Chimpanzees, Unlike Humans, Apply Economic Principles To Ultimatum Game:
New research from the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany shows that unlike humans, chimpanzees conform to traditional economic models. The research used a modification of one of the most widely used and accepted economic tools, the ultimatum game.
New Telomere Discovery Could Help Explain Why Cancer Cells Never Stop Dividing:
A group working at the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (ISREC) in collaboration with the University of Pavia has discovered that telomeres, the repeated DNA-protein complexes at the end of chromosomes that progressively shorten every time a cell divides, also contain RNA.
Key Step Bird Flu Virus Takes To Spread Readily In Humans Identified:
Since it first appeared in Hong Kong in 1997, the H5N1 avian flu virus has been slowly evolving into a pathogen better equipped to infect humans. The final form of the virus, biomedical researchers fear, will be a highly pathogenic strain of influenza that spreads easily among humans.
Why Emotionally Charged Events Are So Memorable:
Both extensive psychological research and personal experiences confirm that events that happen during heightened states of emotion such as fear, anger and joy are far more memorable than less dramatic occurrences.
Negativity Is Contagious, Study Finds:
Though we may not care to admit it, what other people think about something can affect what we think about it. This is how critics become influential and why our parents' opinions about our life choices continue to matter, long after we've moved out. But what kind of opinions have the most effect" An important new study in the Journal of Consumer Research reveals that negative opinions cause the greatest attitude shifts, not just from good to bad, but also from bad to worse.
Simplest Circadian Clocks Operate Via Orderly Phosphate Transfers:
Researchers at Harvard University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have found that a simple circadian clock found in some bacteria operates by the rhythmic addition and subtraction of phosphate groups at two key locations on a single protein. This phosphate pattern is influenced by two other proteins, driving phosphorylation to oscillate according to a remarkably accurate 24-hour cycle.
Related: A Circadian Clock that works in a test-tube explained and Bacteria do it differently...
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"In this way, [chimpanzees] behave like selfish economists rather than as social reciprocators."
So, when confronted by raving Ayn Rand disciples, say, "don't make a monkey out of me!"
I love the contrast between how the biologists describe the authors ('selfish economists') and how the authors describe their chimpanzee subjects ('rational maximizers').
Anyone have a theory about how capitalism somehow emerged and developed in the irrational 'pink hairless' branch of the chimpanzee family instead of in Pan troglodytes, which should have appreciated it more fully?
The latter, on the evidence of this paper, should be renamed Homo economicus.
"Anyone have a theory about how capitalism somehow emerged and developed in the irrational 'pink hairless' branch of the chimpanzee family instead of in Pan troglodytes, which should have appreciated it more fully?"
Economists are more closely related to chimpanzees than to humans? I mean, I kind of suspected that all along, but now we have proof!