This article does not raise the issue of symbols. It turns on imitative learning. But my anaylsis assumes that animals can imitate - monkey see, monkey do. It is symboling that they can't do. They can't understand the concept of representation; or at least not abstractly enough to do it tens of thousands of times readily. A chimp can learn to sssoicate a limited number of words with their referants. Even a dog can learn to associate a few words with referents. It's name, commands like "sit" , "rollover". "fetch". but they don't seem to be able to generalize to the concept of word enough to build the giant vocabularies that humans readily achieve. sit, rollover fetch etc. are built up through conditioned learning links between words and behaviors
CJ can help me to elaborate on the characteristics of full language http://animals.howstuffworks.com/animal-facts/animal-culture-info.htm On a grassy slope above the shore of Lake Tanganyika in the east African nation of Tanzania, two male chimpanzees spot a hole in the ground, into which a long column of ants is marching. The chimps pause for a moment beneath the light drizzle of an early morning rain and then amble to the hole—the entrance to the ants' nest—for a closer inspection. The chimpanzees, lifetime residents of Tanzania's Gombe Stream National Park, expertly select several long sticks and sit down beside the nest. Slowly, each of them extends a stick into the hole and watches as some of the ants swarm up the probe. As soon as either of the chimps gauges that the lower half of the stick has become covered with ants, he extracts it from the nest. He then quickly gathers the tasty insects from the stick with his free hand and pops them into his mouth. Across the continent in the Tai Forest of western Africa's Ivory Coast, two other male chimps have also discovered a nest of ants. They each find a suitable tool—a short stick, rather than the long probes favored by the Gombe chimps-and begin dipping it into the nest entrance to fish for a meal. After the ants guarding the nest climb up the sticks, the chimps sweep the sticks directly across their smacking lips and, without using their hands, draw the ants into their mouths. At the same time that the chimps are enjoying their morning snacks, two other mealtime rituals are being played out by other primates (the order of mammals that includes humans, apes, and monkeys) far to the west. In St. Louis, Missouri, two human families—one whose ancestors came from Asia and the other whose forebears originated in Europe—sit down to dinner at separate tables in a Chinese restaurant. Both families order their favorite dish of spicy orange chicken. When the food is served, the Asian family begins eating its meal with chopsticks, while the other family picks up forks. Since the dish could be eaten with either chopsticks or forks, the preference for one type of utensil over another is simply a reflection of cultural differences between the two families. There's nothing unusual about that. But what about the differences in the ways the Gombe and Tai chimpanzees perform ant fishing? Could those individual preferences also reflect differences in culture? Since all of the chimps are of the same species, it is unlikely that genetic differences could account for the variations in behavior. Thus, the different approaches to a similar task, ant fishing, are likely to be learned behaviors within the Gombe and Tai social groups. That means that knowledge may have been passed from one chimp to another. In other words, the chimps seem to be exhibiting behavior that could be called culture. Social scientists have long maintained, however, that only humans are capable of possessing culture. Are they wrong? Do chimpanzees—and perhaps even other animals, such as monkeys, whales, and birds—also possess a form of culture? Many scientists in 2000 believed that the answer to that question is yes. But others insisted that culture is a purely human phenomenon. 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. Chimpanzee Tool Use and Social Behavior Although other scientists had previously observed chimpanzees in captivity using tools, Goodall was the first scientist to witness chimps in the wild engaged in that activity. On an October day in 1960, soon after she arrived in the area that is now Gombe Stream National Park, Goodall noticed a rustling in the tall grass on a slope. She crouched to the ground, pulled out her binoculars, and watched as a chimpanzee dipped a grass stem into a termite nest to get at the burrowing insects. Over the next several years, Goodall made many observations of termite and ant fishing and discovered that the entire troop of chimpanzees at Gombe engaged in these behaviors. Beginning in the 1970's, other teams of scientists began studies of chimpanzee behavior in different regions of Africa. In 1999, seven research teams, under the guidance of Whiten, pooled their data and published their findings in the British journal Nature. The investigators reported 39 different chimp activities that met their definition of culture as behavior that spreads throughout a social group through imitation. The most significant of these behaviors were the use of simple tools and activities related to grooming and courtship. Most importantly, the different groups of chimpanzees took individualized approaches to similar tasks. These variations could not be explained by either genetic or environmental differences, and so they must have spread through imitation and—possibly—intentional teaching. For example, the scientists described the varying insect-fishing methods used by different chimp groups. They noted that the chimps at Gombe usually use a long stick or stem to extract termites and ants from their nests, and they tend to remove the insects from the probe by swiping their hands along it. Chimps at Tai and at a site called Bossou, in Guinea, are more likely to fish with a short stick and to strip the insects from it with their mouth. Another example of cultural variation in chimpanzees is the use of tools to crack open nuts. At Gombe, though there are plenty of nuts, the chimps haven't learned to open them, despite an abundance of rocks that would be ideal for the task. In contrast, chimps at Bossou use stone “hammers” to crack open nuts on either stone or wood “anvils.” Chimpanzees at Tai also open nuts in this manner, and they often use pieces of wood as well as rocks for their hammers. According to the scientists, nut cracking by the Tai chimps provides a good example of a behavior that is learned by young chimps through imitation and then practiced by them as adults. While adult Tai chimps expertly open nuts with their hammers and anvils, the young chimps try pounding on nuts with rotten branches, pieces of fruit, and even chunks of termite mounds. They eventually discover that the stones and hard pieces of wood used by the adults work the best. _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
