HENRY

Altruism is another one of those things that people have used to pretend that humans are unique. However, a brand spanking new paper in PLoS Biology today shows experimental evidence that chimpanzees spontaneously and repeatedly perform altruistic acts towards both humans and other chimps. The authors argue that:

Taken together, the current results indicate that the altruistic tendency seen in early human ontogeny did not evolve in humans de novo. The roots of human altruism may go deeper than previously thought, reaching as far back as the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees. Undoubtedly, humans are exceptional with respect to the breadth in which they help, displaying helping across diverse contexts already early in infancy. But, as demonstrated here, humans are not unique, because chimpanzees have the capacity to use a newly acquired skill to help a conspecific as well. This helping occurs spontaneously and repeatedly, even in a novel situation when no reward is expected and no previous rewarding could have trained them to act accordingly.

Awwww.. you can read more at PLoS  Biology: Spontaneous Altruism by Chimpanzees and Young Children (doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0050184)

Posted on July 17th, 2007 by Simon Greenhill