By Laura Sanders Older people with hearing loss may suffer faster rates of mental decline. People who have hearing trouble suffered meaningful impairments in memory, attention and learning about three years earlier than people with normal hearing, a study published online January 21 in JAMA Internal Medicine reveals. The finding bolsters the idea that hearing loss can have serious consequences for the brain, says Patricia Tun of Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., who studies aging. “I’m hoping it will be a real wake-up call in terms of realizing the importance of hearing.” Compared with other senses, hearing is often overlooked, Tun says. “We are made to interact with language and to listen to each other, and it can have damaging effects if we don’t.” Frank Lin of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and colleagues tested the hearing of 1,984 older adults. Most of the participants, who averaged 77 years old, showed some hearing loss — 1,162 volunteers had trouble hearing noises of less than 25 decibels, comparable to a whisper or rustling leaves. The volunteers’ deficits reflect the hearing loss in the general population: Over half of people older than 70 have trouble hearing. Over the next six years, these participants underwent mental evaluations that measured factors such as short-term memory, attention and the ability to quickly match numbers to symbols. Everybody got worse at the tasks as time wore on, but people with hearing loss had an especially sharp decline, the team found. On average, a substantial drop in performance would come about three years earlier to people with hearing loss. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Hearing; Alzheimers
Link ID: 17699 - Posted: 01.22.2013

by Douglas Heaven The learning difficulties that can result from premature birth may not be inevitable. That's the exciting conclusion of two independent but complementary studies. Together, the studies suggest that the relatively small cerebral cortex seen in many preterm babies contains a normal number of neurons despite its size – and that these neurons could be nurtured back to health with the right postnatal care. "For decades we thought of survivors of preterm birth as having a devastating permanent injury," says Stephen Back at the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. The small cerebral cortex was widely assumed to reflect insufficient neurons in this part of the brain, perhaps because some of the cells are lost following the ischemia – reduced blood flow to brain tissue – often experienced by premature babies. Back and colleagues decided to look at the effects of ischemia on the developing cortex in more detail. To do so they used a fetal sheep brain, as this animal model has been shown to closely match the brain of human fetuses. In a "painstaking but very accurate" process, Back's team used microscopy techniques to count the number of neurons in samples taken from fetal sheep brains that had suffered induced ischemic injury and those that had not. Though the injured cortices had a smaller volume, Back's team was surprised to find that they had the same number of cells as uninjured cortices. "We counted the money and it was all there," says Back. "But the cells were all squished together." Neuron 'saplings' © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Intelligence
Link ID: 17698 - Posted: 01.19.2013

by Jennifer Viegas The world’s largest archive of animal vocalizations and other nature sounds is now available online. This resource for students, filmmakers, scientists and curious wildlife aficionados took archivists a dozen years to assemble and make ready for the web. “In terms of speed and the breadth of material now accessible to anyone in the world, this is really revolutionary,” audio curator Greg Budney said in a press release, describing the milestone just achieved by the Macaulay Library archive at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “This is one of the greatest research and conservation resources at the Cornell Lab,” added Budney. “And through its digitization, we’ve swung the doors open on it in a way that wasn’t possible 10 or 20 years ago.” The collection goes way back to 1929. It contains nearly 150,000 digital audio recordings equaling more than 10 terabytes of data with a total run time of 7,513 hours. About 9,000 species are represented. Many are birds, but the collection also includes sounds of whales, elephants, frogs, primates and more. “Our audio collection is the largest and the oldest in the world,” explained Macaulay Library director Mike Webster. “Now, it’s also the most accessible. We’re working to improve search functions and create tools people can use to collect recordings and upload them directly to the archive. Our goal is to make the Macaulay Library as useful as possible for the broadest audience possible.” © 2013 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Hearing; Animal Communication
Link ID: 17697 - Posted: 01.19.2013

Search recordings by species: 135793 recordings found

Keyword: Hearing; Animal Communication
Link ID: 17696 - Posted: 01.19.2013

US President Barack Obama waded directly into scientific politics yesterday when he announced a series of measures addressing gun violence in the wake of the 14 December shooting in a primary school in Newtown, Connecticut, that left 26 people dead — 20 of them children. Of the 23 actions he took under presidential authority on 16 January, Obama chose to highlight just a few in remarks he delivered at the White House. One of them was a presidential memorandum directing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other public-health service agencies to “conduct or sponsor research into the causes of gun violence and the ways to prevent it”. An accompanying White House document added: The CDC will start immediately by assessing existing strategies for preventing gun violence and identifying the most pressing research questions, with the greatest potential public health impact. And the Administration is calling on Congress to provide $10 million for the CDC to conduct further research, including investigating the relationship between video games, media images, and violence. The presidential move is a direct challenge to gun-rights proponents in Congress, who since 1996 have used prohibitions written into funding bills to muzzle CDC research on gun violence, as Nature noted in an August 2012 editorial (see ‘Who calls the shots?’). Congress also last year began forbidding the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to spend any money, “in whole or in part, to advocate or promote gun control.” © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 17695 - Posted: 01.19.2013

Jordan Heller The note, which threatened to kidnap O'Leary and went on to reference myriad tortures including dismemberment, disembowelment, Drano and napalm, was published on Negotiation Is Over (NIO), a website that acts as a one-stop shop for animal rights extremists looking to gather intelligence on potential targets. In addition to labeling O'Leary—a professor at Detroit's Wayne State University whose studies on congestive heart failure involve experiments on rodents and occasionally dogs—a sadistic animal torturer, it published his photo and home address. In an email to O'Leary alerting him of the post, Camille Marino, who until last month ran NIO out of her home in Wildwood, Fla., told the professor that some of her "associates" would be paying him a visit to take pictures of his home. "Then you can join ‘NIO's most wanted,'" she wrote. "I hope you die a slow and painful death." Arson, Cracked Testicles, and Internet Death Threats: How Animal Rights Extremists Are Learning From the People Who Murdered George TillerAnimal right activist Camille Marino, who has done stints as an investment banker and law student, was convicted last year of repeatedly threatening a medical researcher. In December, a Michigan judge sentenced Marino, 48, to six months in prison and three years probation for charges related to her off- and online stalking of O'Leary, who at trial called Marino a "clearly disturbed individual, who was threatening me personally, threatening my children, threatening my home."

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 17694 - Posted: 01.19.2013

Ewen Callaway Even as home experiments go, Hopi Hoekstra’s one was peculiar: she built a giant plywood box in her garage in San Diego, California, filled it with more than a tonne of soil and then let a pet mouse dig away. “This thing was bursting at its seams and held together with duct tape,” says the evolutionary biologist, now at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “But it worked.” It allowed her to study the genetics of burrowing behaviour in a controlled setting. Armed with plastic casts of the burrows and state-of-the-art sequencing, Hoekstra’s team discovered clusters of genes that partly explain why the oldfield mouse (Peromyscus polionotus) builds elaborate two-tunnel burrows, whereas its close relative, the deer mouse (Peromyscus maniculatus), goes for a simple hole in the ground1. The findings highlight an underappreciated benefit of a genomics revolution that is moving at breakneck speed. Thanks to cheap and quick DNA sequencing, scientists interested in the genetics of behaviour need not limit themselves to a handful of favourite lab organisms. Instead, they can probe the genetic underpinnings of behaviours observed in the wild, and glean insights into how they evolved. “In my mind, the link between genes and behaviour in natural populations and organisms is the next great frontier in biology,” says Hoekstra. Oldfield mice are native to the southeastern United States, where they burrow in soils ranging from sandy beaches to silt-rich clays. Wherever they dig, their holes look much the same, with a long entrance tunnel and a second tunnel that stops short of the surface and allows them to escape predators. Such invariability hints that the trait is encoded in DNA, says Hoekstra. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 17693 - Posted: 01.17.2013

By Ashutosh Jogalekar G Protein-Coupled Receptors (GPCRs) are the messengers of the human body, key proteins whose ubiquitous importance was validated by the 2012 Nobel Prize in chemistry. As I mentioned in a post written after the announcement of the prize, GPCRs are involved in virtually every physiological process you can think of, from sensing colors, flavors and smells to the action of neurotransmitters and hormones. In addition they are of enormous commercial importance, with something like 30% of marketed drugs binding to these proteins and regulating their function. These drugs include everything from antidepressants to blood-pressure lowering medications. But GPCRs are also notoriously hard to study. They are hard to isolate from their protective lipid cell membrane, hard to crystallize and hard to coax into giving up their molecular secrets. One reason the Nobel Prize was awarded was because the two researchers – Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka – perfected techniques to isolate, stabilize, crystallize and study these complex proteins. But there’s still a long way to go. There are almost 800 GPCRs, out of which ‘only’ 16 have been crystallized during the past decade or so. In addition all the studied GPCRs are from the so-called Class A family. There’s still five classes left to decipher, and these contain many important receptors including the ones involved in smell. Clearly it’s going to be a long time before we can get a handle on the majority of these important proteins. Fortunately there’s something important that GPCR researchers have realized; it’s the fact that many of these GPCRs have amino acid sequences that are similar. If you know what experimental conditions work for one protein, perhaps you can use the same conditions for another similar GPCR. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 17692 - Posted: 01.17.2013

by Elizabeth Norton To humans, all fire ants may look alike. But the tiny, red, stinging bugs known as Solenopsis invicta have two types of social organization, and these factions are as recognizable to the ants as rival football teams are to us. Researchers once thought that the groups' distinct physiological and behavioral profiles stemmed from a variant in a single gene. Now, a new study provides the first evidence that the gene in question is bound up in a bundle of some 600 other genes, versions of which are all inherited together. This "supergene" takes up a large chunk of what may be the first known social chromosome, analogous to the chromosomes that determine sex in humans. The differences between the two types of fire ants start with the winged queens, according to evolutionary geneticist Laurent Keller of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. A so-called monogyne queen is large, fat, and fertile. Once she's mated, she can fly long distances to start her colony, nourishing her eggs from her fat stores, and then wait until her larvae grow up into workers. A monogyne colony will accept only the original queen and kill any other that shows up; these ants are very aggressive in general. By contrast, a polygyne queen is smaller and needs mature workers to help set up a colony. Thus polygyne communities will accept multiple queens from nearby nests—unless, that is, one happens to be a monogyne, in which case, they kill her. In 1998, working with entomologist and geneticist Kenneth Ross of the University of Georgia in Athens, Keller showed that the two groups of fire ants had distinct versions of a gene known as Gp-9. All of the monogynes had two copies of one form; among the polygynes, many had one normal and one mutated copy of the gene. At first glance, the finding made sense. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 17691 - Posted: 01.17.2013

By Ashutosh Jogalekar As marijuana is being legalized in Washington and Colorado states, its proliferation and use raise legitimate issues regarding its dose-dependent and long-term effects. One key question is whether pot leads to cognitive decline and a lowering of IQ, especially if its consumption is started at an early age. Answering this question is important for users, families and policy makers to have a realistic idea of personal and legal policies regarding widespread cannabis use. Last year, Madeline Meier and her group from Duke University reported results from the so-called Dunedin study which tracked a group of 1037 people from their birth to age 38. These volunteers’ pot smoking histories were monitored at periodic intervals from age 18 onwards. The study found a troubling decline of IQ and cognitive abilities among regular pot smokers, especially those whose habit kicked in during their teens. No explicit causal relationship was assigned between the two facts, but the correlation was positive and significant. The study naturally raised a lot of questions regarding the wisdom of early pot use, especially in light of its current legalization in two states. Now a study by Ole Rogeberg from the Ragnar Frisch Center for Research in Norway has called this study into question, both for its methodology and its conclusions. The first thing to realize about any such study, even if you don’t know the details, is that there are going to be several confounding socioeconomic factors in assessing any relationship between cannabis use and IQ. Medicine and psychology are not exact sciences, and following a large sample of people for 38 years and assessing correlation – let alone causation – between any two factors is going to be confounded by a large number of other correlated and uncorrelated variables in an inherently uncontrolled experiment. © 2013 Scientific American,

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Intelligence
Link ID: 17690 - Posted: 01.17.2013

By Laura Sanders A massive effort to uncover genes involved in depression has largely failed. By combing through the DNA of 34,549 volunteers, an international team of 86 scientists hoped to uncover genetic influences that affect a person’s vulnerability to depression. But the analysis turned up nothing. The results are the latest in a string of large studies that have failed to pinpoint genetic culprits of depression. “I’m disappointed,” says study coauthor Henning Tiemeier of Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands. The negative finding, published online January 3 in Biological Psychiatry, “tells us that we have to be very modest,” he says. “Yet we think it’s doable to find some of the genes involved.” Depression seems to run in families, leading scientists to think that certain genes are partially behind the disorder. But so far, studies on people diagnosed with depression have failed to reveal these genes. Unlike earlier studies, the new study ignored depression diagnoses and instead focused solely on symptoms. Researchers combined the results of 17 studies that asked volunteers the same set of 20 questions about their emotional health at the time of the questionnaire. A person with many signs of depression scored high on the index (called CES-D), while a person with few signs scored low. The researchers hoped that capturing the continuum of symptoms — instead of a black-and-white depression diagnosis — would be a better way to ferret out the genes involved in depression. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Depression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 17689 - Posted: 01.17.2013

By Razib Khan In Slate there is an important piece up, The Early Education Racket, which attempts to reassure upper middle striving types that it isn’t the end of the world if their children don’t get into the right preschool. It is important because there are many people out there with lots of money (or perhaps more accurately, just enough money) and no common sense. Though the author, Melinda Wenner Moyer, offers that she’s not “making a Bell Curve argument here,” the general thesis that there are diminishing returns to inputs on childhood environment is well known to anyone with a familiarity with behavior genetics. Here’s a piece in Psychology Today from 1993, So Long, Superparents: If you are doubtful of this, I recommend you read The Nurture Assumption. This book was published in 1999, and Steve Pinker reported on the results in The Blank Slate a few years later, where I first encountered the thesis. The basic insight, that parental home environment seems to have minimal predictive power in explaining variation in outcomes, is still not very well known. The two primary issues to keep in mind are: 1) A substantial proportion of the variation in I.Q. and personality is heritable in a genetic sense. Many observations of parent-child similarities presumed that they were due to learning and emulation, but statistical analysis suggests this is not the case. Today, with genomic understanding of sibling relatedness (recall that though siblings should be related 0.50, there is some variation about this value) this seems more true than ever; much of the difference between siblings seems to be due to the variation of their genetic make up.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Intelligence
Link ID: 17688 - Posted: 01.17.2013

Some children who are accurately diagnosed in early childhood with autism lose the symptoms and the diagnosis as they grow older, a study supported by the National Institutes of Health has confirmed. The research team made the finding by carefully documenting a prior diagnosis of autism in a small group of school-age children and young adults with no current symptoms of the disorder. The report is the first of a series that will probe more deeply into the nature of the change in these children’s status. Having been diagnosed at one time with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD), these young people now appear to be on par with typically developing peers. The study team is continuing to analyze data on changes in brain function in these children and whether they have subtle residual social deficits. The team is also reviewing records on the types of interventions the children received, and to what extent they may have played a role in the transition. "Although the diagnosis of autism is not usually lost over time, the findings suggest that there is a very wide range of possible outcomes," said NIMH Director Thomas R. Insel, M.D. "For an individual child, the outcome may be knowable only with time and after some years of intervention. Subsequent reports from this study should tell us more about the nature of autism and the role of therapy and other factors in the long term outcome for these children." The study, led by Deborah Fein, Ph.D., at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, recruited 34 optimal outcome children, who had received a diagnosis of autism in early life and were now reportedly functioning no differently than their mainstream peers. For comparison, the 34 children were matched by age, sex, and nonverbal IQ with 44 children with high-functioning autism, and 34 typically developing peers. Participants ranged in age from 8 to 21 years old.

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 17687 - Posted: 01.17.2013

By BENEDICT CAREY Doctors have long believed that disabling autistic disorders last a lifetime, but a new study has found that some children who exhibit signature symptoms of the disorder recover completely. The study, posted online on Wednesday by the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, is the largest to date of such extraordinary cases and is likely to alter the way that scientists and parents think and talk about autism, experts said. Researchers on Wednesday cautioned against false hope. The findings suggest that the so-called autism spectrum contains a small but significant group who make big improvements in behavioral therapy for unknown, perhaps biological reasons, but that most children show much smaller gains. Doctors have no way to predict which children will do well. Researchers have long known that between 1 and 20 percent of children given an autism diagnosis no longer qualify for one a few years or more later. They have suspected that in most cases the diagnosis was mistaken; the rate of autism diagnosis has ballooned over the past two decades, and some research suggests that it has been loosely applied. The new study should put some of that skepticism to rest. “This is the first solid science to address this question of possible recovery, and I think it has big implications,” said Sally Ozonoff of the MIND Institute at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the research. “I know many of us as would rather have had our tooth pulled than use the word ‘recover,’ it was so unscientific. Now we can use it, though I think we need to stress that it’s rare.” © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 17686 - Posted: 01.17.2013

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News Light passing through the body and into the womb has an important role in the developing eye, US researchers have discovered. A study, published in the journal Nature, showed that mice spending pregnancy in complete darkness had babies with altered eye development. It indicated tiny quantities of light were needed to control blood vessel growth in the eye. The researchers hope the findings will aid understanding of eye disorders. Light or dark? If you could journey inside a mouse or a person, there would not be enough light to see. However, tiny quantities of light do pass through the body. This effect has already been used to film an infection spreading through the body. Now scientists - at the University of California, San Francisco, and Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center - believe that body-penetrating light can alter the development of the eye, at least in mice. Normally, a network of blood vessels known as the hyaloid vasculature is formed to help nourish the retina as it is constructed. However, the blood vessels would disrupt sight if they remained, so they are later removed - like scaffolding from a finished building. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Vision; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 17685 - Posted: 01.17.2013

By Gary Stix The Atlantic featured a captivating fantasy in its November issue about a scenario to assassinate the U.S. president in 2016 by using a bioweapon specifically tailored to his genetic makeup—a virus that targeted the commander in chief and no one else. A great plot for a Hollywood thriller. But will we really see four years from now an engineered pathogen that could home in on just one person’s DNA, a lethal microbe that could be transmitted from person to person by a sneeze? The authors, including “genomic futurist” Andrew Hessel and cybercrime expert Marc Goodman, both faculty at Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity University, acknowledge that the plausibility of a hit on the president by the time of the next election might be reaching a bit. A personal gene bomb monogrammed for Barack Obama is still beyond the technical acumen of the best genetic engineers. But there is one good use beyond the cloaks and daggers to which the president’s genes might eventually be put. As Obama begins his second term next week, he has begun to contemplate his historical legacy. For his third act—that is, once he leaves office—he might consider extending that legacy further by undertaking a whole genome scan. Obama’s genome, as much as that of anyone alive, might help a bit in the long-running search for genes associated with emotional and psychological resilience. Anyone who runs for president and gets the nomination has to display a measure of mental toughness, and so might carry a set of such genes. Romney was a toughie too—recall the first debate—but he was also to the manner born, doing what was expected for someone of his breeding. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Emotions
Link ID: 17684 - Posted: 01.15.2013

People taking opioid painkillers face higher risks of car accidents even at low doses, say Ontario researchers who want patients to be warned that the drugs can decrease alertness. Knowing that use of opioids like oxycodone, codeine and morphine has increased in North America and that driver simulation studies suggest that the drugs hinder alertness and act as a sedative, researchers at Toronto's Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences looked at emergency department visits among adults treated with opoids. They defined road trauma as motor vehicle crashes that required a visit to emergency. The increased risk for drivers taking opioids started with the lowest doses equivalent to 20 milligrams of morphine. The increased risk for drivers taking opioids started with the lowest doses equivalent to 20 milligrams of morphine. (iStock) Compared with very low doses of opioids, drivers prescribed low doses such as 20 milligrams of morphine showed 21 per cent increased odds of car accidents which rose to 42 per cent for those prescribed high doses, Tara Gomes and her co-authors reported in Monday's issue of the JAMA Internal Medicine, formerly Archives of Internal Medicine. "What was surprising to us was this increased risk started even at what many people consider to be fairly low doses of opioids," Gomes said in an interview. © CBC 2013

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Attention
Link ID: 17683 - Posted: 01.15.2013

By Christine Gorman In the January 2013 issue of Scientific American, D. Kacy Cullen and Douglas H. Smith of the University of Pennsylvania reported on their work using stretch-grown axons (the long thin "arm" of a nerve cell) to some day connect prosthetic devices to the peripheral nervous systems of people who had to have part of their arm amputated. There wasn't enough room to talk about it in the article, but there is another way that these "living bridges" could be used to help people with devastating injuries. The stretch-grown axons could also be used to treat people with major nerve damage that does not necessarily require amputation. The biohybrid bridge provides a conduit for the undamaged part of the peripheral nervous system to bypass the injured nerve and regrow its own axons all the way to the end of the affected limb. If such bridges could be implanted within a few days to weeks of the injury, they would benefit from the fact that neural support cells are still active throughout the length of the limb (these cells usually take a few months to disappear after nerve death) and could guide the regrowing nerve fiber to its final destination. Cullen and Smith hope to begin testing their stretch-grown axons soon in a few U.S. soldiers who were injured while fighting overseas. Cullen described their efforts in a recent email: Peripheral nerve injury (PNI) is a major source of warfighter morbidity. Indeed, only 50% of patients achieve good to normal restoration of function following surgical repair, regardless of the strategy. Moreover, failure of nerve regeneration may necessitate amputation of an otherwise salvaged limb. This stems from the inadequacy of current PNI repair strategies, where even the “gold-standard“ treatment – the nerve autograft – is largely ineffective for major nerve trauma. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Regeneration
Link ID: 17682 - Posted: 01.15.2013

Arran Frood Cannabis rots your brain — or does it? Last year, a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)1 suggested that people who used cannabis heavily as teenagers saw their IQs fall by middle age. But a study published today2 — also in PNAS — says that factors unrelated to cannabis use are to blame for the effect. Nature explores the competing claims. What other factors might cause the decline in IQ? Ole Røgeberg, a labour economist at the Ragnar Frisch Centre for Economic Research in Oslo and the author of the latest paper, ran simulations which showed that confounding factors associated with socioeconomic status could explain the earlier result. For example, poorer people have reduced access to schooling, irrespective of cannabis use. Possibly. The data used in the original paper came from the Dunedin Study, a research project in which a group of slightly more than 1,000 people born in New Zealand in 1972–73 have been tracked from birth to age 38 and beyond. As with all such birth-cohort epidemiological studies (also called longitudinal studies), there is a risk of inferring causal links from observed associations between one factor and another. Past research on the Dunedin cohort shows3 that individuals from backgrounds with low socioeconomic status are more likely than others to begin smoking cannabis during adolescence, and are more likely to progress from use to dependence. Røgeberg says that these effects, combined with reduced access to schooling, can generate a correlation between cannabis use and IQ change. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Intelligence
Link ID: 17681 - Posted: 01.15.2013

By Bruce Bower Chimpanzees often share and share alike when cooperating in pairs, suggesting that these apes come close to a human sense of fairness, a controversial new study finds. Like people, chimps tend to fork over half of a valuable windfall to a comrade in situations where the recipient can choose to accept the deal or turn it down and leave both players with nothing, say psychologist Darby Proctor of Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Lawrenceville, Ga., and her colleagues. And just as people do, chimps turn stingy when supplied with goodies that they can share however they like, the researchers report online January 14 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Humans and chimpanzees show similar preferences in dividing rewards, suggesting a long evolutionary history to the human sense of fairness,” Proctor says. But psychologist Josep Call of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, considers the new results “far from convincing.” In Proctor’s experiments, pairs of chimps interacted little with each other and showed no signs of understanding that some offers were unfair and could be rejected, Call says. “If anything, Proctor’s study suggests that there is no fairness sensitivity in chimpanzees,” remarks psychologist Keith Jensen of the University of Manchester in England. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 17680 - Posted: 01.15.2013