What we can learn from animal societies' ethics

Can animals understand fairness?

Academics have long wondered if fairness is solely a concern of humans. In the largest meta-analysis to date, UC Berkeley researchers tested whether monkeys felt jealousy after receiving unequal rewards. The patterns showed low evidence for inequity aversion and instead frustration due to their expectations not being met by humans. These findings suggest that pursuing fairness and equality is uniquely human.

This Harvard philosophy professor suggests we should rethink our relationship with animals

Christine Korsgaard, a professor of philosophy at Harvard, wrote a book arguing that humans are not more important than other animals and that we should improve our treatment of them. In her view, we have a duty to value the life of our fellow creatures not just for their utility, but for their existence as sentient and conscious beings.

Anthropic's staff philosopher discusses the importance of teaching ethics to AI

Amanda Askell's work focuses on the behavior and values reflected in Claude, the company's AI chatbot, and how its character can better align with how the "ideal person" would act in Claude's position. She also emphasizes the importance of humans being ethical in their interactions with current models, from which future ones will be built.

What we can learn from how penguins express affection

Pebbling, a term used to describe small acts of love within a relationship, comes from penguins. Male gentoo penguins, a species of penguin that lives on sub-Antarctic islands, present pebbles to their potential mates later used to build nests. This small but helpful act is something we humans can learn from. Think of the “pebbles” you can share with loved ones on a daily basis.

Three examples of how humans are still evolving

For much of nature, natural selection and "survival of the fittest" still play a dominant role; only the strongest can survive in the wild. As little as a few hundred years ago, the same was true for humans, but what about now?

What ancient goat teeth reveal about ancient human-animal relationships

About 4,000 years ago, several goats with terrible teeth managed to outlive their better-teethed brethren. With such intense dental damage, the goats were likely fed higher-quality feed than the more dentally gifted herd members, a dietary shift that would've contributed to the difference in life span. These goat teeth underscore the hard truth that humans may inflict harm on the animals they care about most, regardless of intention.

John Steinbeck's philosophical ideas, which he often explored in his novels, wrestled with the role of the individual and the power of community.

The science of symmetry | The Royal Society

Nature is full of symmetries, from spiral galaxies to florets of broccoli. So why do complex creatures break the pattern?This short video discusses why symmetry came to dominate life on Earth, and how many complex life forms, such as humans, transitioned from radial to lateral symmetry.

For most of human history, property rights were in the elite’s hands

Humans learned to domesticate dogs long before they formed the concept of private property. But by the era of the ancient Greeks and Romans, property law and ownership became more sophisticated.

Six of history's most unethical human experiments, from deliberate flu exposure to withholding syphilis treatment

Some of the progress made in mental health treatment, vaccines, blood transfusions, and more came about before the advent of consent and ethics committees, resulting in serious physical and psychological harm that participants in studies were not even anticipating.

Herd behavior has been seen in 193-million-year-old dinosaur fossils

Scientists excavated eggs, juveniles, and adult remains in Patagonia, all arranged by age group. The organization into structured groups may have contributed to evolutionary success by consolidating eggs in one location to make defending them easier.

'Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.'

- Jane Addams (1860-1935)

Similarities between human and animal sleep

Have you ever noticed the wide-ranging differences in sleep between humans and animals? Sleep as a necessity is present amongst all animal species, but the specific patterns of sleep vary widely. Just think of the differences between how an owl, a whale, and a horse might sleep. This helpful resource from the Sleep Foundation explores the relations between human and animal sleep, complete with some fascinating statistics about sleep patterns throughout the animal kingdom!

Matrilineal societies—where women led households—were common among Northeastern natives

Such societies also viewed women as leaders in spiritual matters. Both men and women held political roles as clan leaders and worked in tandem with an advisory council.

Watch how viruses like Ebola can spill over from animals to humans—and vice-versa.

SpongeBob exemplifies Aristotle's philosophy for living well because he understands that happiness doesn't come from external factors like money, recognition, or power.

SpongeBob exemplifies Aristotle's philosophy for living well

In today's society, SpongeBob's life as a single man, line cook, and town fool may not seem appealing. But SpongeBob is perhaps the happiest creature in Bikini Bottom, because he understands that happiness doesn't come from external factors like money, recognition, or power.

Crows are believed to have intelligence on par with a seven-year-old child and demonstrate complex behaviors, from problem-solving with tools to recognizing human faces.

How a Philadelphia soup kitchen taught business students about ethical decision-making

As the St. Francis Inn—a Philadelphia soup kitchen—struggled with decisions about moving its operations to serve more people, a management professor at St. Joseph's University realized his students might have been able to help. Business students used ethical decision-making frameworks to help the soup kitchen serve more people and attract more volunteers.

Larger animals like giraffes, elephants, and blue whales have developed a unique defense against cancer, a phenomenon known as Peto's Paradox

Some animals may speak because of duplicated connections in the brain

Neuroscience suggests that connections responsible for motion made during embryonic brain development—such as those connecting hearing and movement pathways that allow reactive motion when started—are duplicated and connected to the larynx in some animals. This allows some mammals and song-learning birds to speak, provided they have the necessary physiological structures.

Social media can reinforce echo chambers that amplify pre-existing sentiments

A 2023 Nature study showed that exposure to diverse content left participants with unchanged core beliefs, suggesting social media alone cannot create hateful viewpoints. However, such platforms allow rhetoric to spread widely, potentially exacerbating geopolitical tensions.

Listen to the Pink Floyd album inspired by 'Animal Farm'

The 1977 album "Animals" was loosely inspired by Orwell's 1945 novella, though it was not a strict allegory for the Russian Revolution. Instead, Roger Waters' and David Gilmour's songs criticize what they see as the inhumanity of modern capitalism.

'Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.'

Meyer Wolfsheim in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby"

Afterlife traditions help some humans process death

Watch this video discussing concepts of the afterlife presented through an anthropological lens about one family's experience and traditions passed down from one generation to another.

Determine if you're an ethical true crime fan

True crime entertainment researcher Lindsey Sherrill is obsessed with her field of study. She noticed that some true crime content dove into criminal and justice reform, illuminating forgotten cases, while others turned into exploitative entertainment. So, she developed four questions to reflect on the real-life implications of one's true crime consumption.

Invasivorism is a form of ethical eating focused on eating invasive species

The culinary approach helps combat the growth of invasive species populations by increasing demand for dishes made with them, but some suggest that creating a market for these species may help prolong their presence by moderating control. Some diners have expressed reluctance toward consuming more exotic species, such as nutria—raccoon-sized rodents.

Stunning up-close photos of animal eyes

The eyes really are the windows to the soul.

Defiance is choosing to act in line with your values under pressure

Compliance often arises from insinuation anxiety and social pressure, making defiance critical in protecting personal integrity and, in turn, strengthening institutions. Practicing defiance may be achieved through the Defiance Compass framework and can lead to a more values-driven society.

Famed poet TS Eliot rejected the manuscript for George Orwell's political fable 'Animal Farm,' writing that its criticism of authoritarianism was not 'the right point of view.'

Indefinite cloning of some endangered species may not sustain their longevity because cloning success rates decrease as genetic mutations accumulate.

American short story writer Flannery O'Connor raised 40 peacocks, which became potent symbols for her fiction's elegant violence

After NASA's Voyager 1 captured Earth as a single pixel as it left the solar system in 1990, astronomer Carl Sagan used the image to reflect on humanity's fragility and the responsibility to protect 'the only world we've ever known.'

See how each of the more than two million known species relates to each other—and to common ancestors—in this zoomable tree of life.

Watch how algorithms can be designed to train themselves and self-improve without human input, to the point where the optimized code is too complex for programmers to understand.

Before humans, the Soviet Union and the United States sent animals—including apes, dogs, and cats—to space during the Space Race.

Animal phobias are likely the most common type of phobias, followed by an extreme fear of heights.

In 2018, 26-year-old missionary John Allen Chau was killed by tribesmen after attempting to reach and evangelize on India's isolated North Sentinel Island

Up to a million Girl Scouts sell about 200 million cookie boxes every spring, generating $800 million, largely because refusing a child is frowned upon

The Brothers Grimm were lawyers before they were storytellers, and became interested in fairy tales as they began investigating how rules and customs had been passed down through cultures.

Read a deep dive on the 'all-purpose healing' peptide BPC-157.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a group of young men ate standard American food—replete with food additives like borax and formaldehyde—as part of government research to better understand food safety.

Browse a detailed visual analysis of over 200,000 similes—comparisons that often use 'like' or 'as'—from popular fiction to see how frequently writers the same idiomatic expressions.

The US Constitution is widely regarded as the longest-standing written national constitution still in force—see how it has influenced rights worldwide.

For centuries, it was common to sleep in two shifts: a few hours at the beginning of the night, and a longer period beginning around midnight

A Yale student wrote a profound essay about the consulting industry's influence on elite college students that was published in a book of her writing after she died in a post-graduation car accident.

Memecoins are a type of cryptocurrency—a form of digital currency with a wide variety of uses—created around popular 'memes,' or viral internet jokes.

Hedge funds, the private investment firms that trade a wide swath of financial assets, make money by imposing steep fees on investors and from the fund's investment performance.

Graffiti dates back to at least ancient Pompeii, where citizens scrawled messages to one another on public walls

In 2026, Finland was named the world's happiest country for the ninth consecutive year based on its wealth, social safety network, and high life expectancy, among other factors.