The Burning Taper is known across the Milky Way for its never-ending coverage of monkey business. If it's about a primate, we'll print it.Our masthead should be "By monkeys. About monkeys. For monkeys."
(Read more RAW.)
In the past we've brought you cutting-edge monkey business including:
- Peaceful, sex-loving chimps being eaten to extinction
- Chimps making monkeys out of humans?
- Planet of the Crazy Apes
- Evolution, schmevolution! We're all apes inside
- Princeton University shows how to hack an electronic voting machine
- Do Masonic monkeys hold banana-split fundraisers?
- And of course, Burning Taper's 500th post, where I admitted I am, in fact, a semi-literate simian.
Chimpanzees make choices that protect their self-interest more consistently than do humans.
Researchers used a two-player economic game where each player, either chimp or human, receives something of value and can then share it with the other player.
If what is offered is rejected, then neither player gets anything.
Humans typically offer half of the booty, and typically reject any offer significantly less than half, even though rejecting it means neither player will get anything.
Chimps, though, will offer much less than 50%, but will accept any offer.
What's this mean? Researches think it means that humans will go without to punish another person, or to keep him from getting more than his "fair share."
Chimps don't care about being fair. They simply protect their self-interest, and they are unwilling to lose something simply to punish someone else who is being unfair.
Chimps, like most "lower" animals, live in the Now, and are concerned with their immediate present, unlike humans, who constantly live in the past or the future, worrying excessively about other people, both in their attempts to be fair to them, and to punish those who they perceive as unfair.
(Read more Tolle.)
Monkey Business | Chimpanzee Studies | Rationality | Burning Taper | BurningTaper.com
Chimpanzees make choices that protect their self-interest more consistently than do humans.
ReplyDeleteAnd this is supposed to be news?
For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons.
-- Douglas Adams
Be careful quoting atheists, Bro. Tom. The Religion of Freemasonry might disfellowship you.
ReplyDelete— W.S., semi-literate simian
All this shows is that human beings and chimps interact at different scales: chimps act in their immediate self-interest, and human beings in their long-term self-interest.
ReplyDeleteHuman beings seem to have Tit-for-Tat built into their genes, and this vested interest in punishing those who cheat the system is probably part of the reason we manage to have communities that survive.
The Devil may quote scripture for his own purposes, WS. Why can't we Freemasonariasts quote the Devil?
ReplyDeleteQuoting the Devil is safer than quoting the Code Book in some jurisdictions.
ReplyDelete— W.S.