Compassion
Compassion
Every little bit helps. Can't hardly have too much, actually.
Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh
Tales of humpback whales saving other species. Might there be more to it? "“The [humpback whale] bulls love to fight. It’s like Saturday night in the Octagon,” he [Fred Sharpe, a humpback whale researcher] says. “You’ll be in a whale watch boat and all these males will be thrashing on each other. They’re bloodied and so charged up, and the fact that they don’t redirect all that agitation towards the occupants of the boat is remarkable. With a lot of predators, if you got in the middle of that, it would be aimed at you in an instant. Humpbacks are these amazing Buddhist warriors.”
Ascribing Buddhist-like qualities to humpbacks seems particularly apt in light of recent revelations about how these large baleen whales use their superpowers for good. Humpbacks, it turns out, deliberately interfere with attacking killer whales to help others in distress. They don’t just defend their own babies or close relatives. They intervene on behalf of other species—a gray whale calf with its mother, a seal hauled out on an ice floe, even an ocean sunfish. Humpbacks act to improve the welfare of others; the classic definition of altruism.
[...]
In a 2016 article in Marine Mammal Science, Pitman and his coauthors describe this behavior and confirm that such acts of do-gooding are widespread. They have been occurring for a long time and have been seen in locations all over the world. “Now that people know what to look for, especially people out on whale watch boats, they see it fairly regularly,” Pitman says. “So now, even for the people who didn’t believe, which initially included some of the coauthors on the paper, I think everybody now understands that this is going on.”
But knowing that something is happening and understanding why are two different things. Pitman and his coauthors openly ponder the meaning of these encounters. “Why,” they write, “would humpback whales deliberately interfere with attacking killer whales, spending time and energy on a potentially injurious activity, especially when the killer whales were attacking other humpbacks that may not be related, or even more perplexingly, as in the majority of cases reported, when they were attacking other species of prey?”
[...]
What’s powerful about these studies, according to Felix Warneken, head of Harvard University’s Social Cognitive Development Group and the researcher who led the study, is that they challenge the strongly held belief that we need to be taught to be altruistic through social norms. His findings indicate otherwise. Chimpanzees, as well as children too young to have learned the rules of politeness, spontaneously engage in helpful behaviors, even when they have to stop playing or overcome obstacles to do so. The same results have been duplicated with children in Canada, India, and Peru, as well as with chimpanzees at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and other research centers across the world. The chimps helped not only people they knew, but human strangers too.
Compassion, it turns out, is innate. Human beings and other animals have what Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, calls a “compassionate instinct.”"
https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/power-compassion
Every little bit helps. Can't hardly have too much, actually.
Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh
Tales of humpback whales saving other species. Might there be more to it? "“The [humpback whale] bulls love to fight. It’s like Saturday night in the Octagon,” he [Fred Sharpe, a humpback whale researcher] says. “You’ll be in a whale watch boat and all these males will be thrashing on each other. They’re bloodied and so charged up, and the fact that they don’t redirect all that agitation towards the occupants of the boat is remarkable. With a lot of predators, if you got in the middle of that, it would be aimed at you in an instant. Humpbacks are these amazing Buddhist warriors.”
Ascribing Buddhist-like qualities to humpbacks seems particularly apt in light of recent revelations about how these large baleen whales use their superpowers for good. Humpbacks, it turns out, deliberately interfere with attacking killer whales to help others in distress. They don’t just defend their own babies or close relatives. They intervene on behalf of other species—a gray whale calf with its mother, a seal hauled out on an ice floe, even an ocean sunfish. Humpbacks act to improve the welfare of others; the classic definition of altruism.
[...]
In a 2016 article in Marine Mammal Science, Pitman and his coauthors describe this behavior and confirm that such acts of do-gooding are widespread. They have been occurring for a long time and have been seen in locations all over the world. “Now that people know what to look for, especially people out on whale watch boats, they see it fairly regularly,” Pitman says. “So now, even for the people who didn’t believe, which initially included some of the coauthors on the paper, I think everybody now understands that this is going on.”
But knowing that something is happening and understanding why are two different things. Pitman and his coauthors openly ponder the meaning of these encounters. “Why,” they write, “would humpback whales deliberately interfere with attacking killer whales, spending time and energy on a potentially injurious activity, especially when the killer whales were attacking other humpbacks that may not be related, or even more perplexingly, as in the majority of cases reported, when they were attacking other species of prey?”
[...]
What’s powerful about these studies, according to Felix Warneken, head of Harvard University’s Social Cognitive Development Group and the researcher who led the study, is that they challenge the strongly held belief that we need to be taught to be altruistic through social norms. His findings indicate otherwise. Chimpanzees, as well as children too young to have learned the rules of politeness, spontaneously engage in helpful behaviors, even when they have to stop playing or overcome obstacles to do so. The same results have been duplicated with children in Canada, India, and Peru, as well as with chimpanzees at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and other research centers across the world. The chimps helped not only people they knew, but human strangers too.
Compassion, it turns out, is innate. Human beings and other animals have what Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, calls a “compassionate instinct.”"
https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/power-compassion
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