Broad definitions have the additional advantage that they permit us to see the full range of a phenomenon. For example, one could define language so narrowly that the babbling of a toddler does not fall under it, but does this mean that babbling has nothing to do with language? Narrow definitions neglect boundary phenomena and precursors, and they often mistake the tip of the iceberg for the whole. Thus, by saying, as some have done, that in the absence of teaching and instruction there is no point in speaking of culture, one immediately throws out a multitude of human cultural traits. Many habits are picked up without any instruction whatsoever: they require mere exposure, day in day out, to a particular cultural context. The warmth or spontaneity with which we treat our fellow citizens, the way our taste buds react to spices, the desire for consensus over confrontation, the melody and loudness of our voices-all of these become so ingrained that we call them "second nature." They are profoundly cultural, however, despite the fact that active teaching has very little to do with their establishment.
For the biologist, the way habits are transmitted is secondary. All we care about is whether the process is "visible" to natural selection. That is, does learning from others contribute to survival? As illustrated by the examples of alarm calling, food aversion, and snake fear, there is every reason to believe that, yes, information gained from others plays a major role in the struggle for existence. Rehabilitation programs, in which home-reared apes have been released into the wild, have taught us how critical it is for these animals to know what to eat, where to go, and what to avoid. Having grown up in the absence of adult models of their species, young apes are rarely successful in the forest, often starving to death. In this sense, apes are as culturally reliant as we are.
The same is true for vulture culture, and not just because it rhymes. When the last few remaining wild California condors were rounded up in the 1980s to establish an artificial breed ing program at zoos, it was decided to feed the first generation of chicks with hand puppets in the color and shape of adult members of their species. The idea was that this was all that was needed to turn them into real condors. Despite the puppet show, however, the young condors learned to associate humans with food. Upon release into the wild, they ended up hanging around human dwellings, incapable of scavenging on their own. The normally shy, magnificent foragers had been turned into barnyard chicks perching on rooftops. Evidently, the hand-reared vulture is as culturally disadvantaged as the hand-reared ape.
The standard notion of humanity as the only form of life to have made the step from the natural to the cultural realm-as if one day we opened a door to a brand-new life-is in urgent need of correction. The transition to culture has no doubt been gradual, in small incremental steps, and was neither complete (we never left human nature behind) nor much different, at least initially, from the behavioral traditions seen in other animals. The idea that we are the only species whose survival depends on culture is false, and the entire endeavor of juxtaposing nature and culture rests on a giant misunderstanding.
In Consilience (1998), Edward Wilson offered a Darwinian embrace to the social sciences. Some academics no doubt experienced his gesture as suffocating, but it cannot be denied that increased integration among the behavioral sciences is sorely needed. Wilson did extensively discuss the same nature/culture divide that is at issue here, but the interdiscipli nary bridge that he tried to build started at the other end. Instead of urging the social sciences and humanities to absorb more biology, I am asking them to carefully reconsider their own chosen domain-often defined in opposition to biology-and see how broadly it applies. They can export their ideas to students of animal behavior, who will agree that the social environment directs development, and that each individual is part of a larger whole in both body and mind: the group, troop, colony, flock, or community. Imagine that the African proverb "It takes a village to raise a child" applies to baboons, elephants, or dolphins: an entirely new perspective on the social life of animals will ensue. This perspective would be quite close to that of the social sciences, drawing on ways of thinking now applied uniquely to our own species.
At the same time, there is no doubt that we have taken culture an unprecedented step farther than other animals because of symbols, language, ideas, meanings, values, teaching, and imitation. In this sense, the human cultural capacity is truly unique, and has become so pervasive in our lives that it is no surprise that we marvel at its power. Not only do we create cultures, but once created they lend meaning and feed back into everything we do, transforming the very core of our being. We both produce and are produced by culture to a degree not found in any other animal.
Perhaps this is due to our ability, stressed by Michael Tomasello, to build new inventions upon older ones. Tomasello calls the accumulation of improvements through history a "ratchet effect," which he sees as uniquely human.1 I have some qualms, because there seems no intrinsic reason why knowledge accumulation would be hard for animals. It seems unlikely that complex sequences of coordinated actions, such as nut cracking by chimpanzees or beach hunting by killer whales, were invented all at once: what we see these animals do today is most likely the endpoint of a long and steady perfection of skills.14 On the other hand, even if other animals occasionally elaborate upon previous achievements, there can be no doubt that they do so on a smaller scale than we do. Any such difference would be greatly magnified over multiple generations. Possibly, then, the ratchet effect is the yeast in the dough of human culture.
But despite our cultural superiority, what harm can there be in exploring nonhuman parallels to human cultural capacities? Are we only happy with a day-and-night difference, in which we have it all and other animals nothing? Imagine that we were to define "eating" by the use of knife and fork. Such a definition would allow us to claim eating as uniquely human, even uniquely Western, yet we would accomplish this distinction by confusing the instruments of consumption with its essence. The essence of eating is to get food into one's stomach, and in this regard we are obviously not special at all. The relevant question in relation to culture, therefore, is, what is its essence? What is the least common denominator of all things called cultural? In my view, this can only be the nongenetic spreading of habits and information. The rest is nothing else than embell ishment. Those who have elevated language, education, values, and other typically human aspects of culture to its defining criteria confuse the knives and forks of the process with its essence. In doing so, they have succeeded in keeping other anirnals out at the expense of a larger picture, one with the potential of revealing a glimpse of our own cultural origins.
My own definition of culture reflects this broader view:
Culture is a way of life shared by the members of one group but not necessarily with the members of other groups of the same species. It covers knowledge, habits, and skills, including underlying tendencies and preferences, derived from exposure to and learning from others. Whenever systematic variation in knowledge, habits, and skills between groups cannot be attributed to genetic or ecological factors, it is probably cultural. The way individuals learn from each other is secondary, but that they learn from each other is a requirement. Thus, the "culture" label does not apply to knowledge, habits, or skills that individuals readily acquire on their own.
If history has taught us anything, it is to be cautious in postulating differences. It is not too long ago that it was said that "savages" were incapable of organizing themselves into societies, that the word "society" really didn't apply to people marked by rampant promiscuity, crime, and laughably simple languages. Now we realize, of course, that all humans, includ ing those in preliterate societies, have complex value systems and moral rules, and that they speak languages every bit as rich as the one you are now reading.
There exists a parallel history of misconceptions about our primate relatives, who entered Western thinking as the incarnation of the devil, put on earth to mock the crown of creation. These animals have been underestimated over and over, and erosion of c
ommon misconceptions has been slow. Whenever their abilities are said to approach ours, the reaction is often furious. For example, claims of language abilities in apes became so threatening that at one international conference, in 1980, there was an unsuccessful move to ban all animal language research, similar to a ban on the study of language origins by the Linguistic Society of Paris in 1866.15 I am not saying that apes are capable of language, but attempts at censorship do reveal just how much insecurity surrounds human uniqueness.
No wonder that the idea of animal culture had to come from the East, where human self-definition doesn't hinge on a Freudian defeat of basic impulses or a denial of the connection with nature. Given how much the culture concept is tied to the idea that we have distanced ourselves from other animals, this book must explore how animal-like we are, or how humanlike animals are. It must also return to such classical clashes-still as relevant now as then-as those between behaviorists and ethologists, who emphasized learning and instinct, respectively. At every turn I will try to undermine existing dualisms, always looking for the more integrated picture.
In the meantime, it is evident that we have lost control over the apes' tea party. Instead of imitating us, and knocking over the teapot at our expressed request, the apes have taken over the show, displaying habits that they themselves developed and tricks we didn't teach them. As a result, they're holding an entirely different mirror up to us, one in which apes are not human caricatures but serious members of our extended family with their own resourcefulness and dignity.
Ever since Carl Linnaeus courageously classified us with the monkeys and apes in 1758, the message has been coming at us that we are not alone. Biologically speaking, we never were. The time has come to argue the same with regard to culture.
The Western world's historic lack of exposure to monkeys and apes has only reinforced its sense of human uniqueness. Ever since Descartes, the air has been filled with warnings against anthropomorphism. The charge is that we love to project thoughts and feelings onto animals, making them more humanlike than they are.
But getting rid of anthropomorphism is neither easy nor risk-free. By changing our language as soon as we describe animals, we may be concealing genuine similarities. When pioneers of the naturalistic study of animal behavior began to emphasize continuities with human behavior in the 1960s, the message was shocking. It has been amplified since by the burgeoning fields, from primatology to sociobiology, that they helped spawn.
Even a quintessentially human activity, such as art, has not been exempted from such claims. Given that our aesthetic sense has been shaped by the environment in which we evolved, it is logical to expect preferences for shapes, contrasts, and colors to transcend species. Hence we should not be surprised if a composer as great as Mozart admired one as small as his pet starling.
"Why do I tell you this little boys story of medusas, rays, and sea monsters, nearly sixty years after the fact? Because it illustrates, I think, how a naturalist is created. A child comes to the edge of deep water with a mind prepared for wonder. He is given a compelling image that will serve in later life as a talisman, transmitting a powerful energy that directs the growth of experience and knowledge."
F Award 0. Wilson, 1995
"Fear of the dangers of anthropomorphism has caused ethologists to neglect many interesting phenomena, and it has become apparent that they could afford a little disciplined indulgence."
Robert 1982
cientists are supposed to study animals in a totally objective fashion, similar to the way we inspect a rock or measure the circumference of a tree trunk. Emotions are not to interfere with the assessment. The animal-rights movement capitalizes on this perception, depicting scientists as devoid of compassion.
Some scientists have proudly broken with the mold. Roger Fouts, known for his work with language-trained chimpanzees, says in Next of Kin: "I had to break the first commandment of the behavioral sciences: Thou shalt not love thy research subject." Similarly, Jeffrey Masson and Susan McCarthy, in When Elephants Weep, make it seem that very few scientists appreciate the emotional lives of animals.
In reality, the image of the unloving and unfeeling scientist is a caricature, a straw man erected by those wishing to pat themselves on the back for having their hearts in the right place. Unfeeling scientists do exist, but the majority take great pleasure in their animals. If one reads the books of Konrad Lorenz, Robert Yerkes, Bernd Heinrich, Ken Norris, Jane Goodall, Cynthia Moss, Edward Wilson, and so on, it becomes impossible to maintain that animals are invariably studied with a cold, callous eye.
I have met many other scientists who may not write in the same popular style-and who may not dwell on their feelings, considering them irrelevant to their research-but for whom the frogs, budgerigars, cichlid fish, hats, or whatever animals they specialize in hold a deep attraction. How could it be otherwise? Can you really imagine a scientist going out every day to capture and mark wild prairie voles-getting bitten by the voles, stung by insects, drenched by rain-without some deeper motivation than the pursuit of scientific truth? Think of what it takes to study penguins on the pack ice of the Antarctic, or bonobos in hot and humid jungles overrun by armed rebels. Equally, researchers who study animals in captivity really need to like what they are doing. Care of their subjects is a round-the-clock business, and animals smell and produce waste-which some of my favorite animals don't mind hurling at you-something most of us hardly think about until we get visitors who hold their noses and try to escape as fast as they can.
I would turn the stereotype of the unfeeling scientist around and say that it is the rare investigator who is not at some level attached to the furry, feathered, or slippery creatures he or she works with. The maestro of observation, Konrad Lorenz, didn't believe one could effectively investigate an animal that one didn't love. Because our intuitive understanding of animals is based on human emotions and a sense of connection with animals, he wrote in The Foundations of Ethology (1981) that understanding seems quite separate from the methodology of the natural sciences.'I'o marry intuitive insight with systematic data collection is both the challenge and the joy of the study of animal behavior.
Attraction to animals makes us forget the time spent watching them, and it sensitizes us to the tiniest details of behavior. The scientific mind uses the information thus gathered to formulate penetrating questions that lead to more precise research. But let us not forget that things did not start out with a scientific interest: the lifeblood of our science is a fascination with nature. This always comes first, usually early in life. Thus, Wilson's career as a naturalist began in Alabama, where as a boy-in an apparent attempt to show that not all human behavior is adaptive-he used his bare hands to pull poisonous snakes from the water. Lorenz opened his autobiographical notes for the Nobel Committee with "I consider early childhood events as most essential to a man's scientific and philosophical development." And Goodall first realized that she was born to watch animals when, at the age of five, she entered a chicken coop in the English countryside to find out how eggs were made.
Closeness to animals creates the desire to understand them, and not just a little piece of them, but the whole animnal. It makes us wonder what goes on in their heads even though we fully realize that the answer can only be approximated. We employ all available weapons in this endeavor, including extrapolations from human behavior. Consequently, anthropomorphism is not only inevitable, it is a powerful tool. As summed up by Italian philosopher Emanuela Cenami Spada:
Anthropomorphism is a risk we must run, because we must refer to our own human experience in order to formulate questions about animal experience.... The only available "cure" is the continuous critique of our working definitions in order to provide more adequate answers to our questions, and to that embarrassing problem that animals present to us.16
The "embarrassing problem" hinted at is, of course, that we see ourselves as distinct from other animals yet cannot deny the abundant similarities. There are basically two so
lutions to this problem. One is to downplay the similarities, saying that they are superficial or present only in our imagination. The second solution is to assume that similarities, especially among related species, are profound, reflecting a shared evolutionary past. According to the first position, anthropomorphism is to be avoided at all cost, whereas the second position sees anthropomorphism as a logical starting point when it conies to animals as close to us as apes.
Being a proponent of the second position creates a dilemma for an empiricist such as myself. I am not at all attracted to cheap projections onto animals, of the sort that people indulge who see cats as having shame (a very complex emotion), horses as taking pride in their performance, or gorillas as contemplating the afterlife. My first reaction is to ask for observables: things that can be measured. In this sense, I am a cold, skeptical scientist. With my team of students and technicians, I watch primates for hundreds of hours before a study is completed, entering codes of observed behavior into handheld computers. We also conduct experiments in which chimpanzees handle joysticks to select solutions to problems on a computer screen. Or we have monkeys operate an apparatus that allows them to pull food toward themselves, after which we see how willing they are to share the rewards with those who assisted them.v
The Ape And The Sushi Master Reflections Of A Primatologist Page 3