Word: altruism
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...Bekoff and other researchers, ethologists are also starting to accept the once radical idea that some animals--primarily the social ones such as dogs, chimps, hyenas, monkeys, dolphins, birds and even rats--possess not just raw emotions but also subtler and more sophisticated mental states, including envy, empathy, altruism and a sense of fairness. "They have the ingredients we use for morality," says Frans de Waal, a professor of primate behavior at Emory University in Atlanta, referring to the monkeys and chimps he studies...
...TerraMar Research on Bainbridge Island, Wash., animal behaviorist Toni Frohoff has also observed dolphins behaving with what appears to be altruism--although not predictably. In one case, she recalls, she and her colleagues watched a group of dolphins assemble around a female swimmer the researchers later learned was exhausted to the point at which she was afraid for her life. "Conversely," Frohoff says, "I have been 'abandoned' [by dolphins], where all of a sudden they'd disappear and I'd see a shark...
...altruism has earned him much praise...
...good things are not supposed to cash in on them--however belatedly. That Felt may have had other, less than noble motives for his actions--he was angry at the Nixon Administration because he was passed over for the directorship of the FBI--also counted against him. When altruism is tainted by apparently mean--actually entirely human--spirits, people tend to become cynical in their responses to that new, more truthful reality...
...seemed the only concept that could contain the intensity of my feelings. I dismissed the idea of a God who created humans, but a God who came from the human spirit (an idea that my parents had introduced to me)—I liked that. God could be altruism, love, kindness, happiness. God could be what pulled us away from our instincts to be cruel and competitive and distrustful. Although my most sacred experiences were far away from synagogue—on a lake in the Alps, a snow-covered field in upstate New York, or hearing the opening...