Abstract
Human prosociality has often been regarded as an important step towards the capacity for empathy; i.e. to think of others in compassionate and caring ways. This ability, in turn, is related to social attachment. Many writers have rightly argued that, in order to understand the biology and evolution of social attachment, a comparative approach across many taxa is needed.
Highlights
In child psychology, prosocial behaviour refers to voluntary actions that are kind or helpful to others, according to ‘Roots of Prosocial Behaviour in Children’ [1]
There are substantial differences in this stage of development between northern and southern hemisphere birds, as Russel and colleagues have identified [40]. They compared length of parental care post-fledging in 126 species of the northern hemisphere (NH) versus 220 species of the southern hemisphere (SH) Australian based (Figure 1) and found that the majority of SH birds - over 60% - received more than 50 days post-fledging care by parents and, in some species, this care extends to well beyond 4 months
The point of this paper was to highlight that some species of birds have similar social conditions and plenty of time and opportunity, as human adolescents have, to form pre-sexual and pre-reproductive friendships and attachments
Summary
Prosocial behaviour refers to voluntary actions that are kind or helpful to others, according to ‘Roots of Prosocial Behaviour in Children’ [1]. The point that Marshall-Pescini, et al had made, namely to use follow up studies to see whether the most sharing individual donors and recipients eventually become pairs [23] is pertinent here because a) It is observable behaviour and b) It would suggest that a juvenile stage of development in birds, including the development of prosocial behaviour, may have a direct impact on mate-choice and possibly on long-term survival and reproductive success This is difficult work to do and demands longitudinal studies over long periods of time because species with the social dynamics of interest take a long time to become socially independent and sexually mature. The surprising analogies, given the evolutionary distance between human and birds, be this in social [139], developmental [140] and even in some important similarities in mechanisms and structures of the brain [70,141], continue to invite further investigation
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