continuum with human beings. The view was highly controversial at first, but de Waal has been progressively winning the argument ever since; and by extending his ethological studies to include elephants he has secured the ground for saying that empathy is the evolutionary basis of human morality.

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De Waal’s new book, The Bonobo and the Atheist, addresses a matter that he says he had left insufficiently clear in earlier books. The move from descriptions of primate co-operation and conflict resolution to human morality might be a natural one for many people, but to those for whom morality and religion are inextricably linked it is not so obvious. His book is intended to explain the point to them.

The book is, however, an oddity. Besides the stated aim it is a mixture of memoir, a repetition of de Waal’s now familiar views, and a hostile discussion of the “new atheist” movement. The result is a somewhat unfocused ramble, the main point of which, apart from rehearsing the already-won “apes R us” argument, appears to be to distance himself from the “new atheist” attack on religion. He is himself an atheist, he tells us; as an educated scientific Dutchman from secular Europe where religion is a minority if sometimes noisy sport, what else could he be? But he does not like the “new atheists,” and takes the view that religion, though false, has a role, and should be left alone.

Why, he asks, are the “new atheists” evangelical about their cause? “Why would atheists turn messianic?” He cannot see why Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and others attack religion and believers, and why they robustly and even aggressively argue the case for atheism. He can see why the advocates of religion do it; the more believers, he says, the more money they get. (Here, as a sympathiser, he should perhaps recognise that some religionists sincerely believe they have the Truth that will save us, and might be trying to be helpful; not all of them want money.)

Well: here is the answer to de Waal’s question. Some atheists are evangelical because religious claims about the universe are false, because children are brainwashed into the ancient superstitions of their parents and communities, because many religious organisations and movements have been and continue to be anti-science, anti-gays and anti-women, because even if people are no longer burned at the stake they are still stoned to death for adultery, murdered for being “witches” or abortion doctors, blown up in large numbers for being Shias instead of Sunnis… One could go on at considerable length about the divisions, conflicts, falsehoods, coercions, disruptions, miseries and harm done by religion, though the list should be familiar; except, evidently, to de Waal.