What Do Scientists Mean By “culture?”
Scientists have debated whether animals have culture at least since the late 1800's, when the British physiologist and psychologist George Romanes proposed that some animals display behaviors that indicate a high degree of intelligence and an ability to learn. Other scientists, however, disagreed with this conclusion, believing that animal behavior is hard-wired in the brain. Over the years, scientists on both sides of the issue divided themselves into two camps, the culturalists and the anticulturalists. The culturalists contend that animals are a lot smarter and more adaptable than most people think. The anticulturalists argue that animals, regardless of their intelligence, are incapable of culture.
Central to this debate is defining what exactly is meant by culture. One requirement for culture that is accepted by scientists on both sides of the issue is imitation, or learning through observation. Researchers agree that cultural traditions among humans are learned through imitation. An American family in the Midwest may learn to use chopsticks from a daughter who attended school in Japan. In another example, most American teen-agers since the 1950's have learned that rock music is the cool music to listen to. Rock has become a cultural tradition for young people largely through imitation, as teens embrace the predominant musical preferences of their peers.
Individual family traditions are yet another type of cultural behavior learned through imitation. A mother follows a particular recipe for a German chocolate cake because her mother did so. A boy learns how to sail the family boat by watching his father. One thing that these traditions have in common besides imitation is that they are not genetically determined.
Like these examples from human culture, animal behaviors such as ant fishing are not clearly determined by genes and seem to spread from one individual to another through imitation. However, anticulturalists argue that the definition of culture involves more than just imitation. One of the leading voices of the anticulturalist camp, psychologist Bennett G. Galef of McMaster University in Ontario, maintains that culture must be purposefully taught by an individual with the intention of passing on knowledge to another. And teaching, he notes, is a difficult thing to prove in animals. Another factor that Galef and many other anticulturalists believe is necessary for the spread of culture is a spoken language—something that no animal possesses.
Culturalists, however, contend that making a spoken language a requirement for culture amounts to stacking the deck. No shared animal behavior, regardless of how sophisticated it is, could then qualify as culture. Many culturalists, including psychologist Andrew Whiten of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and Jane Goodall, the renowned zoologist who has spent her adult life studying chimpanzees, think culture should be defined more broadly. They believe that the spread of a behavior through a group of animals by observation and imitation qualifies as culture. Under that definition, the transmission of an insect-fishing technique from one chimpanzee to another is indeed a form of culture.
