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Do animals have culture?

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  • Do animals have culture?

    Well, first how do you define culture?

    [QUOTE]In his 1959 book The Evolution of Culture anthropologist Leslie White famously defined culture as "the extra-somatic means of adaptation for the human organism." His goal was to bring some consistency to a field that had 164 separate definitions of "culture" being used interchangeably in the anthropological literature (which, predictably, made cross-cultural comparisons challenging at best). Today, this view has expanded beyond the human animal and a widely accepted definition is from Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd's celebrated work Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution:

    Culture is information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation, and other forms of social transmission.
    By information, we mean any kind of mental state, conscious or not, that is
    acquired or modified by social learning, and affects behavior[/QUOTE
    The above info comes from this link, it discusses some of the issues/debate around defining culture and animal inclusion
    Anthropology, Primatology, and the Definition of Culture: Reply to Sperber : The Primate Diaries

    This issue is being heavily debated in the scientific literature, it is really interesting imo
    So what do you think?

  • #2
    Here are some examples, from http://www.fiwi.at/seminars/070516laland.pdf

    Whiten et al. [11] synthesised behavioural information on chimpanzee Pan troglodytes populations
    collated from seven different sites across Africa. Their analysis revealed 65 categories of behaviour, 42 of which exhibited significant variability across sites. Some of this variation could be attributed to differences in ecology. For instance, the absence of ground night-nesting at four sites could be explained by high predation risk from leopards and lions. However, once ecological explanations had been discounted, 39 variants, including tool usage, grooming and courtship behaviour, were absent at some sites but common at others, and it is these that Whiten et al. described as cultural. As in human societies, for which differences are constituted by multiple variations in technology and conventions, the behavioural profiles of each community were also distinctively different. Seemingly a unique case could be made for the chimpanzee as a cultural animal. However, far from singling out chimpanzees, the study prompted a spate of articles arguing that geographical differences in the behavioural repertoires of other large brained mammals were cultural
    Studies of humpback whale Megaptera novaeangliae song demonstrate that studying culture is possible even with large and
    relatively inaccessible mammals, and provide some of the most compelling evidence for animal cultures (Figure I). All males in a population share the same song at any one time, but the song changes gradually throughout the singing season. In Bermuda, humpback whales change, on average, 37% of their song each year, too rapid a rate to be explained plausibly by genes. It took 15 years to change the entire song [42]. However, off the east coast of Australia, the entire song changed within two years to match that found off the west coast [43], apparently triggered by the movement of a few individuals from the west to the east. Such cases can be used to investigate the meaning and mechanisms of cultural transmission.
    On the other hand
    However, in the light of experimental studies of woodpecker finches Geospiza pallida and New Caledonian
    crows Corvus moneduloides, which revealed impressive tool use in birds reared with no opportunity to learn
    socially how to use tools [22,23], ignoring genetics might be ill-advised.
    This paper is really interesting imo. Most of it is not very technical, although it will take some time to read

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