FW: TODAY: 4pm-6pm, Prof. Felix Warneken (Psych) - Roots of human altruism

Hi all,

Today Cooperation Group will meet as usual today, 4pm-6pm @ the Berkman Center, 23 Everett St 2nd floor.

Our speaker will be Felix Warneken, a new professor in Harvard's psychology department. His work explores the development of altruism by studying helping behavior in very young children and chimpanzees, and his talk is titled "The Roots of Human Altruism in Ontogeny and Phylogeny". It should be great, so don't miss it! Abstract below.

See you at 4pm!

Dave

The Roots of Human Altruism in Ontogeny and Phylogeny

Felix Warneken

One recent debate in the behavioral sciences concerns the origins of human altruism. Several researchers claim that altruistic behaviors such as helping and sharing are unique to humans, emanating from a human-specific psychology and cultural practices. In particular, it is often assumed that human altruism is imposed by the social environment through the transmission and enforcement of social norms. In contrast, I will provide evidence for the hypothesis that humans have a biologically based predisposition to act altruistically independently of socialization. This is based upon two lines of research: developmental studies with young children and comparative studies with one of our closest living evolutionary relative - the chimpanzee.

David G. Rand
Post-Doctoral Fellow in Mathematical Biology
Program for Evolutionary Dynamics
Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Harvard University

I'm not able to go either, but looks interesting. Although I didn't think anyone actually held the belief that humans were the only altruistic creatures (Insects in a hive will die for the group, for ex).