Escaping anthropocentrism in the study of non-human culture, by Alice D. Bridges and Lars Chittka

excerpts for review purposes only.

Imagine the surprise if, one day, researchers were to stumble across a species of primates that lived in a large architectural construction that they had built in common - a megalopolis millions of times the size of a single individual. Imagine that around that “city”, certain individuals worked to clear roads of waste and debris, so that others who had been out harvesting resources could more easily carry them back, while still others guarded these foragers and kept dangers away. Imagine that these resources, while inedible to the primates, could be used as a substrate to grow food that they could eat, and that they would grow this food in parts of the city built specifically to maximise the available surface area for farming. We would not hesitate to attribute a form of cumulative culture to this species.

In truth, however, such “civilizations” have been discovered already - among animals so far removed from humans that throughout all these debates, no one ever really thought about them in this context – the social insects. Social insects construct a large variety of elaborate nesting architectures, have societies whose workers specialise in diverse tasks but cooperate smoothly towards the common good, and communicate by means of symbols (such as in the honeybee dance). An unbiased alien researcher visiting our planet might easily rank these insect societies, and not primate societies, as the most advanced “civilizations” besides those of humans (Shapley, 1963; Chittka and Rossi, 2022). Some Earthlings might be quick to dismiss this view, claiming that behaviour in these humble insects is wholly innate, and that societal complexity thus arose by a wholly different pathway - evolutionary trial-and-error processes rather than cultural ones.

Perhaps much of the extraordinary behaviour of social insects is innate nowadays. But did these behaviours originate without the contribution of individual innovation, social learning and cultural processes, perhaps even cumulative ones? Returning to the agricultural proclivities of leafcutter ants, how this behaviour came to be raises a series of fascinating questions. This is a multi-part, multi-step behaviour involving the coordination of many individuals, each with their own specializations and roles. It may be useful to speculate whether these early beginnings could have arisen through cultural-like processes, with behaviours becoming innate only later on (Baldwin, 1896; Robinson and Barron, 2017). ... We posit that eusocial insects represent a fascinating system through which cultural evolution in non-humans might be studied.

Posted by PLB for review purposes only.

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