From “Collaboration Encourages Equal Sharing in Children but Not in Chimpanzees
ScienceDaily (July 22, 2011)” (ScienceDaily, July 22, 2011) we learn:
Adult humans produce a vast majority of their resources in cooperative work with others. Moreover, they generally try to distribute them based on norms of fairness and equity. With regard to children, previous studies have shown that when adults provide rewards as a windfall and ask children to share, 3-year-olds behave rather selfishly.
However, the present studies show that even 3-year-olds do take note of whether or not rewards were produced collaboratively, which in turn affects their tendency to allocate the toys equally.
Chimpanzees, however,
did not share more often after collaboration than in a windfall situation. Also in the wild, they only rarely actively collaborate for subsistence. Therefore, they may not have evolved a tendency to distribute resources more equally when those resources result from a collaboration.
Oh? Why not?
How do we know there was any evolution involved? What if the trait is an outcome of high intelligence? In that case, there was no long slow series of steps, just a recognition of the concept of justice and the foreseeable outcome of its practice. But that recognition is not available to creatures lacking the ability to abstract.
“Evolution” is often just useless conceptual clutter in the repertoire of science,” to borrow a phrase.