What makes human culture unique from culture of other animals?
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https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/12/27/zcpn-d27.html
Human beings are animals, evolved from ancestral great apes. We are part of nature and yet unique in many ways.
It was once thought that humans were the only animals with culture: the learned rather than genetically determined behavior that is passed on from one generation to the next and is subject to modification. Many decades of research have revealed, however, that a number of other species of animals also have culture, notably other primates and corvids (crows). Nevertheless, human culture is clearly qualitatively distinct from all others. We rely on highly complex cultural inheritance for our very survival. What accounts for this difference? Is it merely a matter of degree or is there something unique about human culture?
Researchers Thomas J. H. Morgan, Arizona State University, and Marcus W. Feldman, Stanford University, have addressed this issue and proposed a new hypothesis, presented in a paper published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, titled, “Human culture is uniquely open-ended rather than uniquely cumulative” (November 7, 2024).
They seem to be saying that it is language as the basis of abstract thinking (ie thinking about something in its absence):
“… the authors of the present study propose that human culture is distinctive for its “open-endedness.” In contrast to all other animals, humans have the ability to learn and execute complex sequences of steps to accomplish an ultimate goal. These steps or subgoals are “modular” in the sense that they can be employed individually to accomplish a number of different tasks. Furthermore, they can be creatively recombined in novel sequences to meet new needs.
This is evident, for example, with respect to language, which can be employed very fluidly to accommodate and adapt to a wide range of factors. Though the authors do not specifically refer to this, the basis of this flexibility lies in the nature of language itself, that is, the mechanism of thought by which actions and phenomena in the external world are abstracted into mental symbols or ideas. This allows ideas to be manipulated and applied in new ways to situations distinct from those from which they were originally derived, in the same way as words can be combined to make new sentences which in turn can be combined into novel paragraphs, and so to express things that did not previously exist.”
I’ve often wondered if, in the absence of the asteroid that killed them, some dinosaur species would have evolved into intelligent technologically advanced animals like ourselves and so would have replaced us mammals? Modern theory seemed to have displaced the old idea that they were slow moving and slow minded reptiles. With the discovery of another planet with signs of life it might be that forms other than mammals can evolve technological societies. Or are mammals and great apes unique in this regard?
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