Abstract:
It has become increasingly common to explain the behavior of animals—from
sperm whales to songbirds—in terms of culture. But what is animal culture, what is its
relationship to other biological concepts and to human culture, and what impact does
culture have on a species’ evolution and ecology? My dissertation is an attempt to
answer these questions. After an introductory chapter, the dissertation begins (Chapter
2) with a proposal for a novel concept of culture and a critique of the existing ways in
which culture has been characterized. These characterizations include views from
cultural anthropology as well as attempts to apply the concept of culture to animals.
The existing concepts are problematic in a number of ways, such as a priori excluding
infrahumans from being candidates for possessing culture, or mistaking what culture is
for its measure. In this chapter I offer a way to understand culture that avoids these and
other problems. With a concept of culture in hand, the next chapter of my dissertation
(Chapter 3) examines and criticizes one key way of understanding the concept of
culture, meme theory. In Chapter 4 I turn to the question of how cultural systems can
arise in nature, how they can be adaptive, and how the evolution and ecology of species
is impacted by the possession of a cultural system. In order to answer these questions I
introduce a general constraint on cultural systems—what I am calling the Fundamental
Constraint—that has to be satisfied in order for cultural systems to be adaptive. In the
final chapter I develop a concept of innovation and draw out the conceptual and
empirical implications of this concept.
