Here’s a tale to help warm the hearts of those of us fed up with the frozen-pipe, leaky-roof, where-is-the-sun-anyway winter blues. It’s a story about altruistic behavior in chimps. Researchers interested in altruism studied behavior of chimps in captivity and in the wild. In captivity, a chimp will unlock a door when it sees that another chimp can enter and get food when the chimp doing the unlocking has no access to the food. Some researchers said this was just because the chimps’ behavior had been altered by its proximity to humans. I guess they thought the chimp learned altruism from its keepers. Hmmm, I don’t know about that.
Juvenile chimps have a long period of dependency on their mothers who protect them from aggression, feed them and teach them how to feed themselves, make sure they catch up when the group is on the move, and initiate them into the intricacies of chimp social life. Losing a mother is often fatal to the baby chimp. Researchers observed that in the wild there were instances when an unrelated chimp would adopt and care for an orphaned baby. In the cases they observed, ten out of eighteen adoptive parents were male! Male chimps do not usually participate in child care. Caring for the orphans required a lot of time and energy from the adoptive parents. Some researchers objected to the conclusion that this is altruism. They said that the chimps adopted the orphans hoping for future payback in terms of food sharing and grooming. They said maybe the chimps mistook the orphans for their own offspring. Are you kidding me? Chimps live in groups that are highly socially organized and they do not get mixed up about whose baby is whose. And furthermore, who is to say that human “altruism” is not based on subtle hope for future payback? Or even the here-and-now payback of feeling good about oneself?
My heart-warming tale has turned into a rant, I guess. Many animal researchers seem to want to demonstrate that humans are unique and superior to all other animals. They set up these milestones to delineate the border of what is human and what is not. There was tool-making, you may remember. Oops, chimps and even crows make tools. There is the matter of language. Well, the more we learn about gorillas and chimps and even parrots and whales, the less unique human language seems. In a way, human altruism has been the last stand of these folks. I do not understand why it is so threatening to think of all forms of life as existing on a continuum. Why not just think of ourselves as an amazing kind of animal with some really special skills? That’s good enough for me. Here is the link to the article. Now I have to apply my human talents to the problems of leaky roofs and frozen pipes.
