9 ms·

Bees and chimps can also pass on their skills

149 points by wglb 3y ago

kombookcha 3y ago
The chimps are one thing, but it's fascinating that bees can do this with comparatively extremely simple hardware. Very cool critters.
- ororroro 3y ago
  The bee results are suss. Bees use pheromones to mark things so there may be no socially learned behavior beyond seeking food at a marked source which is built in. There's also the small sample size which the article mentions. It is still cool that they learned the blue/red trick in the first place either way.
  - kombookcha 3y ago
    Oh, it's for sure not a done deal. But IIRC bees are known to have at least some capacity for memory, in terms of seeking out known food sources that go beyond just following a pheromone marker. I don't know if the mechanism behind this is well understood, but going by the blue/red trick it seems like they can to some extent 'learn' to recognize various types of flowers and seek them out by memory. Whether this type of information is transferable between bees in ways /other/ than a pheromone marker that guides other bees to the same immediate sensory experience of "blue flower = good nectar source", I don't know. But it's intriguing! https://www.jstor.org/stable/24955780 https://www.jstor.org/stable/24955780 Also worth noting that bees can transfer navigational information to eachother by 'waggle dancing', so they have multiple possible vectors for information sharing going for them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance
simmerup 3y ago
Dolphin pods have different cultures and passed on hunting techniques also
- fecker 3y ago
  To add to this, Orcas attacking boats off the Orcades
  - widforss 3y ago
    Orca fashion is also a thing, with salmon hats and the likes.
- andsoitis 3y ago
  > Dolphin pods have different cultures and passed on hunting techniques also Dolphins also use sexual coercion (amongst humans, we would call it rape) and the behavior is violent. Dolphins also commit infanticide.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    True, but also sort of unrelated to the topic at hand. (?)
  - i80and 3y ago
    This is a true but very weird thing to bring into the thread.
    - andsoitis 3y ago
      Humans create and pass along culture, but we also have the capacity for reasoning about ethics, justice, etc. When we say animals are also very intelligent etc. with a couple of examples, it is worth contextualizing the edges or shortcomings of the intelligence on the gradient. Zooming out and looking down on the intelligence spectrum, we have to be humble and concede that we, too, while far superior to other living creatures we have encountered so far, probably also lack some dimensions that even higher intelligence would unlock.
apienx 3y ago
Social transmission of behavior in macaques has been documented since the 1950s. See the potato washing studies of Imanishi et al (ref. #9 in the main paper).
trhway 3y ago
while I'm very far from subscribing to the idea, yet there is for example that scientifically looking article arguing for the genetic instead of the cultural transfer in humans of the skills of making of those stone handaxes. Would some future scientists argue for the genetic transfer of python programming skills in the humans of the 21st century... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5066817/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5066817/
- metadaemon 3y ago
  I can't remember where I read it, but I remember a similar study with rats. Previous generations were shocked when interacting with something specific. Current generations seemingly already knew not to interact with that object. I think they even expounded to study the effects on rats born within an entirely different locale too.
  - trhway 3y ago
    as I don't believe in the genetic transfer, the only other way it seems to be is that the older rats would be telling youngsters a tale of "a shiny prongy thing which gives a painful scare on touch", and such possibility seems very fascinating for me.
agent008t 3y ago
Crows also pass on their knowledge.
- baja_blast 3y ago
  I was about to come in and say this. I feel we greatly over estimate the intelligence of Chimps and underestimate crows and parrots.
kirab 3y ago
"an ability previously thought to be unique to humans". This sentence. I’ve read and heard it so many times now, that according to Bayesian statistics, I should correct my assumptions and assume that, in the end, we will find out that there is not a single thing that’s unique to humans.
- katzgrau 3y ago
  At some point, can’t we just admit to ourselves that we operate from a human-centric worldview and that clouds pretty much all of our thinking on what makes humans special (if anything)? As a species we definitely have some narcissistic tendencies.
  - zvmaz 3y ago
    > At some point, can’t we just admit to ourselves that we operate from a human-centric worldview and that clouds pretty much all of our thinking on what makes humans special (if anything)? I think this is true. The evidence being our ruthless exploitation of our fellow animals without any regard to their interests, suffering, etc.
- timeon 3y ago
  My assumption is that difference is not that something is missing but just in complexity of things. It is strange that people put other mammals in same category with birds for example. Thinking that humans are separate kingdom. I'm closer to pig than pig is to chicken.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
  There aren’t many fundamental unique differences between an 8086 and a M3 Max. But the differences in scale are so vast that it opens massively different capabilities. At some point, quantitative differences are so large they become qualitative differences. Although both can hold matrices in memory and do math operations, the M3 Max can hold so much more and run math operations so fast that LLM inference becomes possible making it seem “intelligent” on a whole different level than an 8086 even though they are at some fundamental level very similar.
ecmascript 3y ago
I am a dog owner, my gf is a dog owner. My dog does this very particular thing when he wants attention and my gfs dog have started doing the same after some time. Humans may be good at learning from others and pick up stuff fast but that don't automatically mean we're unique in our ability to do so. This idea that humans are so special feels very odd to me.
- ozim 3y ago
  Was just going to write about dogs as I believe anyone who owned or owns a dog did not need study to conclude not only humans. My dog learned more stuff from hanging out with other dogs than I could teach it on my own. If someone wants to train a dog best to have already trained dog to pass that just like shepherds did for centuries I guess.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
> Then the Dutch-led team of researchers trained two demonstrator chimpanzees to show the others how it was done. > After two months, 14 "naive" chimps had mastered it. I am not sure the study is showing human like “cumulative culture”. It is showing that if humans train them, they can show others, which is different from humans learning a thing on their own, showing it to others, and then someone else using that as a foundation to discover something new building on that. Basically, the study is showing that a chimp can teach other chimps something humans trained it to do. I don’t think that is a novel or controversial finding. If you grow up around dogs, you know that one trained dog will help the other dogs learn.
- neuromanser 3y ago
  I, too, thought that chimps learning from each other was nothing new (Jared Diamond, etc). Besides that: I haven't read either study, just the article, so who knows what were the actual claims, but… The article opens with: > chimpanzees can learn skills from their peers so complicated that they could never have mastered them on their own. Which you object with: > Basically, the study is showing that a chimp can teach other chimps something humans trained it to do. and: > I am not sure the study is showing human like “cumulative culture”. That reads a bit like rejecting evolution because we haven't fully replicated abiogenesis (yet). Is "humans trained it to do" in "a chimp can teach other chimps something humans trained it to do" so important?
  - Ensorceled 3y ago
    "cumulative culture" is also called "the ratchet effect" ... when you learn something from someone else and then improve on it and pass on the improvements, over and over and over across generations. This is just learning, there was no ratchet effect.
- technothrasher 3y ago
  How cumulative it is, is a fair question to ask. But I don't think animals passing on "culture" has anything to do with humans. Look at lion prides, where one pride has learned how to hunt elephants while another buffalo, and the young ones pick it up from the older generation. But put one member of one of those prides in the other's spot and they'll be clueless until they learn it from the others.
shanth 3y ago
[flagged]
sandworm101 3y ago
And dogs. And cats. And beavers. And most ever mammal that raises young. What is more interesting and more telling imho is to look at what happens to animals that are not by their animal parents. We all know that dogs not raised around other dogs don't develop doggy social skills. Geese won't learn to migrate without other geese. Teaching and learning is more common in the animal community than most researchers want to admit.
- ganzuul 3y ago
  It would be nice to have enough data to predict where biointelligence should emerge.
dotnet00 3y ago
I don't see how this was thought to be unique to humans? For instance, it seems to be common knowledge that big cats have to teach their kids to hunt by showing, for instance. Edit: Going to the source papers clarifies a little, the hypothesis they're challenging relates specifically to social learning for "the knowledge of the production of a particular trait" and not learning in terms of recreating existing behaviors. This would probably also be why pets and birds would be excluded. While they can learn and teach each other various things, most of those things are not relating to production and can be difficult to separate from behaviors that should be considered to already be part of the species' repertoire. Bird song or whale song may be a sort of learned "culture" but it's so endemic to their species that it's treated as distinct from what's being discussed.
- rtsil 3y ago
  My cat didn't knew how to jump over the chain link fence until he saw a neighbor's cat do it. But the point of this study is about extremely difficult problems that an animal couldn't solve by itself, unlike my fence that the cat would have probably solved by brute force given a certain time.
- b112 3y ago
  I have witnessed an older crow, teaching a younger one, to use subsonic sound, in the rain, to find june big grubs under my lawn.
  - tomjakubowski 3y ago
    How were able to detect the subsonic sound?
    - b112 3y ago
      Many animals are able to hear outside of our range of hearing. I tried to capture in when I noticed it happening on 2015, but you can't easily hear the sound, some of it was audible to me, but not with the camera I had (I had to grab the closest thing I could find). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYl_d7dc-EY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYl_d7dc-EY If you watch at 0:50, you'll see in a few seconds the crow is doing a whole-body movement. That's it making the sound, which I could feel against my skin. If you crank it, you can hear the weird, audible part of it. Then, before they really went to work again... one of the crows noticed me. And you can see at the end, the other gets really pissed that it didn't notice me. Basically, he walks to where he can see in my house, spies me, and is all "YOU BASTARD!" Part of an email I sent to a friend at the time: -- This is the first time I've noticed this behaviour. Crows can make sounds, and hear sounds, outside of our range of hearing. And, it was raining. Soaking the topsoil. It is also grub season. Soon, June bugs will appear, but right now they are in grub form, but pupating. I'm not sure if the added density helps in detection or not. You'll likely have to turn this up. I had to grab the nearest device I had, so the resolution sucks too. Watch the larger crow, as it walks around, sounding for grubs. It did this over a large portion of my lawn.. systematically. Wild stuff. --
Ensorceled 3y ago
> Over three months, 66 chimps tried and failed to solve the puzzle. Then the Dutch-led team of researchers trained two demonstrator chimpanzees to show the others how it was done. After two months, 14 "naive" chimps had mastered it. So 14 out of 64 chimps learned a relatively simple trick after two months of "cumulative culture" exposure. Just over a 20% success rate? > Thornton said the research again showed how "people habitually overestimate their abilities relative to those of other animals". People learn how to tile floors, install dishwashers, change their cars oil filter, build websites etc. all from mediocre youtube videos. I don't think I'm overestimating humans "abilities relative to those of other animals" ...
- bee_rider 3y ago
  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H-fC9uNyhWo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H-fC9uNyhWo Also, the human scientists figured out ape intelligence to the point where they can design puzzles that are too hard for the apes to solve, and they figured out how to use that to further study the apes. Underestimate the apes? These scientists seem to be absolutely dunking on the poor little guys. They should go pick on orcas or some other actually clever species.
- j_bum 3y ago
  Well, we would need to identify an equivalently difficult task for humans that couldn’t be learned independently. Building websites or tiling floors (well) are much more complicated than following a set of instructions for changing an oil filter. What percentage of humans could build a website purely from watching a few tutorials? Certainly not 100%. Your comment makes me think that, indeed, humans do overestimate our abilities.
pciexpgpu 3y ago
Haven’t octopuses already shown this to be the case? Learning from each other (even though they are pretty not-so-social creatures). The claim that bees are the first invertebrates to do social skill passing seems weird.
Jensson 3y ago
Not just bees and chimps, single cell slime mold can also teach each other. https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/220/7/1166/19555/Slime-molds-transfer-knowledge-through-fusion https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/220/7/1166/19555... Teaching isn't some complex topic, you just transfer information from one individual to the other.
- Night_Thastus 3y ago
  >Teaching isn't some complex topic, you just transfer information from one individual to the other. [Citation needed] Teaching is sometimes very easy. Sometimes very difficult. Depends what you're trying to teach.
dvngnt_ 3y ago
i feel like elephants are a safe bet too
luxuryballs 3y ago
Bees passed on situational awareness skills to me as a child…
WalterBright 3y ago
Don't dogs learn by watching people and other dogs?
stevenjgarner 3y ago
> Pass on their skills Does this necessarily mean "learning" in the sense that humans use that word? Approximately 15 millions years ago, leafcutter ants completed the 30 million year process of domesticating another species [1] (something also done by ambrosia beetles and termites, not just humans) - the Leucoagaricus gongylophorus fungus cultivated by the adults is used to feed the ant larvae, and the adult ants feed on leaf sap. The fungus needs the ants to stay alive, and the larvae need the fungus to stay alive, so mutualism is obligatory. All with 250,000 neurons! Whether it was the fungus that domesticated the ant or the ant that domesticated the fungus, can passing on this skill also be considered a learned activity? [1] - https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/crop-domestication-balancing-act https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/crop-domestication-bala...

149 points by wglb 3y ago

The chimps are one thing, but it's fascinating that bees can do this with comparatively extremely simple hardware. Very cool critters.

ororroro 3y ago
The bee results are suss. Bees use pheromones to mark things so there may be no socially learned behavior beyond seeking food at a marked source which is built in. There's also the small sample size which the article mentions. It is still cool that they learned the blue/red trick in the first place either way.
- kombookcha 3y ago
  Oh, it's for sure not a done deal. But IIRC bees are known to have at least some capacity for memory, in terms of seeking out known food sources that go beyond just following a pheromone marker. I don't know if the mechanism behind this is well understood, but going by the blue/red trick it seems like they can to some extent 'learn' to recognize various types of flowers and seek them out by memory. Whether this type of information is transferable between bees in ways /other/ than a pheromone marker that guides other bees to the same immediate sensory experience of "blue flower = good nectar source", I don't know. But it's intriguing! https://www.jstor.org/stable/24955780 https://www.jstor.org/stable/24955780 Also worth noting that bees can transfer navigational information to eachother by 'waggle dancing', so they have multiple possible vectors for information sharing going for them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggle_dance

simmerup 3y ago

Dolphin pods have different cultures and passed on hunting techniques also

fecker 3y ago
To add to this, Orcas attacking boats off the Orcades
- widforss 3y ago
  Orca fashion is also a thing, with salmon hats and the likes.
andsoitis 3y ago
> Dolphin pods have different cultures and passed on hunting techniques also Dolphins also use sexual coercion (amongst humans, we would call it rape) and the behavior is violent. Dolphins also commit infanticide.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  True, but also sort of unrelated to the topic at hand. (?)
- i80and 3y ago
  This is a true but very weird thing to bring into the thread.
  - andsoitis 3y ago
    Humans create and pass along culture, but we also have the capacity for reasoning about ethics, justice, etc. When we say animals are also very intelligent etc. with a couple of examples, it is worth contextualizing the edges or shortcomings of the intelligence on the gradient. Zooming out and looking down on the intelligence spectrum, we have to be humble and concede that we, too, while far superior to other living creatures we have encountered so far, probably also lack some dimensions that even higher intelligence would unlock.

apienx 3y ago

Social transmission of behavior in macaques has been documented since the 1950s. See the potato washing studies of Imanishi et al (ref. #9 in the main paper).

trhway 3y ago

while I'm very far from subscribing to the idea, yet there is for example that scientifically looking article arguing for the genetic instead of the cultural transfer in humans of the skills of making of those stone handaxes. Would some future scientists argue for the genetic transfer of python programming skills in the humans of the 21st century... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5066817/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5066817/

metadaemon 3y ago
I can't remember where I read it, but I remember a similar study with rats. Previous generations were shocked when interacting with something specific. Current generations seemingly already knew not to interact with that object. I think they even expounded to study the effects on rats born within an entirely different locale too.
- trhway 3y ago
  as I don't believe in the genetic transfer, the only other way it seems to be is that the older rats would be telling youngsters a tale of "a shiny prongy thing which gives a painful scare on touch", and such possibility seems very fascinating for me.

agent008t 3y ago

Crows also pass on their knowledge.

baja_blast 3y ago
I was about to come in and say this. I feel we greatly over estimate the intelligence of Chimps and underestimate crows and parrots.

kirab 3y ago

"an ability previously thought to be unique to humans". This sentence. I’ve read and heard it so many times now, that according to Bayesian statistics, I should correct my assumptions and assume that, in the end, we will find out that there is not a single thing that’s unique to humans.

katzgrau 3y ago
At some point, can’t we just admit to ourselves that we operate from a human-centric worldview and that clouds pretty much all of our thinking on what makes humans special (if anything)? As a species we definitely have some narcissistic tendencies.
- zvmaz 3y ago
  > At some point, can’t we just admit to ourselves that we operate from a human-centric worldview and that clouds pretty much all of our thinking on what makes humans special (if anything)? I think this is true. The evidence being our ruthless exploitation of our fellow animals without any regard to their interests, suffering, etc.
timeon 3y ago
My assumption is that difference is not that something is missing but just in complexity of things. It is strange that people put other mammals in same category with birds for example. Thinking that humans are separate kingdom. I'm closer to pig than pig is to chicken.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
There aren’t many fundamental unique differences between an 8086 and a M3 Max. But the differences in scale are so vast that it opens massively different capabilities. At some point, quantitative differences are so large they become qualitative differences. Although both can hold matrices in memory and do math operations, the M3 Max can hold so much more and run math operations so fast that LLM inference becomes possible making it seem “intelligent” on a whole different level than an 8086 even though they are at some fundamental level very similar.

ecmascript 3y ago

I am a dog owner, my gf is a dog owner. My dog does this very particular thing when he wants attention and my gfs dog have started doing the same after some time. Humans may be good at learning from others and pick up stuff fast but that don't automatically mean we're unique in our ability to do so. This idea that humans are so special feels very odd to me.

ozim 3y ago
Was just going to write about dogs as I believe anyone who owned or owns a dog did not need study to conclude not only humans. My dog learned more stuff from hanging out with other dogs than I could teach it on my own. If someone wants to train a dog best to have already trained dog to pass that just like shepherds did for centuries I guess.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

> Then the Dutch-led team of researchers trained two demonstrator chimpanzees to show the others how it was done. > After two months, 14 "naive" chimps had mastered it. I am not sure the study is showing human like “cumulative culture”. It is showing that if humans train them, they can show others, which is different from humans learning a thing on their own, showing it to others, and then someone else using that as a foundation to discover something new building on that. Basically, the study is showing that a chimp can teach other chimps something humans trained it to do. I don’t think that is a novel or controversial finding. If you grow up around dogs, you know that one trained dog will help the other dogs learn.

neuromanser 3y ago
I, too, thought that chimps learning from each other was nothing new (Jared Diamond, etc). Besides that: I haven't read either study, just the article, so who knows what were the actual claims, but… The article opens with: > chimpanzees can learn skills from their peers so complicated that they could never have mastered them on their own. Which you object with: > Basically, the study is showing that a chimp can teach other chimps something humans trained it to do. and: > I am not sure the study is showing human like “cumulative culture”. That reads a bit like rejecting evolution because we haven't fully replicated abiogenesis (yet). Is "humans trained it to do" in "a chimp can teach other chimps something humans trained it to do" so important?
- Ensorceled 3y ago
  "cumulative culture" is also called "the ratchet effect" ... when you learn something from someone else and then improve on it and pass on the improvements, over and over and over across generations. This is just learning, there was no ratchet effect.
technothrasher 3y ago
How cumulative it is, is a fair question to ask. But I don't think animals passing on "culture" has anything to do with humans. Look at lion prides, where one pride has learned how to hunt elephants while another buffalo, and the young ones pick it up from the older generation. But put one member of one of those prides in the other's spot and they'll be clueless until they learn it from the others.

shanth 3y ago

[flagged]

sandworm101 3y ago

And dogs. And cats. And beavers. And most ever mammal that raises young. What is more interesting and more telling imho is to look at what happens to animals that are not by their animal parents. We all know that dogs not raised around other dogs don't develop doggy social skills. Geese won't learn to migrate without other geese. Teaching and learning is more common in the animal community than most researchers want to admit.

ganzuul 3y ago
It would be nice to have enough data to predict where biointelligence should emerge.

dotnet00 3y ago

I don't see how this was thought to be unique to humans? For instance, it seems to be common knowledge that big cats have to teach their kids to hunt by showing, for instance. Edit: Going to the source papers clarifies a little, the hypothesis they're challenging relates specifically to social learning for "the knowledge of the production of a particular trait" and not learning in terms of recreating existing behaviors. This would probably also be why pets and birds would be excluded. While they can learn and teach each other various things, most of those things are not relating to production and can be difficult to separate from behaviors that should be considered to already be part of the species' repertoire. Bird song or whale song may be a sort of learned "culture" but it's so endemic to their species that it's treated as distinct from what's being discussed.

rtsil 3y ago
My cat didn't knew how to jump over the chain link fence until he saw a neighbor's cat do it. But the point of this study is about extremely difficult problems that an animal couldn't solve by itself, unlike my fence that the cat would have probably solved by brute force given a certain time.
b112 3y ago
I have witnessed an older crow, teaching a younger one, to use subsonic sound, in the rain, to find june big grubs under my lawn.
- tomjakubowski 3y ago
  How were able to detect the subsonic sound?
  - b112 3y ago
    Many animals are able to hear outside of our range of hearing. I tried to capture in when I noticed it happening on 2015, but you can't easily hear the sound, some of it was audible to me, but not with the camera I had (I had to grab the closest thing I could find). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYl_d7dc-EY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYl_d7dc-EY If you watch at 0:50, you'll see in a few seconds the crow is doing a whole-body movement. That's it making the sound, which I could feel against my skin. If you crank it, you can hear the weird, audible part of it. Then, before they really went to work again... one of the crows noticed me. And you can see at the end, the other gets really pissed that it didn't notice me. Basically, he walks to where he can see in my house, spies me, and is all "YOU BASTARD!" Part of an email I sent to a friend at the time: -- This is the first time I've noticed this behaviour. Crows can make sounds, and hear sounds, outside of our range of hearing. And, it was raining. Soaking the topsoil. It is also grub season. Soon, June bugs will appear, but right now they are in grub form, but pupating. I'm not sure if the added density helps in detection or not. You'll likely have to turn this up. I had to grab the nearest device I had, so the resolution sucks too. Watch the larger crow, as it walks around, sounding for grubs. It did this over a large portion of my lawn.. systematically. Wild stuff. --

Ensorceled 3y ago

> Over three months, 66 chimps tried and failed to solve the puzzle. Then the Dutch-led team of researchers trained two demonstrator chimpanzees to show the others how it was done. After two months, 14 "naive" chimps had mastered it. So 14 out of 64 chimps learned a relatively simple trick after two months of "cumulative culture" exposure. Just over a 20% success rate? > Thornton said the research again showed how "people habitually overestimate their abilities relative to those of other animals". People learn how to tile floors, install dishwashers, change their cars oil filter, build websites etc. all from mediocre youtube videos. I don't think I'm overestimating humans "abilities relative to those of other animals" ...

bee_rider 3y ago
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H-fC9uNyhWo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H-fC9uNyhWo Also, the human scientists figured out ape intelligence to the point where they can design puzzles that are too hard for the apes to solve, and they figured out how to use that to further study the apes. Underestimate the apes? These scientists seem to be absolutely dunking on the poor little guys. They should go pick on orcas or some other actually clever species.
j_bum 3y ago
Well, we would need to identify an equivalently difficult task for humans that couldn’t be learned independently. Building websites or tiling floors (well) are much more complicated than following a set of instructions for changing an oil filter. What percentage of humans could build a website purely from watching a few tutorials? Certainly not 100%. Your comment makes me think that, indeed, humans do overestimate our abilities.

pciexpgpu 3y ago

Haven’t octopuses already shown this to be the case? Learning from each other (even though they are pretty not-so-social creatures). The claim that bees are the first invertebrates to do social skill passing seems weird.

Jensson 3y ago

Not just bees and chimps, single cell slime mold can also teach each other. https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/220/7/1166/19555/Slime-molds-transfer-knowledge-through-fusion https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/220/7/1166/19555... Teaching isn't some complex topic, you just transfer information from one individual to the other.

Night_Thastus 3y ago
>Teaching isn't some complex topic, you just transfer information from one individual to the other. [Citation needed] Teaching is sometimes very easy. Sometimes very difficult. Depends what you're trying to teach.

dvngnt_ 3y ago

i feel like elephants are a safe bet too

luxuryballs 3y ago

Bees passed on situational awareness skills to me as a child…

WalterBright 3y ago

Don't dogs learn by watching people and other dogs?

stevenjgarner 3y ago

> Pass on their skills Does this necessarily mean "learning" in the sense that humans use that word? Approximately 15 millions years ago, leafcutter ants completed the 30 million year process of domesticating another species [1] (something also done by ambrosia beetles and termites, not just humans) - the Leucoagaricus gongylophorus fungus cultivated by the adults is used to feed the ant larvae, and the adult ants feed on leaf sap. The fungus needs the ants to stay alive, and the larvae need the fungus to stay alive, so mutualism is obligatory. All with 250,000 neurons! Whether it was the fungus that domesticated the ant or the ant that domesticated the fungus, can passing on this skill also be considered a learned activity? [1] - https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/crop-domestication-balancing-act https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/crop-domestication-bala...