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Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Wild Fragaria on August 23, 2005, 07:27:25 am
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Nature News
Published online: 21 August 2005; | doi:10.1038/050815-12
by Andreas von Bubnoff
Chimps show sign of culture:
Chimpanzees stick to the majority behaviour of their peers.
Chimps can not only use tools, but also seem to follow the fashion in how they are used.
Researchers have found that a group of chimpanzees will stick to the same method used by their peers, even if they stumble across a different way of using a tool by themselves. That shows that chimps follow a cultural norm that is socially learned and maintained, the researchers say - proof, perhaps, that chimpanzees really do have culture.
Chimpanzees are known to have many complex behaviours, including tool use and grooming, that place them second only to humans. Scientists have long assumed that chimpanzee populations maintain such traditions the same way humans do: by learning to imitate each other.
But proof for social learning in wild chimpanzees has been hard to come by. One problem is that simply observing one animal watching another doesn't prove that he is learning a behaviour. If he picks up the same tricks, it could be that he learned them by himself.
The solution is to check whether chimpanzees can start and maintain a cultural tradition in a controlled environment, says Andrew Whiten of the University of St Andrews in Fife, UK, the lead author of the study that appears this week in Nature1.
Grape games
To do this, he and his colleagues used chimpanzees kept at the Yerkes Primate Center at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. The researchers placed a grape on a platform inside a box, with an obstructing block to stop it falling out. They then taught two different chimpanzees two different ways to use a stick to get the grape.
One used the stick to lift the block out of the box, allowing the grape to fall out. The other learned to poke the block backwards, pushing the grape off the back of the platform and again allowing it to fall out.
Once trained, the animals were returned to their social groups. As expected, most of the peers used the same technique as the one they observed from the trained chimp. Animals that didn't have an example to follow simply couldn't get the grape out.
Some animals did spontaneously switch from one behaviour to the other when they tried to retrieve the grape, figuring out the alternative method themselves. But two months later, most animals had switched back to the majority behaviour in their group.
Whiten points out that even animals who initially poked - a behavior more natural for chimpanzees than lifting - reverted to lifting eventually. "This is an even stronger social learning tendency than we went out to test for," Whiten says. "It's very exciting. We were surprised."
Closing the gap
Whiten isn't the only one who is excited. "This is narrowing the gap between humans and non-humans," says William McGrew, a cultural primatologist at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He says it is the first proof that animals pick up a tradition by imitation.
But Michael Tomasello, a comparative psychologist of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, isn't convinced. The chimps might have learned how to get the grape by watching how the boxes themselves work, rather than by watching other chimps.
But does this show that chimpanzees have 'culture'? Some experts think so. But Bennett Galef, who studes animal behaviour at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario in Canada, says he doesn't think the study provides sufficient proof to call chimpanzee traditions by that name.
Besides, Galef adds, the most interesting thing is to investigate how chimp and human behaviours are alike, and how they are different. Lumping them together with the word 'culture' might foreclose those questions, he says.
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I found this study very interesting, but I don't quite agree with chimps have culture. The term 'culture' is a very complex picture. What undeniable is that chimps show very distinct social pattern similar to ancient human.
Anyway, I particularly like the 'Grape Game' for the chimps. It's almost like a game you could play with modern human babies :D
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I think they missed a trick though. What happens if you seperate a tribe for a couple of months and teach each half one method? Do they simply revert to using the method the alpha pair uses? Do they keep using the methods they've learned? Do they split into two tribes and have a holy war over which way is the correct way to get the grape out? :D
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Nothing new..
Scientists have allready discovered what they would describe as cultue by killer whales, dolphins and a few other mammals..
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What were they doing for it to be described as culture?
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Playing water-polo.
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Originally posted by aldo_14
Playing water-polo.
:lol: :lol: :lol:
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Knowledge specific to a group that gets passed on to the next generation.
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Originally posted by TrashMan
Nothing new..
The concept of man thinking intellegent aminals (like apes, whales and dolphines) have culture patterns is not entirely new. But started claiming that the animal cultures exist is quite a news and also a big challenge.
Scientists have allready discovered what they would describe as cultue by killer whales, dolphins and a few other mammals.. [/quote]
Don't tell me it's water polo as aldo has pointed out.
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Originally posted by karajorma
I think they missed a trick though. What happens if you seperate a tribe for a couple of months and teach each half one method? Do they simply revert to using the method the alpha pair uses? Do they keep using the methods they've learned? Do they split into two tribes and have a holy war over which way is the correct way to get the grape out? :D
Those were very interesting controls to the experiment people had done. I hope they will have more followup on their study soon.
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I think the culture aspect of this study was more the adoption of a behaviour favoured by the majority of 'society', whereas the suggestion of whale culture in particular was due to their ability to communicate and in particular different 'dialects' amongst different social groupings. The idea in that case is that whales, lacking opposable thumbs (to build objects), could form culture in a different way, i.e. mentally through inter-communication.
Although i think there's also the suggestion that whales can learn genetically from parents due to inherited mitochondrial DNA.
In both cases it's really still in the hypothesis stage, anyways; it's not an accepted mainstream conclusion AFAIK that whales have culture, but it is a proposal.
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Originally posted by aldo_14
I think the culture aspect of this study was more the adoption of a behaviour favoured by the majority of 'society', whereas the suggestion of whale culture in particular was due to their ability to communicate and in particular different 'dialects' amongst different social groupings. The idea in that case is that whales, lacking opposable thumbs (to build objects), could form culture in a different way, i.e. mentally through inter-communication.
Whales inherting skills from another whale is interesting but I wouldn't hold it up as evidence of culture. If I taught a parrot to say it's name I could probably get it to teach the same trick to another parrot.
What the chimps are doing however is different. Both ways of getting the grape were equally valid but the chimps were changing over to the accepted norm even in cases where that was less intuitive than the other method. That seems to show that chimps are ignoring their own ability to problem solve and choosing a method that fits in with the tribal norm.
Originally posted by aldo_14
Although i think there's also the suggestion that whales can learn genetically from parents due to inherited mitochondrial DNA.
How the hell can mitochondrial DNA display phenotypic effects? Sounds like an interesting titbit you've got there Aldo. Got a link?
Originally posted by aldo_14
In both cases it's really still in the hypothesis stage, anyways; it's not an accepted mainstream conclusion AFAIK that whales have culture, but it is a proposal.
It's possible maybe even probable that they do but we'll need something more than the research I've seen to prove it.
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Originally posted by karajorma
Whales inherting skills from another whale is interesting but I wouldn't hold it up as evidence of culture. If I taught a parrot to say it's name I could probably get it to teach the same trick to another parrot.
What the chimps are doing however is different. Both ways of getting the grape were equally valid but the chimps were changing over to the accepted norm even in cases where that was less intuitive than the other method. That seems to show that chimps are ignoring their own ability to problem solve and choosing a method that fits in with the tribal norm.
I think it was the whale language being held up as facilitating culture, rather than as proof; the guys' hypothesis AFAIK was that different 'dialects' in whale groups represented a sort of cultural difference.
I have to admit being somewhat sceptical, myself, as it'd surely be impossible to prove mentally held culture. But I think it'd be what Trashman was referring to.
Originally posted by karajorma
How the hell can mitochondrial DNA display phenotypic effects? Sounds like an interesting titbit you've got there Aldo. Got a link?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/222608.stm
To be honest I had a bit of trouble figuring out exactly what they meant;
Scientists say they have found evidence that a whale with a good idea can pass it on to other members of the group.
They report that the whales' knowledge is passed on in their genes to their descendants.
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The way the whales pass their knowledge on to their descendants is connected with their mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA).
The researchers looked at three whale species - sperm, killer and pilot whales - and found that genes in their mtDNA are similar in all groups of each species.
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But the mtDNA does not actually cause the inherited behaviour pattern. It simply rides along in the body of the whale that has the original idea and in its descendants.
Latter bit seems to contradict the first bit. I was very wary mentioning that bit, actually. Seems like the BBc writer fannied it up on reread. I'm not aware of any actual proven genetic learning, albeit I don't read up that much on this sort of thing.
Originally posted by karajorma
It's possible maybe even probable that they do but we'll need something more than the research I've seen to prove it.
They'd probably need to work out a proper definition of 'culture' and 'intelligence' first, though :D
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Originally posted by aldo_14
They report that the whales' knowledge is passed on in their genes to their descendants.
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The way the whales pass their knowledge on to their descendants is connected with their mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA).
The researchers looked at three whale species - sperm, killer and pilot whales - and found that genes in their mtDNA are similar in all groups of each species.
...
But the mtDNA does not actually cause the inherited behaviour pattern. It simply rides along in the body of the whale that has the original idea and in its descendants.
Latter bit seems to contradict the first bit. I was very wary mentioning that bit, actually. Seems like the BBc writer fannied it up on reread. I'm not aware of any actual proven genetic learning, albeit I don't read up that much on this sort of thing.
I think you're right. That's what happens when you let your Environment Correspondent deal with a science article just cause it has whales in it :D
I'm not even going to comment on the fact that the article mentions that the scientists studied 3 whale species and then goes on to only name 2 (killer whales are in fact dolphins, A fact probably not lost on the scientists studying them). :D
I think the point was that the skills the scientists were studying were passed on from mother to child (I've seen that done in that whole killer whales beaching themselves to catch seals thing - It's definately the mother who teaches there). The whole MtDNA thing was simply to prove that the groups of "whales" were closely related.
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Originally posted by karajorma
The whole MtDNA thing was simply to prove that the groups of "whales" were closely related.
Yeah, though the atricle could definitely have made that clearer.
You gave me a bit of a shock there Aldo - Genetic memory would be... unlikely, especially in something as complex as a mammal...
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Moo.
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Originally posted by karajorma
I think you're right. That's what happens when you let your Environment Correspondent deal with a science article just cause it has whales in it :D
Yeah the article was a bit misleading.
Originally posted by karajorma
I'm not even going to comment on the fact that the article mentions that the scientists studied 3 whale species and then goes on to only name 2 (killer whales are in fact dolphins, A fact probably not lost on the scientists studying them). :D
There are a couple more species being mentioned in the original article in Science.
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[color=66ff00]I would have thought it was blatently obvious that you can not in fact have culture without the ability to make tea.
Thus it's obvious that not only do monkeys and whales not have culture but neither do the americans either.
Maeglamor - BSc*
[/color]
*Bronze Swimming certificate
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Scientists present startling new evidence refuting Maeglamor's theory!
(http://homepage.ntlworld.com/karajorma/freespace/Misc-Pics/ta01.jpg) (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/karajorma/freespace/Misc-Pics/ta07.jpg) (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/karajorma/freespace/Misc-Pics/ta26.jpg)
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[color=66ff00]Damn your eyes Kara! You've seen through my flimsy lightshow.
[/color]
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Originally posted by karajorma
Scientists present startling new evidence refuting Maeglamor's theory!
Yeah I will definitely call that the new ape culture :lol:
Originally posted by karajorma
I think the point was that the skills the scientists were studying were passed on from mother to child (I've seen that done in that whole killer whales beaching themselves to catch seals thing - It's definately the mother who teaches there). The whole MtDNA thing was simply to prove that the groups of "whales" were closely related.
Absolutely. mtDNA is a very good source to find out how inviduals are related in a species. but check original article from Science if you're interested:
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Science, Vol 282, Issue 5394, 1616 , 27 November 1998
EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY:
DNA Suggests Cultural Traits Affect Whales' Evolution
by Gretchen Vogel
Students of animal behavior seeking something akin to human culture could do worse than to look at whales. These social creatures have the biggest brains of any animal on Earth, long lives, and a complex repertory of calls, sung in distinct dialects. Now on page 1708, marine biologist Hal Whitehead of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, suggests that in sperm whales and some other species, cultural traits--learned behaviors passed on to family members--are affecting the course of genetic evolution, a situation thus far documented only in humans.
Whitehead has found a pattern of genetic markers in sperm whales implying, he says, that some whale matriarchs teach their groups as-yet-unidentified behaviors that give them a substantial survival advantage. Other marine and evolutionary biologists are greeting the proposal with great interest--and some caution. "It's a provocative idea, a really neat idea," says marine biologist Bernd Würsig of Texas A&M University, Galveston. But it's hard to make a strong case for such a radical notion because so little is known about whale behavior and genetics, whale experts say. "The idea is intriguing but speculative," says marine biologist Sarah Mesnick of the National Marine Fisheries Service in San Diego.
Whitehead admits that a cultural influence on genetic evolution in whales "certainly isn't proven" but says his explanation "fits the data better than any other explanation at the moment." The idea formed, he says, during a sabbatical spent sailing around the South Pacific with his wife, marine biologist Linda Weilgart, and two young children. Seeking a geographical pattern in order to understand the effects of locally intense hunting of sperm whales, Whitehead and Weilgart collected data on whales' vocalizations as well as tail scars, which may indicate how well an animal fends off predators such as killer whales and sharks. They also collected sloughed-off skin samples for genetic testing.
The researchers found no clear geographical pattern, but they did find a genetic one: The whales' mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is inherited only from the mother, indicated that groups with similar calls and markings were related. "The only mechanism that made much sense was that the vocalizations were being passed down through the mother's line like mitochondrial DNA," Whitehead says.
He concludes that whales learn these and presumably other behaviors from their maternal relatives and that the behaviors affect survival patterns. When he studied published genetic analyses of other whales, he found that species such as sperm, pilot, and killer whales--all of which have matrilineal societies in which offspring spend their lives with maternal relatives--have very low mtDNA diversity, less than one-fifth that of other whales such as humpbacks or bottlenose dolphins. Whitehead proposes that the diversity must have narrowed in the course of whale evolution as mtDNA "hitchhiked" on the success of behaviors passed from older females to calves, such as feeding techniques, methods for fending off predators, and baby- sitting. In a computer model, he shows that a cultural behavior that gives a 10% reproductive advantage and is passed on to 95% of daughters will reduce mtDNA diversity to almost zero in 300 generations.
Because these whales live as long as humans and travel in stable groups, it makes sense that their social behavior could affect evolution, Mesnick says. But whale genetic data are so sketchy that it's too early to be confident that the reduced mtDNA diversity is real in all species, she says. And even if the data hold up, it's hard to be sure that cultural transmission is responsible, she and others say. A dramatic, temporary drop in population could reduce genetic diversity as well--although Whitehead argues that because killer whales and sperm whales are global species, they are less likely to have suffered a long-term bottleneck than whales with more restricted habitats, such as humpbacks.
Researchers also question two assumptions Whitehead makes about cultural transmission. In his model, "lateral transmission"--in which an unrelated female learns the behavior and passes it to her relatives--has to be below 0.5%. Otherwise it would dilute the effect of transmission from a mother to her own family, and mtDNA diversity would not be reduced. Whitehead's number is too low to be realistic, say several marine biologists, especially as matrilineal species like sperm whales often have unrelated females in their group. "It's difficult to imagine a mother secretly clicking to her daughter, 'Feed on squid,' " Mesnick says, while not sharing the information with a nearby unrelated female. Whitehead counters that, as in humans, whales might tend to join groups with similar cultural behaviors, so lateral transmission would not matter.
Researchers also question whether learning a specific behavior could boost a female's reproductive success by as much as Whitehead assumes. The 10% figure is "optimistic," says evolutionary biologist Marcus Feldman of Stanford University, even though human cultural practices such as the domestication of animals can confer considerable advantage. Despite all the caveats, whale biologists are fascinated by the proposal. They will now be testing it by studying learned behaviors and their effects on whale survival and genetics, hoping to learn whether whales, like people, are creatures of culture as well as biology.
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That makes it a lot clearer :) Thanks Fragaria :)
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Just read a review on human mtDNA. The review discussed an interesting topic - ancient dapative mtDNA mutation. Apparently, mammalian mtDNAs (although they are smaller and simpler compare to nDNA) have high mutation rate that contributed by chronic exposure to reactive oxygen species :)
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There was a documentary on TV which showed a mother killer whale teching it's son where are the best beaches with nice round pebbles and how to scractch oneself there...
I would call that culture..
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Then you have very relaxed standards. Many animals teach their young various skills.
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Originally posted by TrashMan
There was a documentary on TV which showed a mother killer whale teching it's son where are the best beaches with nice round pebbles and how to scractch oneself there...
I would call that culture..
Nope, you shouldn't. More detail studies have yet to be done before we could call that a culture. That's the whole point I posted the article about whale study (if you haven't noticed).
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Isn't culture a set of knowlegde/skills imparted on to the next genertion by a specific group (more or less living in a specific area)?
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A culture is the totality of all art, customs, and behavioral patterns of a specific group. We are the only species that demonstrates enough complexity for these distinctions to arise. Whales do not have art or customs, and all members of each whale species do the same whale things.
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Here's something might interest you, Karajorma.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/08/31/chimp.genes.ap/index.html
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It did indeed. I'm surprised it took them this long. I suppose the lab rat and fruit fly were considered higher priority (I'm still confused about that worm that they decoded though) :)
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Originally posted by karajorma
It did indeed. I'm surprised it took them this long. I suppose the lab rat and fruit fly were considered higher priority (I'm still confused about that worm that they decoded though) :)
Yep. Mouse, lab rat and fruit fly are used every where in the research labs. So what's should be decoded?
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I agree on those. Like I said it was the worm that confused me. I never understood why that was more important than chimps.
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Originally posted by Ford Prefect
A culture is the totality of all art, customs, and behavioral patterns of a specific group. We are the only species that demonstrates enough complexity for these distinctions to arise. Whales do not have art or customs, and all members of each whale species do the same whale things.
Actually if I rember that documentary, the behavior was specific ONLY for this group of whales and was learned.
Of course you can allways change the definition of culture to anything you please so that any animal is excluded from even a possibilty to have culture....
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Originally posted by karajorma
I agree on those. Like I said it was the worm that confused me. I never understood why that was more important than chimps.
Maybe because of the orders of magnitude of complexity that the chimp DNA would have over worms? Remember, Chimp DNA isn't all that different from our own, and that it has taken literally decades to compile the human genome.
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Originally posted by TrashMan
Actually if I rember that documentary, the behavior was specific ONLY for this group of whales and was learned.
Of course you can allways change the definition of culture to anything you please so that any animal is excluded from even a possibilty to have culture....
By the same token, you can always change the definition so that every animal that has a communication form and/or the ability to manipulate objects does have a culture. The true definition of "culture" is admittedly one of the more pliable ones in the English language, and if you're really excited about this notion of other animals being "complex", then you can play with the definition to a certain extent. However, semantics aside, the behavioral variations from one group of human beings to another are the results of intricacies of thought that we simply have no reason to believe exist outside of our own species.
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Originally posted by StratComm
Maybe because of the orders of magnitude of complexity that the chimp DNA would have over worms?
That could be it. I seem to vaguely remember some reporter saying that the worms genome was very simple. What I'm having trouble with figuring out is why this would be a factor considering that it was done after the fruit fly had been mapped.
Are there lots of labs using nematodes I wonder?
Originally posted by StratComm
Remember, Chimp DNA isn't all that different from our own, and that it has taken literally decades to compile the human genome.
That's mainly due to the fact that PCR was so bloody slow when the human genome project took off. It's gotten faster and faster as time goes by. The ended up cutting a third off of the original estimate due to that and better computing power.
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That is of course true. I would hardly have expected chimp DNA to be done already if speeds were still as much of an issue, but by citing speed I intended to point out the potential parallel nature of genetic mapping. It's not like every lab in the world has been concentrating on mapping the same organisms, one at a time, and by its simple nature the earthworm would have been completed quickly regardless of how many resources were thrown at it.
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Ahhh. Get you now :)
Does make you wonder what else is being mapped though doesn't it :)
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Originally posted by karajorma
That could be it. I seem to vaguely remember some reporter saying that the worms genome was very simple. What I'm having trouble with figuring out is why this would be a factor considering that it was done after the fruit fly had been mapped.
Are there lots of labs using nematodes I wonder?
There are many labs around the world that work with nematodes. They have are simple, easy to obtain and care for :)
Originally posted by karajorma
That's mainly due to the fact that PCR was so bloody slow when the human genome project took off. It's gotten faster and faster as time goes by. The ended up cutting a third off of the original estimate due to that and better computing power.
Oh yeah, that's right.