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BBC: Chimpanzees show empathy and altruism just like humans

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Pan troglodytes & Pan paniscus.jpg
common chimpanzee and bonobo/Chandres William H. Calvin, CC

The BBC has also thought that chimpanzees were entering the Stone Age.

And now:

Eminent anthropologist Frans de Waal explains that politicians have a lot to learn from how chimpanzees show empathy. How chimpanzees reveal the roots of human behaviour” at BBC

Reality: Chimpanzees don’t seek humans out the way dogs do. In many ways, dogs are more like humans than chimpanzees are and better able to communicate with us emotionally. Dogs don’t seek out chimpanzees, come to think of it, though recently, some researchers needed to convince themselves that something like that was happening between monkeys and wolves. (Uh, no.)

Physical resemblance is apparently not all it’s cracked up to be. Serious study might be worthwhile.

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See also: A top anthropology finding of year show humans cognitively closer to dogs than chimps

Anthropologist does not see chimpanzees as fuzzy humans If a well-to-do idler wants to pretend that his spaniel requires psychoanalysis, life’s rotten for that individual dog. But dogs are hardly going extinct. The fact that chimpanzees are an endangered species means that it’s important to understand them as animals who need a specific habitat, not as pre-humans entering the Stone Age.

Intelligence tests unfair to apes?

and

Are apes entering the Stone Age?

Comments
Of related note to the OP, contrary to the ‘selfish gene’ concept, that is more of less directly based on Darwin’s own ‘survival of the fittest’ thinking about competition, genes are instead best thought of as existing in a holistic web of mutual interdependence and cooperation, (i.e. mutual 'altruistic' behavior). Which is, needless to say, the exact polar opposite of being ‘selfish’. (And should, if Darwinism were a science instead of being the religion for atheists that it actually is, count as a direct falsification of the theory). https://uncommondescent.com/evolution/might-snakes-provide-a-way-of-testing-dawkinss-selfish-gene-hypothesis/#comment-667208 bornagain77
News at 6, yes I've often wondered just how badly 'Darwinian science' has hampered scientific breakthroughs. For example, I truly believe quantum computation would be far more advanced than it currently is if biological science was not so muddled in Darwinian propaganda as it currently is: Specifically, a VERY promising avenue of research that is apparently completely ignored by the vast majority of 'Darwinian scientist" is to look to unlock the secrets of quantum biology so as to overcome extreme difficulties that have, for many years now, stymied engineers in their quest to build quantum computers that can be of practical, even commercial, application.
Quantum life: The weirdness inside us - 03 October 2011 by Michael Brooks Excerpt: "It sounds harsh but we haven't learned a thing apart from the obvious." A better understanding of what is going on might also help us on the way to building a quantum computer that exploits coherent states to do myriad calculations at once. Efforts to do so have so far been stymied by our inability to maintain the required coherence for long - even at temperatures close to absolute zero and in isolated experimental set-ups where disturbances from the outside world are minimised. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128321.500-quantum-life-the-weirdness-inside-us.html?full=true Quantum entanglement in hot systems – 2011 Excerpt: The authors remark that this reverses the previous orthodoxy, which held that quantum effects could not exist in biological systems because of the amount of noise in these systems.,,, Environmental noise here drives a persistent and cyclic generation of new entanglement.,,, In summary, the authors say that they have demonstrated that entanglement can recur even in a hot noisy environment. In biological systems this can be related to changes in the conformation of macromolecules. http://quantum-mind.co.uk/quantum-entanglement-hot-systems/ How quantum entanglement in DNA synchronizes double-strand breakage by type II restriction endonucleases - 2016 Implications concluding paragraph: The discovery of quantum states in protein-DNA complexes would thus allude to the tantalizing possibility that these systems might be candidates for quantum computation. The evidence is mounting for the implementation of such technology. Biology is characterized by macroscopic open systems in non-equilibrium conditions. Macroscopic organization of microscopic components (e.g., molecules, ions, electrons) that exhibit quantum behavior is rarely straightforward. Knowing the microscopic details of the constituent interactions and their mechanistic laws is not sufficient. Rather, as this work has shown, molecular systems must be contextualized in their local biological environments to discern appreciable quantum effects. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4746125/
bornagain77
It seems unconscionable to me, bornagain77 and all, because it's not like there is an endless supply of chimpanzees, as there might be of lapdogs, for people to pretend something about the way they think. Wouldn't it be ironic if the chimps really do have a remarkable quality of thought of some type that is entirely lost in this nonsense to pretend they are just like humans. News
Moreover, if anything ever went against Darwin’s claim that “Natural selection cannot possibly produce any modification in any one species exclusively for the good of another species”, it is the notion that a single cell somehow became tens of trillions of cells that cooperate “exclusively for the good of other cells” in a single organism. To claim that one cell transforming into the tens of trillions cells, (of extremely cooperative, even altruistic, cells that make up our ONE human body), is anything less than a miracle is either sheer arrogance or profound ignorance (perhaps both).
One Body – animation – video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDMLq6eqEM4 Mathematician Alexander Tsiaras on Human Development: “It’s a Mystery, It’s Magic, It’s Divinity” – March 2012 Excerpt: ‘The magic of the mechanisms inside each genetic structure saying exactly where that nerve cell should go, the complexity of these, the mathematical models on how these things are indeed done, are beyond human comprehension. Even though I am a mathematician, I look at this with the marvel of how do these instruction sets not make these mistakes as they build what is us. It’s a mystery, it’s magic, it’s divinity.’ http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/03/mathematician_a057741.html
Simply put, Darwinists have no clue how one cell achieves its 'form', much less do Darwinists have an inkling as to how the tens of trillions of 'extremely altruistically cooperative' cells make up the final human 'form'
Darwinism vs Biological Form – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyNzNPgjM4w
And, to state the obvious, since neo-Darwinian explanations are grossly inadequate for explaining how any particular organism might achieve its basic form, then neo-Darwinian speculations for how one type of organism might transform into another type of organism are based on pure fantasy and have no discernible experimental basis in reality. Whereas, on the other hand, Theism, especially with recent breakthroughs in quantum biology,,,
Darwinian Materialism vs Quantum Biology - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHdD2Am1g5Y
,,,is found to be very well supported in its claim that God, Who is beyond space and time, has formed each of us, i.e. each of our 'unifying souls' that provides cohesion for the tens of trillions of cells, in our mother’s womb.
Psalm 139:13 For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb.
Thus in conclusion, the rampant altruism that is found throughout nature, whether physical or behavioral altruism, falsifies Darwin's theory. ,,, As Darwin himself stated, "Natural selection cannot possibly produce any modification in any one species exclusively for the good of another species". If only Darwinism were a normal falsifiable science, instead of being the pseudoscientific religion for atheists that it actually is, this rampant altruism found within nature should count as yet another devastating falsification of Darwin's theory,, Again, IF ONLY Darwinism were a normal falsifiable science!
Darwin’s Theory vs Falsification – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rzw0JkuKuQ
bornagain77
Where is love, empathy, and altruism to be found in physics, chemistry, or especially in Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' maxim? Altruistic behavior of any type is completely antithetical to Darwin's theory. In fact, Darwin himself offered this following 'anti-altruism' standard as a falsification criteria for his theory, "Natural selection cannot possibly produce any modification in any one species exclusively for the good of another species"… and even stated that “If it could be proved that any part of the structure of any one species had been formed for the exclusive good of another species, it would annihilate my theory, for such could not have been produced through natural selection.”
"Natural selection cannot possibly produce any modification in any one species exclusively for the good of another species; though throughout nature one species incessantly takes advantage of, and profits by, the structure of another. But natural selection can and does often produce structures for the direct injury of other species, as we see in the fang of the adder, and in the ovipositor of the ichneumon, by which its eggs are deposited in the living bodies of other insects. If it could be proved that any part of the structure of any one species had been formed for the exclusive good of another species, it would annihilate my theory, for such could not have been produced through natural selection." - Charles Darwin - Origin of Species http://darwin-online.org.uk/Variorum/1866/1866-241-c-1859.html
If evolution by natural selection were actually the truth about how all life came to be on Earth then the only life that should be around should be extremely small organisms with the highest replication rate, and with the most 'mutational firepower', since only they, since they greatly outclass multi-cellular organism in terms of ‘reproductive success’ and 'mutational firepower', would be fittest to survive in the dog eat dog world where blind pitiless evolution ruled and only the fittest are allowed to survive. The logic of this is nicely summed up here in this Richard Dawkins' video:
Richard Dawkins interview with a 'Darwinian' physician goes off track - video Excerpt: "I am amazed, Richard, that what we call metazoans, multi-celled organisms, have actually been able to evolve, and the reason [for amazement] is that bacteria and viruses replicate so quickly -- a few hours sometimes, they can reproduce themselves -- that they can evolve very, very quickly. And we're stuck with twenty years at least between generations. How is it that we resist infection when they can evolve so quickly to find ways around our defenses?" http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/07/video_to_dawkin062031.html
In other words, since successful reproduction is all that really matters on a neo-Darwinian view of things, how can anything but successful, and highly efficient reproduction, be realistically 'selected' for?
“every single organic being around us may be said to be striving to the utmost to increase in numbers;" - Charles Darwin - Origin of Species - pg. 66 The Logic of Natural Selection - graph http://recticulatedgiraffe.weebly.com/uploads/4/0/6/2/40627097/1189735.jpg?308
Any other function besides successful reproduction, such as much slower sexual reproduction, sight, hearing, thinking, and especially altruism, would be highly superfluous to the primary criteria of successful reproduction, and should, on a Darwinian view, be discarded, and/or 'eaten', by bacteria, as so much excess baggage since it obviously would slow down successful reproduction. Yet, contrary to this central 'survival of the fittest' assumption of Darwinian evolution, instead of eating us, time after time we find micro-organisms helping each other, and us, in ways that have nothing to with their own ‘survival of the fittest'’ concerns. The following researchers said they were ‘banging our heads against the wall' by the contradictory findings to Darwinian 'survival of the fittest' thinking that they had found:
Doubting Darwin: Algae Findings Surprise Scientists - April 28, 2014 Excerpt: One of Charles Darwin's hypotheses posits that closely related species will compete for food and other resources more strongly with one another than with distant relatives, because they occupy similar ecological niches. Most biologists long have accepted this to be true. Thus, three researchers were more than a little shaken to find that their experiments on fresh water green algae failed to support Darwin's theory — at least in one case. "It was completely unexpected," says Bradley Cardinale, associate professor in the University of Michigan's school of natural resources & environment. "When we saw the results, we said 'this can't be."' We sat there banging our heads against the wall. Darwin's hypothesis has been with us for so long, how can it not be right?" The researchers ,,,— were so uncomfortable with their results that they spent the next several months trying to disprove their own work. But the research held up.,,, The scientists did not set out to disprove Darwin, but, in fact, to learn more about the genetic and ecological uniqueness of fresh water green algae so they could provide conservationists with useful data for decision-making. "We went into it assuming Darwin to be right, and expecting to come up with some real numbers for conservationists," Cardinale says. "When we started coming up with numbers that showed he wasn't right, we were completely baffled.",,, Darwin "was obsessed with competition," Cardinale says. "He assumed the whole world was composed of species competing with each other, but we found that one-third of the species of algae we studied actually like each other. They don't grow as well unless you put them with another species. It may be that nature has a heck of a lot more mutualisms than we ever expected. ",,, Maybe Darwin's presumption that the world may be dominated by competition is wrong." http://www.livescience.com/45205-data-dont-back-up-darwin-in-algae-study-nsf-bts.html
And again, directly contrary to the central 'survival of the fittest' assumption of Darwinian evolution, we find that bacteria are also directly helping us in essential ways that have nothing to do with their own survival:
NIH Human Microbiome Project defines normal bacterial makeup of the body – June 13, 2012 Excerpt: Microbes inhabit just about every part of the human body, living on the skin, in the gut, and up the nose. Sometimes they cause sickness, but most of the time, microorganisms live in harmony with their human hosts, providing vital functions essential for human survival. http://www.nih.gov/news/health/jun2012/nhgri-13.htm We are living in a bacterial world, and it's impacting us more than previously thought - February 15, 2013 Excerpt: We often associate bacteria with disease-causing "germs" or pathogens, and bacteria are responsible for many diseases, such as tuberculosis, bubonic plague, and MRSA infections. But bacteria do many good things, too, and the recent research underlines the fact that animal life would not be the same without them.,,, I am,, convinced that the number of beneficial microbes, even very necessary microbes, is much, much greater than the number of pathogens." http://phys.org/news/2013-02-bacterial-world-impacting-previously-thought.html#ajTabs
Moreover, directly contrary to Darwin's claim that "Natural selection cannot possibly produce any modification in any one species exclusively for the good of another species", it is now known that "Microbial life can easily live without us; we, however, cannot survive without the global catalysis and environmental transformations it provides."
The Microbial Engines That Drive Earth’s Biogeochemical Cycles - Paul G. Falkowski - 2008 Excerpt: Microbial life can easily live without us; we, however, cannot survive without the global catalysis and environmental transformations it provides. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.474.2161&rep=rep1&type=pdf - Paul G. Falkowski is Professor Geological Sciences at Rutgers
Moreover, in the following article Dr. Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig reveals that "in thousands of plant species often entirely new organs have been formed for the exclusive good of more than 132,930 other species."
Plant Galls and Evolution How More than Twelve Thousand1 Ugly Facts are Slaying a Beautiful Hypothesis: Darwinism2 Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig – 7 September 2017 Excerpt: in the case of the galls, in thousands of plant species often entirely new organs have been formed for the exclusive good of more than 132,930 other species, these ‘ugly facts’ have annihilated Darwin’s theory as well as the modern versions of it. The galls are not ‘useful to the possessor’, the plants. There is no space for these phenomena in the world of “the selfish gene” (Dawkins). Moreover, the same conclusion appears to be true for thousands of angiosperm species producing deceptive flowers (in contrast to gall formations, now for the exclusive good of the plant species) – a topic which should be carefully treated in another paper. http://www.weloennig.de/PlantGalls.pdf
bornagain77
Ed George at 1, it would be very difficult to show a human level of empathy without a human level of consciousness. So of course, they don't. Why the BBC needs to pretend otherwise when there is so much we need to do for the chimpanzees' survival and welfare is a bit hard to understand. Maybe it goes with the territory. News
wow I really hated BBC. Of course this is all about a group of saintly chimpanzees and we’re not even going to glance over their are more unsavory behaviors just the ones where they share all the time and they act like Jesus Christ where the Virgin Mary. AaronS1978
I can accept that chimps show altruism and empathy. But to say that it is just like humans would be a stretch. Especially considering that I can't be sure that anyone else shows empathy and altruism just like I do. I can only presume that this is the case. Ed George

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