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[Kesson Magid <kanadadry AT yahoo.co.uk>]

23 July 2005 
>From New Scientist Print Edition. 

THE greedy fox in Aesop's fable sees his reflection in
a lake and tries to snatch the food the "other" fox is
carrying. Most mammals behave like the fox when they
see a reflection of themselves, and monkeys were
widely assumed to follow suit.

Not so, say primate researchers. Monkeys don't have
the same level of self-awareness as apes and humans,
but neither do they treat their reflection like that
of a stranger.

Frans de Waal and colleagues at Emory University,
Atlanta, watched how capuchin monkeys reacted to
mirrors, or to familiar or unfamiliar monkeys. Males
and females behave differently, they found. In what
could be seen as proto-human reactions, male monkeys
are competitive whereas females flirt with their
reflections. But neither behaves as though they
understand they are looking at themselves, nor acts as
they would with a strange monkey.

"Females are very relaxed in the presence of a mirror,
much more so than in the presence of a stranger," says
de Waal. Males, on the other hand, seem to enter into
some sort of competition, which they can't win.

The work suggests that empathy - for which
self-recognition is thought to be an essential element
- is not confined to apes, says de Waal, but is seen
in a simpler form in monkeys and other mammals too.
"The work hints at very gradual evolution that started
well before humans and apes came along."




                
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