|
| | | | |
| main post story rss feed  search links link to us topics about main |
from the dept. [article] In the journal Science, German researchers report that infants as young as 18 months demonstrated behavior that suggests humans have an innate tendency to be helpful. In the experiments, toddlers aided strangers in completing tasks such as stacking books. "The results were astonishing because these children are so young - they still wear diapers and are barely able to use language, but they already show helping behavior," said Felix Warneken, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Young chimps were also tested, providing the first direct evidence of altruism in non-human primates. "This is the first experiment showing altruistic helping towards goals in any non-human primate," said Warneken. "It's been claimed chimpanzees act mainly for their own ends; but in our experiment, there was no reward and they still helped." Altruism might have evolved six million years ago in the common ancestor of chimps and humans, the study suggests. Separate research in Uganda disclosed further evidence of chimps' ability to cooperate, published in the same edition of the scientific journal. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4766490.stm < | >
|
|
|||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||
| "Science is a willingness to accept facts even when they are opposed to wishes." -- B. F. Skinner | ||
| All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective companies. Comments are owned by the Poster. | ||
Altruism may be hard-wired into humans
