cyborg
04-25-2007, 04:59 PM
Brian Hare of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues tested how well chimps and bonobos coped with challenging social situations. Bonobos, they found, were more likely to share a plate of food, using play or sex to defuse social tensions. In contrast, chimps' more limited social skills meant one individual was more likely to take all the food.
The researchers gave pairs of each species a task that required them to work together to retrieve a food reward that neither could reach alone. When the food was easily shared, both species quickly learned to do this. But when the food was in a single bowl - making it easy to monopolise - chimps were less willing to work together (Current Biology, vol 17, p 619).
"It's so simple and obvious that no one's ever demonstrated it," says Hare. "You can't cooperate if you can't share the spoils." The flexibility that allows humans to work together evolved more from social adeptness than high-powered reasoning, he suggests.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn11542
Selfish reasons
Chimps who shared a mother were far more likely to cooperate with each other. In contrast, there was no evidence that the same applied to chimps with a shared father. This is probably because fathers do not stay with their offspring, so a chimp has no easy way to recognise his paternal brothers.
However, since maternal brothers were rare in this population, most of the cooperating pairs were unrelated or only distantly related.
Extensive cooperation among non-relatives suggests that chimps do it for selfish reasons, with the expectation that favours will be reciprocated, says Langergraber. Human societies use cooperation with similar motives – another behaviour shared with our primate cousins.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn11694
(Modern social progress is a mass marketed fallacy and genetically diffused societies encourage selfish behaviour. Depressing.)
The researchers gave pairs of each species a task that required them to work together to retrieve a food reward that neither could reach alone. When the food was easily shared, both species quickly learned to do this. But when the food was in a single bowl - making it easy to monopolise - chimps were less willing to work together (Current Biology, vol 17, p 619).
"It's so simple and obvious that no one's ever demonstrated it," says Hare. "You can't cooperate if you can't share the spoils." The flexibility that allows humans to work together evolved more from social adeptness than high-powered reasoning, he suggests.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn11542
Selfish reasons
Chimps who shared a mother were far more likely to cooperate with each other. In contrast, there was no evidence that the same applied to chimps with a shared father. This is probably because fathers do not stay with their offspring, so a chimp has no easy way to recognise his paternal brothers.
However, since maternal brothers were rare in this population, most of the cooperating pairs were unrelated or only distantly related.
Extensive cooperation among non-relatives suggests that chimps do it for selfish reasons, with the expectation that favours will be reciprocated, says Langergraber. Human societies use cooperation with similar motives – another behaviour shared with our primate cousins.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn11694
(Modern social progress is a mass marketed fallacy and genetically diffused societies encourage selfish behaviour. Depressing.)