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Sea otters use rocks to break abalone and other mollusc shells.
Penguins on the Galapagos islands show no fear of people when approached on land
but become terrified if someone joins them in the water. When New Zealand saddlebacks
arrive in a new area where the birds have a dialect different from their own,
they quickly learn the new one and adopt it as theirs. Geese migrate to the same
place via the same route every winter. Widespread among the titmice in Britain
is the trick of pecking though the aluminum foil caps of milk bottles and helping
themselves to the cream at the top. Do animals have culture?
speculates John Bonner. In view of behavior such as that described above, his
answer is "Yes." In this provocative, fascinating, and delightfully
illustrated book, he traces the origins of culture back to the early biological
evolution of animals. What he defines as culture, the
author explains, is the transfer of information by behavioral rather than
by genetical means. Culture, then, is a property that can be achieved by any living
organism and, in this sense, is as biological as any other property or function.
Reflected respectively in the examples above are five categories of behavior that
lead to nonhuman culture: physical dexterity, relations with other species, auditory
communication within a species, geographic locations, and inventions or innovations.
Within these categories he finds a progression of behavior that transmits information.
At each stage of its evolutionary rise, Professor Bonner contends,
the cultural transmission of information and the behavior that preceded it arose
by natural selection. He shows how the capacity for culture is genetically advantageous
in fostering more complex social organization and increased flexibility of adaptive
response. By implication, he concludes, there is a continuum between the traits
we find in animals and traits we often consider to be uniquely human.
John T. Bonner is Professor of Biology at Princeton University and the author
of numerous books, including Cells and Societies, The Cellular Slime
Molds, and Size and Cycle (all Princeton). The original drawings in
the book as well as the drawing on the cover are by Margaret LaFarge.
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