Scientist: We're not naturally nasty

Humans are not as competitive, aggressive and brutish as early theories suggest, according to new research. Frans de Waal, a biologist and leading specialist in primate behaviour at Emory University in Atlanta, said his research on higher animals, from primates and elephants to mice, showed there was a biological basis for behaviour such as cooperation. "Humans have a lot of pro-social tendencies," the author of The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society, said. Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Vancouver, he said until just 12 years ago, the common view among scientists was that humans were "nasty" but had developed a veneer of morality. However, it was now thought human children and most higher animals are "moral" in a scientific sense, because they need to cooperate with each other to reproduce and pass on their genes. Dr de Waal said his research disproved the view that morality is absent in nature and something created by humans. And he said common assumptions that that view was promoted by Charles Darwin, the so-called father of evolution, were also wrong. "Darwin was much smarter than most of his followers," he said, quoting from Darwin's The Descent of Man that animals that developed "well-marked social instincts would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience". During his address, Dr de Waal showed the audience videos from laboratories revealing the emotional distress of a monkey denied a treat that another monkey received, and of a rat giving up chocolate in order to help another rat escape from a trap. "Human morality is unthinkable without empathy," he said. But he told reporters the research also shows animals bestow their empathy on animals they are familiar with in their "in-group", and said that natural tendency posed a challenge in a globalised human world.