Animal culture
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Animal culture describes the current theory of cultural learning in non-human animals through socially transmitted behaviors. The question as to the existence of culture in non-human societies has been a contentious subject for decades, much due to the inexistence of a concise definition for culture. However, many leading scientists agree on culture being defined as a process, rather than an end product. This process, most agree, involves the social transmittance of a novel behavior, both among peers and between generations. This behavior is shared by a group of animals, but not necessarily between separate groups of the same species.
The notion of culture in animals dates back to Aristotle and Darwin, but the association of animals' actions with the actual word "culture" first was brought forward with Japanese primatologists' discoveries of socially transmitted food behaviors in the 1940s.
Contents |
Cultural transmission
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Cultural transmission in animals refers to the way in which a group of animals within a society or culture tends to transmit information and novel behaviour within itself through social behaviour. This does not necessarily occur between separate groups of the same species. Various animals learn from other members of its group. For example, wolves in a pack learn various hunting strategies from one another. Birds are also known to learn from one another. Dolphins pass knowledge on tool use to one another. Richard Dawkins has suggested the concept of a meme, which is a "unit of cultural transmission". Individuals acquire memes through imitating what they observe around them. The Webster's dictionary definition of culture, transmission is one fo the two main components of culture. Learned activities have been exhibited by animals. This sharing of behavior correlates directly with memes. Darwin was the first to suggest what became known as social learning in attempting to explain the transmission of an adaptive pattern of behavior through a population of honey bees. Culture can be transmitted among animals through various methods, the most common of which include imitation, teaching, and language. Imitation is one of the most prevalent modes of cultural transmission in non-human animals, while teaching and language are much less widespread. Cultural transmission is a means of passing on behavioral traits. This involves behavioral information being passed amongst individuals through verbal, visual, or written teaching. This allows new behaviors to be learned by many organisms quickly. Research into the transmission of culture in animals has revealed the role teaching plays in the process. Studies show that cetaceans are able to transmit culture through teaching. The intentional beaching of killer whales along with other cetacean behaviors such as the variations of songs among humpback whales and the sponging technique used by bottle nose dolphins to obtain food provide support for the idea of cetacean cultural transmission. Joseph Terkel was able to analyze the mechanisms involved in social learning of rats to determine that a specific pinecone-eating behavior resulted from a combination of ecology and cultural transmission, as the rats could not figure out how to eat the pine cones without being shown by mature rats.
Examples
Researchers
See also
- Animal cognition
- Animal communication
- Animal culture
- Animal language
- Animal consciousness
- Animal-made art
- Animal training
- Culture
- Culture theory
- Cultural transmission
- Social learning in animals
See also
- Animal behavior
- Culture
- Culture theory
- Cultural transmission
- Cultural transmission in animals
- Ethology
- Social animal
- Animal communication
- Outline of culture
