Looks like all those anarchist thinkers were onto something

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The discussion centers on the findings of Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello regarding altruistic behavior in human infants and young chimpanzees, as published in Science. The study demonstrates that human children as young as 18 months exhibit altruistic tendencies, helping others achieve their goals without immediate personal gain. This challenges traditional capitalist views that prioritize competitiveness and material wealth, suggesting that altruism may be an evolutionary adaptation rather than a purely cultural construct. The conversation also critiques the methodologies used in the study and debates the implications of altruism in the context of human nature and societal structures.

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Altruistic Helping in Human Infants and Young Chimpanzees

Felix Warneken* and Michael Tomasello

Human beings routinely help others to achieve their goals, even when the helper receives no immediate benefit and the person helped is a stranger. Such altruistic behaviors (toward non-kin) are extremely rare evolutionarily, with some theorists even proposing that they are uniquely human. Here we show that human children as young as 18 months of age (prelinguistic or just-linguistic) quite readily help others to achieve their goals in a variety of different situations. This requires both an understanding of others' goals and an altruistic motivation to help. In addition, we demonstrate similar though less robust skills and motivations in three young chimpanzees.

Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103 Leipzig, Germany.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/311/5765/1301

well so much for the capitalist theory that humans are naturally competitive & are motivated by material wealth (as enron's old ceo believed, for example). if that were the case i would say that the baby would try to hide the clothespins.
 
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The article does not say that humans are only - or even predominantly motivated by altruism. Nor does capitalism require that humans be motivated only by competitiveness (predominantly, maybe).
 
Altruistic behavior an evolutionary adaptation? Not endowed by God onto man? I say! Science Is truly squeezing God more and more out of the picture.
 
Competition is not inevitable but is largely influenced by culture and environment. State-level cultures are very hierarchial and authoritarian, which is not the case among non-statist cultures.

http://www.diy-punk.org/anarchy/secAint.html
 
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lol that thing about the clothespins probably doesn't make any sense :blushing: i read an article about this study that said one of the experiments invloved an adult hanging clothes on a clothesline & dropped a clothespin & couldn't find it. the baby could tell what the adult was doing, what the clothespin was for, could tell that the adult needed it & readily picked it up & offered it to the adult. sounds like a pretty strong instinct to help others rather than to only look out for themselves.
 
I don't even know where to start with this, it seems so obvious. What kind of study was this anyway? Oh look, a child helps people! Wow, there's something no one could have figured out on their own! Wow, a child helps people, so anarchists are right!

You seem to be of the opinion that we are either all or nothing. Either we are entirely selfish, or you are entirely altruistic. No one ever said that, nor do I believe has anyone ever claimed that. There are charities in capitalist countries, lots of charities. You can be a capitalist and be altruistic. They aren't opposed to each other. This seems like such an obivous fact that I don't even know why I need to point it out.
 
Dawguard said:
I don't even know where to start with this, it seems so obvious. What kind of study was this anyway? Oh look, a child helps people! Wow, there's something no one could have figured out on their own! Wow, a child helps people, so anarchists are right!

You seem to be of the opinion that we are either all or nothing. Either we are entirely selfish, or you are entirely altruistic. No one ever said that, nor do I believe has anyone ever claimed that. There are charities in capitalist countries, lots of charities. You can be a capitalist and be altruistic. They aren't opposed to each other. This seems like such an obivous fact that I don't even know why I need to point it out.


Maybe you're not aware of the context? Disciplines like sociobiology and evolutionary psychology have a hard time accounting for altruism on a genetic basis. Genes would not evolve to trade their own extinction for the survival of some others.

Twenty years ago they thought they had an explanation in kin selection; the "selfish" genes would be selected to promote their own spreading and that could happen if an individual sacrificed herself to enable two siblings, or four first cousins, or (powers of two) more distant relations to breed and leave descendents, since that would spread an equal number of those very genes to further generations as the sacrificing individual would have.

This could account for the sacrifice of the sterile workers in bees and ants. But whether or not it worked in mammals, or in us, was unknown.

Hence this experiment which is trying to see if unforced, untrained, unenvironmental (and hence presumably genetic) altruism exists in higher animals, including us.
 
And not to forget Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, which was set aside for many decades, the idea being that certain altruistic traits were selected for their attractive appeal, much like the peacocks tail.
 
I just read the article in Science. Yes it was about the puzzle of non-kin-selection altruism in humans and chimpanzees. I am a little unhappy with some of their methodology with the human babies; They showed instances of babies gladly helping another baby with such tasks as stacking books with "no reward" and interpreted that as altruism. No reward visible to adults maybe, but anyone who's been around toddlers knows that they LIKE stacking things, and so the task could have been its own reward.
 
  • #10
selfAdjoint said:
I just read the article in Science. Yes it was about the puzzle of non-kin-selection altruism in humans and chimpanzees. I am a little unhappy with some of their methodology with the human babies; They showed instances of babies gladly helping another baby with such tasks as stacking books with "no reward" and interpreted that as altruism. No reward visible to adults maybe, but anyone who's been around toddlers knows that they LIKE stacking things, and so the task could have been its own reward.

I wonder if this could be similar to something I saw on one of those wildlife programs? There was a chick who had been taken away from its mother or perhaps it was killed. The features of the mother bird were something like a long beak with a red spot (If I recall correctly) so the experimenters set about using a whole range of different instruments which ended up having no resemblance to the mothers beak whatsoever, but always kept one feature which was the red spot. Turns out the babies brains are hardwired to discriminate only for red spots. And its not only babies brains which are hardwired. Another bird (Another program) they placed a billiard ball next to the nest and the bird happily pushed it into the nest, same as a light bulb and a whole range of similar smooth looking objects. All this however has nothing to do with altruistic behavior, unless it has implications that the brain is hardwired to act altruistically?
 
  • #11
selfAdjoint said:
I just read the article in Science. Yes it was about the puzzle of non-kin-selection altruism in humans and chimpanzees.

That's called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocal_altruism" , and is actually an adaptive strategy. This includes alliances, and is distinct from friendship (though this can help your chances of survival by increasing happiness and potentially gaining help from friends).
 
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  • #12
fourier jr said:
well so much for the capitalist theory that humans are naturally competitive & are motivated by material wealth (as enron's old ceo believed, for example). if that were the case i would say that the baby would try to hide the clothespins.

Thus the field of anthropology is born:biggrin: I'm sure they'll be employed for a long while:wink:
 
  • #13
Competition is not inevitable

It is, because it's human nature.

Looking out for ourselves, putting "me" ahead of "you", doing what's best for ourselves - it's what we do.

Competition for money, for food, for power, for whatever it is we want if there isn't enough of it for everyone.

We don't need Confucius or Buddah to tell us to be more selfish, competitive and powerhungry, we need them to tell us to be less selfish.

We're born that way - from your coworker who wants a promotion quicker than you to that drunk, middle-aged guy playing in a 40 year-old and up baseball league, we're all competitive.
 
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  • #14
Dagenais said:
It is, because it's human nature.

Looking out for ourselves, putting "me" ahead of "you", doing what's best for ourselves - it's what we do.

Competition for money, for food, for power, for whatever it is we want if there isn't enough of it for everyone.

There is no really such thing as invariant human nature. It depends on environmental, geographical and cultural/social factors. Hunter-gatherer cultures were much more egalitarian. Modern capitalist economy is however, very competitive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_nature
http://news-info.wustl.edu/tips/page/normal/902.html
 
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  • #15
Altruism is more useful than violence and war for territory and food which only a powerful minority survives. In war the powerful wins but all the rest lose.
 
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