Tuesday, February 17, 2009

All You Need is Love

A quick and driveby post as a follow-up to some of our previous posts about our interconnectedness and as the Sioux proverb goes, "With all beings and all things we shall be as relatives", this headline from the Discover magazine blogs caught my attention:

All It Takes Is Love: Baby Chimps Given Extra TLC Score Higher Than Human Infants on IQ Tests

We kid you not: Orphaned baby chimpanzees cared for by humans in a loving, attentive manner have been found to be more cognitively advanced than some human infants.

Authors of a new study in Developmental Psychobiology compared nine-month-old human babies to nine-month-old chimps who had received daily “mom sessions.” For 20 hours a week, humans would play with 17 of the orphaned infant chimps, helping them to develop motor skills and to “meet new challenges with curiosity instead of distress.”

Is anybody really surprised? [Apologies to anyone stuck with the Beatles tune "All You Need is Love" in their head now.]


2 comments:

patricia mariller said...

It's not a big surprise.

When i read the headline, i believed that it was an eulogy for the beatles and one of their greatest hits...

Ok, that has no report with bioƩthics. But this tune...!
Yep!

Nicole said...

This is potentially misleading - what is the developmental age of a 9 month old chimp v. a 9 month old human?