Patience, fairness and the human condition

Human being's "fairness" made them come up to "top" as an evolved beings, comparing to other of our close "relatives" like apes. Marc Hauser of Harvard University and his colleagues have published a research paper in Current Biology describing the degree of similarities and differences among various species including human beings. In their experiments they discovered that "Universally, people reject any share lower than 20%—apparently to punish the greed of the proposer. People do not act like Homo economicus. Instead, they are the arbiters of fairness." For many researchers in the field of human evolution, this sense of fairness is the "killer application":

"It is what allows large social groups to form. Without it, free-riders would ruin such groups, because playing fair would cease to have any value. Dr Jensen's previous experiments have shown that chimpanzees are willing to punish actual thieves. But his new data add weight to the theory that the more sophisticated idea of fair shares, which underpins collaborative behaviour, appeared in the hominid line only after the ancestors of the two species split from one another."

Link to The Economist article:
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9898270