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Joseph 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 p
by drooby 6y ago
Joseph 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.
- wombatmobile 6y ago> they don't have civilization, art, morals, laws, and the practices for developing and improving these things in the minds of our children How can you be so sure of that? Clearly they don't build roads, city halls, cinemaplexes, court houses, theatres, or boxing rings, and they didn't invent Spotify, but neither did you do any of that, and you have culture, don't you, even if you don't engage with any of those examples from 20th century homo sapien culture? https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.190337 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.190337 https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/130425-humpback-whale-culture-behavior-science-animals https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/130425-hu... http://www.replicatedtypo.com/cultural-transmission-observed-in-whales/3463.html http://www.replicatedtypo.com/cultural-transmission-observed... https://www.zoology.ubc.ca/~barrett/documents/Asoundapproachtothestudyofculture.pdf https://www.zoology.ubc.ca/~barrett/documents/Asoundapproach... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982211002910 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098221... https://ceal.lab.uq.edu.au/project/cultural-transmission-humpback-whale-song https://ceal.lab.uq.edu.au/project/cultural-transmission-hum...
- ohthehugemanate 6y agoObligatory Douglas Adams > "For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons." -- the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy