Vampire Bats and the Golden Rule
Michael Shermer writes in The Science of Good and Evil: Why people cheat, gossip, care, share, and follow the golden rule:
Examples of premoral sentiments among animals abound. It has been well documented that vampire bats, for example, exhibit food-sharing behavior and the principle of reciprocity. They go out at night in hordes seeking large sleeping mammals from which they can suck blood. Not all are successful, yet all need to eat regularly because of their excessively high metabolism. On average, older experienced bats fail one night in ten, younger inexperienced bats fail one night in three.
Their solution: successful individuals regurgitate blood and share it with their less fortunate comrades, fully expecting reciprocity the next time they come home sans bacon. Gerald Wilkinson, in his extensive study of cooperation in vampire bats, has even identified a “buddy system” among bats, in which two individuals share and reciprocate from night to night, depending on their successes or failures. He found that the degree of affiliation between two bats—that is, the number of times they were observed together—predicted how often they would share food.
Since bats live for upwards of eighteen years among the same community, they know who the cooperators are and who the defectors are. Of course, the bats are not aware of being cooperative in any conscious goodwill sense. All animals, including human animals, are just trying to survive, and it turns out that cooperation is a good strategy.
This account of food sharing among vampire bats was recently broadcast on my favorite podcast, WNYC’s Radiolab.
Wilkinson, who conducted this research, describes summer nights he spent on a cattle ranch in Costa Rica, lying down inside of hollow, four-story trees along a river, getting pooped on while observing the bats. Often one bat would snuggle up to another bat and begin licking at its mouth, almost like they were kissing, but really she was licking up blood that the second bat was regurgitating.
WATCH VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loXKlwAjwfc&feature=player_embedded
Wilkinson then controlled which bats ate and which didn’t, and kept track of who fed whom, and he found that there are friendship networks among bats. If hungry Sally feeds full Agnes on the first day, then hungry Agnes invariably feeds full Sally the second day. And this isn’t just among related bats; friendship ties are actually more predictive than kinship ties of who feeds whom.
Wilkinson also mentions that large mammals were abundant on the plains 40,000 years ago. But when the large mammals became scarce due to climate changes, vampire bats had to develop a way of working together. Being nice wasn’t an option; it was the only way for the species to survive.
Have a listen to the broadcast: It’s 14:45 minutes long.
The moral of the story? Be nice. I know being nice can’t be taught in a lesson; it’s modeled. But if I’m asked to teach a family home evening lesson, I might as well keep the boys interested with blood-sucking, -pooping, -vomiting bats.
But there’s a second unspoken lesson here—that the existence of altruism, compassion, generosity, kinship, and compassion can be explained very well by natural selection.
Dubious? Read the book.
"..Being nice wasn’t an option; it was the only way for the species to survive...But there’s a second unspoken lesson here—that the existence of altruism, compassion, generosity, kinship, and compassion can be explained very well by natural selection.
So is it morally incumbent upon the bats to survive?
See 2,543 Attempts such as this to explain or account for morality from an a priori assumption of naturalism commit a fundamental category error. The foregoing, even if it were an accurate account of what has happened in the past, does not constitute or offer any explanation at all of morality because mere descriptive accounts of the past are not prescriptive. Morality entails what ought to be done, not merely what is. As Hume showed, you cannot logically derive an ought from an is.
Cordially,