Regarding compassion and emotion, these are not qualities that humans have an exclusive claim on. So within the framework of the argument for the soul, we'd have to include the animals there. I think social compassion is just an elaboration, or extension, of what we might call 'protective instinct' in animals... we've just enlarged our sphere of care to include individuals or groups outside of our immediate reproductive concern.
I personally don't think our cultural behavior requires a 'soul' tho. I see human beings in the social context exhibiting the same group behavior seen in any animal society (beehives, birds, herds, packs, etc).
Science has only very recently stopped seeing us as 'separate' from the 'beasts'. A lot of misconceptions were propagated because we viewed ourselves as being the only tool-using species (wrong!), the only species that killed it's own kind (wrong!), the only species that used intellect and problem-solving (wrong!), etc.
