How exactly the whales are learning from each other is not yet clear, but this study is another step towards a greater understanding of animal culture. As culture is something we consider such a key part of being human, it’s hard not to look at animal culture and compare it to our own. I asked Rendell about how comparable non-human animal culture was to our own, and what studies like his might be able to tell us about our own culture. He pointed out that there is a vast chasm between our own culture and what we see in non-human animals: ‘These differences [between humans and other animals] are so huge that it makes no sense to many perfectly reasonable anthropologists to even call anything non-humans do culture. To them, with their focus on symbols and meanings, they are just not the same.
However, evolutionary biologists tend to focus on culture as an alternative information stream from genes – a second inheritance system – and from this perspective the differences are more of degree than kind. There is no universally accepted right answer to this disagreement right now, but everyone accepts that human culture is unique (but then, so is whale culture, chimp culture, bird culture, just like flying, walking, slithering and swimming are all unique ways of locomoting)… understanding what nonhumans are and are not capable of with respect to culture helps us focus on what it is really that makes human culture unique.’ To take this a step further, by understanding what conditions lead to the culture we see in animals, we can better understand what conditions may have lead to the more primitive culture in our evolutionary past, and how our culture evolved to the point it is at today.
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However, evolutionary biologists tend to focus on culture as an alternative information stream from genes – a second inheritance system – and from this perspective the differences are more of degree than kind. There is no universally accepted right answer to this disagreement right now, but everyone accepts that human culture is unique (but then, so is whale culture, chimp culture, bird culture, just like flying, walking, slithering and swimming are all unique ways of locomoting)… understanding what nonhumans are and are not capable of with respect to culture helps us focus on what it is really that makes human culture unique.’ To take this a step further, by understanding what conditions lead to the culture we see in animals, we can better understand what conditions may have lead to the more primitive culture in our evolutionary past, and how our culture evolved to the point it is at today.
- More Here
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