Is Culture Unique To Humans Animals Evolution
Humans are not unique every bit a species in our power to use tools or form complex social groups. So what happened in the evolution of Homo sapiens that fabricated our species stand out in comparison to other hominids? Several theories betoken to our unique power to develop civilisation via social learning—the capacity to teach and learn from others—as an evolutionary turning point in human being history.
Cistron-Culture Coevolution
When Marcus Feldman started his PhD in biology at Stanford in 1971, there was a contend raging over the publications of Arthur Jensen and William Shockley, scientists who contended that differences in IQ measurements between racial groups were almost entirely based on genetics.
Feldman, at present a professor of biological science at Stanford Academy, described how this racist argue over the mechanisms of IQ heritability led him to become interested in seeing whether cultural manual might also play a function in shaping the characteristics of human populations. He and his longtime collaborator Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, a population geneticist at the Stanford University School of Medicine, began to investigate whether behavioral processes like social learning might exert as groovy an influence on human evolution every bit genetics.
"The two of us sat downward to endeavour to meet whether cultural manual, equally opposed to genetic transmission, could explain our high heritability," Feldman said in an Integrative Science Symposium at the 2019 International Convention of Psychological Science (ICPS) in Paris.
Feldman and Cavalli-Sforza, described as founders of the field of cultural evolutionary research and gene-culture coevolution, began applying quantitative mathematical models from the field of population genetics to understand how a combination of genetics, culture, and behavior contributes to shaping human evolution.
In 1981, the two published a landmark book, Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach, paving the way for the new field of quantitative cultural evolutionary theory. Their book laid out a framework for how the transmission of nongenetic, socially learned traits across individuals and groups can impact human diversity in means similar to genetic transmission.
In the 1990s, Cavalli-Sforza started the Man Genome Diversity Project, a collaborative international project designed to study the richness of human genetic diversity. As office of this project, he, Feldman, and dozens of collaborators compiled the Homo Genome Variety Jail cell Line Panel, a resource of uniquely diverse genetic information nerveless from more than i,000 individuals beyond 52 global populations representing most of the world'due south major geographic regions.
Although Feldman regrets that the team was not able to collect a more consummate and representative panel of samples, the project has provided an unprecedented opportunity to study homo evolution and genetic diversity.
The analyses resulting from this body of work have provided an enormous number of cross-disciplinary insights into fields ranging from archaeology and anthropology to epidemiology and linguistics.
In ane example of the affect of a cultural phenomenon on population genetics, Feldman described how union customs and taboos can influence the frequency of genetic diseases. When the cultural practise of marriage between blood relations is more common, very rare alleles associated with genetic diseases became more frequent within a population, Feldman observed.
"That is a cultural choice [that] dictates the pattern of the DNA variation," Feldman explained.
Since the publication of Feldman'due south piece of work on the Human Genome Diversity Cell Line Panel in Science in 2002, these types of Deoxyribonucleic acid studies have become increasingly common. Even so, Feldman cautions researchers to be wary of how Dna variation can exist misused.
"Nosotros now take a very heavy hammer, which is the ability to find Dna variation everywhere we look—in humans in detail—and associate it with phenotypes. And it'south beingness done all the time, 20 or 30 articles a solar day," Feldman warned. "I remember it'south necessary for psychologists, too as other social scientists, to await carefully and critically at the inferences that are being made nigh circuitous human being traits, especially behaviors."
Excavating Culture
Although we have no remnants of behavioral data from our early on human ancestors, we practice have archeological artifacts dating dorsum as far as 3.3 1000000 years. Cerebral archeology researchers like Miriam Haidle apply these physical objects to trace the cognitive and cultural development of humans and other hominids. Haidle is the scientific coordinator of the Role of Culture in Early on Expansions of Humans project at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities at Senckenberg Research Establish in Frankfurt, Federal republic of germany.
When closely studied, stone tools and other fabric artifacts tin provide researchers with a rich window into the cognitive capabilities, equally well as the cultural practices, of our prehistoric ancestors. For case, the ability to shape stones through flaking, or to turn a small tree into a tool for hunting, can reveal a whole scope of cognitive processes, such as causal reasoning.
In a 2015 paper published in the Journal of Anthropological Science, Haidle and a various grouping of coauthors ranging from archaeologists to psychological scientists described how culture emerges through the development of iii dimensions.
To outset, in that location is a necessary biological dimension, including how biological factors such as genes, anatomy, and physiology both enable and restrict behavior. Homo hands, for instance, let unlike forms of cultural evolution than the flippers of a dolphin or the wings of a bat. There is as well a dimension of individual development that encompasses a given private's capacity, skills, and experiences. Finally, there is the historical-social dimension, which is particularly important for the development of civilisation. This dimension includes knowledge and skills that are shared socially.
Although there is evidence that another animal species are capable of rudimentary aspects of civilization, such as using bones tools, the historical-social dimension is uniquely well developed in humans. In fact, at some bespeak in our evolutionary history, the biological dimensions—our genetically heritable traits—became less important, and the historical-social dimension increased dramatically in importance, Haidle explained at the ICPS symposium.
"There is an increase of the social and material engagement, and this is very important considering you cannot learn everything on your own," she said.
The production of clothing is an example of the importance of social learning in cultural expansion. Making the simplest clothing, simply a piece of leather wrapped around the body, requires only a few tools to scrape, soften, and cut the hide. Even in this unproblematic setting, raw material procurement, tool production, and application crave various skills and noesis that have to be learned and maintained. Producing more circuitous wear requires non but more than steps—making holes in the hibernate, tanning the hibernate, and threading pieces of the hide together—just also more specialized tools, combinations of practices, and thus knowledge and skills.
Tailored wear sewn with eyed needles has existed for at least thirty,000 years, representing farther advances in materials and tools, forth with practices to larn and get trained in using them. The development of such increasingly complex performances is interdependent with the development of transmittance capacities of knowledge and skills, Haidle said. In cultural species, individuals practice non invent behaviors over and over again; information is shared inside and between groups and passed on to new generations. And "in humans, the intensification of social interactions and the expansion of a socially formed concrete environment resulted in new transfer trajectories and the unfolding of new performances."
Self-Conscious Learners
Henrike Moll, an associate professor of psychology at the Academy of Southern California, studies the cultural manual of knowledge: How do nosotros laissez passer information from ane person to another and from one generation to the next?
Children are actually self-witting learners, rather than blank slates or passive sponges that simply absorb whatever information happens to be present in their environment, Moll argues.
"I believe that we have good evidence to retrieve that children sympathize their need to learn. You tin can observe this very early on in children when they testify and then-called social referencing," she said at ICPS. "They wait up at other people in social club to better empathize what they should be doing in an cryptic or ambivalent situation."
Although other animals are capable of social learning, humans are uniquely expert at this skill. Part of Moll's current inquiry examines which mechanisms make human social learning and so successful.
"We believe that there are different kinds of social learning mechanisms that are unique, and one of the most fascinating ones is the instance of teaching," she explained.
In a paper published in the Review of Philosophy and Psychology in 2018, Moll described a series of experiments that demonstrated how children's problem-solving abilities benefit from pedagogy far more than they do good from simply observing someone else solve a similar problem.
When asked to get a peanut out of a tall thin plastic tube using zero but water, almost all four-year-olds failed to realize they could use the water as a tool. When shown a video demonstrating puppets completing a similar task, children still largely failed to improve their trouble-solving. Still, when the same video was shown earlier the task with a teaching framing ("Expect, I want to show y'all something!"), about children succeeded.
Not only do children seek out opportunities for didactics, but they besides seem to sympathise that educational activity serves to spread noesis of a certain kind—namely, general knowledge.
In a series of experiments that are currently nether review, Moll and colleagues found that even four-twelvemonth-olds take an innate agreement of the value of educational activity and how to choose information most conducive to teaching others.
In the study, children were initially taught some new facts virtually an animate being. The facts ever included one generic fact that applied to the entire species ("Hummingbirds can fly backward") and ane episodic fact specific to an individual animal ("This hummingbird is flying backward").
When children were asked to teach what they'd learned about animals to a pretend classroom, Moll and colleagues observed a blueprint: The children consistently recounted generic rather than episodic data.
They seemed to inherently understand that conveying generic facts, which everyone can benefit from, is a central component of teaching. Episodic facts, on the other hand, tend to concern just specific people or situations.
Moll and her team of researchers think that this is because children understand that the goal of didactics is to learn—and perchance farther propagate—knowledge that is full general and objective.
The Epidemiology of Representations
APS Young man Dan Sperber, a social and cognitive scientist at the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris, has adult several influential theories that depict from his interdisciplinary background in anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology.
In his ICPS presentation, Sperber used the period of h2o in a river as a metaphor for understanding the transmission of culture and information. In such a menses, patterns emerge that are adequately stable even though the water is continuously changing.
Likewise, near discernable patterns in the menses of cultural data are highly local and transient, notwithstanding some are widespread and stable over time, Sperber explained.
Ultimately, he said, culture emerges from microscale interactions between individuals—either dyads or just a few people living in a certain place. But sometimes these local, transient interactions lead to a very long and stable chain of transmission that tin can influence entire populations.
"Culture is not a thing nor a collection or system of things," Sperber said. "It is a property that mental representations, behaviors, and artifacts possess to a variable caste."
Sperber has adult a framework, the epidemiology of representations, to depict the distribution and menstruation of mental representations within populations. Similar an infectious disease, the macro-level phenomena of culture are ultimately spread through the day-to-24-hour interval interactions of individuals.
And, similar the vectors of an epidemic, the mental representations that make upward civilisation tin can mutate and shift over the course of person-to-person transmission.
"In the environment, the behavior or artifacts or objects that help convey information undergo lots of processes which may modify the data," Sperber said.
However, these mutations are not random. He argues that the stability of cultural phenomena is due to a trend of these mental representations to gravitate to "cultural attractors." Every bit mental representations are transmitted between individuals, they are not exactly copied or reproduced. Instead, they are transformed by the cognitive functions of each private processing and reconstructing the information.
"Take the example of your friend cooking a wonderful apple pie," Sperber explained. "Your goal is not to reproduce the exact movements and so on, or fifty-fifty the exact apple pie. Your goal is to help yourself produce a better apple pie."
Humans are constantly reconstructing the data we're exposed to, selecting what is relevant or generalizable from the original representation, and attempting to improve on it.
"Y'all're going to extract any, if anything, is relevant to you every bit you lot translate information technology on the ground of your ain interests and ideas," Sperber noted. "And that's what advice does quite systematically."
In order to explain culture from an evolutionary perspective, we must also have fairly complex representations of human psychology and cognition.
References
Haidle, M. Northward., Bolus, Thousand., & Collard, M. (2015). The nature of civilization: An eighth-grade model for the development and expansion of cultural capacities in hominins and other animals. Periodical of Anthropological Sciences, 93, 43–lxx.
https://doi.org/x.4436/JASS.93011
Moll, H. (2018). The transformative cultural intelligence hypothesis: Evidence from young children's trouble-solving. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 9(one), 161–175. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-017-0342-vii
Rosenberg, N. A., Pritchard, J. K., Weber, J. 50., Cann, H. M., Kidd, Grand. K., Zhivotovsky, L. A., & Feldman, Grand. Westward. (2002). Genetic structure of human populations. Science, 298(5602), 2381–2385.
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1078311
Sperber, D. (1985). Anthropology and psychology: Towards an epidemiology of representations. Man, 20(1), 73–89. https://doi.org/10.2307/2802222
Source: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/evolution-human-culture
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