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The idea that culture is important for nonhumans, including whales, has a history of controversy. In the 1930s40s, biology was given a strong theoretical basis in the form of evolution through natural selectionnatural selection as first suggested by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace and then formalized with genes as the units of selection in the modern synthesis. The modern synthesis was not particularly about behavior, but behavioral theorists in and around the 1970s realized it could be applied to behavior as well as morphological, physiological, or anatomical features. This new field was called behavioral ecology or, largely in the United States, sociobiology. Advocated comprehensively in E. O. Wilsons book Sociobiology and summarized eloquently by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, behavioral ecology made a fine job of explaining why animals do what they do. Its application to human behavior was, and is, controversial. For the study of nonhuman behavior, however, behavioral ecology became a hugely successful scientific paradigm. From the 1980s onward, scientific papers describing the behavior of animals invariably started and ended with how the research was situated within the theory of behavioral ecology. We, and most of our scientific colleagues, found the theory very appealing and felt it well explained the behavior of animals. In the field of animal behavior, behavioral ecology became normal science, in the terminology of the philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn. Suggesting that culture could be a major driver of the behavior of nonhumans challenges this paradigm making it revolutionary science, according to Kuhnand, as with other challenges, was resisted. However, in contrast to the opposition facing most other scientific revolutions, the attacks are not coming from the stalwarts of normal science. Since the inception of their theory, behavioral ecologists and sociobiologists have largely accepted the possibility that culture might have an important role in determining behavior, along with genes.

E. O. Wilson, for instance, cowrote Genes, Minds and Culture: The Coevolutionary Process and Richard Dawkins coined the term meme, the cultural analog of the gene.

This is not to say that proposing culture as an explanation for animal behavior does not meet resistance from our closest colleagues, but it does so only from the angle of questioning what the evidence is that a particular behavior results from some kind of social information. There are now, however, enough solidly demonstrated examples that this does in fact happen in many species for the study of social learning to be accepted as a valid and growing field within mainstream animal behavior science. No, while behavioral ecologists may question the evidence and suggest alternative explanations, they are generally not appalled by the very notion of chimpanzee or whale culture. The fiercest critics come mostly from anthropology and psychology. Here, it is the very concept of animal culture that is anathema, not the nature of the evidence. It is part of the paradigm in most of the social sciences, insofar as the social sciences have paradigms, that humans are unique in having culture or, at least, in being overwhelmingly cultured. Culture in other species, if it exists, is an epiphenomenon, not terribly important. It is the challenge to this paradigm that is being resisted.

Critics of all stripes argue against the evidence put forward. They pick away at the (necessarily) spotty evidence from field studies, suggesting that this or that pattern of behavior could have arisen genetically or through environmental correlations. In their laboratory experiments, chimpanzees dont imitate and rats dont teachthus: no culture. On the other side of the debate, field scientists are convinced that culture is a major part of the lives of the animals that they study, but how can they show it?

People have thought about nonhumans having culture for a long time. Aristotle noted that at least some birdsong was learned. Darwin thought many animals possessed inherited habits, and although he did not know how inheritance worked, his conception of these inherited habits was very similar to what we now think of as culture. Following Darwin, many of those who studied the behavior of animals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries believed that socially learned traditions were important in shaping the behavior of at least birds and mammals. However, once genes had become central to biology in the modern synthesis, thoughts that culture might have a role in animals other than humans faded. For a while it was nearly all about genes.

After the end of the Second World War, ethologists began to study the behavior of animals quite broadly and rigorously, and the trend against nonhuman culture reversed. These studies at first indicated and then showed that in two very different kinds of animals, social learningand culture for those who wished to use that termis an important determinant of what animals really do. The clearest case was birdsong. Birds were the model organism for many, perhaps most, of the early ethologists, people like Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen. Many aspects of bird behavior are quite amenable to experimental study, and most especially their songs. It soon became clear that elements of the songs of many birds are socially learned, and social learning seemed the most plausible explanation for the spread of a technique by which blue tits opened the tops of British milk bottles. Birds seemed to have culture.

In the 1950s and 1960s, another group of animals also began to receive the culture label, the primates. This development occurred first in Japan, where, both in society generally and among scientists, the dichotomy between humans and other primates is much less strict than in the European Christian tradition. Japanese scientists noted socially learned traditions in groups of Japanese macaques, most famously the spread of sweet potato washing among the monkeys on Koshima Island, where they dunked the tubers in the ocean to remove sand before eating them. The Japanese and other scientists were usually cautious in discussing these patterns, often referring to them as precultural behavior, protoculture, or traditions rather than unqualified culture.

The study of primate culture moved to another level in 1978 when William McGrew and Dorothy Tutin described variation in the grooming handclasp between groups of chimpanzees. Unlike the Japanese monkey traditions this was arbitrary behavior not involved in resource extraction, and McGrew and Tutin addressed the question of culture head on. They concluded that the evidence on grooming handclasps satisfied most but not all of eight conditions they listed for culture. Over the next few years primate behavior was increasingly described as culture, without qualifiers. A highlight of this period was the publication of McGrews book Chimpanzee Material Culture in 1992. In this book and in his papers, McGrew showed the value of making systematic comparisons both across social groups and for a range of types of behavior, what he called an ethnographic approach. To virtually all field biologists studying chimpanzees, as well as orangutans, capuchin monkeys, and some other species, this approach made sense. It was clear that the animals that they had spent so much time with learned from each other, that they had culture, and that comparing what happened in different groups or at different times was a good way to look at this. However, not everyone was happy with McGrews ethnographic approach.

The promotion of culture as an important influence on behavior in chimpanzees and other nonhumans was attacked by two prominent psychologists. Jeff Galef found little evidence that nonhumans either teach or imitate, and, given that he felt that culture propagated only through these processes, which he argued were different in humans compared to any other animal, he concluded that it is misleading to think of the evolution of culture in animals. Galef also emphasized that culture in humans and what others call culture in animals were analogousthat is, evolved independentlyrather than homologousthat is, similar through common descent. While the homology-analogy contrast is clearly a potentially important issue for those interested in chimpanzee culture, because of the recent common ancestors of humans and chimpanzees, from our cetological perspective this is an unnecessary controversy. The common ancestor of humans and whales was a small, probably fairly solitary, mammal, likely without much, if any, culture. The cultures of whales and those of humans, or chimpanzees, are analogous not homologous, and the fact that they evolved independently makes their similarities and differences particularly interesting. The second major attack on nonhuman culture came from Michael Tomasello. He reinforced Galefs arguments, adding the potentially important point that of all the social learning processes only imitation and teaching can lead to cumulative cultures, which, as we have noted, are one of the most key attributes of human culture. Galef and Tomasello come from a null-hypothesis-testing, experimental psychology background. The null hypothesis is something like chimpanzees do not possess culture, with culture being defined by something like traditional behavior transmitted by imitation or teaching. They could not show in their own or others experimental studies that captive chimpanzees could imitate or teach, so did not reject the null hypothesis. No culture.

The chimpanzee culture wars were on. The field scientists responded, most prominently in a remarkable paper published in the journal Nature in 1999. The study, headed by psychologist Andrew Whiten, charted the incidence of thirty-nine chimpanzee cultural behaviors at seven study sites and concluded that the combined repertoire of these behavior patterns in each chimpanzee community is itself highly distinctive, a phenomenon characteristic of human cultures. Their basis for saying that these behaviors were cultural was that they did not seem obviously linked to some variation in ecology (that might guide individual learning along different paths in different places) nor could it be explained by obvious genetic differences, an argument termed the method of exclusion. Similar studies of orangutans and capuchin monkeys followed.

The rest is here:
Culture war in the deep blue sea: Sciences contentious quest to understand whales and dolphins