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> As Whitehead observes, whale culture is many millions of years older than ours. Oh? How old is our culture? What were whales doing a million years ago that
by wombatmobile 6y ago
> As Whitehead observes, whale culture is many millions of years older than ours.
Oh? How old is our culture?
What were whales doing a million years ago that primates weren't that qualifies as culture?
- darksaints 6y agoWhales can communicate with dolphins as well as other caetacians of various species. Can you communicate with chimpanzees or apes? It is quite possible that, via communication, whale culture actually is millions of years older than ours...kept alive by communicating with species as they evolve.
- wwtrv 6y agoThere are humans who can communicate somewhat effectively with chimpanzees using sign language, does that mean humans now have access to the several hundred year old chimp culture? I don’t think so. Anyway, while we can assume that whales and dolphins have exhibited advanced behaviors throughout the time their species existed do we have any evidence that these behaviors did not develop independently in different populations and were lost or recreated again over those millions of years?
- WalterBright 6y ago> Can you communicate with chimpanzees or apes? Sure. This was well documented by a movie in the 1960s. The apes were at first quite surprised that humans could talk.
- wombatmobile 6y agoAlso dogs, in English, Spanish, German, French, Italian and Thai. Have you not ever taken a dog for a walk and been required to change course when the dog indicates its preference to you in a non-negotiable, but culturally acceptable way?
- drooby 6y agoJoseph Henrich, a professor of human biological evolution as Harvard, has some pretty good theories on the subject. He defines culture as, ”the large body of practices, techniques, heuristics, tools, motivations, values, and beliefs that we all acquire while growing up, mostly by learning from other people.” He estimates that our ability to use culture started at perhaps a million or so years ago, maybe a bit more, maybe hundreds of thousands of years ago. This article challenges his ideas bit since he seems to think that culture is unique to our species, and in contrast these researches of course claim wales have it too. I think the largest point of contention may lie in the definition of culture. Does the ability to communicate danger really amount to “culture”?
- zikzak 6y agoI love the "Wales" typo, here. :)
- slowmovintarget 6y agoI think we keep torturing ourselves by forgetting our own language. Whales do not have a culture. They may be intelligent and social creatures, they may communicate, but they don't have civilization, art, morals, laws, and the practices for developing and improving these things in the minds of our children. The origin of the word is to cultivate, from Latin, and implies building and transmission. Familial training in whale pods for feeding techniques is not the same thing. It seemingly echoes some facets of the immensely more complex concept we call culture, but saying that of whales is reductionist in way that isn't useful for clear thought. Perhaps we can blame modern dictionaries, because the older ones shed more light on the matter: https://www.webster-dictionary.org/definition/culture https://www.webster-dictionary.org/definition/culture
- SamBam 6y agoSure, whales cannot have "culture" if we define it as "art, morals, laws" etc, by definition. But we also need a word for a shared, passed-down learned experiences. Such a thing has been observed in numerous species. For example, certain groups of gulls have learned to drop shells onto the rocks to smash them open. Similar gulls in other areas have not learned this. The ones that have have passed this lesson down for generations. "Culture" to me sounds like a perfectly-good word for it. Cambridge Dictionary has the definition "the way of life of a particular people, esp. as shown in their ordinary behavior and habits." Words can have multiple meanings in different contexts.