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Culture in humans and other animals

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Abstract

The study of animal culture is a flourishing field, with culture being recorded in a wide range of taxa, including non-human primates, birds, cetaceans, and rodents. In spite of this research, however, the concept of culture itself remains elusive. There is no universally assented to concept of culture, and there is debate over the connection between culture and related concepts like tradition and social learning. Furthermore, it is not clear whether culture in humans and culture in non-human animals is really the same thing, or merely loose analogues that go by the same name. The purpose of this paper is to explicate core desiderata for a concept of culture and then to construct a concept that meets these desiderata. The paper then applies this concept in both humans and non-human animals.

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Notes

  1. To avoid repeated uses of ‘non-human’, I will use ‘animal’ in what follows, not as picking out the Anamalia, but as denoting all non-human animals.

  2. The concept of information has been used and often abused in the philosophy of biology (Moffatt 2011). I hope not to be committing these abuses in founding my account on information. Following Dretske (1983), the view here requires that individual signals are carriers of information. Thus, information in this context is not a mere measure of the average amount of uncertainty that is decreased by a communication channel, as in traditional mathematical accounts of information (Shannon 1948; Shannon and Weaver 1949).

  3. The addition of ‘or groups’ to this definition is to not exclude “collective cultures”—cultural variants that are only ascribable to groups, and not possessed (in whole) by any one of the individuals in the group.

  4. An individual can follow DOP in some domains only. If the individual tries to follow this rule in all domains, it will quickly perish. (The parents eat and breathe, after all.).

  5. Ignoring, of course, other possible effects of the parents on the life span of their offspring, such as parents who live longer being able to provide more resources for their young.

  6. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,941144,00.html.

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Acknowledgments

I thank Robert Brandon, Andreas De Block, Daniel Dennett, Agustín Fuentes, Dan McShea, Güven Güzeldere, Maya Parson, Charles Pence, Alex Rosenberg, Kim Sterelny, and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable input into this paper.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA

    Grant Ramsey

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Ramsey, G. Culture in humans and other animals. Biol Philos 28, 457–479 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-012-9347-x

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