and misleading conclusions I always go to the
Institute for Creation Research.
Research has shown that humans like to help, even before they are old enough to have been taught how to do so. This innate characteristic distinguishes humans from their supposed closest evolutionary family member, the chimpanzee, which doesn’t demonstrate the same altruistic behavior.The research he cites is that of Dr. Michael Tomasello. Brian's second sentence didn't sound right to me, so I Googled "chimpanzee altruism." And lo, the first hit is for a study by that same Dr. Tomasello et al. And in the abstract for that study, what do we find?
Many researchers have claimed that such altruism emanates from a species-unique psychology not found in humans' closest living evolutionary relatives, such as the chimpanzee....In contrast, we report experimental evidence that chimpanzees perform basic forms of helping in the absence of rewards spontaneously and repeatedly toward humans and conspecifics. In two comparative studies, semi–free ranging chimpanzees helped an unfamiliar human to the same degree as did human infants, irrespective of being rewarded (experiment 1) or whether the helping was costly (experiment 2)....These results indicate that chimpanzees share crucial aspects of altruism with humans, suggesting that the roots of human altruism may go deeper than previous experimental evidence suggested.So Brian, and GGG: you were saying?
What did you expect. BTMS* and GGG NEVER let the facts get in the way of a good story. They are simply preaching to their own crowd who are either too lazy, dumb, or convinced to actually do any resarch or critical assessment.
Wait a minute—are you saying this Thomas bozo, in making his argument, cites to an authority whose research indicates the exact opposite of the central claim Thomas is making? Did I read that correctly?
LOL!!!
Upon reading the ICR article, but before reading the thread, and thus before seeing your post, I did exactly the same thing. I googled the slightly different search phrase, "altruism chimpanzees," but still got that PLoS article as the very first hit.
BTW, the full text of the article is available at that link. You can even download videos of the experiments.
I've read enough ICR articles over the years to know that there will always be something deliciously stupid about them. This was only slightly more tasty than usual.
Won't embarrass GGG, though. No matter how often he gets burned, he'll keep the hits coming!