Yet another reason why the youngest wizards would be the most powerful...

[dianeduane]

Makes perfect sense to me:

Infants as young as 18 months show altruistic behaviour, suggesting humans have a natural tendency to be helpful, German researchers have discovered....

...Many scientists have argued that altruism is a uniquely human function, hard-wired into our brains. The latest study suggests it is a strong human trait, perhaps present more than six million years ago in the common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans.

And the younger you are, the less chance you have for older human primates (i.e. adults...) to have talked you out of one of the behaviors that probably contributed to the survival of our species.

Tags: altruism, toddlers, human, wizard, wizardry, power

Comments

It's like the old story of how business rules come to be...

[carpdeus.livejournal.com]

Put 8 gorillas in a cage and hang a bunch of bananas at one end. Every time one of them goes for the bananas, use a fire hose on all of them. By the end of a week, none of them will go for the bananas. Now remove one gorilla and replace him with a new one. The new one will go for the bananas and the 7 original ones will attack him to keep him from reaching them until he learns not to do that. Keep replacing one gorilla each week and, in 9 weeks, none of the original gorillas are left. But still no one will touch the bananas.

Though, to your comment about youth, I think it shows Shaw was right. "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." And children, not knowing the impossible, are as unreasonable as it comes <smiles gently>

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I always assumed it was because they didn't know in their hearts that what they were doing was impossible - at least that's the explanation I used in my Nesbit RPG. But altruism works for me too.

[megabitch.livejournal.com]

You just try getting an 18 month old to share her/his toys with another toddler and see just how altruistic they are then :)

[ailbhe]

Linnea can be very altruistic, even now, when she feels like it. It's quite humbling. She first showed it before she could walk.

My mother says she has seen children desperately keen to share the good stuff - *definitely* an innate trait - who give away all the good stuff and then cry because there's none left for themselves.

Children are taught to be nasty. They're not born knowing how. They're nice people.