Providing Care, more than a Moral behavior, is an Evolution Trait that We were Born with.
Troy Jiang Oct. 16th, 2018
Picture Credit: https://www.prevention.com/life/a20445806/help-and-resources-for-caregivers/
Researchers in Durham University, UK suggest that human beings possess cognitive traits that motivate care-giving. The press release of this research on nature research press site explains that providing care to others helps control the spread of disease within a group as the group gets larger and more complicated. Therefore, having these cognitive traits is an evolution strategy and providing care is an intrinsic part of human cognition.
Social workers, politicians, philosophers, and anthropologists have been discussing about why and how people should take care of each other. This study adds new insights into the discussion as Dr. Sharon E. Kessler, the leading researcher for this study, commented that “[their] findings suggest that care-giving for the sick may be part of a larger package of traits that are associated with the genus Homo — increased sociality, empathy, a tendency to cooperate, larger brains. If care-giving evolved together with these other traits, it would suggest that humans are cognitively specialized for care-giving.”
To show the existence of such traits, Kessler’s group created four social systems under two models (effective care model and ineffective care model) for simulations. Each social system contains 50-200 individuals that were assigned different parameters (intelligent score, the relationship with other individuals etc.) Based on these parameters and the model they are under, individuals may perform care giving to others who are marked as affected. Individuals evaluate the cost-benefit of providing care in terms of disease risk. Researchers later compare the spread of the disease to evaluate the performance of each social system.
The result shows that effective care model has 50% more resistance to new diseases. Higher intelligent score is corelated with high care giving skills in the effective care model. The simulation also suggests that every time a disease is introduced, it improves individual’s ability to provide care if they are under the effective care model. Social systems under the ineffective model show a more random level of resistance to diseases. Dr. Kessler points out that “[the] positive feedback loop produced by the correlated evolution of disease recognition and social learning … is consistent with the idea that care-giving evolved as part of a suite of cognitive and emotional adaptations.” Combining the observations from the simulations, Kessler concludes that “care-giving likely evolved when humans were living in small kin groups before the advent of agriculture… lots of family members helped raise the children. These networks likely served as the basis for care-giving when people were sick too.”
Kessler’s team is not the only group who believes human being’s ability in care giving. Anthropology Professor Jada Benn Torress at Vanderbilt University commented that, “in our intro anthropology classes, we show the picture of these skulls without teeth. There were supposed to be holes on the skull where the teeth fell off, but there were not. That means they lived long enough after they lost their teeth, so the holes healed. The only way for them to survive without teeth was if someone took care of them.”
The study shows reasons for related individuals to take care of each other. Kessler expresses that her next step is “to look at how humans went from a family-based care system to the system we have now where strangers also provide care — and in doing so risk infections for people they aren’t related too. How did that evolve?”