Spite is Strictly Human

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Chimpanzee

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Philosophers, religious thinkers, and teens brimming with angst have
long thought about the following question for thousands of years - what
does it mean to be human?

Conscience? Will? Thought? Art? Creativity? A plethora of other attributes?

Although
these might be true, there is another human behaviour that appears to be
unique to our species - spite - according to a recent publication in
the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

[q
url="http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2007/716/1"]Evolutionary
biologist Keith Jensen of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, wanted to know whether chimps can be
spiteful. Jensen and his colleagues placed two chimps into separate
cages facing one another, with a table in between them that held
peanuts. One of the two chimps, which could not access the table,
nonetheless had the power to deprive its compatriot of food, by pulling
a rope in its cage and collapsing the table. But the chimp did that no
more often than in another experiment where it was alone. Frustration
at being unable to reach the food itself, not a petty desire to deny
food to the other chimp, was behind its behavior...[/q]

Would the response be the same if the food was stolen?

[q
url="http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2007/716/1"]The
disgruntled chimp pulled the rope almost 50% of the time when the other
chimp stole its food, showing a tendency to punish the offending chimp
for theft by cutting off its access to the food...The chimp's behavior,
[Jensen] says, shows that it punishes the chimp only when it's the
offender.[/q]

So deliberate spiteful acts are foreign to
chimps, but not so for human beings.  An interesting question to ask,
and one I have no answer to is, why is this so?  What evolutionary
adaptation lead to such behaviour?  I would imagine, as is the case for
chimps, acts of spite or malice would result in the excommunication of
that individual.

Any thoughts?