Empathy No Longer Sets Humans Apart

Human beings want to believe that we are special.  We fervently cling to the ideas that our cleverness and powerful emotions are something unusual and extraordinary in the natural world.  Unfortunately science does not seem to hold humans in as high esteem.  Evolution, after all, is a completely random and directionless system.  It is also an incredibly connected system and the roots of many behaviors and traits can be found strewn across vast numbers of different species and families.  The more that we look for what makes us special, the more we find that we are not.  In the disciplines of cognition and intelligence especially, the borders that long separated humans and animals are becoming blurred.  Scientists are now finding startling similarities between animal brains and our own.

The historically famous, but incorrect, picture showing evolution having direction and culminating in the creation of man
Source: Unknown

If there is one thing that mankind has been proud of, it is empathy.  We have often bragged about our ability to feel for others and to offer help to those that need it.  Often, our art and literature paints the animal world as cruel and uncaring, while humans alone are able to work together to aid one-another.  Unfortunately for these compelling narratives, cognitive researchers have found empathy to exist in a number of animal species and believe that we are thinking of empathy in the wrong way.  In truth, empathy is a simple neurological process that serves as an internal rewards system for social behaviors.  Humans have deluded ourselves into believing what we were experiencing was some isolated phenomenon unlike any other.  This has clouded how we have viewed the cognitive abilities of our fellow animals.