Evolutionary basis for altruism revisited

Posted by Guamo at 5:21pm Nov 30 '09
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In the last few months, there have been a few discussions about the evolution of altruistic behaviors, both in humans as well as in other species. To that effect, I bring you this NYT article that explains how recent research suggests that humans are naturally helpful, in addition to being naturally selfish. Basically, altruism can be seen in children young enough that they would have not been introduced to societal norms yet. And although possibly the behavior could have been learned through mimicry, positive reinforcement does not increase the behavior, suggesting it is in fact natural and not learned. This is opposed to behaviors seen in other primates which show very little natural altruism. One other interesting (to me) point the article brings up is that this difference from other primates can even be seen physically. Humans are the only primate with visible scleras (the white of your eyes) and the author suggests this is b/c we have evolved to be able to track other's eye movements, indicating a certain level of inherent cooperation.