Empathy Update

 

In a recent post, I cited a book by Frans De Waal that described research showing that behavior expressing empathy--or at least its building blocks--wasn't restricted to humans but was present in a range of primates and other mammals.  That far from either a strictly human accomplishment or evolutionary aberration (depending on your bias), empathy is a natural tendency across species.  

That book (The Age of Empathy) was published back in 2009.  But just this week the New York Times featured a story about more recent research, focusing on the phenomenon of animals other than humans who express and even cultivate caring relationships with members of other species.  Who, in their journalistic shorthand, treated them as pets.

As the caption to the above photo summarized: "Scientists examined 427 interspecies interactions across 88 primate species finding that every primate, regardless of species, held some behavior that could be linked to pet-keeping."

The story by Taylor Mitchell Brown was derived from an article published in the scientific journal Primates.  As with earlier research on empathy, this behavior flies in the face of gene-centric evolutionary theory, or even strict versions of the laws of natural selection.  But then, humans and their relationships with pets has always challenged the same simplistic laws.  Brown quotes a scientist not involved in this new research: "Lavishing resources on members of other species we have no evolutionary state in seems to make no evolutionary sense."

Yet we do, and apparently so do some chimps, gorillas, monkeys, etc.  Every primate species studied showed some signs of caring for another animal, which included mice, marmoset, lizards, birds, a chicken, squirrels, even a small deer and yes--dogs.  It happens in the wild as well as in captivity. Often the behavior was fleeting--grooming, for instance--but sometimes it was "outright adoption."

Once again, as in the research on empathy, the evidence has been out there for a long time, but given the professional bias of that prevailing interpretation of evolution as all against all, nobody was brave enough to study it. One scientist explained that the behavior was often observed but always ignored, because it was deemed inappropriate for peer-reviewed journals.  "Someone might get a photograph and post it on social media," he said, "but you don't write a scientific paper about it."

That in this study, such kindness to other species was seen more often from females and juveniles but not so much among adult males--and adult male humans having dominated scientific paper writing as well as evolutionary theory--may have something to do with this learned ignorance.

Now somebody has written a scientific paper about it.  Some of the scientists speculated on reasons for the behavior (loneliness was one) but surely a major conclusion is that it is behavior natural to at least primates, and perhaps other animals not studied yet.  Further evidence that empathy doesn't decrease chances of survival, but may very well enhance it.  As well as just contributing to making life worth living.