The recent “Animal Social Complexity and Intelligence” symposium held in Chicago reflected a pivotal study of culture that is proceeding resolutely, despite the slings and arrows of outraged skeptics.
What does it mean to be a human being? Where did we come from? Where are we going? These are the great questions of existence. But while we don’t know whether other intelligent life exists in the universe, evidence is mounting that we might not even be unique on our home planet.
Billed as a first, the conference sponsored by the Chicago Academy of Sciences featured 27 world-renowned experts who had been lured from their jungles, oceans, and other laboratories to share their research on the culture, intelligence and social learning of animals.
The scientists were all seasoned pros devoted to the messy, difficult and sometimes dangerous task of lifting animal consciousness out of the murky world of just-so stories and into the sunlight of solid, empirical research.
The recurring theme of the conference was culture.
One synthesizer was William McGrew, a professor of anthropology and zoology at Miami University of Ohio who has long studied chimpanzee populations and elementary technology among the great apes, particularly their use of tools.
“Anthropology has been very jealous of the culture concept,” he says. “Even from the beginning of the discipline in the 19th Century, culture has been held out as something uniquely human.”
McGrew, who also holds a doctorate in psychology, has a definition of culture that he feels applies across the board.
“Culture is something that is learned, rather than innate, and it’s learned socially from one another, rather than from another species or from the environment.
“Culture is standardized in the sense that it’s not infinitely flexible. There are forms that emerge that still have some kind of norm to them. Last, there’s something about culture that is collective. It characterizes groups.
“I think those essentials apply equally well to humans and non-humans, and when they are met by non-humans, it’s tough for me to see how you could deny them culture.”
Last year, McGrew and six other heads of field sites presented their case for chimpanzee culture in the prestigious British journal Nature. After four decades of gathering information, the scientists reported an astonishing variation in tool technology among different chimpanzee groups across Africa. The scientists documented 39 behavior patterns–including tool use, grooming and courtship behaviors–that are customary in some communities but absent in others.
Different chimp groups have developed their own styles. Some fish for ants with short sticks, slurping the prey one by one. But at least one group has developed the more efficient technique of accumulating many ants on a long wand, then sweeping the insects into the mouth with a single motion.
Such a custom is not inherited, nor can it be explained by environmental factors. It must be passed on culturally.
“The evidence is just overwhelming that chimps do this,” wrote Emory University primatologist Frans de Waal, an organizer of the Chicago conference. “The record is so impressive that it will be hard to keep these apes out of the cultural domain without once again moving the goalposts.”
Adds McGrew: “A lot of creatures use tools, but only chimps have tool kits. A chimp can take a leaf and make it into a probe to get insects or into a sponge to get water or into a napkin to wipe blood from a wound or even a leaf clipping to do some courtship.”
The cross-fertilization of cultural ideas was a major aim of the conference.
“I felt lucky just to be able to attend,” says Jack Bradbury of the celebrated Cornell University Lab of Ornithology. “It was fascinating to compare what my wild parrots are doing with other animals. The similarities across the board were just amazing “
Bradbury’s talk about vocal learning in wild parrots was one of the hits of the conference.
A colleague–psychologist Irene Pepperberg of the University of Arizona–had set science abuzz with her book, “The Alex Studies,” which recounted 22 years with a loquacious African grey parrot she had taught to communicate using spoken language. Alex is now 23 and can name about 50 objects, identify seven colors and five shapes, count to six and understand the concepts “same,” “different,” “bigger” and “smaller.”
The thought had struck Bradbury that although captive parrots had the ability to mimic human sounds and use them in clever contexts, nobody knew how they used sounds in the wild. Could they communicate complex environmental information to each other the way humans do?
Intrigued by the possibility, Bradbury went to Costa Rica to find out. The answer, five years later: No, they can’t. Baby parrots learn virtually everything by watching other parrots. In the jungle, they may fly 5 miles a day, so they need to know where to go and what to eat. They spend a lot time forming flocks and leaving them, playing and yakking, cultural activities in themselves. The vocalizing, Bradbury found, simply helps them decide who they want to hang around with.
This branch of science–called cognitive ethology–is gaining in visibility and popularity. Its biggest star, British ethologist Jane Goodall, has become a cottage industry, perhaps the most famous female scientist since Marie Curie.
But the jungle at Gombe National Park in Tanzania never gave Goodall anything like the problems facing Hal Whitehead. He studies 60-foot sperm whales, the giant leviathans of “Moby Dick.” They range widely, pursuing squid a mile deep, so that much of the time he doesn’t even know where they are. But when they surface to breathe, they leave behind bits of skin that Whitehead collects for DNA analysis, allowing him to identify individuals and compile family trees.
Whitehead, who lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and teaches at Dalhousie University, has found that the creatures with the largest brain on Earth have used it to form complex societies based on stable, largely matrilineal units. The units share ranges and frequently interact but seem to maintain distinctive cultures.
Whitehead has found, for instance, that certain groups of sperm whales are much more successful at reproducing than others, and he thinks it’s due to cultural differences: The fecund groups teach their offspring to avoid sharks.
Another favorite at the conference was Indiana University’s Meredith West, who seemed to captivate colleagues with her talk about the communicative capacities of songbirds, including Mozart’s starling muse, and how female songbirds’ manipulation silently guides the singing of males who are striving so mightily to impress them.
“I must admit I was somewhat intimidated hearing everyone talk about the big brains of their animals. I have bird brains. How can that compare with whales?
“Then I remembered what a flock of migrating blackbirds looks like when it blots the sky. Thousands of individual birds can swoop and turn in perfect synchrony–like a venetian blind opening and closing. `Why, that flock looks like a big brain,’ I thought.
“What keeps them all together is socially distributed intelligence–just like in human culture, where we depend on others with different intelligences–like plumbing!–in order to survive. So I told the conference my flock of birdbrains was really much bigger than any old whale brain. That made me feel a whole lot better.”
