Three Big Bangs Read online

  Animal ethologists have complained that such accounts of culture are too anthropocentric and need to be more inclusive of animals (de Waal 1999). Partly because of new animal behaviors observed, but mostly by enlarging (or, if you like, shrinking) the definition, it has become fashionable to claim that animals have culture. Although finding human culture a “spectacular anomaly,” still Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson are willing to revise the definition of culture: “Culture is information capable of affecting individuals’ phenotypes which they acquire from other conspecifics by teaching or imitation” (1985:33). The addition of “imitation” greatly expands and simultaneously dilutes what counts as culture. Animals may observe and learn. By this account there is culture when apes “ape” each other, but also culture in horses and dogs, beavers, rats—wherever animals imitate the behaviors of parents and conspecifics. Geese, with a genetic tendency to migrate, learn the route by following others; warblers, with a tendency to sing, learn to sing better when they hear others. Copied song dialects may persist over several generations. Whales and dolphins communicate by copying the noises they hear from others; this vocal imitation constitutes culture at sea (Rendell and Whitehead 2001).

  But with “culture” extending from people to warblers, “culture” has become a nondiscriminating category for the concerns we here wish to analyze. One finds widespread animal cultures by lowering the standards of evidence. Critical to a more discriminating analysis is the difference between mind-mind interactions, the sharing of ideas, pervasive in human cultures, and not mere behavioral imitation, copying what another does, which is widespread among animals that can acquire information. If we are going to call what warblers and geese do “culture,” then we will need to invent another word, “superculture,” to describe what humans do, which is indeed “super” to these animal capacities.

  Opening an anthology on Chimpanzee Culture, the authors doubt, interestingly, whether there is much of such a thing: “Cultural transmission among chimpanzees is, at best, inefficient, and possibly absent.” There is scant and in some cases negative evidence for active teaching of the likeliest features to be transmitted, such as tool-using techniques. Chimpanzees clearly influence each other’s behavior, and seem to intend to do that; they copy the behavior of others. But there is no clear evidence that they attribute mental states to others. They seem, conclude these authors, “restricted to private conceptual worlds” (Wrangham et al. 1994:2). Christophe Boesch finds population-specific behaviors in chimpanzees, which spread by imitation, and is willing to call this “culture,” but he adds: “It seems far-fetched to pretend that human cultures are similar to chimpanzee culture” (Boesch 1996:266).

  Without some concept of teaching, of ideas moving from mind to mind, from parent to child, from teacher to pupil, a cumulative transmissible culture is impossible. Humans learn what they realize others know; they employ these ideas and resulting behaviors; they evaluate, test, and modify them, and, in turn, teach what they know to others, including the next generation. So human cultures cumulate, but with animals there is no such cultural “ratchet” effect.

  In a lead article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Michael Tomasello, Ann Cale Kruger, and Hilary Horn Ratner pinpoint this difference:

  Simply put, human beings learn from one another in ways that non-human animals do not…. Human beings are able to learn from one another in this way because they have very powerful, perhaps uniquely powerful, forms of social cognition. Human beings understand and take the perspective of others in a manner and to a degree that allows them to participate more intimately than nonhuman animals in the knowledge and skills of conspecifics. (Tomasello, Kruger, and Ratner 1993:495)

  Tomasello continues: “Nonhuman primates in their natural habitats… do not intentionally teach other individuals new behaviors” (Tomasello 1999:21).

  Cheney and Seyfarth report from their studies of monkeys: “Teaching would seem to demand some ability to attribute states of mind to others…. Even in the most well documented cases, however, active instruction by adults seem to be absent” (Cheney and Seyfarth 1990:223–225). Tetsuro Matsuzawa concludes: “There is no overt teaching behavior in chimpanzees…. Chimpanzee mothers in the wild do not teach as human mothers do” (Matsuzawa 2007:99–100). Bennett G. Galef Jr. concludes: “As far as is known, no nonhuman animal teaches” (Galef 1992:161). “Given that imitation is rare in nonhuman primates and teaching is essentially nonexistent, it’s hard to see how you are going to get the cumulative culture which is the hallmark of our culture” (Galef, quoted in Vogel 1999:2072).

  Animals do not have a sense of mutual gaze as joint attention, of looking with. “Nonhuman primates in their natural habitats… do not point or gesture to outside objects for others; do not hold objects up to show them to others; do not try to bring others to locations so that they can observe things there; do not actively offer objects to other individuals by holding them out” (Tomasello 1999: 21). Animals do see others in pursuit of the food, mates, or territories they wish to have; but they do not know that other minds are there to teach.

  One can trim down the meaning of “teaching,” somewhat similarly to reducing the definition of “culture,” and find noncognitive accounts of teaching. Interestingly, a recent study suggests a form of teaching not in the primates, where it is usually looked for, but in wild meerkats. Adults differentially cripple prey for their young to hunt, depending on how naïve the juvenile hunter is. They cripple scorpions, prey with dangerous stingers, differently depending on how adept the juvenile is at handling them (Thornton and McAuliffe 2006). Many predators release crippled prey before their young, encouraging their developing hunting skills (Caro and Hauser 1992).

  But if teaching is found anywhere individuals have learned to modify their behavior with the result that the naïve learn more quickly, then teaching is found in chickens in the barnyard, when a mother hen scratches and clucks to call her chicks to newfound food and the chicks soon imitate her. The meerkat researchers conclude that there is only simple differential behavior responding to the handling skills of the pups, without the presence of ideas passing from mind to mind. There need not even be recognition (cognition) of the pupil’s ignorance; there is only modulated behavior in response to the success or lack thereof of the naïve, with the result that the naïve learns more efficiently than otherwise. There is no intention of bringing about learning, and such behavior falls far short of customary concepts of teaching, undoubtedly present in ourselves.

  Indeed, teaching in this differential behavior sense is found even in ants, when leaders lead followers to food (Franks and Richardson 2006). If we are going to accept such animal activities as (behavioral) teaching, then we need a modified account of (ideational) teaching, where teacher deliberately instructs disciple.

  David Premack finds that humans are quite unique in this capacity to teach: “Teaching, which is strictly human, reverses the flow of information found in imitation. Unlike imitation, in which the novice observes the expert, the teacher observes the novice—and not only observes, but also judges and modifies” (Premack 2004:318). There is two-way positive and negative feedback, driven by approval and disapproval. In due course in human societies, the pupil likewise judges and modifies what the teacher teaches. In such recursive loops cumulative transmissible cultures can be endlessly generated and regenerated. Richard Bryne finds that chimpanzees may have glimmerings of other minds, but show little evidence of intentional teaching (Bryne 1995:141, 146, 154).

  So humans are unique in their cultural capacities because the mind that enables culture can transcend genetics. Richard Lewontin puts it this way:

  Our DNA is a powerful influence on our anatomies and physiologies. In particular, it makes possible the complex brain that characterizes human beings. But having made that brain possible, the genes have made possible human nature, a social nature whose limitations and possible shapes we do not know except insofar as we know what human consciousness has already made possible�
��. History far transcends any narrow limitations that are claimed for either the power of the genes or the power of the environment to circumscribe us…. The genes, in making possible the development of human consciousness, have surrendered their power both to determine the individual and its environment. They have been replaced by an entirely new level of causation, that of social interaction with its own laws and its own nature. (Lewontin 1991:123)

  Theodosius Dobzhansky, a pivotal figure in modern genetics, reflects:

  Human genes have accomplished what no other genes succeeded in doing. They formed the biological basis for a superorganic culture, which proved to be the most powerful method of adaptation to the environment ever developed by any species…. The development of culture shows regularities sui generis, not found in biological nature, just as biological phenomena are subject to biological laws that are different from, without being contrary to, the laws of inorganic nature. (Dobzhansky 1956:121–122)

  Ian Tattersall concludes:

  With the arrival of behaviorally modern Homo sapiens, a totally unprecedented entity had appeared on Earth…. Homo sapiens is not simply an improved version of its ancestors—it’s a new concept, qualitatively distinct from them…. It’s more akin to an “emergent quality,” whereby for chance reasons a new combination of features produces totally unexpected results. (Tattersall 1998:188–189)

  By astronomical and evolutionary scales, the development of culture is many orders of magnitude more rapid, 5,000 years of human historical memories against 13 billion years of universal history, or 3.5 billion years of life on Earth. In recent centuries, the explosive speed of cultural innovation has increased, with an ever-enlarging knowledge base making possible technological innovation, owing in large part to the powers of science. In the recent decades, information accumulates and travels in culture at logarithmically increasing speeds. Today cultural development takes place digitized at megabytes per second over the Internet. We seem to have reached a turning point in the long accumulating story of cognition actualizing itself.

  Symbolic Explosion: Human Language

  The power of ideas in human life is as baffling as ever. The nature and origins of language are proving, according to some experts in the field “the hardest problem in science” (Christiansen and Kirby 2003; Hauser et al. 2002). Kuniyoshi L. Sakai finds: “The human left-frontal cortex is thus uniquely specialized in the syntactic processes of sentence comprehension, without any counterparts in other animals” (Sakai 2005:817). Spoken language requires the evolution of genes for producing speech as well as comprehending it, and such genes, differentiating humans from other primates, arose at a highly critical period in our evolution.

  The best current estimates place the origin of linguistically capable humans in the range of 40,000 to 100,000 years ago (Appenzeller 1998; Holden 1998). The range itself reveals our ignorance of the origins of language. The FOXP2 gene, called a speech gene, arose less than 200,000 years ago and became the subject of strong selection, making language possible. Couple this with the genes enlarging our brain and the result is our mental incandescence.

  Ideas pass from mind to mind, and for this hearing what is spoken is more important than sight—at least until the invention of writing. We already examined the co-option that made the evolution of hearing possible. Millennia later, written language (needing those eyes and their co-opted crystallins) has transformed cultures by making possible the transmission of thoughts nonorally, across centuries and peoples. Printing makes possible massive public communication, followed by radio, television, electronic communication, the Internet.

  Humans co-opted earlier animal hearing and sounds to develop a discursive language in which words and texts have become powerful symbols of the world, of the logic of that world, and of our place in the world. Humans have a double-level orienting system: one in the genes, shared with animals in considerable part; another in the mental world of ideas, as this flowers forth from mind, for which there is really no illuminating biological analogue. There can be, so to speak, knowledge at a distance. When knowledge becomes “ideational,” these “ideas” make it possible to conceptualize and care about what is not present to felt experience. Humans can produce arguments about ideals in the face of the real.

  Cumulative transmissible cultures are made possible by the distinctive human capacities for language. Language “comes naturally” to us, in the sense that humans everywhere have it. The child picks up speech during normal development with marvelous rapidity; language acquisition is only more or less intentional. The child mind is innately prepared for such learning (Chomsky 1986). Human language, when it comes, is elevated remarkably above anything known in nonhuman nature. “The huge number of words that every child learns dwarfs the capabilities of the most sophisticated non-humans” (Hauser and Fitch 2003:159). Marc Hauser remarks that, cognitively, the difference between humans and chimps is greater than that between chimps and worms. “When we transform thoughts into speech, we do something that no other animal ever achieves” (Hauser and Bever 2008:1057). Our capacities for symbolization, abstraction, vocabulary development, teaching, literary expression, and argument are quite advanced; they do not come naturally as an inheritance from the other primates, whatever may otherwise be our genetic similarity with them. Though language comes naturally to humans, what is learned has been culturally transmitted, this or that specific language, and the content carried during childhood education is that of an acquired, nongenetic culture. On this language capacity the development, transmission, and criticism of culture depends.

  In a major recent study of whether animals have language, the authors conclude: “It seems relatively clear, after nearly a century of intensive research on animal communication, that no species other than humans has a comparable capacity to recombine meaningful units into an unlimited variety of larger structures, each differing systemically in meaning.” The primate communication “system apparently never takes on the open-ended generative properties of human language” (Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch 2002:1576–1577).

  Stephen R. Anderson, a linguist, concludes:

  When examined scientifically, human language is quite different in fundamental ways from the communication systems of other animals…. Using our native language, we can produce and understand sentences we have never encountered before, in ways that are appropriate to entirely novel circumstances…. Human languages have the property of including such a discrete infinity of distinct sentences because they are hierarchical and recursive. That is, the words of a sentence are not just strung out one after another, but are organized into phrases, which themselves can be constituents of larger phrases of the same type, and so on without any boundary. (Anderson 2004:2–8)

  The result is “massive differences in expressive capacities between human language and the communicative systems of other animals” (Anderson 2004:11).

  No other primate functions communicatively in nature even at the level of protolanguage, and the vast gulf of discrete, recursive combinability must still be crossed to get from there to the language capacity inherent in every normal human. We seem to be alone on our side of that gulf, whatever the evolutionary path we may have taken to get there. (Anderson 2004:318)

  After thirty years’ study of communication in mountain gorillas, the researchers conclude:

  Gorilla close-calls [those made within the group] are very far from being language-like, they seem to be of the order of complexity of threat displays, as indeed do chimpanzee calls. That simplicity raises the question of why apes, popularly considered more intelligent than monkeys, have apparently a simpler mode of communication, in the sense that they apparently do not label the environment by association of specific calls with specific contexts…. We have no answer for the contrast. (Harcourt and Stewart 2001:257–258)

  Cheney and Seyfarth (1990) found that vervet monkeys give different alarm signals for snakes, leopards, and eagles; other monkeys hear these different alarms and take cover appropriately t
o differing predators. So it seemed that the calling monkey intends to refer and communicate its knowledge to others. But the most recent evidence raises doubt whether the seeming “callers” intend to inform. Rather, these differing noises are just spontaneous response grunts in alarm, although other monkeys can learn from such differing sounds and respond appropriately to what predator is present. Such signals cannot “be considered as precursors for, or homologs of, human words.” “There is no evidence that calling is intentional in the sense of taking into account what other individuals believe or want” (Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch 2002:1576). Even chickadees give out different calls when encountering predators of different sizes (Templeton et al. 2005). But it is a mistake to think this is either language or a precursor of language.

  Chomsky concludes:

  There seems to be no substance to the view that human language is simply a more complex instance of something to be found elsewhere in the animal world. This poses a problem for the biologist, since, if true, it is an example of true “emergence”—the appearance of a qualitatively different phenomenon at a specific stage of complexity of organization. (Chomsky 1972:70)

  Linguistic ideational uniqueness involves complex use of symbols. Ian Tattersall concludes: “We human beings are indeed mysterious animals. We are linked to the living world, but we are sharply distinguished by our cognitive powers, and much of our behavior is conditioned by abstract and symbolic concerns” (Tattersall 1998:3). Similarly, Richard Potts concludes: