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New research shows that it's definitely better to make love not war.
Hey I'm Carin for DNews and today we've got a story about the evolution of cooperation.
To get a better understanding of this idea, researchers from Emory University looked at
spontaneous cooperation in a population of eleven chimpanzees. Here's what they did.
The chimps were housed in a large outdoor enclosure. This kind of complex environment
is far different than the simple setups normally used when testing social behavior in primates
- and this is significant because it more closely resembles the chimps' natural setting.
Researchers rigged up an experimental apparatus that required either one or two chimps to
move a barrier while another pulled in a tray that was baited with food. That meant that
the task could not be completed by one individual alone.
Researchers undertook a large scale set of observations on how the chimps handled the
task at hand, and they found that they spontaneously cooperated more than 35-hundred times over
almost a hundred hour-long sessions. Interestingly, it turned out that an individual chimpanzee
was more likely to lend a helping hand when another chimp of a similar rank was around.
And it didn't seem to matter to the chimps whether they were related or not - the most
important factor was social status. The researchers say this shows that chimps have a direct preference
for cooperating with socially tolerant partners - AND they're able to do this spontaneously
in a complex environment.
Similar studies have been done before, in much more controlled settings. But the high
level of cooperation exhibited in this study wasn't thought to exist in chimps.
Last week my buddy Trace brought you a story about how the facial features of human males
may have evolved due to the fact that we hit each other a lot; however, this week's story
gives us a different perspective on the evolution of our social behavior. What it tells us is
that spontaneous cooperation between individuals DOES happen in a natural setting. However,
the fact that social rank played such a large role in whether the chimps cooperated also
tells us that there could easily be violent clashes between individuals of different social
status. Researchers still have a lot more to learn about the similarities between chimps'
and humans' behavior. But since they're our closest primate relatives, this work is still
really exciting because it sheds important light on the evolution of cooperation in us
as well.
So does this study make you feel a little better about humanity? Let us know in the
comments below and keep coming back for more DNews every day of the week.