Chimps may lack altruism

This article

http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/nation/13007022.htm

reports research showing that chimpanzees, at least in a laboratory setting, lack the altruistic impulse that characterizes some humans.

To quote:

"
The experiment gave the animals the opportunity to pull a lever and provide treats for chimps in adjacent cages — without receiving anything in return and at no cost to themselves.

No cost. No benefit. Sorry, Bonzo, no banana.
"

If this holds up it has interesting implications regarding the evolution of human altruism.

I was reminded however of some experiments I read about in the book "The Curse of the Self" this morning (it's a decent though not awesome book, with a lot of interesting research-psychology tidbits assembled in favor of its Buddhistic theme on the dangers associated with the psychological construct called "self"). In these experiments, a set of people was divided into two groups by a series of coin tosses, and then informed about who was in their group and who was not. Then, people were asked questions about the individuals in their group and in the other group -- and systematically people rated individuals in their (randomly selected!) group higher on various scales than people in the other group. This sort of finding has been replicated repeatedly and seems pretty robust.

Maybe if you divided the chimps into randomly selected groups and let them know who was on their team, then the chimps in each group would be willing to pull the levers to give each other bananas! Hmmm....

It is nice to know that we are more ethically advanced than chimps, but unfortunately I don't think we've advanced all that far, given the society I see around me....

But at least we do have the notion of balancing selfishness with altruism -- i.e. of balancing the good of our own individual system with the good of the larger systems in which we're embedded. We have a hard time figuring out how to carry out this balancing act, but even choosing to carry out such a balancing act at all is progress beyond our chimp forebears, it would seem.

And I do call this "progress" intentionally -- I think that it's progress not only in the narrow sense of agreeing better with human value systems, but also in the broader sense that it leads to more complex and interesting structures than the chimp way. Altruism, kept within appropriate bounds, promotes the emergence of complex inter-organismic social structures, which support things like mathematics, literature, books, articles, experiments and blogs. Some libertarians have argued that pure selfishness would lead to more complex and productive emergent inter-human structures, but I tend not to believe it. My guess is that, if the emergence of interesting social and cultural systems is the goal, there is some optimal level of altruism which is between zero and maximal.