CULTURE CLUB: The burgeoning reach of animal culture
Research has revealed culture to be widespread in nature, permeating the lives of a diversity of animals, including all major classes of vertebrates, and extending also to invertebrates — notably, insects.
ANDREW WHITEN: Culture can be defined as all that is learned from others and is repeatedly transmitted in this way, forming traditions that may be inherited by successive generations. This cultural form of inheritance was once thought specific to humans, but research over the past 70 years has instead revealed it to be widespread in nature, permeating the lives of a diversity of animals, including all major classes of vertebrates.
Recent studies suggest that culture’s reach may extend also to invertebrates — notably, insects. In the present century, the reach of animal culture has been found to extend across many different behavioral domains and to rest on a suite of social learning processes facilitated by a variety of selective biases that enhance the efficiency and adaptiveness of learning… The reach of culture has similarly been discovered to span diversity in behavioral domains, including foraging techniques, tool use, vocal communication, social customs and preferences for particular prey, migratory pathways, nesting sites, and mates…
The wealth of methodological advances and empirical discoveries about animal cultures in the present century provides an exciting foundation from which to explore deeper questions. Do animal cultures evolve, cumulatively, as human cultures have done so impressively over past millennia? How profoundly does the lifetime reach of culture in animals’ lives reshape our understanding of behavioral ecology and the fundamentals of evolution at large? How close are human and animal cultures now perceived to be, and where do the principal differences remain? SOURCE…
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