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Comment by etaioinshrdlu | Hacker News Reader

I think one could make a good argument that in fact, humans are the species with the most empathy, out of all other species.

The very idea of one species caring for another, which many humans do, seems completely unique in the animal kingdom.

I would say the rest of the natural world is very ruthless. Humans have empathy for other species, nothing else in nature seems to.

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I think there are a few counter examples. Many pet owners have posted videos of their dogs and cats being protective of their (human) babies. In fact, Koko the gorilla was very affectionate towards her kittens.

Sure, but those situations probably wouldn't arise without human guidance.

Perhaps for those situations I mentioned one could argue that human guidance had a hand. However, there many other examples of cross species altruism where humans play no role (other than observational).

I believe similar situations have been observed rarely in nature, although I wonder if they were indirectly influenced by humans.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2016/08/humpback-wha...

I don't think empathy is uniquely human. That would be very unusual for a trait to have emerged fully formed for only one species in all animal kingdom--I think most things are on a gradient.

Would you call torture human guidance?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcs-H5p-MYw

It's an extreme situation that created this, but I think if you take species in which empathy has been observed, and put them in a secure environment, where they are all well fed, I don't think it's crazy to imagine that they too will have the luxury of inter species empathy, without any human involve in that regard. In general, "That's actually why people keeps mammals in the home and not turtles or snake or something like that who don't have that kind of empathy." (Moral Behaviors in animals | Franz de Waal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcJxRqTs5nk)

And yet my dog would also regularly show up at the back door with a freshly caught bird’s legs sticking out of her mouth even though she was provided with ample and a wide variety of food.

Does your dog understand that another animal can suffer, and that the bird it has is suffering?

It's a complex problem. Would it matter?

> The very idea of one species caring for another, which many humans do, seems completely unique in the animal kingdom.

A quick youtube search would provide you countless counterexamples to this.

Individually there are counter examples, but does any other species display empathy at the scale of another species? I doubt it. And the species that do display empathy at an individual level will also display cruelty.

Humpback whales appear to show empathy towards other species. We have 115 documented cases of them doing so (and it is a lot given how hard it is to observe them).

http://oceanwildthings.com/2018/06/what-humpback-whales-can-...

They also have mirror neurons that have been an important component in theory of mind.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061127111607.h...

How many other species can afford the time to express empathy as much as humans do? Most of them are just struggling to survive, so it's not like we get a lot of opportunities to observe that behavior.

So two examples come to mind where it wasn't just survival. One, a wolf pack in Yellowstone invades another wolf pack's territory, chases them away from their dens, forcing their cubs to starve to death. And two, the brutal Chimpanzee war Jane Goodall observed between two tribes. A third example could be any ant conflict between two colonies where they could in theory both survive but instead choose to try and wipe each other out. In fact, some ants form super colonies instead of fighting one another.

How do you distinguish between individual acts of empathy and "empathy at the scale of another species?"

> And the species that do display empathy at an individual level will also display cruelty.

Sounds like that applies equally to humans. There are cultures where cruelty towards dogs and cats is more common that empathy, and even in places where empathy is more common, individuals can still be cruel.

A "Save the Whales" campaign may seem like empathy towards another species, but it only exists because humans hunted whales so vigorously, and are also in the midsts of ruining their environments, so neither of those sound like examples of true empathy towards another species.

> How do you distinguish between individual acts of empathy and "empathy at the scale of another species?"

An invasive species (or if an imbalance occurs such as predators become scarce and prey population explodes) will just outcompete other species for resources with no empathy. Humans can certainly do that, but we also sometimes worry about preserving species and habitats.

Since we've caused more species to go extinct than any other invasive species in history, that's a remarkably ineffectual case of empathy.

In any case, I'd argue that this isn't real "empathy." We feel intellectually that we've done something wrong, and we even feel sadness about it (although possibly in a similar way that we'd feel towards abiotic ruin, like destroying all the arches in arches national park), but I don't think we truly empathize with the, say, beetles who are going extinct, as we cannot comprehend their minds in any way.

Since this whole discussion is about theory of mind, we should use empathy correctly: "the ability to understand and share the feelings of another."

Humanity doesn't exactly display empathy on a species scale either.

Elephants and cetaceans may show empathy towards humans without cultivating a relationship with one first.

Do you have citations for that? I'm interested and couldn't find convincing sources

No, unfortunately I made this assertion based on unscientific anecdotes I've read previously.

While I do think that the human species is the one with the most empathy, we are definitely not the only species to take care of another species.

I'm not sure humans have the most empathy. In fact, there's a good chance that even when other species have empathy to other creatures, we don't necessarily recognize it.

I think it's a mammalian thing, not just a human thing. It's right in the word: mammal, "of the breast." Animals which suckle their young. Some level of empathy for things other than oneself is required, and this spills over to other individuals and species. And for social animals, having a broader net of empathy that encompasses non-directly-related individuals, empathy also enhances survival. And I think you could make the case that animals sometimes help each other out when facing a common threat, i.e. warning of predators, etc. As humans, we can perhaps see the importance of spreading the net of empathy ever-wider.

Humans are also the species with the most intelligence and the most wisdom. That doesn't mean we still may not be very low on an absolute scale of intelligence and wisdom. Saying we're better relative to other species is pretty meaningless.

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