Read Online Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind by Mark Pagel - Free Book Online
Authors: Mark Pagel
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of stimulus enhancement.
Battles rage among scientists who study animal behavior over whether some specific action is a case of social learning or stimulus enhancement. But if we apply a simple test most examples provide a clear answer: does a species show any evidence of the behavior becoming more sophisticated and refined over long periods of time? This test is crucial. If an animal lacks true social learning, each new generation will have to rely on trial and error, catalyzed only by a little push of stimulus enhancement, to discover for themselves how to perform some action or use some tool; they do not seem to learn directly from others. For example, chimpanzees are often lauded as the champions of culture in the rest of the animal world. Anthropologists have documented that chimpanzee groups living in different parts of the forest have about thirty different cultural traditions in such things as how they fish for ants and termites, or how they use stones to crack open nuts. But these differences among chimpanzee societies almost certainly owe more to the vagaries of local circumstance than to any real design on the part of the animals, because there is no evidence that the chimpanzees, or for that matter any other animal, get better at using or producing these tools—they don’t build better nut-cracking devices or invent better ways to fish for termites. Instead, being surrounded by other chimpanzees that use the sticks this way seems to make it more likely that a naive one will pick up a stick and poke and prod things with it—things chimpanzees do anyway. Then, just by chance this might lead to acquiring a few ants or termites to eat and this reward seems sufficient to keep the behavior going.
What this means for most species is that any new innovations or improvements seem limited almost entirely to what an individual can produce on its own, because, they don’t seem to recognize and then acquire them from others the way we do: they don’t seem to be aware of the innovations, much less whether they are useful or not. Even if there were a chimpanzee-Einstein, its ideas would almost certainly die with it, because others would be no more likely to copy it than a chimpanzee-dunce. And this means that, lacking social learning, there is no real cultural ratchet that leads to improvement over time, no shared reservoir of accumulated ideas, skills, and technologies. Instead, each individual chimpanzee is left to come up with its own rules and own particular styles of nut cracking, or termite fishing. Indeed, were we to go away for a million years, upon our return the chimpanzees would probably still be using the same sorts of tools to fish termites from the ground. The same is true of the birds pecking at milk bottles or the macaques washing their food. This simple difference creates a vast difference between the other animals and us. Just imagine if each generation we had to learn for ourselves how to make fire, flake hand axes, make bows and arrows, sew clothes, navigate by the stars, or build shelters or hunt game, not to mention how to build printing presses, computers, and spacecraft.
The reason animals don’t seem to move beyond stimulus enhancement or having their attention drawn to things is that they don’t seem to put themselves inside the minds of others, or, as Michael Tomasello argues in his Cultural Origins of Human Cognition , they seem to lack a “theory of mind,” or the ability to adopt another’s point of view. They don’t seem to assume as we do that someone is doing something for some reason or purpose . Lacking a theory of mind is why a chimpanzee can be taught to paint, but the animal is not really “painting,” just spreading paint onto a surface, and chimpanzees will go on doing this, aimlessly painting over what they have done until they grow tired of the activity or until someone takes the brush away. They don’t seem to “get” the bigger idea of what they are doing or why.
Battles rage among scientists who study animal behavior over whether some specific action is a case of social learning or stimulus enhancement. But if we apply a simple test most examples provide a clear answer: does a species show any evidence of the behavior becoming more sophisticated and refined over long periods of time? This test is crucial. If an animal lacks true social learning, each new generation will have to rely on trial and error, catalyzed only by a little push of stimulus enhancement, to discover for themselves how to perform some action or use some tool; they do not seem to learn directly from others. For example, chimpanzees are often lauded as the champions of culture in the rest of the animal world. Anthropologists have documented that chimpanzee groups living in different parts of the forest have about thirty different cultural traditions in such things as how they fish for ants and termites, or how they use stones to crack open nuts. But these differences among chimpanzee societies almost certainly owe more to the vagaries of local circumstance than to any real design on the part of the animals, because there is no evidence that the chimpanzees, or for that matter any other animal, get better at using or producing these tools—they don’t build better nut-cracking devices or invent better ways to fish for termites. Instead, being surrounded by other chimpanzees that use the sticks this way seems to make it more likely that a naive one will pick up a stick and poke and prod things with it—things chimpanzees do anyway. Then, just by chance this might lead to acquiring a few ants or termites to eat and this reward seems sufficient to keep the behavior going.
What this means for most species is that any new innovations or improvements seem limited almost entirely to what an individual can produce on its own, because, they don’t seem to recognize and then acquire them from others the way we do: they don’t seem to be aware of the innovations, much less whether they are useful or not. Even if there were a chimpanzee-Einstein, its ideas would almost certainly die with it, because others would be no more likely to copy it than a chimpanzee-dunce. And this means that, lacking social learning, there is no real cultural ratchet that leads to improvement over time, no shared reservoir of accumulated ideas, skills, and technologies. Instead, each individual chimpanzee is left to come up with its own rules and own particular styles of nut cracking, or termite fishing. Indeed, were we to go away for a million years, upon our return the chimpanzees would probably still be using the same sorts of tools to fish termites from the ground. The same is true of the birds pecking at milk bottles or the macaques washing their food. This simple difference creates a vast difference between the other animals and us. Just imagine if each generation we had to learn for ourselves how to make fire, flake hand axes, make bows and arrows, sew clothes, navigate by the stars, or build shelters or hunt game, not to mention how to build printing presses, computers, and spacecraft.
The reason animals don’t seem to move beyond stimulus enhancement or having their attention drawn to things is that they don’t seem to put themselves inside the minds of others, or, as Michael Tomasello argues in his Cultural Origins of Human Cognition , they seem to lack a “theory of mind,” or the ability to adopt another’s point of view. They don’t seem to assume as we do that someone is doing something for some reason or purpose . Lacking a theory of mind is why a chimpanzee can be taught to paint, but the animal is not really “painting,” just spreading paint onto a surface, and chimpanzees will go on doing this, aimlessly painting over what they have done until they grow tired of the activity or until someone takes the brush away. They don’t seem to “get” the bigger idea of what they are doing or why.
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