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Does sympathy motivate prosocial behaviour in great apes?

ABSTRACT: Prosocial behaviours such as helping, comforting, or sharing are central to human social life. Because they emerge early in ontogeny, it has been proposed that humans are prosocial by nature and that from early on empathy and sympathy motivate such behaviours. The emerging question is whether humans share these abilities to feel with and for someone with our closest relatives, the great apes. Although several studies demonstrated that great apes help others, little is known about their underlying motivations. This study addresses this issue and investigates whether four species of great apes (Pongo pygmaeus, Gorilla gorilla, Pan troglodytes, Pan paniscus) help a conspecific more after observing the conspecific being harmed (a human experimenter steals the conspecific's food) compared to a condition where no harming occurred. Results showed that in regard to the occurrence of prosocial behaviours, only orangutans, but not the African great apes, help others when help is needed, contrasting prior findings on chimpanzees. However, with the exception of one population of orangutans that helped significantly more after a conspecific was harmed than when no harm occurred, prosocial behaviour in great apes was not motivated by concern for others.

SUBMITTER: Liebal K

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3885567 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:DNA methylation is an epigenetic modification involved in regulatory processes such as cell differentiation during development, X-chromosome inactivation, genomic imprinting and susceptibility to complex diseases. These changes can be inherited through generations and likely have played an important role during human evolution. We performed a comparative analysis of CpG methylation patterns between humans and all great apes (chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla and orangutan) on a total of 32 individuals.Our analysis identified ~1,000 genes with significantly altered methylation patterns among the great apes, including ~200 with a methylation pattern unique to humans. Analysis of genes with human-specific epigenetic patterns identified enrichments for several functional categories that are key for human-specific traits, such as advanced facial expressions or equilibrium related to bipedalism. We also found a highly significant positive correlation between the genomic distance genome-wide and the methylation levels. In a pairwise comparison, we observed that ~9% (~30,000) of CpGs assayed show significant methylation differences between human and chimpanzee, including promoter regions of 879 genes (11.9% of those tested), suggesting that epigenetic changes have occurred at high frequency during recent primate evolution and represent an important substrate for adaptive modification of genome function. Epigenetic changes among primates are highly enriched for sites showing intermediate DNA methylation levels might be related to regulatory elements, and we observed a significant relationship between changes in DNA methylation and gene expression across multiple different tissues. We also identified a significant positive relationship between the rate of coding variation within genes and alterations of promoter methylation, suggesting concerted evolution between protein sequence and gene regulation. Contrastingly, our analysis also identified scores of genes that are perfectly conserved at the amino acid level between human and chimp, yet which show significant epigenetic difference between these two species. We conclude that epigenetic alterations represent an important force during primate evolution and has been systematically under explored in evolutionary comparative genomics.

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Does sympathy motivate prosocial behaviour in great apes?

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