Animal Social Complexity - Intelligence and Culture 245
| Animal Social Complexity: Intelligence and Culture | |
| author | Frans de Waal and Peter Tyack |
| pages | 616 pages |
| publisher | Harvard University Press |
| rating | 9 |
| reviewer | Danny Yee |
| ISBN | 0674009290 |
| summary | 18 papers on primates, cetaceans, other mammals and birds |
How are brain size and intelligence related to social complexity? What are the evolutionary underpinnings of cooperation? How sophisticated are animal communication and social cognition? And do animals have culture? These are some of the broad questions addressed by the eighteen papers in Animal Social Complexity, which look not only at primates and cetaceans, but also at hyenas, elephants, bats, and birds. The common focus is on societies that are individualized, with members recognising each other as individuals, and stable, with long-lived members and on-going relationships, and in which there are learned survival skills and social behaviours. Some of the papers are overviews of particular species or taxa, some address specific questions in the context of a particular species, and some present cross-species comparisons.
Consisting of the papers from a conference held in 2000, Animal Social Complexity is a professional volume, complete with a hundred pages of references. But the topics covered are of widespread interest, and the multi- and inter-disciplinary nature of the papers makes them mostly accessible to the lay reader.
Carel Van Schaik and Robert Deaner present a life history perspective on cognitive evolution: demonstrating a link between social complexity and intelligence/brain size is complicated because both are correlated with long life spans. Randall Wells presents an outline of dolphin social complexity based on long-term studies on the communities in Sarasota Bay, Florida. And Katy Payne gives an overview of social complexity in the three elephant species.
Christophe Boesch describes examples of complex cooperation among Tai chimpanzees, in group hunts for monkeys and in territorial conflict with other chimpanzee groups. Christine Drea and Laurence Frank describe the social system of spotted hyenas and argue that more attention should be paid to social complexity in carnivores. It has commonly been argued that social stress is a consequence of subordination; Scott Creel and Jennifer Sands present evidence suggesting that it may in fact be a cost of domination, at least in some species.
Three of the papers debate the underlying mechanisms of social cognition. Ronald Schusterman et al. argue for equivalence classifications as a basic structure. In contrast, Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney argue that "nonhuman primates are innately predisposed to group other individuals into hierarchical classes". And for Frans de Waal the conditionality of behaviour suggests a role for if-then structures in primate "social syntax".
Taking a comparative approach to laughter and smiling in primates, Jan Van Hoof and Signe Preuschoft find that "laughter has evolved in the context of joyful play, and that the broad smile has evolved as an expression of nonhostility and friendliness, taking its origin in the expression of fearful submission". Looking at vocal learning in four parrot species from Costa Rica, Jack Bradbury suggests that in "ecology, social organization, and vocal communication, parrots appear to be more convergent with dolphins than they are with other birds".
Gerald Wilkinson looks to bats for an independent test of the Machiavellian Intelligence hypothesis, probing the relationships between brain size, vocal complexity, and colony size. And Peter Tyack explores bottlenose dolphins' use of signature whistles in communicating social relationships.
Following in the footsteps of Imanishi, pioneer of Japanese primatology, Tetsuro Matsuzawa considers, as examples of "culture", sweet potato washing among Koshima monkeys and nut cracking using stone tools by Bossou chimpanzees. Toshisada Nishida describes the "flexibility and individuality of cultural behavior patterns" among chimpanzees at Mahale. And in "Ten Dispatches from the Chimpanzee Culture Wars" William McGrew gives an overview of the arguments between cultural anthropologists, psychologists, and primatologists (among others) over chimpanzee culture -- and over the definition of culture.
Hal Whitehead looks at sperm whales, the cetacean culture debate more generally, and the possible effects of "cultural hitchhiking" on genetic diversity. And Meredith West et al. find a critical role for social interaction in learning and development in cowbirds and starlings.
In addition to the eighteen papers, there are a dozen shorter "case studies" which tackle narrower questions. Animal Social Complexity is an important contribution to the scientific literature. And it has a wealth of material for anyone fascinated by social animals and not intimidated by scientific methodology, a little bit of statistics, references and scholarly language.
Danny Yee has written over 700 book reviews. You can purchase Animal Social Complexity: Intelligence and Culture from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Mmm, animals. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Mmm, animals. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Mmm, animals. (Score:2)
Re:Mmm, animals. (Score:2)
actually not all humans are advanced enough to claim it in my opinion but thats another matter!"
Specially those who can't get through 2 pages of text.
on a more serious note (Score:2)
this sounds like a fantastic set of papers. at any point is there a discussion on the mechanism by which culture is transmitted? how is cognition meansured.
many thanks for taking the time to review this and to bring it to my attention.
"The Book of Memory" or "The Civilizing Process" (Score:2, Informative)
A multi-disciplinary approach to how medieval memory was constituted. Carruthers goes into how modern memory is "documentary" rather than "rote." Really dense and good book that avoids the pitfalls of behaviorism that animal psychologists can fall into. Since I haven't read the above papers, I would assume these folks are enlightened by
Re:"The Book of Memory" or "The Civilizing Process (Score:2)
Strange how society's changed. Nowadays, if you're going to show your arse to anybody, it's generally considered good manners to have wiped it first.
Brain Size?!? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, if we look at ants, bees and termites, we can safely draw the conclusion that brain size and social complexity are inversely proportional.
Re:Brain Size?!? (Score:5, Funny)
Seconded! I have a huge brain, and am above average in intelligence, but my social life is negligible.
Re:Brain Size?!? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Brain Size?!? (Score:2, Insightful)
You might be able to say that but insects do not view each other as individuals and thus are not the subject of the book.
Re:Brain Size?!? (Score:4, Funny)
Communal insects have workers, drones, and queens.
We have all those, plus lawyers, porn stars, and programmers. Yee ha. It's good to be human.
Re:Brain Size?!? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Brain Size?!? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Brain Size?!? (Score:5, Interesting)
(Note that a worker bee is designed to die when it stings, since its only motivation is what is good for the colony, rather than what is good for itself. That would *never* happen in a species where all the individuals could reproduce directly.)
Weird bee trivia (Score:5, Informative)
It's not just the Darwinian dynamic that encourages cooperation; it's helped along by pheromones from the queen bee. These pheromones inhibit the sexual development of the worker bees (who are all sexually immature females as a result).
Deprived of a queen (and her pheromones) for a sufficient time, some worker bees will stop cooperating and will begin to lay eggs. They also begin to secrete the same pheromone that queen bees secrete, inducing other worker bees to feed and groom them as though they were the queen.
However... these egg-laying worker bees have never mated. Indeed they can't mate; they never developed the required anatomy. So they lay only unfertilized eggs, which, due to a strange quirk of bee biology, develop into male bees (male bees all come from unfertilized eggs - they have no fathers and no sons!). A hive with laying workers is soon teeming with males, who do no work and cannot even feed themselves, but who CAN mate with queen bees (from another hive - remember this hive's queenless) and thus carry on the bee's genetic legacy.
Worker bees aren't truly sterile; they're just *mostly* sterile.
Re:Weird bee trivia (Score:2)
Re:Brain Size?!? (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't know if bee language is learned or hardwired, though. My instinct is to say learned because a lot of things can go wrong with hardwiring "five s
Re:Brain Size?!? (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, and you know that they do use chemical weapons, and some species are kn
Re:Brain Size?!? (Score:2)
There is a whole continent devoid of ants: the antartic.
There are no ants in artic climates.
and they are the only animal that can resist nuclear and biological weapons.
That's cockroaches.
We use science because we have weak bodies.
I don't know about you, but I am stronger than an ant.
Yeasts have culture (Score:5, Interesting)
Once I read "brain size," all I could do was think of the efforts -- well discussed in Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man -- of 19th and 20th century physical anthropologists to use "brain size is correlated with intelligence" to justify racism & sexism.
The only thing that brain size is really correlated with is body size. Cattle have larger brains than most monkeys. Men have larger brains than women. Blacks have larger brains than whites.
Sounds to me like the anthropologists are out looking for grant money...
Re:Yeasts have culture (Score:5, Interesting)
You also have to consider that elephant brains while larger actually are a smaller percentage of total body weight than human brains.
dolphins (Score:5, Interesting)
Species Brain Weight as % of Body Weight
human 2.10
bottlenose dolphin 0.94
African elephant 0.15
killer whale 0.09
cow 0.08
sperm whale (male) 0.02
fin whale 0.01
http://dubinserver.colorado.edu/prj/jbes03/brai
Re:dolphins (Score:5, Interesting)
lesser short-tailed shrew 2.80%
little brown bat 2.50%
mouse 1.30%
The brain weight as percentage of body weight thing just doesn't work. What you're looking for is the "encephalization factor".
The formula for that is:
brain weight
-------------
(body weight) ^
Done this way, brain vs. body weight works in our favor (the human encephalization factor is
Re:dolphins (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Yeasts have culture (Score:2)
(Waits for the inevitable BSOD posts....)
Analog: DNA "complexity" (Score:2)
I would more likely believe that brain size (in terms of computational circuits) would be more appropriate...
A similar argument could be made -- would be made, intuitively, I'd think -- that the more "complex" a critter is, the more complex its DNA would be. More combinations means more potential "circuits" would be the idea. Actually looking at the human genome, though, makes you scratch your head over that one. Though expected to be around 100,000 genes, the human genome turns out to be 30-40,000 genes
Re:Analog: DNA "complexity" (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't understand why this figure generated so much fuss. We're looking at a combinatorial system - you don't need many inputs to get an enormous number of outputs. It's like being amazed that telephone numbers in a large city "only" have eight digits.
Picture the human genome as a binary string 30,000 bits long. Each bit represents a gene: 1 mean
Re:Yeasts have culture (Score:3, Informative)
Popular measures include relating brain size to body mass or body complexity. The premise of these measures is that you've got to factor out the overheads. In computer terms, it's similar to the concept of looking at RAM in terms of the OS requirements, and the overheads for each thread.
Another popular measure looks at the number of folds in the neocortex, but this only works on animals with a neocortex, so it's real
Re:Yeasts have culture (Score:2)
Of course.
I will reiterate my recommendation of Gould's The Mismeasure of Man. In it, he traces the history of many of our most cherished statistical methods (Spearman, Pearson, etc), which were developed to relate brain size to "something else." In those cases, the purpose was to adjust the brain size of white males so it consistently came out on top.
Another main theme of Gould's book is "reification" of intellige
Re:Yeasts have culture (Score:3, Informative)
As long as you also warn those you recommend that Gould wrote Mismeasure, in large part, to aid in the campaign -- largely grounded in Marxist ideology rather than science -- of denigration of E.O. Wilson and Sociobiology.
To put Gould (and Rose and Lewontin) in context, recommend also Ullica Segerstrale 's Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond, a dense but thoroughly entertaining look at Soci
Re:Yeasts have culture (Score:2)
Gould's best shots at E.O. Wilson are in other works.
Trust me, there are plenty of biologists who think that Wilson shoulda stuck with fire ants.
Re:Yeasts have culture (Score:2)
As far as it being "Marxist," I challenge you to find any theory that isn't colored to some extent by politics, right-left, right-wrong. In fact, one
Re:Yeasts have culture (Score:5, Funny)
Yes. But if you are talking about putting it to use too, remember what Robin Williams said. "God gives men a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to run one at a time.".
Re:Yeasts have culture (Score:2, Informative)
Not smiling? (Score:5, Funny)
Ah, this must explain why I never felt like smiling during my punk rock days. I was younger, angry and much less secure and could have "evolved" a behavioral approach that prevented my appearing submissive to anybody. (that and I simply thought of myself as one baaaad dude.
Animals 'live in the moment' (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't get me wrong: nothing wrong with planning for the future, or in a quiet moment remembering cool stuff that we did with our grandparents when they were still alive, but almost all of our thoughts are best focused on what we are doing now.
BTW, I too often rant to my friends and family about what I consider to be an indication of the fall of western civilization: too many people are caught up in a lust for material possessions - I think that is just another aspect of not living in the moment.
-Mark
Re:Animals 'live in the moment' (Score:2)
Me too! Recently I did my tax returns, I run my own business from home and after all my write-offs I made a whopping $5000/year or so! Obviously I am not out to win any monopoly game here.
I hate jewelry, my wife loves the stuff, but I maintain it is worthle
Re:Animals 'live in the moment' (Score:2)
I don't have religious beliefs to fall back on, I don't believe in life after death either other than the spirit/memories of those who have died remain with the living, but only for so long unless you did something famous or something.
I have had lots of friends and family die in my 37
Re:Animals 'live in the moment' (Score:2)
Animals 'live in the moment' to their own demise (Score:2)
Re:Animals 'live in the moment' (Score:2)
Dolphins. (Score:3, Interesting)
But whether or not we as humans regard such a practice as "cultural" or "savage" is another issue altogether.
Re:Dolphins. (Score:2)
Hey, as long as they don't take to human sacrifice, I'm fine with 'em...
Ants, termites, wasps, and bees... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Ants, termites, wasps, and bees... (Score:2)
The chemically processes that drive ant society basically make the colony a large, slow, brain. Different nodes/ants perform different tasks and use chemical and electrical intructions to do so. The more ants, the more successfull the colony. The more ants to faster the colony adapts and grows.
you can see evidence of this by the fact that the number of offspring produced by the queen cannot grow exponentially like it does in other animals t
insects organise chaos (Score:3, Interesting)
this post is spot on. In David Suzuki's [davidsuzuki.org] latest series, The Sacred Balence [sacredbalance.com] , he talked to a scientist Brian Goodman [sacredbalance.com] about Ants. Goodman gathered data on the communication between ants that are working and ants not working.
Plotting the r
Hacking into a horse's brain. (Score:5, Interesting)
Your first step is to teach the horse you mean no danger. Become a -safe- element of the environment. No matter what goes on, the horse feels fine with you.
Second step: Get the horse to recognise you as another horse. Of course no hooves, no eating grass. But typical horse behaviours. Horses yield from pressure from other horses but push against predators. Horses rarely approach each other directly, usually go along some rather obscure curves. And so on...
Third step: Gain leadership of the herd. Challenging the horse, duelling it, in a special kind of fight that doesn't involve violence, but charisma. Strong, hard looks, stepping forward, making the oponent lose ground...
And then polishing the communication. Getting the horse used to unusual situation, generally utilising newly gained power.
Horses that were proclaimed "lost" by the best classical trainers, were "recovered" and wildest ones became nice and gentle thanks to "horse whisperers" as those who practice natural horsemanship are sometimes called.
The final step (Score:2)
Whew! Re:The final step (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Hacking into a horse's brain. (Score:2)
Sorry, good information, but couldn't resist.
Re:Hacking into a horse's brain. (Score:2)
You miss the difference between a hacker and a cracker
zerg (Score:2, Funny)
Now from Harvard University Press... (Score:2, Funny)
Pet peeve. (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course. One example species would be ourselves.
Sorry, but humans talking of animals as if they don't belong to the group themselves is just a pet peeve of mine.
Re:Pet peeve. (Score:3, Funny)
(yeah, I know we came from apes, not monkeys... but the insult works better)
re: pet peeve -- Scientists as Creationists (Score:3, Insightful)
When it comes to animal thought, feeling, and culture many scientists seem turn into strict Creationists.
How? Because they seem to believe that thought, feeling and culture somehow spontaneously arose in humans instead of evolving slowly over aeons in many different species of animals.
If we have it, why would scientists be surprised that other animals have it too unless the scientists believed in some type of creationism?
Thankfully science is beginning to evolve past that point but if you talk to any sc
Re:Pet peeve. (Score:3, Insightful)
In 1920 a bird learned to open milk bottles in England. A few weeks later all of that bird specie knew
Re:Pet peeve. (Score:3, Informative)
Any life form that is obligate multicellular, posseses distinct organ systems, is heterophagic and capable of controlled, self-sustained motion at some point in its life cycle is an animal. Humans are animals in the biological sense. We are not a Kingdom unto ourselves.
Re:Pet peeve. (Score:2)
It means that the organism's caloric food source is the consumption of other organisms. The "we are not a Kingdom unto ourselves" is a reference to the fact that we are members of the animal Kingdom.
And what plant (slime mo
Re:Pet peeve. (Score:2)
Remember...the organism must fulfill all requirements listed. Remember also that heterotrophy refers to caloric food source. Venus fly traps, pitcher plants and the like use the insects they catch as a nitrogen source. Their caloric foodsource is still photosynthesis, making them autotrophs.
As for motion, what is described at the (broken) link is not the controlled motion I was talking about. I suppose I should have again been exceptionally precise with my st
Re:Sessile animals? (Score:3, Funny)
Sponges, other tunicates, corals and barnacles are free swimming as larvae. They only become sessile as adults.Reminds me of a favorite quote of mine regarding sea squirts (tunicates), which are, incidentally, the closest thing there is to a vertebrate that's not quite a vertebrate:
The juvenile seasquirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task it has a ru
Brain size and cognative/communication ability (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a lot of other stories too. My slashdot name is based on the name "Weeboo" which is what Elmo named me for some reason.
If you want to read more about avian (specifically African Grey) cognitive ability, try going to www.alexfoundation.org [alexfoundation.org] to read more about an African Grey named Alex and Dr. Irene Pepperbergs [wikipedia.org] research with interspecies communication and animal cognitive ability.
Re:Brain size and cognative/communication ability (Score:2, Funny)
And she's probably wondering why you called her "Elmo".
Conditioning != cognition (Score:2)
This has been done for centuries. It neither demonstrates knowledge nor understanding - just primitive cause-and-effect association.
Alex (Score:2)
Considering that crows can both make and use tools and octopus can learn to open containers by watching other octopus, limiting these things to "primitive cause-and-effect association" seems a bit chauvinistic on our part.
Re:Conditioning != cognition (Score:3, Interesting)
Possibly. Of course if that were the case, then if she asked for juice and I gave her water, she wouldn't push away the water and ask for juice again. Food is just a generic term. Dr. Pepperbergs Grey identifies specific food items and even assigns names to new fruit. For example, he knew the words for bananna and cherry. When presented with an apple, he called it a banerry. Insides colored like a banann
Re:Brain size and cognative/communication ability (Score:2, Interesting)
Our Grey's psychotic - he hates men, and will only interact with women.
He recognises the names of different foods, and you can list them - banana, carrot, beans, peas, nuts, etc - and he will say 'Want Some!' when you get to what he wants, and he will ask for particular items if he sees you eating them.
Trouble is, only my girlfriend and daughter can feed him - I have to lob whatever it is in his dish, or he'll try to take my finger off.
Pepperberg was on BBC Radio the other week - it was a great
Re:Brain size and cognative/communication ability (Score:2, Funny)
I know that if Elmo asks for a specific object (object "x") and you give object "y" instead, Elmo repeats her original request or ignores object "y". She occasionaly will say "no" when she doesn't get what she wants, but has abandoned that word in favor of the more entertaining (and emba
Animals that can play the piano. (Score:3, Interesting)
Now considered separately, meither of the abilities to mimic nor to differentiate between pleasant and unplesant sounds is truly "cultural", or more cultural than instinctive. However, this is where we certainly run into a question of the definition of culture -and what exactly makes us as humans gifted with it and not any other animal.
with enough monkeys... (Score:2)
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
Animal intelligence and society (Score:4, Interesting)
We have two known examples of demonstrable lateral thinking on the part of avians. Grey Parrots have shown an ability to actually understand sentances containing verbs, adverbs, adjectives and the indefinite article. They also exhibit the ability to handle basic arithmetic.
Crows, on the other hand, have been shown to be able to study problems, manufacture tools from raw materials, and use those tools to solve those problems.
It's easy to argue that these cases are only over a very limited range of conditions, and under very controlled conditions. And that's all true.
The point I'm making is that if we use a simple definition of intelligence - say the ability to handle abstract concepts, logical and lateral thinking, and the ability to handle conceptual modelling (which is basically what a language is), then intelligence is amazingly common on Earth.
Hey, that's not too bad a definition, but it includes too wide a range of life. It becomes useless as a definition, because so little is excluded.
Now we move onto society. If we do a basic study of human society, we see that reptilian traits (eg: the ability to act/react without thought) are far more highly prized than mammalian traits (eg: the ability to have emotional associations, the ability to form bonds that have nothing to do with personal gain, etc).
From a strict study of current social patterns, humans are probably one of the most primitive of all the mammals. The preference of using the older, reflexive parts of the brain, over and above the emotional and intellectual parts, is definitely regressive.
Modern society is the way it is because it actually works. Many things, from riding a bicycle to karate, would be impossible if there was a heavy dependence on the "thinking" parts of the brain.
My point? Societies are going to evolve towards whatever works well, though not necessarily for the same reasons, and are not necessarily constrained to the social norms.
In consequence, any such study is going to be extremely difficult to do. There are a lot of unknowns, and many of them are unknowable. Further, social studies often fall into the "soft" sciences, which are badly-funded and often badly-run.
The papers are worth reading, but I'm not confident that those doing the research know enough to do the research well. I'm not even sure anyone does. That makes the results suspect, even if the actual studies themselves are of value.
One Way Relationship (Score:3, Interesting)
I would say that it's their *lack of society* that makes other animals so strong... the way they seemingly operate on instinct and loosely defined (by our conventions) social structures. Oscillating (beyond our understanding) between these two polar opposites. If however all the animals on the planet were suddenly gone, including insects, I think we'd probably last a few years or less. Point is, we need them, they *don't* need us. What's more, I believe we could learn a lot from them in terms of living socially. And I mean that in a sincere way not a dig against us as humans but as suggestion that just because we appear to be the most intellectually motivated species on the planet, doesn't mean we're automatically right and just in our endeavours.
I'm reminded of the line from Aliens when they're discussing the impending break-in of the aliens and someone says something to the effect of "you don't see them fucking one another over for a share".
Re:One Way Relationship (Score:2)
Isn't this simply because we have no natural predator? No animal bases its life on hunting, killing and eating humans (except the Predator :). Being at the top of the food chain means we wouldn't be missed if we vanished. Some domesticated species of animals and plants would probably struggle to survive, but everything else would contin
Re:One Way Relationship (Score:2, Interesting)
we don't need them. The planet needs animal life to support animal life. If all other animal life died out, only science and technology could save the remaining single species as it would overpopulate and ravage its food source.
also, if all dog species died out, humans would not perish, not would many other species.
if all humans die, just one species has been eliminated and most others would survive as they do now. Now if all ants died, that would be an ecological disaster and a number species
Re:One Way Relationship (Score:2)
Male lions who have usurped others as the head of a pride will, given the chance, kill the offspring of the former male.
Those are two examples of animals of the same species fucking each other over in the name of family: a hardwired war and family feud.
Human intelligence has complexified the situation. We are able to find other reasons to cooperate (indeed, in the two situations above for us, our animal instinc
Social Structures + The Human Species (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not quite sure I understand what you mean by 'loosely defined [...] social structures'. A lot of species live in groups with very clearly defined structures and roles: who's the alpha male/female and who isn't, for example, which decides who gets to eat first, who gets to drink first, who gets to mate etc etc. The individual fulfilling each role may of course vary -- for instance, alpha male gets
Smart (Score:4, Interesting)
Ants, Termites and Bees (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Ants, Termites and Bees (Score:2)
Why Ants, Bees, Wasps are social (Score:3, Interesting)
Sometime being social is the most selfish strategy possible.
Orangutans have culture (Score:2)
Rattlesnakes (Score:2, Interesting)
I'd never thought of snakes as social before, but this looks like interesting research.
Kropotkin and a book not directly related. (Score:2, Interesting)
How is "brain size" measured (Score:2)
mark
Animal Cultures (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyway, a great webpage on this from Boesch's team Chimpanzee Culture [st-and.ac.uk]
See also -
Whiten et al. Nature, 399:682-685
van Schaik et al. (2003). Orangutan cultures and the evolution of material
Re:Interesting idea (Score:5, Insightful)
That being said, culture doesn't necessarily have to mean an appreciation of the arts or some human social charateristics. It could simply be the existence of order within a group. In that case, culture can be as simple as the patterns of a flock of birds or a school of fish, or as complex as the interactions of humans in determining socio-political norms. It pertains to the possibility of non-randomness in behavior, and this denotes intelligence and possibly culture.
Re:Interesting idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Interesting idea (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Interesting idea (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Interesting idea (Score:2)
God damn I'm tired of that stupid Seinfield crap.
Yeah, dog owners pick up their poop, while holding a choke chain around their necks, after having subjected them to cosmetic surgery as babies, after having surgically sterilised them, after having taken them forcibly from their mothers...
Re:Interesting idea (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Interesting idea (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Interesting idea (Score:5, Informative)
As an example, while we're on France around the Revolution, Mariane is often portrayed in French painting as bare breasted. The acceptability of this is an example of a cultural difference between the French of the period and the US of the Superbowl incident. If one tribe of chimpanzees has a characteristic behavior pattern that differs from that of another tribe - there is some ground for discussing whether this is a cultural difference akin to the difference between French and American beach behavior, or the difference between American and European uses of knives and forks.
Re:Interesting idea (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, when you write "Marriage of Figaro" maybe I'll listen to your judgments on other species.
Meanwhile, "culture" is something everyday, that we all participate in, rather than strictly the highbrow Culture with a capital C.
And who's to say that dogs don't have an extremely elevated aesthetic sensibility that's just beyond the grasp of our (differently limited) human brains?
Re:Interesting idea (Score:3, Informative)
Arts: the Bowerbird [wikipedia.org] will Decorate [google.com] it's nest, actively arranging objects in a way that suits his aesthetic.
Koko and Michael the gorillas are also known for their paintings. [koko.org]
Beliefs? This one is Tricky. I'll leave it up to someone else to tackle this for now. Although animals showing signs of mourning (evidence shown under institutions) forms a good basis for beliefs.
Institution
Re:Interesting idea (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Do animals dance? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:some days (Score:2)
ant theory of aliens (Score:2)
Maybe the aliens have been using raid (the weather) on us for some time now...