The Empathic Ape

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This is taken from last week's New Scientist, and is part of a longer article, which you can't tap into unless you subscribe- if you'd like the whole text PM me and I'll send it to you.

The human species, however, is what zoologists call "obligatorily gregarious", and the selfishness of molecules, which is really all genes are, is a questionable notion. Like all organisms, we evolved to pass on our genes, but we do so by sticking together. This is why, next to death, our severest punishment is solitary confinement. People become depressed without company, and die younger if unmarried. We are social to the core. Whatever conservative ideologues want us to believe, the dog-eat-dog world they envision suits neither us nor most other primates.
This truth has been poorly served by biology writers. Bonobos and chimpanzees are equally close to us, yet scenarios of human evolution focus entirely on the chimpanzee as the ancestral model. This ape's violence, and the abundant evidence that our behaviour is even worse, has led to the common "killer ape" epithet for the human race. But is this all there is to us? The emphasis is bound to change with the recent discovery that humans and bonobos share a special section of DNA that regulates responses to vasopressin, a hormone involved in attachment and bonding. Chimpanzees lack this particular chunk of DNA (Science, vol 308, p 1630). So our ape ancestors may have behaved more like bonobos, known for being peaceful and empathic.
For a demonstration of primate empathy consider a zoo bonobo named Kuni. When she saw a starling hit the glass of her enclosure, she picked up the stunned bird and climbed to the top of the tallest tree. She carefully unfolded its wings and spread them wide, holding one wing between the fingers of each hand, before sending the bird like a little toy airplane out towards the barrier of her enclosure. But the bird fell short of freedom and landed on the bank of the moat. Kuni climbed down and stood watch over the starling for a long time. By the end of the day, the recovered bird had flown off safely.
The way Kuni handled this bird was different to anything she would have done to aid another ape. Instead of following some hard-wired helping scheme, she tailored her assistance to the specific situation of an animal totally different from herself. This kind of empathy rests on the ability to imagine the circumstances of another. Adam Smith, the father of economics, must have had actions like Kuni's in mind (though not performed by an ape) when he offered us the most enduring definition of empathy as "changing places in fancy with the sufferer".
The possibility that empathy is part of our primate heritage ought to make us happy, but we are not in the habit of taking pride in our nature. When people commit atrocities, we call them "animals", but when they give to the poor, we praise them for being "humane". We like to claim the latter behaviour for ourselves. Curiously, it took science a long time to take empathy seriously.

What follows here is Leo's reply : somehow it osmosed into my original post!

With respect to the writer in New Scientist, to my mind this remarkable behaviour shows MUCH MORE than mere empathy, which can be on an almost subconscious, unreasoning, automatic level, but a very high, unprecendentedly high amount of reasoning, not seen in fact in many humans!!!

The Bono had to reason just what enabled the bird to fly and had to assist it in the deployment of that means. 'Empathy' would have resulted in a blind 'sympathy' for the bird, possibly with a simulated prone stance in its cage, or even a limping, the Bonos equivalenet of an inability to fly.

This report is indeed remarkable, but not for the reasons given

Leo