Arizona State University News:

Why is human culture — the shared body of knowledge passed down across generations — so much more powerful than animal cultures?

“What’s special about our species?” is a question scientists have wrestled with for centuries, and now a scientist at Arizona State University has a new hypothesis that could change the way we perceive ourselves and the world around us.

“Ten years ago, it was basically accepted that it was the ability of human culture to accumulate and evolve that made us special, but new discoveries about animal behavior are challenging these ideas and forcing us to rethink what makes our cultures, and us as a species, unique,” said evolutionary anthropologist Thomas Morgan in a new research paper published this week in Nature Human Behavior.

“It used to be thought that other species just didn’t have culture,” said Morgan. “And now we know that lots of other species do. Then it was thought that only human cultures accumulate or evolve over time. But now we know animal cultures can do this too.”

For example, just as humans pass on knowledge to our children, when a new queen leafcutter ant hatches, she collects a little mouthful of her mother’s fungus and takes it with her to start a new colony. This has been happening for so long — millions of years — that the fungus within these colonies is genetically different from the wild fungus outside of the colonies.

Similar to how human languages change, new data shows that humpback whale songs evolve, spread between groups and become more complex over time. Like humans, chimpanzees learn to use tools, and we now have evidence that they have been doing so for thousands, perhaps millions, of years.

These discoveries, along with others, have shown that not only do animals have culture, but there are also examples of accumulation in their culture, something that for a long time was believed to be uniquely human.

“So, if animals do have evolving cultures,” Morgan proposes, “then what’s special about human culture that differentiates us from other animals?”

Morgan and Stanford University Professor Marcus Feldman address this question in their new paper, “Human culture is uniquely open-ended not uniquely cumulative.”

They present a new hypothesis: that we humans dominate and are so special because of “open-endedness” — our ability to communicate and understand an infinite number of possibilities in life. [Continue reading…]