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Chimpanzees return favors at a personal cost.

ABSTRACT: Humans regularly provide others with resources at a personal cost to themselves. Chimpanzees engage in some cooperative behaviors in the wild as well, but their motivational underpinnings are unclear. In three experiments, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) always chose between an option delivering food both to themselves and a partner and one delivering food only to themselves. In one condition, a conspecific partner had just previously taken a personal risk to make this choice available. In another condition, no assistance from the partner preceded the subject's decision. Chimpanzees made significantly more prosocial choices after receiving their partner's assistance than when no assistance was given (experiment 1) and, crucially, this was the case even when choosing the prosocial option was materially costly for the subject (experiment 2). Moreover, subjects appeared sensitive to the risk of their partner's assistance and chose prosocially more often when their partner risked losing food by helping (experiment 3). These findings demonstrate experimentally that chimpanzees are willing to incur a material cost to deliver rewards to a conspecific, but only if that conspecific previously assisted them, and particularly when this assistance was risky. Some key motivations involved in human cooperation thus may have deeper phylogenetic roots than previously suspected.

SUBMITTER: Schmelz M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5514715 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Chimpanzees return favors at a personal cost.

Schmelz Martin M Grueneisen Sebastian S Kabalak Alihan A Jost Jürgen J Tomasello Michael M

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20170619 28

Humans regularly provide others with resources at a personal cost to themselves. Chimpanzees engage in some cooperative behaviors in the wild as well, but their motivational underpinnings are unclear. In three experiments, chimpanzees (<i>Pan troglodytes</i>) always chose between an option delivering food both to themselves and a partner and one delivering food only to themselves. In one condition, a conspecific partner had just previously taken a personal risk to make this choice available. In ...[more]

PMID: 28630319

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Project description:The goal of human genome re-sequencing is obtaining an accurate assembly of an individual's genome. Recently, there has been great excitement in the development of many technologies for this (e.g. medium and short read sequencing from companies such as 454 and SOLiD, and high-density oligo-arrays from Affymetrix and NimbelGen), with even more expected to appear. The costs and sensitivities of these technologies differ considerably from each other. As an important goal of personal genomics is to reduce the cost of re-sequencing to an affordable point, it is worthwhile to consider optimally integrating technologies. Here, we build a simulation toolbox that will help us optimally combine different technologies for genome re-sequencing, especially in reconstructing large structural variants (SVs). SV reconstruction is considered the most challenging step in human genome re-sequencing. (It is sometimes even harder than de novo assembly of small genomes because of the duplications and repetitive sequences in the human genome.) To this end, we formulate canonical problems that are representative of issues in reconstruction and are of small enough scale to be computationally tractable and simulatable. Using semi-realistic simulations, we show how we can combine different technologies to optimally solve the assembly at low cost. With mapability maps, our simulations efficiently handle the inhomogeneous repeat-containing structure of the human genome and the computational complexity of practical assembly algorithms. They quantitatively show how combining different read lengths is more cost-effective than using one length, how an optimal mixed sequencing strategy for reconstructing large novel SVs usually also gives accurate detection of SNPs/indels, how paired-end reads can improve reconstruction efficiency, and how adding in arrays is more efficient than just sequencing for disentangling some complex SVs. Our strategy should facilitate the sequencing of human genomes at maximum accuracy and low cost.

Dataset Information

Chimpanzees return favors at a personal cost.

Publications

Chimpanzees return favors at a personal cost.

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