When we turn to look at what various people working on cumulative culture mean by the concept, we find that they tend to pick out very different kinds of phenomena. But if researchers use different definitions of cumulative culture, it is reasonable to question whether they are also identifying different underlying structures. There is room for philosophy here to help distinguish the various dimensions of cumulative culture, and to make clear, at least in the broad strokes, what different kinds of structures might be at work.
Demonstrating these different kinds of accumulation is one step towards a more fine-grained scientific analysis of what separates our human psychology from our animal ancestors. Illustration of a Beaver dam, Public Domain. One way in which human innovations seem to differ from those we see in animals is their complexity. Instead, such a complex thing is the result of years and years of tinkering, with gradual improvements to design, telemetry , physics, and material science.
The increasing complexity of innovations seems to be a peculiarly human trait, and one that seems to rely on a special ability for faithful copying.
Without faithful copying the story goes we would lose accumulated innovations of the past, never being able to add more complex bells and whistles to the artefacts that we have. Another striking feature of human beings is that as well as our having so many innovations, we also maintain them in our societies for long periods of time.
Thus, another way that culture accumulates is in terms of the sheer number of innovations. But how do we explain this ability to grow knowledge — to grow our culture? There are plenty of capacities that are at play here, but a crucial kind of ability seems to be that of inventing and combining innovations. What is required for these capacities? One interesting feature seems to be the ability to break down tasks and innovations, and to have the psychological capacities to mix and match and repeat various component parts of tasks and innovations.
This ability to imaginatively, as well as physically, try out the combinations and permutations of various innovations seems to rely on cognitive abilities for decomposing tasks into constituent parts, and manipulating these parts in a variety of ways. So far, I have only hinted at the use of our innovations and knowledge, only saying that it somehow allows human beings to survive in an extremely wide range of environments. One important aspect of culture that seems to follow from such observations is the way in which culture has helped the human race to succeed, to outbreed other mammals of a similar size.
Take spices as an example. Several spices have antimicrobial properties — others are fungicides. There is some suggestive evidence that recipes, passed down over time, incorporate tacit knowledge about these properties. Spices are added in combination to increase their antimicrobial effect and at different times in the cooking process, seemingly sensitive to the heat-resistance of their antimicrobial properties.
How can culture have this feature of increasing adaptiveness, where recipes can have increasingly effective antimicrobial properties? Here, researchers seem to identify two important features. Even with widely distributed and variable innovations, unless individuals can tell which innovations are better or worse the population is less likely to generate innovations with an adaptive fit. This capacity to tell good from bad is likely to rely on some cognitive machinery — though here there is a serious debate as to what this machinery might be.
Illustration of the New Caledonian Crow Corvus moneduloides , Let me sum up. Cumulative culture is something that marks human beings as exceptional from other animals.
But understanding this intricate phenomena, and how it came about is complex. I have highlighted three ways individuals interested in cumulative culture have used the term, picking out three broad kinds of accumulation: the complexity of an innovation, the number of innovations and the adaptiveness of an innovation.
Maybe we should get rid of it. It might be the case that cumulative culture is picking out what evolutionary theorists call evolvability. Cumulative culture might be an investigation into cultural evolvability. His research focuses on philosophical issues surrounding the science of human evolution, particularly the evolution of human psychology.
This is an interesting post, I have a keen interest in the subject of the physiological differences between humans and our more primitive counterpart. The question persistent in my mind is are humans capable of isolating our species separate from our animal cousins mentally. Chimps engage in war. Rats show altruism and exhibit empathy. In a study published last week in Nature Communications , neuroscientist Christopher Petkov and his group at Newcastle University found that macaques and humans share brain areas responsible for processing the basic structures of language.
Although some of the previously proposed reasons our brains are special may have been debunked, there are still many ways in which we are different. They lie in our genes and our ability to adapt to our surroundings. Two other recently published studies add new insight to the debate. Unique genetic signatures At the genetic level, humans are similar to other animals.
We share more than 90 percent of our DNA with our closest relatives , including chimpanzees, bonobos and gorillas. Mice and humans also share many of the same genes —which is why scientists use them as a model to study many human diseases.
Studies in recent years, however, have revealed that the way in which genes, the segments of DNA that code for specific proteins, are expressed can be quite different among humans and other animals. One reason scientists can now unravel these more nuanced differences between the human brain and those of other species is the rise of more robust data collection techniques.
For example, scientists at the Allen Institute for Brain Science have developed detailed atlases of the expression patterns of thousands of genes in various species, including those of adult mice and human brains. In a study published last week in Nature Neuroscience researchers used these enormous data sets to look for the patterns of gene expression that are shared within the human population. They were able to identify 32 unique signatures within 20, genes that appear to be shared across brain regions in six individuals see a map here.
This unique genetic code may help explain what gives rise to our distinctly human traits. Thank you for commenting to my article. Also, thank you for providing that reference. It has been in the news lately and I searched for it when I was writing the article, but somehow I missed it.
Instead, I cited Rilling et al. As I said in the article, it is unlikely that all those cognitive abilities that give us our humanity evolved in the relatively sort transition between our ape ancestors and humans sort in the evolutionary scale. So it is not surprising finding them in the great apes, although not as developed as in humans. There is some fascinating work by BUD Craig illustrating the progressive development of the anterior insula from monkeys to the great apes to humans.
Regarding theory of mind, it has been surprisingly hard to find in chimpanzees, as the article that you cite recognizes. What other of the cognitive differences that I cite are outdated? Do you think there are fundamental differences in theory of mind, consciousness and the other cognitive abilities that I cite between apes and lower mammals rodents, for example?
Not just intelligence: Why humans deserve to be treated better than animals from philosophy. Is it just or ethical for the powerful to abuse the weak or less developed for their own gain?
I would be much honored if Frans de Waal commented on my article. Thanks for the video! I know Peggy Mason personally and she is very cool. She does research on pain neuroscience, just like I do. The video shows an example of the cool things we can learn from animal research. Yes, rats and other social mammals display some amazing forms of altruism.
I am not an animal rights activist. It would only make opinions polarized. There is a lot of experimental data about animals and intelligence or empathy. Ravens have theory of mind or something really similar! They have also episodical memory, that was found by Konrad Lorenz in ravens!
Mirror neurons, I was forgotting to mention them. Rizzolatti is a neuroscientist and produced good datas. What about the Cambridge declaration? Neuroscientists, again. The difference is more in quantity, than in quality.
Empathy is nothing but an evolutionary strategy adapted in social animals: group selection. Again: difference is in quantity, not quality. Scientists at first are concerned on animal suffering. Luckily there are scientist and biologists working in lab, who are not only philosophers.
These are NOT arguments that I would use to justify the use of animals in biomedical research. So, we have to use our noble features or not? We are both trying to improve wellness for animals and to defeat diseases. The 3 R laws are a stimulating factor for this. Theropoda survived for mil of years and colonized almost all habitats developing a lot of biodiversity from their bauplan, they are still alive in the form of birds, their time, evolutionary, biological success might be seen as superior to ours if we change comparison terms.
We are superior to tardygrades in intelligence as they are superior to us in resistance to radiations or temperature. Arguments like this one, on a scientific website about animal research, a place where medical researchers speak, might increase the distance between scientists and those who ask for animal care and dignity. Only those who already agree will… agree.
Everytime we try to base the success of another spiece on how similar they are to us, we humans will seems always to be more successful. I could list here thousands of characteristics that only animais have, or have it in a greater degree than us.
We keep on electing our cognition as the only moral baseline. Animals strive for freedom and life. If you try to take their freedom, or if you try to hurt or kill an animal he will surely try to defend himself. In some way they do suffer like we do. The well-fare movement is just postponing what is evident. We can live without animals most of time but we decided not to, just because they taste good. But suffering depends on cognition, it does not happen independently of the other functions of the brain.
Do plants suffer? Do sponges suffer? Do insects suffer? Do mice suffer? How can you tell? In what are you going to base your determination? Quite the opposite: I see a big difference between a sponge and a rat.
You seem to have missed this part of my article:. That leaves a lot of animals for which it is hard to guess whether they are conscious or not: insects, fish, octopi, lizards and small mammals like mice and rats. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.
Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates. The Cambridge Declaration is a strange thing. I plan to write an article dedicated to it, since it would be too complicated to addressed in a comment. In any case, it was not signed by neurocientists and the scientific community has largely ignore it. Which I think is the best thing to do with animal rights publicity stunts like that. Click to access CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciousness.
Ah, and PS — Scientists are very concerned on animal suffering. Humane endpoint, animal welfare science, Felasa ….
Please point out the place in the article where I say that animals do not suffer, that they are not conscious, that their suffering is irrelevant or that their suffering does not matter.
I was very careful not say these things. I ask you again: if mice are between those animals, why are researchers so concerned on mice and rats distress and suffering? No matter where you draw your senciente line, pig, cow, chicken and fish are certainly above it. So are mice. Otherwise, how would you justify the fact that science is using them for so long to test all kind of medicine, even pain killers?
So you are basing on Descartes? I am afraid you are years behind in science. They have eye to see, mouth to taste, ear to hear and we should believe that their nervous system is inactive? I agree that pain is subjective. Some feel more pain and some feel less pain it happens even between us, humans. How can science be against their own observations? Have you read the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness?
So, if you get a human being who cannot talk or express his feelings in any way and provoke pain on him, he would react as an automaton? How do you prove that he is feeling pain? I would observe his reactions and compare to mine. But, when we cross the species barrier this approach seems to be illogical. The same structure, the reaction, and a quite different conclusion.
Sorry, that is to much brain exercise to prove a negative situation. This is an old trick: to completely change the meaning of what I said but quoting only part of it. The full quotation is:. They are like plants: living beings able to react to the environment as automatons. Some others may be, nobody knows. I doubt that you or the scientists that wrote the Cambridge Declaration have solved the problem of consciousness.
Edelman and Koch took a shot at it, but I doubt that they are arrogant enough to say that they have. So, until we solve that problem, we cannot tell for sure that an animal is conscious. We simply do not know. Noah its pretty simple really. Some of us choose to take medications because we want to get better if we are sick or god forbid be cured of a life threatening illness.
So unless you can specify which forms of animals testing are unnecessary and what testing can actually replace it then no one is interested in your opinion which comes across as the inane unresearched rhetoric of the AR cult.
While the above examples are abilities that most animals do not have, I do not believe it is an excuse to allow forms of animal testing that harm the animal. Human life is ultimently important to us but it is important that animal life is not discarded as a result, as it is possible to care for both.
Finally, plants, despite having nervous systems, do not show cognitive abilities to think or show emotion, unlike animals, and thus do not need the same rights as animals.
Of course that does not mean plants should be destroyed or cut down because of that, since they are extremely useful for all animals including us. Skip to content One of the cornerstone ideas of the animal rights movement is that there are no fundamental differences between humans and animals: humans are just animals, only more intelligent Ryder, Theory of Mind is the ability to understand what other people are feeling and thinking [pp.
Of course, the model is not always right, but nevertheless it is extremely valuable because it lets us predict the behavior of people around us. Theory of mind seems to require the right anterior insula, a part of the brain cortex that evolved very rapidly in apes. The function of the right anterior insula is to create hypothetical models of the internal state of our body in different circumstances Craig, , For example, when we imagine what it would feel like to stab our toe, is the right anterior insula doing that.
Likewise, the right anterior insula can make a model of the internal state of the body of another person. Of course, theory of mind is much more than that and involves the cognitive abilities of many other parts of the brain.
Research on theory of mind has revealed it to be uniquely human Penn and Povinelli, , although some studies claims to have found it in rudimentary form in chimpanzees Call and Tomasello, ; Yamamoto et al. One negative aspect of theory of mind is that it often creates the delusion of attributing human consciousness to inanimate objects or animals.
The same way we project our thoughts and feelings to a person that we see behaving in a way similar to us, we project human thoughts and feelings to an animal or an object we see doing something that resembles human behavior. This delusional form of theory of mind is responsible for the anthropomorphizing of animals that is so common in modern culture.
Episodic memory. There are two basic forms of memory: procedural and declarative [pp. Procedural memory is present in both humans and animals and consists in the retention of perceptual, motor and cognitive skills that are then expressed non-consciously. For example, when we walk, swim, ski, listen to music, type on a keyboard or process the visual information we get from a television screen, we use procedural memory.
Declarative memory stores information about facts and beliefs about the world, and can be further divided into semantic and episodic memory. Semantic memory is about facts in the world that stand by themselves, independently of our self, whereas episodic memory is remembering things that happened to us. That is, episodic memory retains events as they were experienced by ourselves in a particular place and time.
Episodic memory appears to be uniquely human, because it involves subjective experiences, a concept of self and subjective time. This is important because it allows us to travel mentally in time through subjective experiences, while animals are locked in the present of their current motivational state.
Humans emotions. Mammals, birds and some other animals have a set of six basic emotions listed by Ekman: anger, fear, disgust, joy, sadness and surprise. However, we humans are able to feel many other emotions that regulate our social behavior and the way we view the world: guilt, shame, pride, honor, awe, interest, envy, nostalgia, hope, despair, contempt and many others.
While emotions like love and loyalty may be present in mammals that live in hierarchical societies, emotions like guilt, shame and their counterparts pride and honor seem to be uniquely human. There is much controversy these days on whether dogs feel guilt and shame , there is evidence that they do not , but they may also have acquired this emotion as a way to interact with humans. What is clear is that many of the emotions that we value as human are not present in animals.
Empathy and compassion. Empathy is defined as the capacity to feel what another person is feeling from their own frame of reference. It is a well-established fact that many animals react to distress by other animals by showing signs of distress themselves.
However, this does not seem to represent true empathy as defined above, but a genetically encoded stress response in anticipation of harm. Since empathy requires feeling what the other person is feeling from their own frame of reference, it seems to require theory of mind. Empathy involves the newly evolved anterior insula in humans Preis et al.
Compassion is currently thought to be different from empathy because it involves many other parts of the brain. It seems to be associated with complex cultural and cognitive elements. Therefore, it seems safe to assume that animals are not able to feel compassion.
Language and culture. Although animals do communicate with each other using sounds, signs and body language, human language is a qualitative leap from any form of animal communication in its unique ability to convey factual information and not just emotional states.
In that, human language is linked to our ability to store huge amounts of semantic and episodic memory, as defined above. The human brain has a unique capacity to quickly learn spoken languages during a portal that closes around years of age. Attempts to teach sign languages to apes has produced only limited success and can be attributed to a humanization of the brain of those animals, raised inside human culture.
The effectiveness of spoken and written language to store information across many generations gave raise to human cultures. The working of the human brain cannot be understood without taking culture into account. Culture completely shapes the way we think, feel, perceive and behave. Although there are documented cases of transmission of learned information across generations in animals, producing what we could call an animal culture, no animal is as shaped by culture as we are.
Esthetic sense or the appreciation of beauty also seems to be uniquely human. Of course, animals can produce great beauty in the form of colorful bodies, songs and artful behavior. What seems to be lacking is their ability to appreciate and value that beauty beyond stereotypical mating and territorial behaviors. Even attempts to teach chimps to produce art by drawing have largely failed. Ethics is the ability to appreciate fairness, justice and rights.
It is at the very core of our ability to form stable societies and to cooperate to achieve common goals. Lacking all those mental abilities, animals have no sense of ethics. Even though some studies have shown that monkeys have a primitive sense of fairness particularly when it applies to their own interest , it is but a pale anticipation of our sense of justice.
It simply goes to show how that ethics is rooted in our evolutionary history. The fact that animals cannot even remotely comprehend the concept of rights is a strong argument for why they should not have rights.
What sense does it make to give animals something that they do not know that they lack? Extended consciousness. Therefore, the related question of whether animals have consciousness, or what animals have it, remains similarly unanswered in the strict sense. However, based on their behavior, we commonly assume that animals like cats, dogs and horses are conscious and able to make some autonomous decisions. On the other hand, unless we invoke some mystical definition of consciousness, it is safe to assume that animals with small nervous systems, like jellyfish, worms, starfish, snails and clams have no consciousness whatsoever.
What has been becoming clear is that we humans possess a kind of consciousness that no other animal has: the ability to see ourselves as selves extending from the pass to the future [pp. Extended consciousness is based on our ability to have episodic memory and theory of mind. Episodic memory configures remembered events around the image of the self, whereas theory of mind allows us to create a model of our own mind as it was during a past event or to hypothesize how it would be in a future event.
I should also point out that a few animals apes, dolphins and elephants may turn out to have episodic memory, theory of mind and hence extended consciousness.
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