The Comparative Biology of Cultural Inheritance

Abstract

When Waddington coined the word “epigenetics” to describe the mechanisms of phenotypic expression that are not due to changes in genes, he paved the way for understanding the wide assortment of inheritance mechanisms that have since come to light. Non-genetic effects on inheritance are now known to encompass much more than emergently heritable patterns of DNA expression or parental transcription effects on morphogenesis (West-Eberhard 2003). Cultural transmission and other forms of environmental manipulation that are repeatably induced or learned from generation to generation, collectively referred to as ecological niche construction, are thought to constitute their own systems of non-genetic inheritance (Sultan 2003). These environmental pathways of non-genetic inheritance are not negligible contingencies of normal reproduction and development, but rather are thought to play a key role in the origin of life itself (Dyson 1986) and in the construction of new levels of biological organization, which is a common theme of major transitions in evolutionary history (Jablonka and Lamb 2006). Why is it then that the “question of animal culture” persists in being a controversial, unsolved puzzle? The essays collected in the edited volume The Question of Animal Culture do not directly touch on this large body of research in evolutionary biology but present instead research in psychology and ethology about what constitutes uniquely human social behavior. This historical controversy can be characterized as an iterated cycle of skepticism expressed by experimental psychologists about non-human animal abilities, driving field behaviorists to make stronger cases for the complexity of their focal species’ behavior, followed by experimental psychologists “raising the bar” for what they consider uniquely human cognitive features under the rubric of “culture.” The book’s editors, Kevin Laland of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and Bennett Galef of McMaster University in Ontario, both experimental psychologists by training, introduce the book’s collection of essays with a brief history of this research into non-human animal behavior in captivity and in the field. In their introduction, they describe the knowledge gained from early accounts of termite fishing in chimpanzees up through recent studies of singing in humpback and sperm whales, providing a brief but vivid outline useful for teachers of biology, psychology, and anthropology. Although none of the contributors are evolutionary biologists, perhaps the most biologically oriented perspectives in the collection are written by proponents of “niche construction” and occur in Chapters 8 (Laland, Kendal, and Kendal) and 13 (Sterelny). Niche construction is a generalized description of a lineage’s modifications to the environment that subsequently affect future generations of conspecifics and ecological interactors, most notably by altering the parameters of natural selection (Odling-Smee 2003). Culture is clearly an example of niche construction, and in light of this, Laland, Kendal, and Kendal attempt to change the framework of the debate by arguing that “[a]nimal culture is much more than a window onto human evolution” (p. 177). In fact, the universality of niche construction implicates all species in a certain kind of sociality insofar as parental effects are always necessary to offspring fitness. Laland, Kendal, and Kendal review the evolutionary effects of culture by describing that not only does culture, like other forms of niche construction, offer opportunities for adaptive behavior, but it can also become an independent pathway for evolution that limits the interconnection of individual organisms with the external Evo Edu Outreach (2009) 2:573–574 DOI 10.1007/s12052-009-0146-z