Debates about altruism are often based on the assumption that it is either unique to humans or else the human version differs from that of other animals in important ways. Thus, only humans are supposed to act on behalf of others, even toward genetically unrelated individuals, without personal gain, at a cost to themselves. Studies investigating such behaviors in nonhuman primates, especially our close relative the chimpanzee, form an important contribution to this debate.
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In spite of ourselves
Humans have a strong desire to help each other, but is spite also part of the human condition?
In a study published in the
Proceedings of the Royal Academy, Keith Jensen and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany looks at altruism and spite in our close cousin; the chimpanzee.
Generosity Is No Monkey Business, Study
Given the opportunity to spread random acts of kindness, chimps would just as soon pass, finds a new UCLA-led study.
The study, published in the Oct. 27 issue of the journal
Nature, suggests at least one way in which humans differ from their closest living relatives in the animal kingdom.
Simian foamy virus found to be widespread among chimpanzees
Researchers in Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, France, Gabon, Germany, Japan, Rwanda, the United Kingdom, and the United States have found that simian foamy virus (SFV) is widespread among wild chimpanzees throughout equatorial Africa. Details are published July 4th in the open-access journal
PLoS Pathogens.
The economics of nice folks
A basic tenet of economics is that people always behave selfishly, or as the 18th century philosopher economist David Hume put it, "every man ought to be supposed to be a knave."
Great apes think ahead
Apes can plan for their future needs just as we humans can – by using self-control and imagining future events. Mathias and Helena Osvath's research, from Lunds University Cognitive Science in Sweden, is the first to provide conclusive evidence of advanced planning capacities in non-human species. Their findings are published online this week in Springer's journal,
Animal Cognition.
Infant play drives chimpanzee respiratory disease cycles
The signature boom-bust cycling of childhood respiratory diseases was long attributed to environmental cycling. However, the effect of school holidays on rates of social contact amongst children is increasingly seen as another major driver. New research on chimpanzees suggests that this effect of social connectivity on disease cycling may long predate attendance of children at schools, with chimpanzee infant mortality rates cycling in phase with rates of social play amongst infants.
Researchers find human virus in chimpanzees
After studying chimpanzees in the wilds of Tanzania's Mahale Mountains National Park for the past year as part of a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant, Virginia Tech researcher Dr. Taranjit Kaur and her team have produced powerful scientific evidence that chimpanzees are becoming sick from viral infectious diseases they have likely contracted from humans.
Did walking on 2 feet begin with a shuffle?
Somewhere in the murky past, between four and seven million years ago, a hungry common ancestor of today’s primates, including humans, did something novel. While temporarily standing on its rear feet to reach a piece of fruit, this protohominid spotted another juicy morsel in a nearby shrub and began shuffling toward it instead of dropping on all fours, crawling to the shrub and standing again.