Altruism might be genetic

Why do people help strangers? This question has interesting evoluionary roots: by helping strangers, it’s not immediately obvious what the advantages are in evolutionary terms. Actually, altruism in general is an interesting idea to study from an evolutionary perspective. As confusing as our understanding of it is, there is no doubt it does happen routinely in human life.

So where does human altruism come from? Is it solely due to social pressures, along the lines of ‘you have to be nice’, or does it have genetic roots? To answer that, researchers in Germany studied how babies interact and help each other. Babies as young as 18 months "quite readily help others to achieve their goals in a variety of different situations". This suggests that altruism is genetic, because society has not had time to teach those babies.

Interestingly, by doing the same study on chimpanzees, the researchers found that chimps also have the same altruistic signs, but they were not as clear as in humans. These results follow from an earlier study on chimpanzee collaborations.

So where do things stand? Well, given that altruism is a fact of life, and now there is evidence that it might be genetic, we need to look really hard at why it happens. We cannot ignore the question any more in the face of all this mounting evidence. Whatever the answer turns out to be, finding it will force us to explore many interesting evolutionary questions.

Technorati Tags: altruism, evolution, humans, chimpanzees, genetics, biology, science