Sciencey Friday MOIF-- move over Ira Flatow
Considering my love of animals and the study of nutrition probably most of my Sciency Friday posts will not be about a new particle collider or a new development in AI. Today's topic adds more support to the idea that some animals do in fact continue to show altuistic behavior.
Two new chimp studies this year found more evidence that chimps experience empathy. Some people don’t like to consider the possibility empathy or emotion could be part of animals' lives, because they adhere to the belief only humans have them and are evidence of human superiority. Happily science is gradually overturning that outdated belief.
Let me provide an example. Emory University researchers trained a group of chimps to recognize tokens that were of two colors. One color could be traded for food just for one chimp, and the other was for one chimp and another. The researchers observed almost 70 percent of the time a female chimp would choose the token which provided food for herself and one other chimp. This contradicts previous studies which supposedly showed chimps were selfish creatures by default. The old view was that chimps were altruistic only when pressured, and wouldn’t share or look out for others unless pressure was applied. Field observations noted chimps in the wild did make altruistic actions, but research studies largely did not include this view.
Frequently elephants have been observed cooperating to achieve a goal and it isn’t just chimps and elephants that are capable of empathy; there is no reason why the sort of altruism described here should be unique to primates and elephants. In time I believe it will be shown in other species.
6 comments:
Poor little elephant baby. So glad all his kin rescued him.
-Shirin
Here is a potentially important question about the Emory experiment that you cited; important because, depending on the answer, your altruism conclusion may not be necessarily correct: Did the "altruistic" chimp after selecting the "altruistic" token see the receiver chimp eat? If the answer is yes, then there are competing hypotheses, beside altruism, that can explain the results.
My point here is only for the sake of methodological soundness; as far as I am concenred, because chimps are humans' biological cousines, surely we have a lot of shared emotional and moral attributes. The issue I have with the above experiement is only technical.
Saeed
Yes, each chimp was paired with a partner who could then receive a banana or something.
This experiment, therefore, is inconclusive as far as the reason for the chimp's altruistic-like behavior. Seeing another chimp eat in itself may be rewarding for the chimp, as it is for humans and a few other animals, as for example per phenomenon of social facilitation, or by making the food more appetizing, etc. I think there may be other ethological/adaptive significance associated with one chimp seeing another eat. A good researcher would have to re-run the experiment and add a control group in order to determine if the champ would select "altruistic" tokens even though it does not see the recepient eat.
Saeed
Well, the report didn't say anything about seeing the recipient eating the food. The way it was phrased was that the test chimp was able to provide for the recipient. I guess we could assume they could also see them eat it, but they were in different cages. I'm just not sure.
My feeling is that, had the test chimps done what they did without seeing the recepients, because it would be an amazingly important findng, the information would have had the center position and therefore specifically highlighted in the report.
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